Mwsmith13

$12 for a negroni?!?!?

Thanks to Forever Single (possibly with a new handle) for sending. hahaha

9th and P Street, NW

On Monday, Rae Carruth released a 15-page letter, with an added page as an introduction, and gave a phone interview to WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina. The former Carolina Panther has been in prison since his 2001, when he was convicted for conspiring to murder the mother of his child. Enough time has passed since then that it’s worth remembering the sheer brutality of what led to Carruth’s conviction. Cherica Adams was shot while she was eight-months pregnant and inside her car; during the trial, the gunman said, “She was screaming. She was drowning in her own blood.”

Adams died a month later after giving birth to Carruth’s son, Chancellor Lee Adams, who was born with with cerebral palsy. During his trial, prosecutors said that Carruth ordered the killing because he didn’t want to pay child support.

Carruth is scheduled to be released from prison this October. His son has been raised by Adams’ mother, Saundra Adams. Various publications have, over the years, profiled Saundra and Chancellor Lee Adams and their life together.

In his recent letter and phone call, Carruth said he was apologizing “for the senseless act that led to the death of your daughter,” accused Saundra Adams of telling lies to reporters, and added that he wants a relationship with his son. Yes, the child whose mother he was convicted of conspiring to murder—and whose cerebral palsy is connected to his traumatic birth.

After the letter and phone interview came out, Saundra Adams spoke with the Charlotte Observer and assured that Carruth would not have legal custody of Chancellor.

“I’ve forgiven Rae already, but to have any type of relationship with him, there does have to be some repentance,” Adams said. “And I think this opens the door. But I can say definitively he’s not ever going to have custody of Chancellor. Chancellor will be raised either by me or, after I’m gone, by someone else who loves him and who knows him. He will never be raised by a stranger—someone he doesn’t know and who tried to kill him.”

... “He’s not going to have custody of Chancellor. The law is on my side on that one. Rae tried to have Chancellor murdered—plus he’s a perfect stranger (Carruth and Chancellor have not seen each other since Chancellor was a baby). I’m not even mad about the idea, because it’s not going to happen. I am not going to waste my emotion on it.

Saundra Adams told WSOC that Carruth’s parental rights “were extinguished, terminated” when he was found guilty. She added in a video posted online by the Observer that she has a plan in place for other family members to take care of Chancellor Adams if something happens to her.

Carruth did not send the letter directly to Saundra Adams. She eventually got a copy if it and, per the Observer, “disputes many parts of it.”

You can read the full letter below.

Tonight’s Timberwolves-Cavaliers game was stupidly fun on several fronts—an NBA record 40 three-pointers, for one thing; a total of 34 lead changes, for another—but the fact that it ended with an insane series of LeBron James plays, each more dazzling than the last, was maybe the most fun of all.

First was evading Karl-Anthony Towns for a driving layup, tying the game with 24 seconds remaining in overtime. In other circumstances, that might have ended up feeling like a game-changer; here, it was more or less a forgettable intro. Because it was followed by this, a monstrous and soul-crushing block of Jimmy Butler that kept the game tied with just two seconds to play:

And then by this, a buzzer-beating game-winner if you’ve ever seen one:

The Cavaliers are still, in all likelihood, the same drama-filled mess that they were ten hours ago. But forget that until tomorrow morning. For now, just watch that block again.

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Sid Catlett, a former NCAA star and brief NBA player who always regarded a high school hoops game as his sporting peak, is dead. Catlett was 69 years old.

Officials at DeMatha Catholic High School, his alma mater, put out word on Saturday morning that Catlett had died. No cause of death had yet been determined. A report in the Hyattsville, Md., school’s newsletter last month said Catlett was recovering from brain surgery after suffering an apparent stroke in June, hours after coaching in a youth summer camp in the Atlanta area.

Catlett played for Notre Dame from 1968-1971, then spent one injury-riddled season with the Cincinnati Royals of the NBA. But before those stints, Catlett was a member of the storied DeMatha squad that beat Lew Alcindor’s powerhouse Power Memorial High in 1965. That game, played before a packed house at Cole Field House on the campus of the University of Maryland, has long been hailed as the greatest high school game ever played. Schoolboy hoops had never gotten such attention: All 12,500 tickets for the game sold out weeks in advance, and newspapers in the nation’s capital put previews of the contest on the front page.

Catlett, a sophomore forward and the youngest player on the floor, scored a team-high 13 points, including seven of his squad’s final nine points, in DeMatha’s 46-43 win, which ended the New York school’s 71-game winning streak. He also helped guard Alcindor (who by the end of the decade would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and go on to be the top scorer in NBA history) holding him to just 16 points, and giving the acclaimed best prep player in the land the only loss of his high school career.

The game also brought national renown to DeMatha coach Morgan Wootten, now a member of the Naismith Hall of Fame. In workouts leading up to the game, DeMatha coaches had Catlett hold a tennis racket over his head to simulate what they’d face on offense playing against somebody with the wingspan of the 7-foot-1 Alcindor. “I can remember [DeMatha guard] Mickey Wiles hitting a high jump hook over Lew Alcindor, so the tennis racket kind of paid off,” Wootten told the Washington Post in a 2014 retrospective on the game.

Catlett, in a 2011 interview, told me it was the game of his life. “Nothing I was involved in was bigger,” he said.

For Catlett, its importance transcended hoops. That contest also was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Catlett and Abdul-Jabbar. They would go on to face each other again in college, as Jabbar’s defending national champion UCLA squad whupped the Fighting Irish, 88-75, in December 1968, the first game at Notre Dame’s Athletic and Convocation Center, which is still the team’s home arena.

Music enhanced the bond between Catlett and Abdul-Jabbar.

Catlett, you see, was the son of Big Sid Catlett, a Chicago-based jazz man and one of the most influential and revered drummers of the 1930s and 1940s. Big Sid kept the beat for such legends as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong, among others, and was known for occasionally peeving bandleaders by outshining them with his showmanship. In April 1945, the Washington Post went all hep cat in begging jazz fans not to miss a show promoted by future Atlantic Records founder and music industry dynamo Ahmet Ertegun that featured Big Sid—“winner of the recent Esquire poll as the greatest jazz drummer”—coming to town to play alongside young and hot New York pianist Errol Garner. (The gig was at Turner’s Arena, that downtown D.C. venue where Vince McMahon Sr. would soon launch the pro wrestling empire now known as WWE.) A snippet of that vintage preview in the Post: “Whip in a large number of the best swingmen now playing in Washington and the chances are this will be a jam session to go down in history—provided the history is recorded on asbestos paper!” Two decades later, that same paper would name Little Sid to its All-Met basketball squad for schoolboy stars.

On that trip, Big Sid met Florence Jackson, a D.C. native who would subsequently become his wife. But Big Sid died of a heart attack in 1951, when his son was just two years old. Florence Catlett and the boy, who grew up being called Little Sid, moved to Washington after the patriarch’s death. Little Sid told me that he had “almost no recollection” of his father, and that he tried to fashion some relationship with his dead dad by playing drums as a little kid, obsessively attempting to re-create the lick from Big Sid that he heard on the records his mom played in the house. But by adolescence, Little Sid felt he had to choose between jazz and another pastime that the locals were quite enamored with: Basketball. Music lost out.

“I’m 12 years old and I’m 6-foot-2,” he said, “and there was no way I’d survive in the community without playing basketball. I couldn’t serve two masters.”

He grew to 6-foot-8, and after mastering hoops on the same D.C. playgrounds—Turkey Thicket and Edgewood—that produced such local legends as Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing, plus former Notre Dame basketball star Monk Malloy, he caught the eye of DeMatha’s Wootten. As his star rose on the court, his nickname graduated to Big Sid, just like his dad. He is one of at least 18 DeMatha players to reach the NBA, an alumni group that also includes the top pick from this year’s draft, Markelle Fultz of the Philadelphia 76ers.

Abdul-Jabbar, meanwhile, was also the son of a jazz musician, Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr. His 2005 obituary in the New York Times says Alcindor was trained at Juilliard and had played with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and Tito Puente. Abdul-Jabbar would grow up to be possibly the greatest basketball player of all time, and among the greatest jazz collectors in the whole world. (He lost a reported 3,000 jazz LPs in a 1983 fire at his Los Angeles home.) And, as any vintage jazz buff would be, he was a huge fan of Big Sid Catlett.

Catlett told me that he and Abdul-Jabbar kept in touch sporadically through the decades after their on-court matchups, mostly to talk jazz. He recounted a phone call from Abdul-Jabbar that came “out of the blue” 2003, after the old rivals and fellow music buffs had gone a few years without talking. Abdul-Jabbar imparted with excitement that he’d been watching a DVD imported from France called The Small Black Groups that was a compilation of vintage movie clips. Abdul-Jabbar said it had scenes featuring Big Sid that had been taken from 1940s feature films, some of him performing and others with him delivering spoken lines. “Kareem told me my dad talked,” Catlett said. “I had never heard my father speak.”

This was before Youtube and years before transferring large video files digitally was an everyday thing. But Catlett found a Tower Records outside D.C. that had The Small Black Groups in stock, and immediately drove out and picked up a DVD. He told me he watched it alone in his living room in an otherwise empty house, and was overwhelmed.

“So here I was, a guy in his fifties, hearing his dad talk for the first time,” Catlett said. “It was an incredibly private, emotional moment.”

Catlett was convinced that he never would have gotten this gift were it not for the DeMatha-Power Memorial game, nearly four decades earlier.

“Playing in that allowed me to hear my father speak,” he said.

There is a certain type of American who, as he or she watched the seconds tick down on the USMNT’s devastating loss to Trinidad & Tobago and, moments later, those in Honduras’s stunning win over Mexico, felt a rush of self-important pride. Whether it be for reasons of philosophical differences about how to organize soccer development in this country, or because the person is that insufferable type who supports some tenured European side and now doesn’t have to compete for a spot at the bar with “casuals” there to root on their national team at 8 a.m. on a workday, or because they’re a right-wing lunatic who considers soccer a socialist sport, or because they’re a left-wing lunatic who considers backing one’s national team a gauche act of jingoism, the reality is that a lot of people aren’t crying in their coffees today that the United States will miss its first World Cup in 32 years.

Fuck all those people.

Fuck that CONCACAF continues to give the Pac-12 a run for its money in incomprehensible, match-deciding officiating errors, but fuck also the mysterious and byzantine U.S. Soccer system that both fails to produce young, competitive players and drags our veterans away from the competitive leagues that might help keep them sharp, with the end result being a squad that loses to, yes, Trinidad and fucking Tobago. Fuck that in spite of such incompetence and felonious mismanagement, a once-in-a-generation talent has emerged, and now he’s going to be deprived the opportunity to face the world’s best on the largest international stage (for awhile, at least).

Fuck the idea that this was necessary, that our affairs were in such disorder that only complete destruction could prompt the needed transmutation of ataxia to strategic organization. While you’re hoping a group of people who have never once proven the ability to make a good decision will come to Jesus and wake up with a new 10-year plan to Make American Soccer Great Again, the next Christian Pulisic is picking up a basketball instead of being inoculated with the dream of representing his country in the planet’s biggest sporting event.

Fuck that the World Cup was literally the last thing that brought the country together, more or less, behind the same cause. Nobody cares about the Olympics anymore, our basketball teams stopped being interesting 25 years ago, and our hockey teams now feature a bunch of people of whom you’ve never heard (for the men) or a singular competitive rival against whom it’s hard to generate much animus (for the women). Men’s World Cup soccer was the one sport where just about everyone could set aside the both the problematic history of this country and its somewhat terrifying future and be a ridiculous pro-U.S.A. nationalist for 90 minutes. It’s healthy, psychologically, to have something to be proud of, even if it doesn’t all work out in the end.

Fuck that this is probably our last time seeing guys like Tim Howard, Jozy Altidore, Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley, DaMarcus Beasley, Geoff Cameron, and Chris Wondolowski playing for our national team. Certainly, their lack of performance is what put us in this situation to begin with, but they’re also the players who contributed to things like the 2009 Confederations Cup run, the memorable 2010 matches against England and Algeria, and two separate five-match unbeaten runs against Mexico. It’s time for them to move on, but we’d prefer it have been on terms other than in an empty stadium in Couva, Trinidad.

And, finally, fuck that the USMNT’s absence from the World Cup and its subsequent lack of broader coverage from mainstream U.S. media outlets will inevitably result in great stories from other countries being overlooked. Iceland! Panama! A fascinating but complicated Colombia team! Senegal (probably) or Burkina Faso (unlikely, but would be great)! English-language rights holder Fox will inevitably shift to El Tri as its “home” team—good luck with that one, y’all—but the reality is that a lot of people really are just going to skip over the soccer this time around, and that doesn’t do anything for anyone worth doing anything for.

Fuck.

Ryan Zimmerman is off to a great start. We’re only 26 games into the season covering 104 PA, but anytime you’re running a .427/.462/.875 line, it’s worth celebrating. Among qualified hitters entering play on Thursday, Zimmerman led the league with a 241 wRC+. This is particularly noteworthy because, measured by outcomes, Zimmerman had a terrible season in 2016. Zimmerman posted a 67 wRC+ in 467 PA last year after many years as an above-average hitter.

During the offseason, Jeff Sullivan noted that Zimmerman’s 2016 probably didn’t portend doom. Jeff pointed out that Zimmerman was hitting the ball pretty hard in the air, but he simply wasn’t collecting extra-base hits at a rate consistent with that contact quality. Erstwhile FanGrapher Mike Petriello made a related argument, recognizing that Zimmerman was making hard contact, but that he simply wasn’t hitting the ball at a steep enough angle to turn that hard contact into productive contact.

I probably don’t have to tell you where this is going. This season, Zimmerman is hitting the ball a bit harder than last year, 93.6 mph on average vs, 92.5 mph in 2016, but his average launch angle has increased from 9.0 to 11.7 degrees in 2017.

But you don’t need fancy Statcast numbers to notice this difference. His fly-ball and ground-ball rates are plenty clear. Zimmerman has joined the ranks of so many players who are trying to hit more fly balls. And at least so far this season, it’s working quite well for him.

Often, when a player is in the midst of a hot streak, I like to examine a rolling average graph of his performances over an extended period. Zimmerman is killing the ball over his last 26 games, but it’s helpful to see if he’s ever done anything like this before. I’m certainly not about to suggest his .448 ISO and .469 BABIP are here to stay, but there’s probably something to be gained from identifying other similarly productive intervals in his career, if they exist. Is this something we’ve never seen him do? Or is this what he looks like when he’s going good?

As you can see, this is Zimmerman’s best stretch by a hair. His previous peak was in the summer of 2012, when he posted a 231 wRC+ over 26 games. Maybe you want to count that 2009 peak as well, in which he posted a 224 wRC+. In other words: Zimmerman has done this kind of thing before, at least from a results standpoint. The exact endpoints aren’t that important; the point is, he’s had a couple other stretches where he’s been similarly valuable at the dish.

An examination of Zimmerman’s streaks reveals that his strikeout and walk rates were much better in those days. The process for Zimmerman is a bit different this time around.

But here’s something that’s perhaps more interesting.

In all three of Zimmerman’s best stretches, he’s been a fly-ball hitter, hitting more balls in the air than in his dreadful 2016 or even relative to his career average. While there should be some healthy skepticism about the idea that every player would benefit from hitting more fly balls, it does seem to be the case for Zimmerman. This tracks nicely with what Eno Sarris wrote earlier this week about the idea that every player has their own ideal swing path.

Zimmerman has had a great season so far after having a terrible time in 2016. It’s clear that he’s changed the angle at which he’s striking the ball, and while we don’t have Statcast numbers from 2009 and 2012, the more basic batted-ball data seem to indicate that Zimmerman does his best work when he’s hitting about an equal number of fly balls and ground balls.

The main takeaway is obviously that Zimmerman’s 2016 was not a sign that his career was over, but you knew that simply from looking at his results this April. You didn’t need a deep dive to know he was crushing the ball. Perhaps a less obvious takeaway, however, is that while BABIP fluctuates and results can be wacky in small samples, players themselves change within and across seasons in ways that aren’t always obvious.

Obviously Zimmerman’s .469 BABIP isn’t his new true-talent BABIP, but there’s a version of Zimmerman who hits for power and a version of Zimmerman who doesn’t. It’s not always easy to pick up this variation because there is so much noise piped into everything in baseball, but as Russell Carelton noted last year, true talent can wander. Figuring out whether a player can control that wandering once he has a handle on it is another matter, one that Zimmerman and the Nationals are hoping to answer in the affirmative.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question, but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it's actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. The study, to be presented soon but previewed by IEEE Spectrum, is entitled "Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing" -- and really, the title says it all. The researchers sat volunteers at a table with a Nao humanoid robot reclining casually on it. They were told (by the robot, in fact) that it was a vocabulary exercise focusing on terms for body parts. Volunteers were told by the bot to, for instance, "touch my ear" using their dominant hand, while the non-dominant hand remained on a skin conductance sensor that loosely monitored their physical state. When asked to touch "high accessibility" areas -- places we normally touch on other people, like shoulders and elbows -- volunteers did so without hesitation or agitation. But "low accessibility" areas -- this would be the robot's butt and where its junk would be -- produced delay and that arousal we talked about.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

codguy writes: Up to now, airline passengers have been able opt out of the TSA's Advanced Imaging Technologies (AIT) whole body scanners, and request a physical pat-down for their security check. But ProPublica journalist Julia Angwin points out that a rule change on December 18, 2015 now allows the TSA to compel some passengers to use these scanners instead of giving them a pat-down. The updated rule says, "While passengers may generally decline AIT screening in favor of physical screening, TSA may direct mandatory AIT screening for some passengers," (PDF source). Of course, the criteria for when this can happen is completely unspecified, and one can easily imagine them abusing this by deciding to compel anyone who requests a pat-down to go through the scanners for some reasonable cause from their perspective. Guilty until proven innocent?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nets owner and crazy Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov stopped by his team’s practice session today. Was he there to check in on how the guys are feeling? To offer some encouragement ahead of the new season? Hell no, man, he was there to teach those young bucks some important hoop skills.

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v3rgEz writes Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects and to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, according to documents released via a MuckRock FOIA request. As Shawn Musgrave reports, it's an unusual setup arrangement for two public agencies to swear each other to secrecy, but such maneuvers are becoming more common.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HughPickens.com writes Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health, writes at The Atlantic that there is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. "It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic." Emanuel says that he is isn't asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening his life but is talking about the kind and amount of health care he will consent to after 75. "Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won't actively end my life. But I won't try to prolong it, either." Emanuel says that Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. "I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Send stories, photos, and anything else you might have to tips@deadspin.com.

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Each week during college football season we put the conventional polls to shame by ranking every FBS team from 1-125, by whatever standard we see fit. As always, last week's rankings were not consulted.

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Here's three Cleveland fans painted to look like Chief Wahoo, and TBS kept cutting to them.

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