Wapsi Square Forum

Announcing?

For comparison: Conan O'Brien at the Race Track!

Full play if link doesn't work for you. Fun starts at 4:10.

My ad blocker was hiding the imagery. YMMV.

I REALLY wish that i could find a transcript of Bob Shaw's Guest of Honor speech at an SF convention i attended years ago.

Shaw was a newspaperman in Ireland, and the publishers decided to discontinue the edition he worked on (the daily edition, i think, while continuing the Sunday ... but maybe it was the other way round). His editor assured him that he'd find a place for him on the edition that continued, and assigned him to cover a hockey game.

"But," quothee, "I don't know anything about hockey."

"That's okay," Herr Editor replied, "It's just like football, but they play it on skates."

At this point he felt that it might be counter-productive in terms of continued employment to point out that he knew nothing about football, either.

So he went to the match and sat there watching all these fellers with sticks zipping all over the rink hitting a little black thing, and was totally bewildered.

Then he heard the elderly feller next to him say "So, what d'ye think of young Collier?" to another old feller, who replied "Well, he handles the stick well, but I really think he ought to come up the wing with a bit more authority."

It struck him that this sounded like they knew what was going on, so he kept listening and took notes, wrote up a column and turned it in and the editor liked it and he got assigned permanently to the sport beat.

And, while he began to catch on to the various games, he still used the same method for later columns, and they were very popular.

People were reading them out at the Sunday breakfast table and saying "That's just what i was sayin' to Padraic at the match..."

Last night, I was assigned to a line where I hadn't worked before, running one of the slowest lines in the toilet seat side of the factory. Easy, but boring... And sometime after my last break (which is around three in the morning), I happened to sit on a stool while waiting for the machine to finish another seat, and propped my right foot up on my left knee... And saw the head of a nail in the tread of my shoe. A nail which turned out to be an inch and a half long, but surprisingly I never knew it was there. You'd think I'd have felt the resistance of my shoe against the nail as it went into it near my heel.

Also, at the beginning of the shift, I kept thinking of Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which then came on the radio. Same thing happened a short while later with "Let it Be." Oh, and the speaker was near my line, pointed right at my work table.

Did it go into your foot as well, or just into the heel of the work boot? (I presume you wear work boots, there?)

Personally, I'm not too surprised to see that you never felt it. That kind of thing can happen as you walk, and never even slow you down, depending on the size of the nail, and the hardness of the sole...


Some times I'm like that: I'll injure myself slightly (a scrape, mostly), and start bleeding without even knowing it, until either I or someone else happens to spot it...

Like the time I was helping tear down the church kitchen, so we could remodel the whole basement... I had no idea that as I was chipping away at the tiles, the tiles were fighting back as they flew every which way...
Good thing I had good face protection!
See? It really was, "but a flesh wound..."

I have work shoes, with slip/oil resistant soles and steel toes, and I put in some gel inserts. The area where the nail went in was less than a quarter inch from the edge of my shoe, and the heel is pretty thick there.

It may have helped that the nail was bent, instead of straight, otherwise I might have felt a tiny bump, if anything.

Catawampus wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:

TazManiac wrote:Now then; not knowing the Sport is less a problem than you might think, AND it might be an initial benefit: "Hi, this is Lake Wrangler, your Know-Nothing Sports Announcer, so round up all your know-nuth'n friends and lets do this!"

Ha! Cute...

Maybe you could actually make that work for you by being part of a two-person announcer team. There can be you, and then a guy who actually knows what's going on. He can say that McSimmons just flidged the ball to the hurkle by snoffling, and you can ask what that means, and he can explain it. That might get people who know less about the sport more interested in the announcing.
Or people can just have fun listening to you announcing in your own weird special way.

'zzzzackly, you can make your seemingly lack of experience an asset...

lake_wrangler wrote: Like the time I was helping tear down the church kitchen, so we could remodel the whole basement... I had no idea that as I was chipping away at the tiles, the tiles were fighting back as they flew every which way...

In case you'd like to do things like that without paying a blood chit...

Get a wide stiff putty knife with a hammering end - they're metal-bound. They slip in behind the tile and tapping with a hammer will separate the glue bond. This way the tiles stay reusable and the wall is undestroyed. Throw thew tiles in a pot of boiling water and the mastic will come right off with a bit of a scrape - tiles for reuse.

Handy trick for when the wall falls apart and the tiles need to go back on.

In our case, we were tearing everything down... I was using a ... hoe? Spade? Whatever it is, I usually use it to scrape the ice off my front steps at home... I was vigorously inserting the flat part between the tiles and the wall, making the tiles fly everywhere... (rather cathartic, actually...)

Later on, I used a 10lb sledge hammer to utterly destroy the walls...

Two days later, I also had fun with the (appropriately named) jackhammer...

Sledgehammers are fun.

Just be very careful to hold the correct end when turning the crank on a jack-in-the-box-hammer. They can be dangerous.

Since it's been rather quiet the last couple days, here are some photos from my recent visit to Chicago. Yes, touristy things but something to see just the same.

And more...

Cool beans. Pops was from Chicago.

(That sub looks like a ship in a bottle...)

The 505 is indoors these days?

AnotherFairportfan wrote:The 505 is indoors these days?

If you’re talking about the Uboat, yeah. It was getting ravaged by the Chicago elements, so they dug a big trench next to it, slid it in (using jack stands from hell and all manner of pulleys and other devices of mechanical advantage, no doubt), then popped a big ‘ol roof on top.

Hansontoons was telling me about it at the con.

GlytchMeister wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:The 505 is indoors these days?

If you’re talking about the Uboat, yeah. It was getting ravaged by the Chicago elements, so they dug a big trench next to it, slid it in (using jack stands from hell and all manner of pulleys and other devices of mechanical advantage, no doubt), then popped a big ‘ol roof on top.

Hansontoons was telling me about it at the con.

What about the locomotives?

=================

Which reminds me - trivia time - where was the last World War One U-boat sunk by naval gunfire?

I ended up getting a hardback copy of the core rulebook for Pathfinder. I'd have gotten more stuff to go with it, but I wasn't sure what I needed, so I'll save that stuff for later.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:The 505 is indoors these days?

If you’re talking about the Uboat, yeah. It was getting ravaged by the Chicago elements, so they dug a big trench next to it, slid it in (using jack stands from hell and all manner of pulleys and other devices of mechanical advantage, no doubt), then popped a big ‘ol roof on top.

Hansontoons was telling me about it at the con.

What about the locomotives?

=================

Which reminds me - trivia time - where was the last World War One U-boat sunk by naval gunfire?

Locomotives still there.

In water.

And no Vimana cells were found. I didn't get a shot of the forward torpedo room, the tour is about 12 people and I was on the wrong side of the compartment. And it’s a little tight inside, pretty much elbow-to-elbow with everyone inside the same space.