Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Earl Weaver and the evolution of baseball take the field in The Last Manager

It has been five years since I read and posted about Earl Weaver’s autobiography It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. Since then, a new Earl Weaver biography has been published by John W. Miller, The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball.

This book doesn’t just tell the story of Earl Weaver. It puts Earl Weaver in the context of what baseball has become and how we arrived at it before the rest of the league.

Declassify >

The Dying Art of the Animation Cel

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.

Declassify >

The Cap is more about life than it is about survival

The Cap: The Price of a Life is Roman Frister’s autobiography, written in a nonlinear fashion of his survival through horrendous situations throughout concentration camps and hate during the Holocaust.

I don’t know about other Holocaust survivor autobiographies, but Frister has somehow found a method of lightening the load of this heavy story while also expanding the poignancy to greater heights.

Declassify >

Coupland Uncovers the Future of Bell Labs and More in Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

Declassify >

A Complete Unknown does justice to Dylan’s electrified 1965 revolution

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…

Declassify >