Today in History: April 19

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Tim Curry is 70 today.

The actor has offered several performances in his career that could be described as “career-defining”; so many defining performances that he really does not have one for which he is most fondly remembered, except of course, THIS one:
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In My Closet

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.

The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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Today in History: April 18

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The longest professional baseball game in history started 35 years ago today. The Pawtucket Red Sox (box score above) and the Rochester Red Wings, two Triple-A teams, played 32 innings to a 2-2 tie between 8:25 p.m. and 4:07 a.m. the next morning, April 19. Several players recorded more than a dozen at bats each in the game. (Wade Boggs went four for 12 for Pawtucket and Cal Ripken, Jr. went two for 13.)

Most cities and, thus, most professional sports leagues have mandatory curfews that dictate a game should be suspended at a certain time if it is tied. This is for many reasons, all of them having to do with common sense: courtesy to the neighbors of the ballpark if the park is located in a residential neighborhood, for one thing, and also so that those in attendance who need mass transportation services to get home can catch the last trains home. The rule book in home plate umpire Dennis Cregg’s possession did not happen to have the league’s curfew rule included in it. So when 12:50 a.m. ticked by, which was the league’s mandatory, common sense, curfew hour, the two teams continued playing.
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