Using Italics and Bolding In YouTube Comments

I just discovered today that the new YouTube comments design allows users to use some degree of markdown in their comments on videos. For instance, placing underscores around words and phrases makes them italicized:

_italics_

Placing asterisks around words and phrases makes them bold:

*bold*

Kind of nice I guess.

Cheating In Baseball (Hello St. Louis!)

I've written once before here about steroid use, but not cheating in general and what we can and should do about it in Major League Baseball.

Steroids themselves don't really bother me so much. It's the cheating aspect I find vexing. I honestly thought the Cardinals were above hiring a known drug cheat, but apparently General Manger, John Mozeliak, is not the man I thought he was. Peralta is on the team. It's a done deal. Can someone tell me what all this Christian Night at the Ballpark was about last summer? Apparently it was little more than a publicity stunt.

What kind of example does this set for our kids in town? If you cheat in baseball you get a fat contract worth tens of millions of dollars! That's what it teaches them. Mozeliak talks about giving second chances to ballplayers who make "mistakes." But this wasn't a mistake. Peralta took PEDs on purpose. He didn't accidentally shoot-up the wrong drug. It was a premeditated decision on his part.

Cheating in sports is not like breaking other laws. It's not like speeding or tossing a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. People pay a fine for those things and get a second or even third or fourth chance, and it brings a little revenue into the city in the process. Sports are different.

Second chances don't apply to cheaters in sports for a few different reasons. One, we fans enjoy baseball stats. We love talking about who had the best batting average,  the most home runs, the pitcher with the most no-hitters and so on. Cheating makes those statistics useless while lessening the enjoyment of the sport. Two, drugs that enhance a player's performance will also enhance his contract and entitle him to more money than he deserves. Third, players who did only marginally worse while not shooting drugs may lose a slot on the team to a cheater.

Cheaters only win if you let them. If you get caught cheating on a test at Harvard, Stanford, or just about any other Ivy League college you get booted from the school, and you don't graduate. You'll also have a hard time getting into any other Ivy League school, which means going to a lesser college and probably making less money in the real world.

If you really want to stop cheating in Baseball or sports in general, you can't give second chances to someone who has permanently tarnished the game. Boot the cheaters out of the Majors and maybe they can get a job playing for a lesser league like the Independent League or the Mexican Pacific etc. But get them out of the Majors.

Shame on the Cardinals and John Mozeliak in particular. I won't be attending any Cardinal games next year. I'd sooner drive up to Chicago and watch the White Sox lose every game, but lose them honestly.

Converted Trash Truck Decoliner!

This is from an episode of Jay Leno's Garage (one of the very best shows on YouTube). It's hard to believe this motorhome was built from a trash truck, but it's true.

Bicycle Memories

I found this on the interweb and it got me thinking about bikes when I was a kid. My first cool bike when I was about nine was a black Huffy Dragster III circa 1969 or so. Apparently everybody else thought it was cool too because it got stolen twice. I never got it back the second time. I was very sad about that for a long time. Mine had a 3-speed shift on the handgrip.

Here's a little better picture of one but with a different color. It also had the shift on the crossbar which is a little cooler when you're a kid. There's actually a Dragster forum on the interweb for these things. They refer to them as "muscle bikes" these days and they sell for as much as $450 on eBay.

 

 Going into the 70s, the trend with banana seats continued along with a high sissy bar. The next step in bicycle coolness was bikes with steering wheels.

 

A lot of guys rigged their own, but manufacturers soon started sending them out from the factory. I never had one of these, but I did have a chance to ride one that belonged to my cousin's boyfriend when I visited in Indianapolis once. I was very young at the time and found the bike hard to control. Of course now that I've been driving a car for almost four decades I imagine that steering wheel bikes would seem fairly normal.

 

After this in the mid 70s came the chopper look with the long front forks. 90% of these forks were homemade, but I do think a few were factory made somewhere.

 

Next up was something a little strange. These were called "high bikes." I'm pretty sure that no factory ever made any of these. They were pretty much all homemade designs that usually consisted of welding one frame atop another.

 

Of course some guys were bound to get carried away with things.

 

After this, the run-o-the-mill 10-speeds came in and took over for a couple of decades, followed by the mountain biking trend. However, cool bikes did make a brief return in the new century with kids customizing small bikes that had pegs welded here and there for trick riding.

 

Well that's it for this article. Next week we'll take a look at some very "dapper" vintage antique bikes.

Breaking Bad's Finale Left Me Under-Whelmed

I thought it was ridiculous actually. First off, Walt somehow managed to park his car beside the right building. How did he know which building the meeting would be in? What if they had been in the basement or upstairs? What were the chances that all these deadbeats would be standing up at the same time? There were plenty of chairs around. Why did all these people keep standing once the shots started? Shouldn't they all have hit the deck immediately instead of just standing there letting themselves get shot? How did Walt get shot when he was laying on top of Jesse under the line of fire? What would he have done if the guy he met in the parking lot wouldn't have gotten into the car with him and instead forced him to just leave it where it was and walk from there? I'm sorry sports fans, but that was about as contrived an ending as was ever concocted in the history of writing.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Steve Winwood at 17?

Well 17 or 18 anyway, with The Spencer Davis Group of course. He started playing/singing with them at 14 in 1962. I believe this video is from 1966.

Cardinal Bob Gibson Playing With the Harlem Globetrotters?

Many people know that Cardinal pitching great, Bob Gibson, was also a great basketball player in college at Creighton during the mid to late 1950s. He also played with the Harlem Globetrotters during their 1957-58 season before turning to baseball fulltime. I've never been able to find any footage of him playing at Creighton, but I may have found some of him playing with the Globetrotters in 1958. At least 1958 is the date of this video. I know that Wilt Chamberlain played with them during the 1958-59 season, and he's obviously not in this video, so I'm guessing it's from the 57-58 season when Gibson should have been there. He was a 6'1" guard, but I have no idea what his jersey number was. I'm guessing, however, that if he's in this video at all he must be number 33.



Gibson averaged over 20 pts. per game at Creighton and was the only non-white player on the team. In fact, he was their first non-white player ever. He had great leaping ability, and even at only 6'1" he could stuff the ball backwards with both hands.

His roommate with the Trotters was actually Meadowlark Lemon who years later said, “I thought Bob was a better basketball player than a baseball player. I think Bob could have played with any NBA team. He was that good.”