As part of an ongoing series of glossaries on diverse themes (previously), Tedium presents an interesting index of Americana ahead of its national holiday, not as a patriotic apology but rather a celebration of the miscellany that has influenced the shape of the country—and there are some choice facts and figures, like how the Clinton impeachment helped launch Netflix, with the company selling DVDs of the grand jury testimony for 2¢ (plus shipping), Kraft dinner, disco demolition Night at ballparks, Jackalopes and other domestic cryptids, suppressing the metric system, or the phenomenon that is BJ Snowden—a cult figure more for the neighbour to the north of the US for her songs covering each province but also celebrated as an outsider musician in America as well for her album Life in the USA and Canada and this power ballad.
Sunday, 2 July 2023
civics semiotics (10. 850)
Tuesday, 15 November 2022
6x6 (10. 306)
honkbal hoofdklasse: Dutch for ‘Major League Baseball’
fragrant, acid, burnt and caprylic: the Crocker-Henderson odour classification system

the floor is lava: a fun looking arcade experience though the best part was climbing over the furniture and leaping from place to place
pontifex: the cathedral-like under-girding of the bridges of Seoul
phryge-fest: Paris unveils its Olympic and Paralympics mascots—anthropomorphic hats
Friday, 21 January 2022
6x6
wheelie bins: a collection of municipal-issue recycling bins from across the UK—via Pasa Bon!
filmovรฝ plakรกt: a gallery of vintage Czech movie posters
1 000 trees: drone footage showcases Heatherwick studios’ Shanghai shopping centre
northwoods baseball sleep radio: a fake game with no jarring sounds designed for podcast slumber
holkham bible picture book: a 1330 curiosity that illustrates select passages from the Old and New Testaments
the great british spring clean: projects and programmes (see also) sponsored by Keep Britain Tidy
Saturday, 2 October 2021
net promoter score
Incredulously and with much the same hubris and spirit that the American baseball commission calls its big annual play-off the World Series (it’s not) or organisers an international beauty pageant Miss Universe (she’s not), we learn thanks to the always authentic and as-advertised Miss Cellania that unsurprisingly there’s not only no US airline placing in the top ten globally, because America can’t rise to the challenge to compete on the world-wide stage, there’s a separate ranking for North American airlines. The US doesn’t even manage to sweep this category with Air Canada placing third.
catagories: ⚾️, ✈️, ๐, networking and blogging
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
roughly the kinetic energy of a well-pitched baseball
In operation from 1986 to 1993, the Fly’s Eye ultra-high-energy cosmic ray observatory in the desert of western Utah detected on this day in 1991 a particle whose excited state was off-the-charts with nothing remotely close ever seen again (see also), though similar subsequent events suggest that it is not a malfunction. This anomaly was dubbed the “Oh-My-God particle” (not to be confused with the God Particle) due to the wallop it packed. Though this probably does not sound like an astronomical amount, to take it in context, the importance of this reading begins to take shape.
The signal represented the energy carried by a single photon—as if a beam of light could nudge something aside, concentrated on one particle and represents something magnitudes stronger than any radiation measured from the gamma bursts of distant exploding galaxies (by some twenty million fold) and twice again as much as the CERN is able to create. The cosmic ray, to have attained the title heft, was propelled along at near the speed of light (one-sextillioneth shy—that is, nine-nine percent followed by twenty-one significant digits, short scale). Were it possible to boost the particle through the infinitesimal fraction, it would have the kinetic equivalent to the potential (chemical energy) of a small automobile on a full-tank of gasoline. The Oh-My-God particle and others approaching this class originate from the direction of the asterism Ursa Major though there is no consensus on the source.
Tuesday, 1 November 2016
hand jive or out of the park
Little did we know that not only is the origin of the high five as a congratulatory greeting well documented, it is also a fairly recent one and was conceived (on 2 October, 1977 to be precise—although there are antecedent anecdotes and competing stories) by a largely forgotten professional athlete called Glenn Burke, who just happens was and remains the only major league baseball player in the US to come out as a homosexual during his career. Visit รon magazine at the link above to watch a documentary on the Burke, his struggle with prejudice and his salute.
catagories: ⚾️, ๐ณ️๐
Tuesday, 2 December 2014
double the pleasure, double the fun
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
rookie card
catagories: ⚾️, ๐, networking and blogging