Blackberry (phones)

BlackBerry 8820, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Classic - by Kt38138 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

BlackBerry is a line of smartphones, tablets, and services originally designed and marketed by Canadian company BlackBerry Limited (formerly known as Research In Motion, or RIM). It is a product name, though many people think it is the company's name.

Research in Motion first offered their Inter@ctive Pager 900 in 1996. It was a clamshell (flip) device that allowed two-way paging. Their first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, in January 1999 which integrated email.

A number of other names had been considered for that integrated model, including "LeapFrog" because the company considered the device to be "leaps and bounds" over everything else on the market. EasyMail, MegaMail and ProMail were also considered as well as "Strawberry" because the tiny keys resembled seeds. But when someone felt the word "straw" sounded slow and negative. The name BlackBerry was coined by the marketing company Lexicon Branding and BlackBerry with its internal second capital B name was chosen due to the resemblance of the keyboard's buttons to that of the drupelets that compose the blackberry fruit, as well as the popular device color of black.

President Obama famously fought to keep his BlackBerry phone and the product had a loyal following in its time. It picked up the nickname of "CrackBerry" because of its addictive nature.

Cassandra Complex

Cassandra by 

Evelyn De Morgan - Wikimedia

The Cassandra complex is the name given to a phenomenon where people who predict bad news or warnings are ignored or outright dismissed.

For our origin story, we go back to Greek mythology. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king who reigned over Troy when the Greeks attacked it.

Cassandra was so beautiful that she attracted the attention of the god Apollo, the son of Zeus. He gave her the gift of prophecy, but she refused his attentions. This made Apollo angry and, like all those ancient gods, he took revenge. He cursed Cassandra so that even though she could make truthful prophecies, no one would ever believe her.

In the Old Testament, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos were all prophets who tried to warn people of what they saw as wrong in their society. But people didn’t believe them, and they ended up being punished for their prophecies.

The term "Cassandra complex" entered the lexicon in 1949 when a French philosopher discussed the potential for someone to predict future events. This complex has found its way into usage in psychology, the circus, the corporate world, environmentalism and philosophy.

Psychologists use the term "Cassandra complex" to apply to people who suffer feel humiliated because they are never being listened to or believed when they try and explain themselves to other people.

Defunct Basketball Team Names

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional men's basketball league, currently consisting of 30 teams in North America (29 in the United States and one in Canada).

The league began in New York City in 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). It adopted the name National Basketball Association (NBA) at the start of the 1949–50 season when it absorbed the National Basketball League (NBL).

At some point, we will have posted about all the NBA teams' name origins. Some of them are fairly obvious; some are not. But an interesting side note is the now-defunct basketball teams and their name origins. There have been 15 defunct NBA franchises.

One of those defunct teams and names is the Providence Steamrollers. They were a BAA team based in Providence, Rhode Island. They were one of the original eleven Basketball Association of America teams, and they posted an all-time record of 46–122 (.274) before folding after three seasons.

The Steamrollers still hold the dubious NBA record for the fewest games won in a season, six, in the 1947–48 season.

During the 1947–48 season, the Steamrollers' coach, Nat Hickey, activated himself as a player for one game two days before his 46th birthday, setting a still-standing record as the oldest player in NBA history.

The team took its name from the NFL franchise that was also called the Providence Steamrollers. They won the NFL championship in 1928 and are the last NFL champion to no longer be in the league. The Providence Steam Roller (also referred to as the Providence Steam Rollers, the Providence Steamroller and the Providence Steamrollers) was a football team from 1925 to 1931. Providence was the first New England team to win an NFL championship. Most of their home games were played in the small 10,000-seat stadium that was built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The Providence team was established in 1916 by two staffers at the Providence Journal - sports editor Charles Coppen and part-time sports writer Pearce Johnson. During halftime of one game, Charles Coppen heard a spectator remark that the opposing Providence team was "getting steamrolled." He liked that remark so much that he named his team the Steam Roller.

As of this writing, the Steamrollers remain the last professional sports franchise from one of the Big Four leagues to be based in Rhode Island.  

One defunct team whose name has survived is the Denver Nuggets. The original Nuggets joined the NBL for the 1948–49 season, and then joined the NBA after the merger for the 1949–50 season. The Nuggets were the first major professional sports franchise in Colorado, and the first NBA franchise west of the Mississippi.

In 1950, the Nuggets were one of seven teams, including Anderson Packers, Chicago Stags, Sheboygan Red Skins, St. Louis Bombers, Washington Capitols, Waterloo Hawks, that dropped out of the National Basketball Association altogether.

When the Denver Rockets of the American Basketball Association (ABA) joined the NBA, a contest was held in 1974 to give the team a new nickname since the NBA already had the Houston Rockets. The "Nuggets" name, which referenced Colorado's days of gold mining for nuggets, was selected for the new team.

The current Denver Nuggets also started out in the same venue as the original Nuggets, the Denver Auditorium Arena, playing there from 1967 to 1975. They now play their home games at Pepsi Center, which they share with the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League (NLL).