Head on over to Playboy‘s Kinja site and check out Alex Haley’s 1965 interview with MLK.

[Photo Credi: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press]

Broncos vs the Pats, Niners vs the Seahawks.

Man, I sure would love to see Peyton get back to the Super Bowl but I’ve been nervous all week about the AFC Championship. I would never bet against Brady and I wouldn’t today, either. Which is a drag because I really don’t want to see the Pats back in the Big Game.

Ugh. Oh, well. I’ll be watching and rooting either way.

[Photo Credit: AP Photo/Ed Andrieski]

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)”–T. Monk

[Photo Credit: Kate Wimer]

Duke and Train.

[Picture by Calin Kruse via This Isn’t Happiness.]

Today the Yankees agreed to contracts with all of their remaining arbitration-eligible players. Their projected payroll, based on the 25-man roster using league minimum players to fill in wherever there is not an obvious starter, is now at about $188 million dollars.

Masahiro Tanaka appears to be a player the Yankees want desperately. Will they break their backs for him? Ponder this current roster this weekend and do whatever kind of dance you need to do to help the Yankees land Tanaka.

If they do, they’ll have no chance at shrinking the payroll enough this season to fit the original austerity plan and they’ll be free to sign more bullpen and rotation depth and to try to upgrade second and third base through trades. But if they don’t sign Tanaka…

Can you imagine them stepping over the $189 million threshold for Ubaldo Jimenez or Ervin Santana or anyone else that’s currently available? The Yankees have been crash-dieting ever since 2011. Masahiro Tanaka is the diet-breaker – the butter-soaked porterhouse. These other guys aren’t even Kit-Kats.

Hey, light day of blogging on my end so here’s an open thread. Have at it.

Picture via MPD. 

And you can quote me on that.

Welcome one and all; we’re back with another round of Where & When.  Still looking for interesting pics and anecdotes to go along with them, searching for little twists to challenge you with. All in a few minutes of feverish work or days of planning? Doesn’t matter, we have fun.

Take this pic for example:

Easy, right? You’ve seen that building before, and you can still see it if you like.  But you know me by now, it’s not that simple.  I want to know if you can tell me where the photographer was standing when this picture was taken.  There are obvious clues and not-so obvious to help you figure that out, so you won’t need any clues from me.  When it was taken shouldn’t be too hard to figure out either, though I will accept an approximation in lieu of an exact date.  As a bonus, name two prominent buildings in the picture.

Your favorite root beer in a decanter if you are the first with the answers, your favorite cream soda in a spritzer bottle for all follow-ups and a scoop of ice cream for the bonus.  Be fair, don’t look at the photo credit for the answer and show your math (which means something this time around).  I’ll be back in the afternoon (hopefully) with the answers.  Hmm, and full credit will be given only for complete answers and proof of your strategy; that means you won’t get credit for only answering one question per comment, but feel free to utilize the comments to map your strategy before presenting.  Have fun!

[Photo credit: NYC Past]

Dolla, dolla bill y’all.

[Photo Credit: Chris Williams/Icon SM]

First lines.

Alex Rodriguez vs. The World.

Sue Who? Sue Everybody.

Oliver Wang on De La’s third album Buloone Mindstate. 

And more De La, here.

Salute Judy Protas.

Happy New Year! Welcome to a new year and new round of Where & When; time to get off on the right foot and move forward.  Let’s see how many more people we can get into our little games here and see how far we can expand our borders; for the coming year we will be traveling around the tri-state area to various points of interest and try to determine where the heck we ended up.  Of course New York City remains the center of attention, but as I’ve said, the challenging pics are hard to come by.  But enough complaints and speculation, check out this interesting point:

Gotta love Olde Bvildings.  Okay, enough horsing around, let’s try to find out where this is.  As far as when, if you study the pic, you’ll notice something (open to the public one year prior) that gives you the proper year.  As a bonus, consider the statue in the picture and tell us who it depicts.

Rewards: The first person with the correct answers gets a fictional snifter of the root beer of his or her choice (New Year’s Special), and the runners-up will get a martini-glass of the ream soda of their choice; you all should you declare your brand of choice.  The bonus will get you an extra cream soda, and you are also welcome to submit additional trivia for a bonus.

Well, have it.  Stay away from the photo credits, I’ll try to get back to you all in the afternoon.  And, as always, new challenge ideas are always welcome, just send me an email with a pic and date and we’ll queue it up.  Enjoy!

[Photo credit: Ephemeral New York and Old NYC Photos]

More playoff football.

Drawing by Barry Windsor Smith.

“If I Didn’t Care”–The Ink Spots

Painting by Pierre Bonnard.

NFL Playoffs this afternoon into tonight. The Seahawks are on their way to a home win, though the Saints are making a game of it. The Pats host the Colts in a bit.

Enjoy.

Painting by Augusto Giacometti (1938).

The Rodriguez decision: 162 games.

[Picture via: Kitty en classe]

“Dancing In The Dark”–Cannonball Adderly

[Photo Credit: kygp]

In this weekend’s book review, Molly Haskel reviews the massive first volume of Victoria Wilson’s new Barbara Stanwyck biography:

Start with the voice, which seems to have been around since the world began: lush, weary, tender, worldly, skeptical, ranging nimbly between hard and soft. It could be metallic, mannish and brittle or gentle as a down pillow, sometimes within the same film, as befits an actress who was at ease in every genre, from woman’s melodrama to the western, with noir and screwball comedy in between. Though film buffs have treasured her for years, Barbara Stanwyck has burned less brightly among general moviegoers for whom a higher voltage is synonymous with stardom.

She was neither a great beauty nor a glamour puss, and the importance of this — her refusal or inability to be simplified into a single image — has to be seen as a major factor in her longevity. More iconoclast than icon, more a character star on the order of Bogie or Cagney, she was often the second or third choice after Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis and Irene Dunne. Yet she has worn especially well. And if she was underappreciated in her time, her minimalist gifts — the fluid movement, the stillness in repose, the sense of interiority — have come to seem ultramodern.

If ever there was an actress who was ready for prime time, it is Stanwyck, and this enormously informative tribute — juicy yet dignified, admiring yet detached — is the book to bring her to center stage. Or books, I should say, for this full-dress treatment is not for the fainthearted: “A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940,” at 860 pages of text (notes, index and appendices bring it to 1,044), is only the first volume, beginning with Stanwyck’s birth and ending with the films preceding World War II. Wilson stays resolutely and sometimes frustratingly within this time frame, resisting even an anticipatory peek at those glorious ’40s films. I confess to having felt a certain alarm when I heard that Wilson, a vice president and longtime editor at Knopf whose first book this is, was writing two volumes on Stanwyck. In general, only someone of global consequence merits such exhaustive and demanding length. It seemed — and still seems — especially disproportionate in the case of Stanwyck, whose talent for passing under the radar was one of her charms. But Wilson’s aims are far more ambitious than documenting the minutiae of a movie star’s life.

What she does is provide context of ­extraordinary breadth, taking in not only Stanwyck’s life, her beginnings in poverty and tragedy and her emergence as an emblem of self-sufficiency, but also the world through which she moved: the cultural and political forces that shaped her years in show business as she went from burlesque and theater in New York to the turbulent Hollywood of the 1930s. Each film from this period is recounted in detail — indeed not just the films she made, but the ones she almost made and the parts she didn’t get. These descriptions are interspersed with mini-biographies of the various participants, forays into Stan­wyck’s social life (or antisocial life, as the case often was), along with politics, both local and national.

Margaret Talbot picks some of Stanwyck’s finest work over at the New Yorker.