Puma and Adidas were created by estranged brothers

Puma and Adidas were created by estranged brothers. Their rivalry is detailed in Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud That Forever Changed the Business of Sports:

It's a long road between the Nazi spectacle of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic Games in Munich and the media frenzy of David Beckham's 2007 move to Los Angeles, but there has been one constant during the intervening years of athletic history-sports shoes. This book traces the evolution of Gebrüder Dassler, a Bavarian shoe company founded by two brothers whose vicious feud led to the creation of two rival, iconic businesses: Adidas and Puma. Smit, an international business journalist, delivers a fascinating story of the complicated intrigues in the lives of both companies, as well as the founders and their descendants. The tale encompasses almost ever major sports figure in modern times, from Jesse Owens, (who wore Dassler shoes during the 1936 Games, unaware that the two brothers were members of the Nazi Party), to basketball legend Walt Frazier, whose signature Puma "Clydes" sold "well over one million pairs throughout the Seventies," kick starting the sports shoe-as-fashion statement trend. Overall, Smit provides a necessary account of how the growth in sports-related businesses has moved athletics "from jolly amateurism to unapologetic greed."

X-Wing pilot jacket by Ecko

Available at Amazon.

Link roundup

1.  Barry Bonds's success convinced baseball players to use bats made from maple, instead of ash.

Trouble is, while all bats may break, some maple bats did not so much break as explode. Bits of them have ended up in Colvin’s chest, and in the faces of fans in ballparks in New York and Kansas City. For five years, Major League Baseball has been trying to end the era of the shattered bat.

MLB teamed up with the US Forest Service to improve the bats.

2. "Lo Hsing Han, heroin king and business tycoon."

3. David Quammen looks at the short, violent lives of lions for NatGeo:

They were handsome devils, a quartet of eight-year-old males, resting in a companionable cluster. They looked forbidding and smug. They’re probably two sets of brothers, Rosengren told me, born within months of each other in 2004. They had been dubbed “the Killers” back in 2008 by another field assistant, based on his inference that they’d killed three collared females, one by one, rather systematically, in a drainage just west of the Seronera River.

Link roundup

1. State legislators in Colorado are given special license plates that are essentially invisible to red light cameras.

2. William Gibson's commentary on the evergreen story that many elevator and crosswalk buttons are nonfunctional placebos:

Elections as placebo buttons...

3.  The Oklahoma Thunder "makes about $15 million from its local television deal; the Lakers make $250 million per year from theirs."

Colorful chimera

Chimera by Hey. Webstore.

Link roundup

1.  "Cal Ripken Jr. announced a $100,000 reward Thursday for information that helps lead to the capture and conviction of the person who abducted his mother a year ago."

2. The All–NFL Bad Contracts Team.

3. Politico:

Pot legalization activists are running into an unexpected and ironic opponent in their efforts to make cannabis legal: Big Marijuana. 

Medical marijuana is a billion-dollar industry — legal in 18 states, including California, Nevada, Oregon and Maine — and like any entrenched business, it’s fighting to keep what it has and shut out competitors.

4. Part of an argument that gold is largely a foolish investment:

First of all, gold has always had a lot of limitations as a medium of exchange. Most notably, it is relatively easy to steal. To realize this, all you have to do is look at games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons, or the original Final Fantasy. In those games, gold is the money, and you often get gold not by doing an honest day's work, but by running around and beating people up and taking their gold. In other words, the entire world of modern fantasy role-playing is a subtle joke on gold's unsuitability as a medium of exchange.

5.  Usain Bolt is now a 99 cent unlockable character in Temple Run 2.

Link roundup

1.  From the start of an article at The Economist:

EVERY day for up to ten minutes near the London Stock Exchange, someone blocks signals from the global positioning system (GPS) network of satellites. Navigation systems in cars stop working and timestamps on trades made in financial institutions can be affected. The incidents are not a cyber-attack by a foreign power, though. The most likely culprit, according to Charles Curry, whose firm Chronos Technology covertly monitors such events, is a delivery driver dodging his bosses’ attempts to track him.

2.  "Want to be richer? To live longer? Easy. In Japan, the latest craze is to change your fortune with palm surgery that extends your lines."

3.  Nightmare fuel.