GameSpot presents a very thorough "History of Football Games":

The story of sports gaming is the story of football gaming. Ever since the console and computer games industries got off the ground in the later 1970s, developers have been trying to build a better football title. No other sport was given the attention granted to the gridiron game. Even baseball, the national pastime for nearly a century and an apparent natural to be reenacted on a TV screen or computer monitor, lacked the prestige of its younger brother.

"Hey pig / Yeah you / Hey pig piggy pig pig pig / All of my fears came true / Black and blue and broken bones you left me here I'm all alone / My little piggy needed something new." — NIN

(Shouts to MurDog)

The next time a friend asks you to check out his Nikes, you might have to look into his eyes.

That's because the shoe and apparel giant's new contact lenses, called MaxSight, hit optometrist offices nationwide on Monday. The lenses are meant to replace sunglasses. They are designed to filter out ultraviolet light and are said to make the ball and its surroundings appear crisper through the company's patented technology.

(via ESPN.com)

It's no negroblackAfricanAmerican, but it sure seems like "And1" is becoming a euphemism for something, dontcha think?

My wife Lindsay attends a women-only fitness club here in Toronto. Like many other types of buildings that have intermediate-level security requirements, this club features a database-controlled electronic swipe card system to automatically monitor access.

Deleuze:

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

Linds inadvertently found a vulnerability in the system recently when she realized that the club hadn't been charging her for some time, though her swipe card was still validating. Undeterred, she continued to use the facilities on a periodic basis, until finally one day the computer at the turnstile refused to yield entry, gave a loud beep, and instructed her to report straight to the front desk.

Her options: pay the not-insignificant arrears on the account and receive a slightly lower monthly rate thereafter, or begin a new membership with the club for the slightly higher introductory rate she had originally been paying. Since she believed the error to be the club's, Linds ultimately chose the latter (and less expensive) option.

One thing appears certain in this case: in an era of increasingly ubiquitous pantactile awareness, we tend not to internalize any marginal increase in the intensity of the control system's touch-sense. By temporally removing Bentham's guard from the tower, so to speak, the threat of punishment is not internalized to the same degree as it would be otherwise. The imperative of the automated system, then, is to reduce this temporal gap between signal and engagement.

As DeLanda argues convincingly, much of the "intelligence" required to accomplish this goal in the military control system is being downloaded to computers. A similar shift is taking place with other systems of production, in business and elsewhere. But the system is only as good as its databases, algorithms, rule-sets, etc. If we are to understand databases as cellular, organic processes, then we must understand them as sites of rot, decay, and chaos. I presume that this is how Linds slipped through the gaps in the system.

Don't want to forget to post this one: Five months after testifying before U.S. Congress that he never took steroids, long-ball hitter Rafael Palmeiro is suspended by Major League Baseball for using the banned substance stanozolol.

As McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media, touch has less to do with objects pressing against the skin, as it is a complex interplay between the senses that involves the translating of one sense for another. This is wonderfully illustrated by the following story:

Brice Mellen is a whiz at video games such as "Mortal Kombat." In that regard, the 17-year-old isn't much different from so many others his age. Except for one thing: He's blind.

. . .

Blind since birth when his optic nerve didn't connect because of Leber's disease, Mellen honed his video game skills over the years through patient and not-so-patient playing, memorizing key joystick operations and moves in certain games, asking lots of questions and paying particular attention to audio cues. He worked his way up from games such as "Space Invaders" and "Asteroid," onto the modern combat games.

. . .

"I'll challenge them, maybe. If I feel like a challenge," he said, displaying an infectious confidence. "I freak people out by playing facing backwards."

(thanks to Amateur from Now THAT'S Amateur)

Resample: "Upon retirement, golf becomes the new work."

Let me rephrase that: In the post-industrial age, we retrieve the industrial in the form of leisure — in this case, the assembly-line manufacture of completed rounds of golf.

I was playing golf the other day with my friend Seabs and was startled on one hole to see the golf cart of the man playing behind us escape him and start to pick up speed as it headed down the hill.

Only he wasn't on a hill. And the bag wasn't running away from him.

It was a remote controlled golf bag! I had never even heard of them before, much less seen one in action. But there it was, humming along about 20 feet ahead of its master.

I couldn't help but think of the Jetsons and robot butlers. And when that foursome came up to the next tee box just as Seabs and I were leaving, the robot golf butler politely paused to let us pass through.

I hoisted my bag over my shoulder, turned to the butler, uttered a "pardon me … thank you," and trudged up the fairway to track down my drive.

Just got back from vacation. Of course, interesting tidbits come from all sorts of places. Case in point: my 6-year-old nephew, as he began to play a videogame on a 68-inch(!) TV, asked if I would like to be his "audience."