**Just so you know, I’ll spend most of Monday hoping and praying that my beloved New York Rangers don’t cap off a colossal choke and get eliminated by the 8th-seeded Ottawa Senators in the Stanley Cup playoffs tonight. Hope your day is less angst-filled…
I may have mentioned this before, but the obits are one of my favorite parts of the newspaper.
I find it fascinating to read about people I never heard of, or find out all kinds of fun stuff about people who were famous that I never knew before.
One of my favorite Twitter people to follow, Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch, has been saying for months that The Economist magazine, of all places, has been running awesome obits lately. So I finally checked one out and it was pretty terrific.
I give you the life and times of Murray Lender, the guy who not only invented and popularized Lender’s frozen bagels (I hate to admit this as a native NY’er, but when I lived in N.C. I did eat a few Lender’s bagels to get by. New Yorker, don’t judge me: Look, you weren’t there, you don’t know how bad the local bagels were!), but basically helped spread bagel love all across America (OK I know that sounds dirty).
Really a fascinating guy. Check out the obit here.
**Today’s example of “Inventions that didn’t really need to be invented” comes here: Boys and girls, I give you an ice cooler made out of ice. I guess this could come in handy if you were looking to have a beer party in middle of the desert…
**Remember two years ago, when Major League baseball umpire Jim Joyce cost pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game when he called a runner safe on what would’ve been the last out (the runner was clearly out)?
Well, we now have a little bit of the baseball gods, or karma, evening things out. Saturday in Seattle, Chicago White Sox pitcher Phillip Humber threw the 21st perfect game in big-league history. Humber was fabulous, striking out nine batters and only allowing a few balls to be hit hard.
But in the ninth inning, with two outs and a 3-2 count on Mariners batter Brendan Ryan, we had a little bit of controversy. Ryan tried to check his swing on a pitch and it looked like he had done it. Except umpire Brian Runge said he went around and called him out.
It was an iffy call; check out a slow-motion look at it here. (Personally, I think Ryan checked his swing).
But hey, the baseball gods giveth, the baseball gods taketh away. I’m glad that on a close call like that, the ump decided to side with history.
Amazing that in the history of baseball, there’ve been only 21 of these perfect games thrown.
Wide World of Stuff 