Today's funny posts

ロシアのカザフには「インディージョーンズ(Indiana Jones)」風のジーンズショップ「インディージーンズ(Indiana Jeans」があるらしい pic.twitter.com/jpolDE1jRD

— 吉野@連邦(renpou.com) (@yoshinokentarou) June 15, 2022

Today's funny posts

For a full minute, I thought this cat was dressed as Leeloo from The Fifth Element. https://t.co/EmqcIZ1RK7

— Priscilla Mizell (@PriscillaMizell) May 18, 2022

Kansas City Public Library reading challenge offers sippy cups to toddlers and pint glasses to adults

Link. (Here's what the 2020 glass looked like.)

Steph Curry "is listed at 185 pounds but says he now weighs exactly 200"

ESPN:

"He is strong. And when I say strong, I mean strong," Green told ESPN. "Like, if you go in our weight room, and we're doing dumbbell bench press, Steph is in the hundred [pound] club. Not many people get to the hundred club. His legs [are] super strong. That change happened last year."

...

"It's incredible just how much he's changed just in the seven years that I've been here," says Warriors coach Steve Kerr. "I would say over the last three years, it's been really apparent just how much his body has changed."

...

Whether deadlifts, single-arm dumbbell presses, a variety of leaping exercises or simply having Curry stand in a challenging position -- such as holding a quarter squat pose on one leg -- to test muscle endurance, [the Warriors director of performance] soon found that Curry possessed a seemingly bottomless reservoir of strength.

"The artist in [California State University Long Beach]’s new exhibit is a major donor. That’s bad, and so is the art"

LAT:

A gift deal that includes permanent maintenance of a big collection and an archive of the donor’s bad art, plus a gallery dedicated to its display, all in exchange for millions of dollars, makes it impossible not to think “pay to play.” According to [the museum director], who was not on staff when the deal was struck, the artist approached the university about making the paintings donation, and the school responded favorably, along with a request for a cash gift. The $10 million helped get the museum expansion built; about $7 million went toward construction, while other funds will endow operations and scholarships.

The brand new stadium in Los Angeles doesn't have the field space to host a soccer game?

From an article predicting which cities/stadiums will host 2026 World Cup games:

One ideal city, two less-than-ideal stadiums — and that’s why Los Angeles' status as a favorite to host the U.S. opener has gotten shaky. It has ritzy SoFi, with just about every imaginable amenity but not enough field space for soccer. It has the Rose Bowl, which is steeped in history but relatively bare-bones compared to the other venues on this list.

It’s unclear whether both will get games or, more likely, FIFA will choose one. SoFi is the logical choice, but if FIFA is unwilling to compromise on field dimensions, it might have to sacrifice thousands, if not tens of thousands of seats — an adjustment that could jeopardize L.A.’s candidacy for a high-profile match like an opener or semifinal.

"James Patterson mostly doesn’t write his books. And his new readers mostly don’t read — yet"

A 2016 headline by WaPo about Patterson's "BookShots" series of novellas:

“I’ve taken the fat out of commercial novels,” he says. “In an awful lot of novels, there’s more in them than there should be.”

Not in these books. The sentences are simple and declarative.

And frequently double as paragraphs.

...

The brevity of BookShots serves another master: Patterson’s mortality. “Jim realized his ideas were never going to all get done at the regular pace of publishing,” [BookShots’ editorial director] says.

...

In the past year, he’s written 117 volumes for BookShots.

Although written is not the precise verb. Conceived, outlined, co-written and curated. 

A 2018 article high up on Google:

Why Did James Patterson’s BookShots Fail?

Many reviews of BookShots titles included complaints that these stories were superficial and not nearly as satisfying as James Patterson’s full-length novels. For an author who is routinely criticized by readers for paper-thin character development and plots, these short stories only exacerbated an already pervasive problem.

Here's one from 2017: 

Six Lessons I Learned Co-Writing A Novella With James Patterson

4. Think about your analogies

This is just a great bit of nuts-and-bolts advice: At the opening of the story, I had a character get tackled by someone, and describe it as being hit in the gut with a cannonball. Patterson nixed that—he said that analogies like that need to be familiar to the reader, and no one knows what it feels like to get hit with a cannonball.

It’s not something I ever thought about, but it makes a ton of sense.