We’ve been digging and pumping highly efficient batteries out of the ground for the last 100 years, now we need to find a way to replace those batteries.

—Megan McArdle (August 27, 2008) - Is the hydrogen economy nearer than we think?

My brother was the USOC transportation person at the Beijing airport, charged with getting atheletes into and out of the country. Two stories from after the games:

• Shawn Johnson asked if maybe showing her medal to someone at the airport would get her a better seat on the plane. Matt responded that going to the counter and GIVING them her medal they would probably work. She looked at the medal, and decided her current seat was probably just fine.
• Kobe Bryant was flying first class, and was told he should feel free to wait for his flight in the first class lounge, but the USOC really didn’t want him in there by himself. Matt, being the transportation liaison, was asked if he wouldn’t mind spending an hour, on the busiest travel day of the games, sitting at a table with Kobe Bryant. They spent a nice hour chatting in the lounge.

(via kxp130)

Copyright 1337 haXXXor (via shawnrider)

His pal Marty was with him that day: Marty Londergan, a dentist, Joe’s buddy from high school. “Joe,” Marty said. “How we gonna get all this shit back?”

“Get a truck,” Joe said. Like everybody’s brother had a forty-foot flatbed in the garage.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “Who’s gonna drive it?”

“I’ll drive,” Joe said. “Used to drive ‘em all the time.”

Sure enough, Marty found somebody’s brother who’d lend a truck, and Joe drove the thing, overloaded, rocking and pitching, with trees hanging off the tail, down the back roads, an hour and a half, back to Wilmington. Then he started digging–a forty-five-foot trench, three feet deep and three feet wide, through blacktop and paving stones. He was out there in gym shorts and hiking boots, sweating like a pig, with the headlights of four cars shining upon his ditch, with Jill leaning out the window to yell, “Come to bed, honey!” … while an old friend or two propped the trees and bushes up in the ditch, so Joe could wall away his realm.

“No, tighter!” Joe’d say.

“I don’t know, Joe…”

“Tighter,” Joe said. He had to have privacy. The rhododendrons, he planted them two feet apart. Next weekend, he’s back for yews. He built a wall of yews around the swimming pool. Never mind there was no room for them to spread their roots.

“Whaddya think?” Joe asked, grinning.

Two years, of course, they’re all dead.

—Choice Cuts: Richard Ben Cramer on Biden - The Stump

Antje in the Forest (via MikeWebkist)

In the course of a long evening, billions of viewers were induced not so much to revise their opinion of China as to realize that its formidable manpower could be harnessed to the cause of astonishment. China supports a population of 1.3 billion, and the knowledge of that resource was never far away; indeed, the whole evening became an exercise in number-crunching, as mass art was constructed from a mass of humanity.

—Letter from Beijing: The Only Games in Town: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker