Links for 2011-12-01

1. Stick What’s brown and sticky? A Stick. This versatile toy is a real classic — chances are your great-great-grandparents played with one, and your kids have probably discovered it for themselves as well. It’s a required ingredient for Stickball, of course, but it’s so much more. Stick works really well as a poker, digger and reach-extender. It can also be combined with many other toys (both from this list and otherwise) to perform even more functions.

“There’s another type of song that endures but in a completely different way. These songs do make us think about our own lives. We carry them in our subconscious like our hands harbor germs; we don’t always see them but they infect us all the same, and there’s seemingly millions of them. (Actually, it’s more like 200.) It has nothing to do with liking these songs; they become characters in our memories, which makes them as personal as family photographs. They’re so deeply embedded in our pasts that we don’t notice they’re there — and then somebody points one of them out, and this makes us laugh. Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is that kind of song.”

Like Vonnegut, Bradbury enjoys a great deal of genre crossover appeal. Though my barfly friend was confused about names, he was also familiar with the other Bradbury titles I rattled off (though still attributing them to Roddenberry.) The point is, everyone has heard of Ray Bradbury, even people who know nothing about science fiction. But why? Was Bradbury the original genre buster?

Boise State lost a football game, you will say, which may hold a great deal more weight if every other college football team, save LSU and Houston, had not lost a game as well.1 Well, Boise does not play the same grueling schedule as everyone else, you will say, and I might afford this more weight if (a) Boise had not manhandled one of the SEC’s championship game participants in what was essentially a road game, and (b) Boise’s opponents’ win percentage had not actually exceeded that of both Alabama and Oklahoma State. Did you know that in the month of October, Alabama didn’t play a single team that finished the season with a winning record? Well, it didn’t,2 and if you don’t count FCS teams, it played only four all season. Did you know that Oklahoma State lost a game to a team that may not finish with a winning record at all, which was in fact a far worse loss than the one Boise suffered? Well, it did.