In my literary travels, I recently learned that Helvetica was originally called… Neue Haas Grotesk. And indeed, the name was changed for marketing reasons.
That reminds me of the case of the Chilean sea bass, the yummier-sounding fisheries label for the creature otherwise known as the Patagonian toothfish...
(image from Wikipedia)
It occurred to me recently that Garry “Ironman” Unger — who played with the Red Wings in ‘70-’71 and with the Oilers in the early 1980’s, might’ve been the only guy ever to have played in the NHL with Gretzky, Howe and Messier, the three top scorers in the league’s history.
(Incidentally, Ron Francis, the NHL’s 4th all-time highest scorer, played with Howe in ‘79-’80 in Hartford. But Marcel Dionne, #5 all-time, only started with the Red Wings in ‘71-’72, the year after Howe retired.)
A quick check online suggests that — there was one other NHL’er to share dressing rooms with Howe, Gretzky and Messier in his NHL career. And that was a journeyman by the name of:
- Jeff Brubaker (three games with Howe; four games with the Oilers in ‘85-’86)
Looks like there was one near-miss as well:
- Nick Fotiu (most of ‘79-’80 with Howe; and one game with Edmonton in ‘88-’89, the year after The Trade)
(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)
I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently. It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago. Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.
Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”. This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world). To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him. Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 
Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.* But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels. The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries. And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels. Ah, the miracle of mistranslation!
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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend. If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area. (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)
So, I got to wondering just what the difference between Gatorade (Pepsi) and Powerade (Coke) really was.
My experimental samples:
Here are the ingredients lists.
So, there you go. Not really much difference. Or, maybe more precisely, really not much difference.
Maybe this speaks to first-mover advantage: Powerade sells essentially the same product, but despite its efforts to gain “official drink” status for various sports teams and events; it’s stuck at 14% market share in the US, compared to 83% for its rival.
This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.
It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico! [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…
I went to a Comicon last weekend, scouting out artists to adapt my samurai play into a graphic novel. There are two things I took away from that event:
1. I finally met someone whose brother was named “Thor”
2. I found out that it takes 8+ hours (!) for a professional illustrator to draw a single page of today’s typical Western superhero comics. This does include time spent doing the layout — but wow!
I asked a manga artist about the same thing, and was told six hours was typical!
…so, I did not at all appreciate how much work goes into a monthly, 20-odd page comic, and can only imagine how manga artists go through, to churn out 20 pages a week. (Specifically, I’m imagining a huge entourage of assistants…)