sports – Clay Carson

sports

November 2018

This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

“Listen, it takes a long time to go broke buying Ferraris”

What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles?

I remember one day I was running late for practice, so I was flying down the 405. All of a sudden, I look in the rearview, and I see the flashing lights. This unmarked police truck is right up on me. Tinted windows. Big heavy-duty truck. Woop-woop.

I knew I was speeding. So I pull over, and I roll the window down, and I’m reaching over into the glove compartment to get my papers ….

… Then I hear this voice. Big, booming voice.

“WHERE YOU G’WAN, BOY?”

I’m like, Damn, they got the sergeant on me or something?

I turn to look out the window, and I can’t even see this dude’s face he’s so big. All I see is his chest.

“I SAID WHERE YOU G’WAN BOY?”

Then he bends down and looks in the window.

Big, dumbass grin on his face.

It’s Shaq.

I’m like, “Yo! I’m going to practice! You made me late!”

He don’t miss a beat. He taps side of my truck, turns around and says, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll pay your fine. Just holler at me.”

I’m looking in the rearview mirror, like, How the hell …

I built a desk once…twice actually

How One Man Made Stardew Valley

Then there’s Stardew Valley—a humble, intimate farming adventure about the monotony of domestic life, in which you spend dozens of hours parenting cabbages. Eric was a team of one. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week.

When I first played Stardew Valley all I wanted was to play it on an iPad. Stardew Valley for iOS was released in late October. If you do decide to give it a shot, the Wiki is required reading as far as I am concerned.

Greenland is a Poser

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical navigation because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (making it a conformal map projection), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are, relative to landmasses near the equator such as Central Africa.

Around The Web

Sign Off

Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

_ Newsletter _ , , ,

October 2018

This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Ping of Pong

The Tables

A look at the powerful connection between a pair of outdoor ping pong tables in the heart of New York City and the unlikely group of people they’ve brought together, from homeless people to investment bankers to gangbangers.

COFH, BIRF, CORS

The Unique Neurology of the Sports Fan’s Brain

Affiliation with sports teams, it seems, is a contemporary form of tribalism. “Our sports heroes are our warriors,” Cialdini once remarked. And tribal affiliation, along with satisfying our need for a sense of belonging, produces another social pleasure that’s not so warm and fuzzy: the good vibes of walloping your opponent. It’s what Germans call schadenfreude, literally “harm-joy,” the pleasure derived from others’ misfortune.

Around The Web

Sign Off

Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

_ Newsletter _ , , , ,

Roger Federer as a Religious Experience →

Bill Gates recommends a book of compiled David Foster Wallace articles called String Theory. Wondering if I’d enjoy the book, I stumbled upon this 11 year old article that examines an already experienced Federer whose career we still enthralled with today.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

_ Links _ , ,

A Relentless Rivalry With Brother and Caddie, Austin, Has Propelled DJ to the Top of the Game →

At the Ryder Cup every little detail becomes an obsession, from the pleats in the golfers’ pants to how the pin positions favor the collective ball flights of the home team. No minutia is insignificant … unless you’re Dustin Johnson and his brother-caddie, Austin, golf’s most laconic characters. During last year’s event at Hazeltine, Dustin faced a sloping mid-length putt that plainly had two or three feet of right-to-left break. After conferring with his brother, he started his ball a yard left of the hole, missing the putt by at least six feet. Had the tension short-circuited his stroke or perhaps clouded his vision, even though this was just a practice round? In his soft South Carolina drawl, Dustin offered his caddie a different explanation: “Awwwww, man, I had the [green-reading] book upside down.”

_ Links _ ,

Ryder Cup Secrets From Undercover Pros →

This isn’t just jingoistic chirping about the enemy. In some cases, it’s Americans critiquing Americans, or Europeans burying Europeans: “It started with slightly dodgy mechanics,” said one, “and it has developed into a full-blown mental problem.” Another player’s weakness is highlighted: “Over a bunker to a tight flag is his worst nightmare. It’s not pretty.” And this: “He’s well capable of giving up. … If he’s not in the mood, he’s just not in the mood.”

_ Links _ ,

The Secret History of Tiger Woods →

Outside of the golf course, it really seems that Tiger felt most comfortable using his superstar status to train with Navy SEALS.

Eventually, Woods learned how to clear a room, working corners and figuring out lanes of fire, doing something only a handful of civilians are ever allowed to do: run through mock gun battles with actual Navy SEALs. “He can move through the house,” says Ed Hiner, a retired SEAL who helped oversee training during the time and wrote a book called First, Fast, Fearless. “He’s not freaking out. You escalate it. You start shooting and then you start blowing s— up. A lot of people freak out. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy. He did well.”

At one point, Marshall put him through a combat stress shooting course, making him carry a 30-pound ammunition box, do overhead presses with it, do pushups and run up a hill, with shooting mixed in. Tiger struggled with slowing his heart rate down enough to hit the targets, but he attacked the course.

“He went all out,” Marshall said. “He just f—ing went all out.”

Marshall got his golf clubs at one point and asked Tiger to sign his TaylorMade bag. Tiger refused, sheepishly, saying he couldn’t sign a competing brand. So Marshall challenged him to a driving contest for the signature. Both Marshall and Brown confirmed what happened next: Tiger grinned and agreed. Some other guys gathered around a raised area overlooking the shooting range. Marshall went first and hit a solid drive, around 260 or 270 yards. Tiger looked at him and teed up a ball, gripping the TaylorMade driver.

Then he got down on his knees.

He swung the club like a baseball bat and crushed one out past Marshall’s drive. Tiger started laughing, and then all the SEALs started laughing, and eventually Marshall was laughing too.

“Well, I can just shoot you now and you can die,” Marshall joked, “or you can run and die tired.”

Today, Woods held a demo for Golfweek Junior Tour and is seen hitting golf balls publicly since late February.

_ Links _ , , ,

How in the Hell Did NFL Blitz Ever Get Made? →

The game was quite obviously not a simulation in the realm of the Madden NFL franchise or NFL Quarterback Club, but it was disconnected from reality in a revealing way. The NFL Blitz team wanted to include everything people loved about football and take out the things they don’t, creating a consequence-free version of the sport. Keep and exaggerate the bone-splitting hits; lose the killjoy penalties and injuries.

_ Links _ , , ,