• My Life as a Young Thug
  An excerpt from Mike Tyson’s biography focusing on his life in Brooklyn and how he got started as a boxer. Interesting read, and you might end up reading the entire book.

  One day I went into this neighborhood in Crown Heights and I robbed a house with this older guy. We found $2,200 in cash, and he cut me in for $600. So I went to a pet store and bought a hundred bucks’ worth of birds. They put them in a crate for me, and the owner helped me get them on the subway. When I got off, I had somebody from my neighborhood help me drag the crate to the condemned building where I was hiding my pigeons. But this guy went and told some kids that I had all these birds. So a guy named Gary Flowers and some friends of his came and started to rob me. My mother saw them messing with the birds and told me, and I ran out into the street and confronted them. They saw me coming and stopped grabbing the birds, but this guy Gary still had one of them under his coat.

  “Give me my bird back,” I protested. Gary pulled the bird out from under his coat. “You want the bird? You want the fucking bird?” he said. Then he just twisted the bird’s head off and threw it at me, smearing the blood all over my face and shirt.

  “Fight him, Mike,” one of my friends urged. “Don’t be afraid, just fight him.”

• Straight Up
  A short profile into the history and success of Johnnie Walker.

  But Walker understood that to truly make his mark, he needed to conquer a market much closer to home: London. In 1880, he opened offices in the city and became his company’s first brand ambassador. As Lockhart noted, “he understood the art of personal advertisement,” riding around town on a specially built open carriage known as a phaeton, a mode of transport favored by royals and the superrich. Drawn by “two superb ponies,” the conveyance “attracted the desired attention and increased the still-more-desired sales.”

• The Oral History of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ Video
  

  Hollister: But I wasn’t having it: “Are you fucking kidding me? A gun?” He was wearing all brown, and he would have been standing on the butt, looking like … you know!

  Sir Mix-a-Lot: I was wearing a brown shirt and brown pants, and they were taking Polaroids, and I saw that I looked like dancing turd. My boys said, “You always talking like you’re the shit. Well, now you really the shit.” They still ride me on that.

• Bay Watched
  I read this article, but I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be about. Certainly, it talks about SF. Certainly, it talks about why some young people are flocking to the city’s tech industry, and it talks about how the new early investing and VC games are working. But I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to shine a light on – how SF is changing but remaining true to its roots perhaps?

  “It’s much more a campaign-based model, where you’re going to crush it for a few years and then be absent for a while,” Bahat said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called a C.E.O., and it’s like, ‘I’m at a meditation retreat!’ or ‘I’m tied up for the next three months!’ ” The meditation lacuna is as much a mark of success as the chockablock schedule, since stepping away is something that only high-achieving people can do. Once, when Bahat reported on LinkedIn that he was leaving a job by changing his status to “Doing Nothing,” his New York friends fretted, and promised to let him know if they heard of any openings. His Bay Area friends, meanwhile, congratulated him on his exit.

• Remote Control
  A look back at Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, 20 years later.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: pocket