Aug 4
A wonderful little documentary on someone’s attempt to bike the tour taken by the Tour de France. He makes it, but it’s certainly a trying experience. Makes you realize how insane people like Lance Armstrong are.
I say bring back pistol dueling. And it looks as if the Olympics were held in largely empty stadiums at this time.
London 1908: The Most Dapper Olympics : The Picture Show : NPR.
I know the Isle of Man TT race happened over a year ago, but this video is really, really insane. Makes one feel sorry for the sheep that got taken out in that crash near the coast.
The first ever Monaco Grand Prix was held in 1929. The winner was William Grover-Williams, and the race was first set up by cigarette manufacturer Anthony Noghès. This video from that first race shows how the times they have a changed.
Putting together an NFL season schedule is a pretty daunting task. The Atlantic Wire has an interesting bit (half way down the page) on how schedules are crafted in the NFL, part computer, part human:
Putting together a 17-week NFL schedule is hard work. To begin with, a full 17-week grid is full of lots of tiny boxes. That’s always a sign that things are going to get complicated. There are also travel considerations (you don’t want to send Minnesota to Miami and then up to Seattle the very next week), bye weeks, the NFL’s new plan to stack divisional games in the second half of the season, and conflicts with other weekend jamborees. The league office uses a computer For the last eight years, the first step has been consulting a computer capable of “spitting out 400,000 complete or partial schedules from a possible 824 trillion game combinations.” After sorting through 14,000 potential schedules, NFL “scheduling czar” Howard Katz sent commissioner Roger Goodell an email at 12:33 a.m. on Monday that the 2012 slate was finally set. The entie process “gets serious in January, when teams submit lists of requests detailing stadium availability and preferences for scheduling order.
How Your NFL Schedule Gets Made; Andrew Luck Is A Winner – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire.
In what brings to mind a Three Stooges movie, here’s a guy  (who looks like a young Trotsky) demonstrating his new invention, the football helmet. Filmed in 1932, it’s surprising that the helmet didn’t come into being until 27 years after the infamous 1905 season in which 19 people were killed in a single season.
In 1903, Princeton and Yale met in the college football championship in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale had been unbeaten up to that point, only to fall to Princeton 11-6. Princeton depended on Hall of Fame guard John DeWitt, who seemed to have played both defense and offense. In the game, DeWitt scored all of Princeton’s 11 points, including a blocked Yale field goal attempt in which he ran back the ball 75 yards for a touchdown. He was also known as a great punter and drop-kicker, apparently able to drop-kick 50 yard field goals from any angle on the field. So great was DeWitt’s heroics, signs on the Princeton campus showed “DeWitt 11, Yale 6.”
Watching the film, it’s interesting to see that no one wore helmets and plays happened in such quick succession, making today’s no-huddle offense seem snail pace. Also this is before the forward pass was introduced to the sport. President Theodore Roosevelt intervened in the sport in 1905 in an attempt to help make football safer after 19 people were killed in a single season and almost led to a permanent ban on the sport.
Fortunately Thomas Edison was at the Princeton-Yale game to film it for posterity. It is the oldest surviving footage of an American football game
Princeton and Yale football game – YouTube.
More on the Princeton-Yale game details here.
And Thomas Edison footage of Chicago-Michigan game from 1903.
During my Salad days of high school, I spent many an hour playing Cyberball at the local 7-11. There was always that emotional rush when a robotic player was  destroyed by the exploding football after failing to convert on third down and sideline personnel transporting the resulting shrapnel from the field. In the 20-plus years since playing that game, Cyberball has receded in memory … that is until watching Fox Sports NFL Sunday and that stupid jumping robot Fox forces on viewers during the show’s introduction and conclusion as well as commercial transitions.
A little research into this robot tells me that “Cleatus”, the name of Fox’s jumping robot, first premiered on the Fox network in the 2005-2006 NFL season, 17 years after Cyberball’s initial release. While Cyberball players don’t play the electric guitar, jump up and down and dance, there seems to be a strong similarity between Cyberball players and Cleatus. Perhaps some poor sap of a graphic designer at Fox was under a tight deadline to come up with something for the network to fill in for self-promotional shots during NFL games. You be the judge. Are Cyberball athletes and Cleatus separated at birth?
Update 1/16/12: Seems I am not alone in making the connection between Cleatus and Cyberball:Â http://www.sflunaticfringe.com/tag/cleatus/
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