Turning And Turning In The Widening ONT

Hello everybody! Welcome to Thursday night. En garde! Prêts? Allez! !

Jewel-Box Ballparks

The Comiskey effect: Can MLB revive what it lost in the retro building boom?

The architecture firm HOK, later named Populous, designed Guaranteed Rate Field. The firm also created Camden Yards, which opened in 1992 in Baltimore. Populous has designed or renovated 20 MLB parks.

Camden Yards was viewed as a revelation in design, harkening back to a bygone era because it featured the B&O Warehouse beyond right field, asymmetric dimensions, and wrought-iron flourishes. Camden Yards ushered in the greatest stadium construction boom since the jewel-box era.

In contrast, it made Comiskey's replacement appear to be a massive error: it was generic, gigantic, and soulless. (HOK gave White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf a Camden-like option, but he turned it down.)

But in many ways, at least from foul pole to foul pole, the two new parks were similar.

While it wasn't quite as tall, it still towered over classic, jewel-box parks. And to eliminate obstructed seating caused by beams needed to support the upper deck, both stadiums pushed the upper deck back from the playing surface. Layers of skyboxes and club seats were added between the upper and lower decks. This became the template. The retro generation of ballparks, for all their amenities and wider concourses, have done one great disservice to the fan experience: they've pushed fans further from the playing field.

"Why do we keep building the same park with different window dressing?" Flesch said.

This is real (heh) inside baseball stuff, but it's interesting nonetheless. Look, I love Camden Yards, it's a great place to take in a game, and it did set the standard in ballpark construction, but it's 30 years old now. I'd love to see a new revolution in ballpark design with a modern take on the old jewel-box stadiums. Smaller parks with the seats on top of the field like you're at a play, not a soccer match, yet all modern amenities? Lemmie get a big hell yeah from the baseball fans out there, HELL ,YEAH!

Tunnel Jews

This story is kind of odd, but it's been bouncing around the internet for the past week, mostly in the wrong places (more on that in a sec)

Tunnel Found Burrowed Under Women’s Section of 770, Possibly Destabilizing The Building

Now the story is likely as simple as it seems: Wanting to expand, the Jews dug tunnels when they couldn't get permits for above ground expansion. Simple enough, but this is where I mean it's being discussed in all the wrong places. The anti-Semites have their teeth in this thing and they're going to town. Try to find out more factual information and * Poof! *, like Alice, you're down the rabbi hole. Here is a very long thread on Twitter that, as far as I can tell, does an excellent job at explaining the situation, including background information on the Chabad.

What's wild is that the people digging were...teenagers. Does that mean they're Teenage Jewish Ninj....nevermind.

Reason To Carry Concealed # 15,295

30 Years Later: Massacre at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen

I remember when this happened. I wasn't in Texas then, but it was national news. I doubt it could happen again down here, at least not the same way. Too many people carry today. And that's a good thing.

This Is Amazing

Click through and read the entire thing. An absolutely fascinating bit of guerrilla archaeology.

TRUST ME on this, it's worth the read.

Here's A Neat Bit Of History

The South End “Reservation” Red-Light District — ca. 1907

That seemed odd. Three single women occupying three separate houses, all next-door to one other. There weren’t a lot of single women living in houses alone in 1907. Hmm. I checked all the directories between 1905 and 1910 to see who was living in that block. Every year, each of those houses showed a new occupant, and, with one exception, all were single woman (the exception was a man who owned a saloon across the street and who had faced charges at one point for “keeping a disorderly house” ). …Okay. I got the picture.

I checked the Sanborn map from 1905 for this block and saw something I’d never seen before: the designation of a building with the letters “F.B.” What did that mean? Turns out, it means “Female Boarding House.” Or, less euphemistically… a brothel. Look at the map here (more maps are linked at the bottom of this post) to see the frankly ASTRONOMICAL number of “F.B.” buildings in this one small area. (There weren’t as many saloons — designated with “Sal.” — as I expected, but I’m pretty sure a lot of saloons in this area were operating illegally.)

Yes Dallas had legalized prostitution in the first part of the 20th century. Fascinating stuff.

I Found This When Researching The Tunnel Story

I had been told what an eruv was years ago, but had since forgotten. It's pretty interesting.

A Fishing Line Encircles Manhattan, Protecting Sanctity Of Sabbath

The concept of the eruv was first established almost 2,000 years ago to allow Jews to more realistically follow the laws of Sabbath rest, particularly one — no carrying on the Sabbath.

According to the laws of Sabbath rest, nothing can be carried from the domestic zone into the public zone on Saturday. That means no carrying house keys or a wallet. It also means no pushing a baby stroller. For parents of young children, no carrying would mean not leaving the house on Saturday.

The eruv symbolically extends the domestic zone into the public zone, permitting activities within it that would normally be forbidden to observant Jews on the Sabbath.

Pretty neat.

News Of The Weird

Inmate's organs, including brain, missing from decomposing body; second case revealed in last month

ST. CLAIR COUNTY, Ala. — ABC 33/40 News has obtained court documents revealing another case of a deceased Alabama inmate's body found missing organs. The body of Charles Edward Singleton was returned to his family missing all organs including his brain.

Singleton died on November 2, 2021 in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections. He had been housed at the Hamilton Aged and Infirmed before he was sent to an outside hospital for care prior to his death.

The brain was later found in a jar labeled “Abby Normal”.

Crisis Of Competence

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

Scary stuff. What say you, Mr. Yeats?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Tonight's ONT is brought to you by porn. If this doesn't get you hard for more than four hours, you may be dead!

posted by WeirdDave at 09:50 PM

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