There is a lot of good international soccer coming up this weekend, so kick things off with these vintage-looking soccer graphics from Zoran Lucić. I’m impressed with the sheer number of different posters he has made. These need to be made available for purchase ASAP.
Barcelona and Real Madrid played each other again this week, with Barcelona pulling off a 2-0 win in Madrid. During the first meeting of the two teams this season, back in November, Barcelona thrashed Real Madrid 5-0. The animated highlights of that game were just released today on YouTube. Enjoy:
Yesterday Real Madrid beat Barcelona to win the Copa del Rey (that’s King’s Cup for the gringos) in Spain’s highest soccer league. It was Madrid’s first Copa win in 18 years, and after the win the fans and players partied and paraded late into the night. It appears that Madrid defender Sergio Ramos might have been partying a little too hard, as he decides to balance the trophy on his head and then loses control of the trophy and watches if fall off the bus and directly under the tires where it promptly gets run over. It’s been a while since Madrid has had a trophy to lift so maybe he forgot what it was like. I like to think this must have made the Barcelona players feel just a little bit better.
Here’s the clip:
What most people know as the hash or pound symbol is in fact called the octothorpe. The punctuation mark previously best known for its place on touch tone phones has had a renaissance over the past few years thanks to twitter. But where did the octothorpe come from, and what’s with the name?
Robert Fulford has some answers:
It was born somewhere in the Bell system in the 1970s, when touchtone became established. The first half of the name was easy, though rich in cultural reference. Since the # has eight points the name fell within the order of eight, where an eight-sided figure is an octagon, a sea creature with eight suckered arms is an octopus, eight notes are an octave and octopush (an underwater game played by two teams of scuba divers pushing a lead puck on the bottom of a swimming pool) originally had eight players a side.
And where did “thorpe” come from? The American Heritage Dictionary says it honours James Edward Oglethorpe, the 18th-century British general who helped found the colony of Georgia in 1732. A more popular story has an engineer at Bell Labs deciding to honour Jim Thorpe, an Indian athlete who won the pentathlon and decathlon for the U.S. at the 1912 Olympics; he had his gold medals taken from him when his background as a professional athlete was disclosed, a decision that was reversed three decades after his death.
So there you have it. Of course, no one actually calls it an octothorpe anymore, but it’s nice to know the correct name.
So if you ever have some extra space at the end of a tweet, why not use it up with a nice #octothorpe? You’ll be totally cool and ironic, and you just might draw some attention to an aging punctuation mark.
This is a post from a grammar blog detailing the history of the name for the little dot at the end of a sentence. In North America it is usually referred to as a period, while in the United Kingdom it is called a full stop.
