Correction: May 8, 2011

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Researchers say this paragraph from a New York Times blog post approaches the theoretical maximum nerdiness-per-character density, known colloquially as “The LARP Limit”.

Not a fan of that blue border on the kottke.org redesign? You could use a feed reader. But if you prefer browser-based reading, try the following Greasemonkey script:

// ==UserScript== 
// @name          kottke-blue-begone
// @namespace     http://modcult.org/userscripts
// @description   Black and White and Red All Over.
// @include       http://kottke.org/*
// @include       http://www.kottke.org/*
// ==/UserScript== 


(function() {

    var elements, e_id;

    elements = [ 't','b','l','r','tl','tr','bl','br' ];

    for (i in elements) { 
      var e = document.getElementById(elements[i]);
      if (e) {
        e.parentNode.removeChild(e);
      }
    };

})();

I actually like the new design quite a bit sans blue frame.

His insight into magic, postmodernism, nerdery, and slackerdom (as mentioned in this Salon piece) would probably be a good fit for Modcult.

…a Princeton grad who was an English Ph.D. candidate at Yale (his unfinished dissertation was to have been on morality, magic and technology and “Gravity’s Rainbow”).

Apparently, FTW doesn’t always mean what I thought it did. Alternates:

• For The Win
• Facing The Wall
• Free The Whales

Thanks, Urban Dictionary. The latter is now my preferred mental narration when reading “FTW”.