Yesterday’s contest pitched the inventor of basketball against a composer of music. Sports vs. arts. Invention vs. namesake.
John offered this amusingly ambiguous comment:
I like both of their creations in general; though I’ve only actually played one myself, I’ve attended performances of the other a few times. If we’re going with the “smell my perfume” test, I think the composer would get the nod here. Plus I just couldn’t imagine an opera about “Nixon in China”, but wow it works. So I’ll vote for John Adams as the speaker that defies expectations.
And I still can’t quite get my head around Manuel’s contribution:
You can be a composer of dissonant, tuneless music and still be a good speaker, but if I had good speakers in my audio system I wouldn’t use them to play dissonant, tuneless music. James Naismith is a slam dunk in this round.
The decider comes from Raghu:
I’m thoroughly bored by the “hot hand” posts that come up from time to time, and this neverending topic is likely to come up with Naismith. Not reading those posts is good for my productivity, so I vote Naismith.
Whatever we can do to boost Raghu’s productivity is worth it. He wrote this cool book about biophysics, and who knows what heights of productivity he could achieve if we can continue to fill up this blog with “hot hand” material?
Today’s matchup
It’s Al Capone from the “Alleged tax cheats” category coming up against Henry Winkler from the “Cool people.” Whaddya wanna see, Robert De Niro beating someone to death with a baseball bat, or an acting teacher on waterskis? Ayyyyyyyy!
Arthur Fonzirelli already jumped the shark.
Big Al is still buried somewhere under Giants Stadium.
Gotta go with Capone here.
This is a seminar series? Does anyone have to ask if Capone would be more interesting than Winkler? Zed’s dead baby, but resurrection is a thing.
I brought this one up with the family and I thought my wife would make a strong case for Henry Winkler, since she’s from Milwaukee, but she votes for Capone. On a cold Spring day years ago with some time to kill in central Milwaukee, we dragged the kids to see the statue of The Fonz which, unlike many of the other places we’ve taken them, was not met with rapture and amazement but rather, “Why are we here?”, “Who is the Fonz?” etc. Make of this what you will.
There’s still time I see.
Given the discussion in the Xiao-Li post a couple days ago (do the extra words help reader or no?), and then the Google post (let’s just drop everything but a few keywords), I think Al is a slam dunk.
The idea is that mobster talk is always trying to come at a point sideways without actually saying the thing, so we would maximize decoration and minimize content. So it’s sort of the opposite, and that’s fun.
“What was the population of the United States in 1860?” -> “Say Lincoln comes to me and says, ‘I want to buy a hat for everyone’, how many hats would that be?”
Anyway my version of this is clearly lacking, but that’s where Al’s big seminar comes in!