碳定年

"It remains inexplicable that we can solve murders with the help of a single hair fiber or a drop of saliva, but we can't figure out the exact ages of Cuban baseball players and Asian basketball players."

Source: ESPN's Bill Simmons, talking about how we have no idea what Yi Jianlian's actual age is. Yi is listed as 20 by the Milwaukee Bucks, but it is widely believed that he's older. Luckily, we don't have concerns like that with American players.


Nope, nobody has ever thought that a young American basketball talent was older than he claimed.


Nosirree. Never.

Special Blog Bonus: As a bonus today, you get a little culture. The title of today's post is "Carbon Dating" translated to simplified Chinese*, via Google Translator. I do not actually know anything about Chinese. This is why I wonder about people who get tattoos of Chinese or Japanese characters. It's not that I don't trust a tattoo artist named "Snake" to be a reputable source for eastern Asian languages... I'm just afraid that a minor miscommunication somewhere along the line might leave me with "Monkey's Butt" permanently written in large Chinese characters** somewhere on my body.

*I just discovered that these Chinese characters are unprintable on my home machine, but show up fine on my work machine. If you don't have the fonts, then just pretend that the unprintable characters are really Chinese.
**Google claims this tattoo would look something like "屁股的猴子" in simplified Chinese.

Shirley, You Can't Be Serious.

"One of the interesting things of my minor league experience is just how into the games people get in like Yakima, Washington or Fargo, North Dakota, because there is nothing else to do - the people just are living and dying by their team. I mean I saw the same phenomenon in just coming back from Spain on the island of Menorca where there are only 65,000 people in the entire island and 5000 of them were at our games and were losing their minds whether won or lost. When we finally saved the team from relelgation to the second division and came back to the island the next day, there were 5000 people waiting in the city center and we went up on this balcony to like pontiff style talk to the masses as they bowed at our feet. And, uh, you're right, you don't get that in New Jersey."

Source: Paul Shirley responding to Bill Simmons about Nets fans.

Explanation: Well, frankly, I'm a sucker for anything related to the Balearic Islands, but if you combine that with New Jersey, the quote is a winner for sure.

Paul Shirley is also the author of Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond, which I have not yet read, but plan to.