Rare video footage of Babe Ruth playing baseball, also, Efforts to Map London, also subway maps

 Two amazing links in the Uniwatchblog ticker today. The first is super-rare footage of Babe Ruth getting hit by a pitch. Not sure exactly how much film exists of the Babe in action, so this is super-cool to see. Here is the link.

Also, an interesting/nerdy series in Slate magazine exploring signage and navigation in big cities. Kind of a poor start with a Penn Station piece, and then a better one on attempts to make useful maps of London for pedestrians. New York has a subway map that is also useful as a general map of NYC (despite its skewed orientation (and the flip side showing the regional train map is fantastic). Chicago's El map is somewhat useful for getting around town, but their system is relatively uncomplicated. (also, the trains are super slow). London, famously, has a post-modern tube map that is generally useless for navigating the city above. The planners are hoping that better signage will encourage more walking and thus remove stress on the tube system.

Then there is Los Angeles. Feast your eyes on the area's utterly insane bus+train map. The buses out here are actually pretty good, provided you only travel in a straight line. L.A.'s actually an easy city to navigate, what with the major boulevards running from the ocean eastward to downtown, major avenues running from the hills southward to the ports,  and the odd-numbered north-south freeways and the even-numbered east-west freeways. Of course, it's always depressing to see old train/trolley maps of L.A., with lines going everywhere, serving the whole region before being torn up in the 1950s. Then again, if L.A. actually had a functional and useful subway system it would instantly become the greatest city in the world and become more crowded than it already is so...