"At the time, in the field that we flopped into, the artists wrote and performed all of their own material,” Felice recalled. “Then, after a while, the road got to them. They couldn’t think, they couldn’t doodle around on the front porch with a guitar, they couldn’t stroll through the woods and get inspired. So Boudleaux and I were the first people who came to Nashville who didn’t do anything but write. We were the factory." What do the songs Love Hurts, Rocky Top, Bye Bye Love, and Wake Up Little Susie have in common? Why, they were all written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, of course! Perhaps best known for the hits they penned for the Everly Brothers, The Bryants were an American husband and wife songwriting duo whose compositions, mostly country music, are estimated to have been on hundreds of millions of records sold. Let's get to know them a bit better, shall we?
posted to MetaFilter by ORthey at 8:09 PM on December 19, 2010 (13 comments)

"In order to renew my Fangraphs membership, every six months, Dave Cameron flies out to meet me in an unmarked parking garage in Washington DC, where I swear a blood oath by candlelight on a stack of Necronomicons never to write anything complimentary about Derek Jeter’s mobility or range. Cameron’s post about Jeter yesterday was faithful to our sworn mission. The awful secret of Derek Jeter’s fifth Gold Glove requires a little background in a few of the more esoteric domains of human knowledge. This may be the most important blog post I ever write; if it is the last, dear readers, only you will know the truth." Sure, FanGraphs appears to be a geeky site for baseball stat-heads who live in their mothers’ basements, crunch numbers whilst sipping Diet Dr. Pepper, and invent silly acronyms instead of dating girls. But FanGraphs bloggers quite firmly embrace their own nerdiness – even going so far as to create NERD, the stat, which rates the “watchability” of a team. Furthermore, they so often blend humor, politics, literature, and philosophy into their writings that to shun the site is to deprive yourself of fascinating, scrumptious nuggets of surprisingly accessible, occasionally math-heavy, and nearly always well-written baseball geekery. Would you like to know if better players have more Twitter followers? Wondered, Is The DH Dying? Derek Jeter cheated... so what? How about a lengthy meditation on baseball and the science of happiness?
posted to MetaFilter by ORthey at 9:20 PM on December 2, 2010 (30 comments)

"Lunch is really nice again, not mentioning a few battles with foods that were calling me like sirens called Odysseus. I had some salad some pasta and some fish and we had a nice chat with some Russian girls at an “All-Russian” table. Catching up on all the gossip, laughing, and in general making fun of people! By the way I forgot to mention that this is a men’s and women’s tournament so if you lose early and you are lacking confidence there is a good chance to challenge one of the girls to a match." Russian-American tennis player Dmitry Tursunov blogged his experiences at a 2006 tourney in Estoril, Portugal with hilarious results. [For best results, read from the bottom of the page up!]
posted to MetaFilter by ORthey at 8:08 PM on August 7, 2009 (6 comments)

Demetri Martin cast in Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball. An adaptation of Michael Lewis' controversial and influential 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the film will begin shooting in June and will star Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane, Martin as Beane's then-assistant GM Paul DePodesta, and former major leaguers Scott Hatteberg and David Justice as themselves.
posted to MetaFilter by ORthey at 4:07 PM on April 21, 2009 (48 comments)