Basketball Ghosts

Writing at Awful Announcing, Holly Wetzel suggests that if the upcoming Golden State-Cleveland NBA finals is not an awesome series of games, then the NBA could be in big trouble, since its current model offers little incentive for casual fans to watch games not involving their own preferred team.

I think she makes a good point about the disinterest provoked by the league's current arrangement and extensive post-season schedule, but I think she's a little optimistic about the impact of a great series. I'm probably within that "casual fan" bracket, although I really like basketball. I just think the version of the game offered by the national pro league is not all that fun to watch, and the only time it's interesting is when I care about the outcome because of being a fan of a particular team.

So whether the Warriors and the Cavaliers have a great series or not, I'm not much invested in the outcome beyond hoping that the Warriors lose again. And that's not really a reason to watch.

Choices

Over at Ask the Past, we learn how one might be advised to eat an avocado if one were living in the Victorian era.

The most obvious advice is overlooked: When confronted with an avocado and asked how best to eat it, the proper response is: "Don't." At least it is for me. Along with Brussels sprouts. And broccoli. And asparagus...

Great Minds Think of Type

Late last week, I posted an item about the development of the typewriter. Charles over at Dustbury has just recently posted a photographic item about a typewriter as well, highlighting a version of the machine that you paid to use.

Just deposit coins into the proper place and you are given an amount of time in which the typewriter will work. Once the time expires, you have to insert more coins or declare your novel or essay finished. Ray Bradbury used a coin-operated typewriter for the manuscript of "The Fireman" on it, which later became the novel Fahrenheit 451. In an interview, he called the book his "dime novel," because those were the coins the machine accepted and he used 98 of them to complete it.

Choose Your Own Hackneyed Genre!

This cartoon offers a handy way to generate a horror movie plot by choosing different items from each column. It's fiction, of course, because it involves far more creativity and effort than modern horror movie writers put into their work. You might think it incomplete because it doesn't offer a section for nudity, which is pretty much ubiquitous in the genre. But it's not listed because it's assumed to be present in every choice.

Category Holy COW, That's Huge!

The Juno satellite recently returned photographs of Jupiter's south pole, which swarms with cyclones the size of the planet we live on.

"The National Weather Service has issued a severe storm warning for the entire surface of the Earth. There is a 100% chance of poisonous hail the size of Buicks and wind that will literally rip your face off. We advise you forget about survival and start getting hammered like we are."

Hunt and Peck

This item at io9 offers a pictoral history of the typewriter, from its earliest concepts up through the first versions of computerized word processors.

We're so used to the keyboard now it seems like it's the only possible way to do things (although there are probably more efficient setups than the QWERTY arrangement). But as the "typing ball" shown below indicates, the choice was not necessarily so obvious from the beginning.

It would be interesting to see what might have happened had the format remained closer to this instead of the rectangular rows of keys we use now.

Summer of '77

Forty years ago today, 20th Century Fox released a sci-fi movie with a mostly unknown cast bolstered by a couple of British stalwarts and a guy who'd gotten some good notices in American Graffiti.

Then -- as now -- Han shot first.