Topic: Review
Now I'm not a sports fan, not by a long, long shot. Maybe it's the intensity of the competition, the purity of the skill, the romance of a perfect glorious moment, that makes sports moments so emotional and cathartic. Sometimes sports moments engender the best advertising campaigns. This one is from Gatorade: "23 vs. 39".

MJ's ready for his close-up
By Eric Neel, ESPN Page 2 Columnist

>>excerpts only - for full article click on link provided<<

Michael Jordan is working out in a gym alone, just shooting around. A door opens on the other side of the building, and in walks none other than Michael Jordan.

Only this is the young-legs MJ, the circa-'87 MJ, complete with a No. 23 Bulls uni, a pair of the old, bold red-and-black Airs on his feet, and hops for days and days and days. The game is on.

Experience versus hunger. Wisdom and guile head-to-head with brilliant abandon. Head-fakes and shoulder leans on the perimeter against head-fakes and acrobatics around the rim. Trash talk in both directions. Playoff intensity and playground swagger in the air.

As for why the ad works? This stuff is subjective, of course, but I'll offer up a short list of why I think it strikes a chord:

1. It's bitchin' -- Camaro bitchin', cherry, sweet, clean, cool and fly. Do people still say "tight"? If they do -- even if they don't -- I'll say it: This ad is tight. You don't analyze this kind of thing too closely, you just know it when you feel it and you're glad of it. It's the kind of thing you know by its symptoms: a slow, sloppy head-wag and chuckle, a little spike in the heart rate, some shallow breathing, an urge to grab somebody and make them watch and wait with you for the next time it comes on -- this kind of thing.

2. The young Jordan, the one who dunked everything he got his hands on, from any spot on the floor, the one who seemed to tear through defenses like the Alien screaming through Ripley's ship, is somebody any of us who've watched the game in the last 15 years still carry around in our heads -- some with delight and some with fear. And either way, there's a wild kind of rush in seeing him again, not in some clip we know from before, but in a new context, against a new foe.

3. No soundtrack, just voices and crashing game sounds -- like that, that's nice.

4. The intricate marriage of technology and biology that went into making the ad are actually almost invisible in the end. The extraordinary technique ends up making things seem ordinary. What I mean is, the impossibility of the scenario gets squeezed out by the believability of the images of MJ-young and MJ-old, staring each other down. And what you have left feels like a familiar, genuine showdown, the kind of thing that could be played out in a gym, in a driveway, on a Nerf hoop in somebody's den, anywhere.

There's only one person that can wear down MJ.

5. The yesterday-vs.-today fantasy matchup stuff is deep in the vein of the way sports fans think all the time. The elders-teaching-the-youngsters, youngsters-bucking-the-elders thing is even older and deeper than that.

6. There's a bit of farewell in the spot. We know we're seeing something close to the end of the MJ-era now, and by calling up the young man in Chicago, and the very young man in Chapel Hill, it gives us a chance to think of the scope of that era, to appreciate and reminisce.

7. The present-day MJ isn't surprised to see his younger self stroll onto the floor. It's like he's always known he was lurking, like he's been thinking about him, playing against him in his mind, using himself to push himself. There's an intriguing little peek inside one of the more guarded personalities of our generation in this, I think.

8. The powder-blue-and-white punch line is just right.

9. Every one of us can imagine (probably has imagined) being where MJ is in this moment. Were we more powerful back then, when our reflexes were quicker, when we could jump and reach a little (maybe a lot) higher than we can now? Or is experience the thing? Can we think our way into and out of possibilities and scrapes now that we would only have stumbled through then? And is that the power?

And the beauty of the ad is that it doesn't resolve the question. Both young and old Michael have their moments. The game is fierce, but it's never decided. "Michael said he couldn't let either his young self or his present-day self win," Ryan told me. "Because that would mean one of him would lose." It's a sweet stroke on MJ's part: We're left to wonder, but also to trust in and appreciate both versions -- young and old -- of him, and maybe even on some level, of ourselves.

10. Um, he's Michael Jordan.

Topic: Review
The Adidas TV ad featuring Mohammed Ali and his daughter Laila Ali is a masterpiece of film editing, and the following review captures it most excellently...

Ali vs Ali:

New adidas ad lands the perfect combo
Shadow Boxing
By Eric Neel, ESPN Page 2 Columnist

>>excerpts only - for full article click on link provided<<

The idea for the campaign was to invoke Adidas' storied history (Ali wore adidas boots in several key fights, including the Rumble in the Jungle) and at the same time build a bridge to its present-day athletes (enter Laila).

And why do they it hit us in the gut, so hard and so true?

For starters, because new tech in the service of something as simple and basic as two bodies dancing and jousting in space -- and not of something simply techy -- is a hyper-real rush.

Because there's love in the spot: His for her, hers for him, and ours for him, too.

Maybe it's the marriage between the rising guitar chords and Laila's genuine intensity. Maybe it's the fact that she speaks for Ali, whom we know is nearly silent now.

You're not looking at manufactured confidence. You're looking at something deep and inbred, something that might strike you as funny and out of place -- women's boxing ... please! -- if you didn't know so well the source from which it springs.

And while we're on this tip, because "Rumble, young girl, rumble" -- in addition to being a touching homage and a clever flip of the script -- is a line you hope every daughter you have and every little girl you know commits to memory and whispers like a mantra before every single game, test, and trial of her life.

Topic: Personal
The Concourse hosted the Bar Exam the last couple of days...and every time I walk by the building, there is a twitchy clutch of law students standing around, chain-smoking as quickly as possible - trying to inhale as many cigarettes as they can in their short breaks. I think I even saw this one woman with a cig in each hand. I don't think I can ever become a lawyer - since I don't smoke, how will I handle the stress of the Bar?

Topic: Review
I think it can be argued that the early Christian Church has some doctrines that were a tad...strange, during the Dark Ages. The belief that washing one's own body was sinful, for one thing [and consequently causing much disease and suffering amongst the faithful who sought cures in prayer]. But just before the Dark Ages descended on Europe, the Ancient World flourished with studies in mathematics, science, and medicine; particularly in Alexandria, a major center of learning. Power struggles between rulers, between secular and religious authorities, and possibly even climate change have all been connected to the change from the Classical era and the Dark Ages, but was there a notable single turning point?

A detail little known outside Classical academia:

Hypatia of Alexandria was the first woman to make a substantial contribution to the development of mathematics. She came to symbolize learning and science which the early Christians identified with paganism. However, among the pupils who she taught in Alexandria there were many prominent Christians. One of the most famous is Synesius of Cyrene who was later to become the Bishop of Ptolemais. Many of the letters that Synesius wrote to Hypatia have been preserved and we see someone who was filled with admiration and reverence for Hypatia's learning and scientific abilities. A few years later, Hypatia was brutally murdered by a mob of early Christians who felt threatened by her scholarship, learning, and depth of scientific knowledge(1).

A bishop and early Christian spoke with approval of the murder of Hypatia because "she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music.(2)" [NB: I didn't know math was considered magic by the early Church. How did they do their church accounting without the satanic influence of math?]

This event marked the beginning of the decline of Alexandria and classical learning, and plunged Europe into a thousand years of darkness where science and learning was replaced with ignorance and fervid religion until the Renaissance.

---

(1)School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Hypatia.html
(2)The Life of Hypatia by John, Bishop of Nikiu, ALEXANDRIA 2 Cosmology, Philosophy, Myth, and Culture, ed. David Fideler, Phanes Press. Reprinted by http://www.cosmopolis.com/index.html

Justin & Janet - A Legal Precedent
Topic: Fun

As translated by Richard Zacks, in his book History Laid Bare:

Phryne the [Greek] courtesan was so beautiful that she posed for several of antiquity's most famous statues of Aphrodite, including one at Delphi.

Phryne was brought to trial accused of a crime that called for the death penalth...When her lawyer Hypereides realized he was losing the case, and that the judges meant to convict her, he summoned her to the center of the courtroom; then he tore off her skimpy tunic and revealed her naked breasts for all to see. And he started wailing hysterically at the sight of her spectacular beauty. The judges were flustered and awestruck by this handmaiden of Aphrodite and, feeling merciful, they didn't put her to death.

But once they acquitted her, a decree was passed that no lawyer may ever wail hysterically during a plea, and no accused man or woman may ever be stripped in the courtroom.

-------------Athenaeus, in Deipnosophistae, c. 2nd or 3rd Century A.D.

Topic: Fun
You don't need to read Chinese to know what this strip is about!

Topic: Cute

Twin giant panda babies Ryu-Hin and Shu-Hin climb atop their mother Mei-Mei, born in China, as they play at Adventure World in Shirahama, southwestern Japan February 20, 2004. The five-month-old male cubs are a rare case of twin pandas, neither of which has been abandoned by their mother, which is often the case, but instead are both lovingly nurtured, Adventure World said. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY REUTERS/Eriko Sugita

Topic: Cute

A cat joins its owner reading a book at a Tokyo cafe Friday, Feb. 13. 2004. (AP Photo/Katsumi Kasahara)

Topic: Review
Here, chronologically, are the 20 top tech screw-ups of the 20th century. For further details, see http://www.improbable.com

In 1903, physicist Rene Prosper Blondlot of the University of Nancy, France, announced a great scientific discovery: a new kind of radiation called "N-rays." X-rays had been discovered just a few years earlier, causing worldwide excitement, and Blondlot's N- ray announcement caused a sensation. After seeing a demonstration of Blondlot's N-ray detector, American physicist R.W. Wood secretly removed the guts from the machine and then asked Blondlot to repeat the demo. Blondlot, using the broken machine, insisted that he was still seeing N-rays. Almost everyone except Blondlot then concluded that N-rays do not exist. This became the science community's great example of why extraordinary claims ought to be tested before people accept them as valid.

On April 14, 1912, the ocean liner Titanic, described by its manufacturers as unsinkable, sank on her maiden voyage.

During World War I, nearly all the world's technological innovation was poured into the battlefields of Europe's Western Front. Both sides expected their technology would quickly break the impasse. Instead, it produced three years of deadlocked trench, barbed wire, rifle, grenade, machine gun, artillery, gas, tank, and aeroplane warfare, and the deaths of millions of people.

On May 6, 1937, the hydrogen-filled dirigible Hindenberg, arriving in Lakehurst, New Jersey, after a transatlantic flight, caught fire and disintegrated.

On July 17, 1938, pioneer aviator Douglas (ever after to be called "Wrong Way") Corrigan, took off for California from an air field in Brooklyn, New York. He landed in Ireland.

On November 7, 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in Washington state, twisted wildly and collapsed. The twisting was caused by wind forces, which the designers had ignored.

In the early and middle parts of the century, powerful new antibiotic drugs were developed, saving countless millions of lives. By century's end, careless over-use of these drugs fueled many microbes to evolve resistance to them, thus endangering countless millions of lives.

In 1952, the de Havilland Comet, a commercial jet aircraft, made its debut. Twenty-one of this first model were built. Seven of them crashed due to a kind of metal fatigue that the designers had not considered.

On December 5, 1959, the Malpasset Dam in the Reyran Valley on the French Riviera cracked and burst. Its foundation, which was seated next to a seam of clay the designers had ignored, had shifted, causing the crack. More than 420 people died.

During the years 1958-62 a Chinese government-mandated technological revolution called "The Great Leap Forward" caused food production to plummet, which led to massive famine. Under orders, people over- and mis-used techniques that were copied from the Soviet Union (soil was plowed too deeply, seeds planted too densely, irrigation projects engineered badly if at all, etc.) Bureaucracy on all levels exacerbated the problem by decreeing that there was no problem. The death toll from the famine is estimated at 30-50 million people.

In 1962, Mariner 1, the first U.S. spacecraft sent to explore the planet Venus, went off-course shortly after launch because of an error in its guidance computer program. The error was small: a wrong punctuation character in one line of code. The result was large: instead of going to Venus, Mariner 1 went into the Atlantic Ocean.

In the early 1970s, the new, 60-story Hancock Tower in Boston, one of the first tall buildings clad entirely with large mirrored glass panels, began shedding its 500-pound windows, one by one. The window material had been used in much smaller buildings, where it caused similar problems; the Hancock designers overlooked this fact. Sheets of plywood -- more than an acre of them -- were put up in place of the missing windows, and for years the streets in the neighborhood were covered with tunnels to protect pedestrians from the falling glass. The building also caused neighboring utility lines and foundations to crack, and induced nausea in its occupants when heavy winds blew.

On September 1, 1983 a Soviet Su-15 jet fighter mistakenly shot down a Korean Air civilian airliner near Sakhalin Island, USSR, killing 269 people.

On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide chemical plant at Bhopal, India leaked toxic gas, killing more than 6000 people and injuring and/or debilitating many more.

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff because a sealing ring failed. The sealant material was known to be brittle in the cold, and the rocket had spent many hours sitting in cold weather prior to launch.

In April 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia suffered a partial meltdown due to design deficiencies and sloppy maintenance. More than thirty people were killed in the short term, thousands more suffered severe illness and/or impairment, and a vast expanse of land, water and air was laced with radioactive contaminants.

On July 3, 1988 the US naval vessel Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iran Air civilian airliner, killing 290 people.

In 1989, Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, chemists at the University of Utah, announced their discovery of "Cold Fusion," a simple, inexpensive way to produce nuclear fusion. The method promised a future in which energy would be cheap and plentiful. The announcement triggered wild financial speculation and frenzied, unsuccessful attempts worldwide to demonstrate cold fusion. Later, it appeared that Fleischmann and Pons had based their claim on poorly documented, sloppy experiments, and were refusing to discuss the details . The insistent, extraordinary claim, together with the lack of information that would allow others to test it, made Fleischmann and Pons -- and their idea -- pariahs to much of the science community.

Juan Pablo Davila worked for the Chilean government-owned Codelco Company. In 1994, while trading commodities via computer, Davila accidentally typed "buy" when he meant to type "sell." After realizing his mistake, he went into a frenzy of buying and selling, ultimately losing approximately .5% of the country's gross national product. His name thereupon became a verb, "davilar", meaning "to screw up royally."

And finally, comes the Y2K computer bug, the nature of which is all too well known to turn-of-the-century readers.

Topic: Fun
State of the Union, 2003...on crack.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/presaddress2.shtml