The Yankees set the all-time team homer record on Saturday, with 266. They have one more game tomorrow.

And they did that with Aaron Judge missing 50 games!

As of today, they have hit 144 at Yankee Stadium, 122 on the road.

Thomas Jefferson never said any of these things!
It has long been a technique of the unethical and/or the downright stupid to add gravitas to their pronouncements by claiming an origin from an acknowledged genius. Before the internet and cable television, such misinformation was generally confined to discussions between individuals, and it was difficult back then for one person to publish or broadcast misquotations without somebody else fact-checking the claims. The self-publishing capability of the internet, however, has made it a simple matter for a person to promote a personal agenda by merely typing an opinion beneath the solemn visage of an acknowledged sage, then posting the .jpg on a social media site or a blog. Sometimes these misquotations go viral. I hate the word “viral” in this context. It’s actually more of a plague than a virus.

Here are some other examples:

Confucius never said: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” How could he? Very few people got to “choose” a profession in China 500 years before Christ. In fact, Confucius did say almost the opposite. He argued that the enlightened master should be wise in choosing our work for us! “When the person in authority makes more beneficial to the people the things from which they naturally derive benefit;– is not this being beneficent without great expenditure? When he chooses the labors which are proper, and makes them labor on them, who will repine?”

Benjamin Franklin did not say, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither,” mainly because he was a genius, not an idiot. The very essence of “civilization” involves people banding together and surrendering absolute liberty to create mutual security. Before the dawn of civilization, our cave-dwelling ancestors discovered that absolute freedom is not such a good thing, except for the strongest and most violent among us. Franklin did say, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” With those essential qualifiers, the statement becomes indisputable. Without them, it is gibberish.

John Stuart Mill did not say “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives,” again because he was not a fool. In fact, the LEAST-educated people, high school dropouts, vote overwhelmingly for liberals. Among those with no high school diploma, President Obama beat Governor Romney 64-35. On the other hand, the MOST-educated people also vote overwhelmingly for liberals (55-42 Obama). Using educational achievement as a reasonable surrogate for intellectual capability, it can fairly be argued, at least in the context of modern American politics, that most stupid people are liberals and that most smart people are liberals. (That reality renders the liberal coalition highly fragile.) Everyone in the middle tends to be conservative. Here is what Mill actually said: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” Get it? Not “conservatives,” but “THE Conservatives” with a capital “C.” He is not referring to “conservative” with a lower-case “c” as a general political philosophy, but with an upper-case “C” as a specific political bloc in 19th century England whose members were, in Mill’s esteemed but pompous judgment, chowderheads, presumably because they often disagreed with him, thus failing to suitably acknowledge his genius to his satisfaction.

Einstein never said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” If he had said it, an editor would probably have re-worded it to employ a more suitable verb than “surpass” (“suppress,” perhaps?). A movie called “Powder” claimed (fictionally) that the great physicist once said, “It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.” The movie’s version at least includes proper grammatical parallelism, and may even be a wise observation, but I can’t give you a link to the real quote because the real Einstein never said that or anything like it.

Pretty much every aphorism attributed to Mark Twain is spurious.

Kanamara Penis Festival, Kawasaki, Japan

On the Scoopy Calendar, this is the second most important holiday of the year, after William Shatner’s Birthday

These are our holidays:

March 14: Steak and BJ Day

March 22: William Shatner’s birthday.

First Sunday in April: Giant Pink Japanese Penis Day

July 31: National Orgasm Day

Sept 19: Talk Like a Pirate Day

Oct 24: Salieri Day (F. Murray Abraham’s birthday)

Dec 23: Festivus

Like Easter, GPJPD it marks the beginning of Spring. I keep hoping they will make the pink peeps penis-shaped to commemorate the convergence.

A repeated word of warning for those who hope to attend: do NOT try to smuggle giant pink penises into Japan from other countries. In addition to the fact that you would face the dire legal penalties for giant penis smuggling (imagine Midnight Express, except with giant penises), there are simply good reasons why you should not do so.

• First of all, they would not be sacred. Only giant pink Japanese penises have been blessed. That would be like trying to pass off a bottle of Ozarka from 7-Eleven as Holy Water in the Vatican.
• Second, the Most Honorable Japanese Department of Agriculture and Giant Genitalia is concerned that introducing a new strain of giant pink penises into their eco-system could cause the native strain to mutate or die out. It’s the same reason why you can’t take frogs to Australia.

The main thing to remember is that there is simply no need for you to take such a risk. There are plenty of giant pink Japanese penises to go around, and that means a fun day for one and all.

The U.S. Presidential IQ hoax was a mid-2001 e-mail and internet hoax that purported to provide a list of estimated IQs of the U.S. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

It was reprinted as if factual by the ever-gullible Guardian, and was cited in a Doonesbury cartoon as if it represented reality.

In reality, we have a good handle on only three Presidential IQs.

JFK was tested at 119 by his prep school.

President Bush the Younger scored 1206 on the pre-1974 SAT, which converts to an IQ of about 129 on the Otis scale. (There was a close correlation between SAT and IQ in those days. The correlation was dependable enough that MENSA accepted a 1250 score for membership at that time. Over the years the tests have been revised, the correlation no longer exists, and MENSA no longer accepts SAT scores in its admission process.)

Richard Nixon was one of the gifted students studied by Terman in his longtitudinal study. Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 when he was in Fullerton High School in California.

Al Gore was never elected President (or was he?), but we also have a pre-1974 SAT score for him. He scored 1355, which is equivalent to about 137-138 on the Otis scale, and would place him in the upper 1%, about in the same league as Nixon.

Ugly no more.

Eli Wallach, “The Ugly” from the classic Leone western, has passed at 98. How old is that? You know the famous scene in The Godfather where the director gets a horse’s head in his bed? Well, that was supposed to be based on a real incident in which Frank Sinatra was cast as Maggio in From Here to Eternity. The details of that story have been debunked by everyone concerned, but the fact of the matter is that Sinatra was given a role that had already been cast – the original Maggio was Eli Wallach!

The Wikipedia entry on Wallach tells the story this way:

Wallach is central to one of the most infamous show business legends. In 1953 he was cast as Angelo Maggio in the film From Here to Eternity, but was abruptly replaced by Frank Sinatra before filming began. Sinatra went on to win an Oscar for the performance, which revived his career. Sinatra purportedly used pressure from his underworld connections to get the part, an incident that inspired the Johnny Fontane character in the classic 1972 film The Godfather. To spare Sinatra embarrassment, Wallach says he turned down the role to appear in a Tennessee Williams play, claiming: “… whenever Sinatra saw me, he’d say, ‘Hello, you crazy actor!'”

Wikipedia, as is its wont, is being less than encyclopedic, and is not sticking to objective fact there. To my knowledge, Wallach has never claimed that he received any incentive or pressure to drop out of the Maggio role. If there is a secret, he has kept it well. He simply says that he regretted dropping out of the movie to take a stage role.

Having dealt with some mob types during my years in the late Pinball / early Video Game era, I would say that intimidation, ala the horse’s head, was unlikely. The wiseguys know very well that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. Moreover, somebody who is threatened becomes an enemy, while somebody who accepts a lavish bribe becomes an accomplice who cannot ever tell the story without compromising himself. My guess is that if anything at all happened in Sinatra’s favor, it’s that Wallach was offered what seemed like a tremendous opportunity elsewhere, and the producer who offered him that opportunity was rewarded handsomely for doing something he was probably quite pleased to do, given that Wallach was already a Broadway star at the time, and possibly the single best interpreter of Tennessee Williams’ male characters. (He won a Tony in 1951 for The Rose Tattoo.)

But that’s just me speculating.

Anyway, how old was Wallach? He made his Broadway debut during WW2 – and he was a late bloomer. He was already 30 at the time!

How old was Wallach? A year and a half older than John F Kennedy.

How old was Wallach? He and Walter Cronkite were best buds as Longhorn undergrads at the University of Texas, where they appeared in a student play together, circa 1934. According to Wallach, as cited in the linked article, Cronkite played a coroner and Wallach was the corpse.

A .gif collage – including several Hayek nude scenes

Link fixed:

Caveat emptor. Or maybe caveat surfor – let the surfer beware. (Pretty sure the ancient Romans had no word for “surfer,” so I’m going with “surfor.”) As usual with alleged leaks like this one, I have no idea where they came from or whether they are legitimate.

Dana is a relatively obscure actress. Here is her IMDb page.

The bottom portion of her outfit is nearly non-existent

I don’t usually learn much from the posts on Cracked.com, although I sometimes enjoy their take on things. This article is an exception. I learned a lot.

I didn’t know that there was an American town completely within Canada. In order to get from Point Roberts, Washington to any other part of Washington, there are only two options: take a boat, or drive through Canada! One of the coolest things about this situation is that Point Roberts is too small to have its own school system beyond third grade, so the children there have to be bused through Canada and back into the USA twice a day – four border crossings every single weekday.

I didn’t know there was a walled-in Spanish town (Melilla) completely on the continent of Africa.

I know that the Balkan borders are sometimes crazy, but I didn’t know that Croatia is split into two halves separated by a six-mile stretch of Bosnia. This presents so many border-related traffic problems that Croatia is trying to negotiate a plan to build a six mile bridge over the Bosnian territory. (Of course they need Bosnia’s permission to build the chain of supports on Bosnian territory.)

And some of the other examples are also fascinating!

A cam clip of Amber Heard naked in London Fields

… and here’s the very first clip we saw