A high school baseball coach is in trial in New Jersey for allegedly talking to his players about their masturbation habits. A number of the former players at Belmar’s St. Rose High School have told jurors how their 43-year-old coach asked that they send him a text message every time they masturbated. The coach would pay up to $5 per text, the players said, and devised a code in which they were provide details. The Asbury Park Press Reports, “The code included a number for the duration of the act and a one-word description of how it felt-from bad to good to excellent.”

Here Are Some Things That You Could Put On the TV What With All the Extra Time That the TV Has Now, with Seth Colter Walls

by Seth Colter Walls

So there’s that thing with the TV people and TV timeslots you’ve no doubt heard about, and how pretty soon there’s gonna be more time on TV for one TV network to fill, because that one guy who was on TV at one time, for awhile, didn’t want to be on TV at another time? So now people are saying that the one guy probably won’t be on TV anymore, or at least not on this same TV place, and the other guy who used to have his TV time, before, will just go back to it now, leaving his other TV time available for something. Oh, it’s all quite amazing, these minutes of the day still with TV left to be crammed into them.

Anyway, the TV people at the TV company with all the extra TV time to fill already have a plan, sorry to say, for this putatively TV-less time, so they don’t need any of your ideas about how to put TV into time, thank you very kindly.

A couple days ago, someone sent me a note at a time when I was not watching TV for some reason. It was an acquaintance of mine who had taken the time to send me a note about TV that had used to happen in the past, with a link about how the TV people spent their TV hours, in the time long ago, on performance things-very occasionally. They called it “The Seven Lively Arts,” and this was on the CBS TV people’s time, decades ago-and once the show put Coleman Hawkins and Count Basie and Gerry Mulligan on it, though none of them were punching each other or anything, which for being on TV as an unscripted thing was kind of interesting.

In my life, I had always needed to spend quite a lot of my time going around to find this kind of thing in places or buildings that I’ve always noticed don’t have TV cameras in them, for whatever reason. But my friend showed me, via the Internet, the proof about the fact that just people making music on instruments used to be on the TV time, pretty unmediated. I thought, hey, I’d watch that on the TV times even today. Here is some more of the TV time that happened once:

Pretty beautiful way to spend time, TV or not on TV, right?

But then something on TV happened that was pretty good-or at least the other people who I knew said it was pretty good-and then I forgot what the other guy had said for a couple days. Also because all the people on the other TV hours started talking about TV hours a lot and it was pretty good TV, I have to say! At least compared to what’s on TV most of these hours, when all the TV hours are nicely accounted for.

So anyway, I was getting ideas, for a time. About how to fill TV time up like that again! Like this one guy Vijay Iyer had a record that all the jazz people thought was the best way to spend jazz time in 2009, and he plays in New York a lot, and could probably spend time on TV very inexpensively, owing to how jazz people today don’t get much time from people anywhere, let alone TV time. And if you said they could spend time on TV, they probably wouldn’t even ask you for cab fare. And if you were looking to spend not much money on TV time, you could put him in a room with most any other jazz player, and they would do interesting things, because the music they play is often unscripted, and they know how to fill up the time anyway, when things aren’t written out all the way.

Another pianist named Robert Glasper also knows good ways to spend your time, both when he does more traditional-sounding jazz things…

…and also when he plays more popular-sounding songs, but in his own way, like Black Star things with Mos Def.

This guy Allen Toussaint spent a lot of time writing R&B; songs, but he also plays jazz clubs today, and can fill time real good with both singing and piano. I bet he’d be good for a whole hour of TV time that people might need to fill!

There is also a guy named Marc Ribot who spends time doing this, and I bet he’d also spend time on TV for very little or no money. He does a Beatles song in a very pretty way that is good to spend time with.

Then there’s also this person Jenny Scheinman, who plays jazz violin but also writes some quite beautiful folk-like numbers. You could put her in a room with maybe lots of these other people, and something interesting and new might happen.

So I was getting pretty excited about the show that somebody could put on TV, if they had the time on hand to hand around to people who know how to spend it. I was just getting started! But then I heard that they, the TV people, were giving the time to reruns of things that had already been on TV for quite a lot of time already, and also new versions of the same shows, essentially, but done a little bit differently, to help mix things up. So I stopped spending time thinking about it, since I’m sure they know what’s best in terms of filling up the entire day with TV.

Seth Colter Walls isn’t interested in a “new comedy panel series about the unpredictable and hilarious institution commonly known as marriage.”

“Dear Amy,

While attending the 4 p.m. Christmas vigil mass at my church this year, I was shocked.

I look beyond the fact that no one dresses up for church and that talking across the pews seems to be a normal occurrence, but what happened this year is beyond me.

During the Holy Communion mediation song (with only 10 minutes left to the service) the women behind me started to breast-feed her baby.”
-Letter writer to (rape-blaming) advice columnist “Ask Amy” has no clue what Christmas is actually about (second letter).

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon has ruled that the FDA cannot bar “electronic cigarettes” from being imported into the country, finding that they are more or less the same as actual cigarettes and are not, in fact, a drug-delivery device. Leaving aside the fact that actual cigarettes, or “acoustic cigarettes,” are indeed a drug delivery device themselves (and one of the best kinds), this ruling makes me sad, because “electronic cigarettes” are for pussies, and the word “vaping,” which is used to describe the process of inhalation, is just awful.

Some excerpts from Ohio State University’s Disaster Research Center’s Working Paper #71, “Looting in Disaster,” by Jane Gray and Elizabeth Wilson, August 1984, prepared for a conference discussion on the topic of the sociology of disaster.

The is worth a read. As is “What Looting in Civil Disturbances Really Means,” from 1968, and “Local And National Media Coverage Of Disaster: A Content Analysis Of The Print Media’s Treatment Of Disaster Myths,” from 1986.

“I think my parents are going to also finally be able to say, ‘Right on! You’re finally putting that college education to work!’”
-Former Alaska governor/Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin discusses her new job with Fox News.

Can someone please explain what Roger Ebert is talking about in his recent piece on Cache please? He wrote: “Now I call your attention to the shot I missed the first time through. You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39. You tell me what it means. It’s the smoking gun, but did it shoot anybody?” Nobody seems to understand what he is talking about.

“Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well.” That’s David Brooks, going out on a crazy limb. (He goes out on some others, which we’re not even going to address. This one is maddening enough.) For starters. Barbados has a population well under 300,000, and Haiti has a population of over 10 million? Haiti is almost 11,000 square miles and Barbados is 167? This is a question of manageability. More importantly, Barbados has been stunningly smart in occupying the middle ground between neighboring tax haven islands and the highly-regulated (and/or more greatly taxed) larger neighbors in the Americas.

At least 240 U.S.- and Canada-based insurance companies operate in Barbados’ international business sector. (Meanwhile, AIG has outposts in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago-and Goldman Sachs has a troubled office in Cayman.) While definitely not a tax haven, so that they can provide companies with a clean bill-Barbados has extensive agreements with the U.S. and Canada, China and Venezuela alike-Barbados still has extremely favorable financial arrangements for corporations.

And while tourism accounts for about half the country’s economy, Barbados had $240 million in tax income in 2009 from their “international business sector”-a bit more than half of the $412 million in 2009 corporate tax income in the country.

That sort of income is Barbados having a severe downturn, in both tourism and corporate taxes, from 2008, by the way. In fact, the U.S.-led financial crisis very nearly took down much of the Caribbean over the last year. Barbados is entrenched enough to survive.

If you are planning to watch all four football playoff games this weekend, you can expect about forty-four minutes of actual football in total, according to the Wall Street Journal. Whatever, I’ll take it. Go Saints!

by Ned Frey

Wikipedia commingles inane and profound topics willy-nilly, most always with equal weight and seriousness of tone. Cataloging everything under the sun with such seriousness of purpose and attention to detail is an amazing endeavor. The excerpts that follow are both very silly and very informative. The complete entries on “Deep-fried Mars Bar” and “Exploding Whale,” for example, are each almost as long and serious in tone as the entry on “Immanuel Kant.” They highlight the oddity and incongruity and wonder of the whole enterprise. What’s more, these excerpts are proof that Wikipedia is most likely the most positive development in the history of our extremely troublesome Internet.

• “A deep-fried Mars Bar is an ordinary Mars Bar normally fried in a type of batter commonly used for deep frying fish, sausages, and other battered products … It is said to have been invented in the Haven Chip Bar in Stonehaven, near Aberdeen on Scotland’s North-East coast, in 1995. The first recorded mention of the food was in the Daily Record, August 24, 1995, in an article titled ‘Mars supper, please’.”

• “A tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells.”

• “Gleek is a blue ‘space monkey’ and the pet of Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins. … A joke involving Gleek often ends episodes of the Super Friends in which he appears. Gleek has a stretchable, prehensile tail which can be quite useful. Gleek is also highly intelligent, as he clearly understands spoken English, even somewhat complicated concepts such as the various stages of simple strategic planning.”

• “Cyberspace … is the global domain of electromagnetics as accessed and exploited through electronic technology and the modulation of electromagnetic energy to achieve a wide range of communication and control system capabilities.”

• “Exploding whale most often refers to an event at Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when a dead sperm whale (originally reported to be a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass. … There have also been spontaneous explosions. The most widely reported example was in Taiwan in 2004, when the buildup of gas inside a decomposing sperm whale caused it to explode in a crowded urban area, while being transported for a post-mortem examination. Other exploding whales have been written about and documented by several well-known authors.”

• “The three wise monkeys (Japanese: san’en or sanzaru, or sanbiki no saru, literally ‘three monkeys’) embody the proverbial principle to ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. The three monkeys are Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil; Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil. Sometimes there is a fourth monkey depicted with the three others; the last one, Shizaru, symbolizes the principle of ‘do no evil’. He may be shown covering his abdomen or genital area …”

• “The Hampster Dance or Hampsterdance is one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme. Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte … designed The Hampster Dance in August 1998 as an homage to her pet hamster, named ‘Hampton Hamster.’”

• “Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. … Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason.”

• “The Scrubbing Bubbles are anthropomorphic bubbles with brush bristles on their undersides.”

Ned Frey is a corporate writer who pens occasional reality show linkbait posts for Gawker as “MisterHippity.”