When news leaked Monday morning that James Holzhauer had finally lost on Jeopardy!, our first thought was, Those damn eight smarty pants from the National Spelling Bee have struck again! Wrong.
The person who unseated Holzhauer after 32 consecutive victories and $2,464,216 in winnings was Emma Boettcher, a 27 year-old librarian, also from Chicago. Boettcher has been a home viewer for years who would record her scores and even fashioned her own buzzer (nerd).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvUZijEuNDQ
Holzhauer exits only about $56,000 shy of Ken Jennings’ record from 2004, an achievement that took Jennings more than twice as many games (74) to amass.
The Final Jeopardy! answer was “Who is Kit Marlowe?” (foremost Elizabethan playwright). Both got it correct, but Boettcher was ahead and wagered more.
Royals
How would you caption this photo? Does anyone look happy here? Is Queen Elizabeth II wondering why she had to live this long? Is Donald about to play a concerto? Is this what meeting the in-laws is like?
HBO aired the finale of Chernobyl, a show that massively succeeded on the premium cable channel despite having not one sex scene or anyone ever using the “F-word.” There was brief nudity, but only of male miners digging au naturale because of the heat.
We won’t spoil it for you (we’re no Dan Steinberg), other than to say that our hero, Andrey Legasov (Jared Harris) chooses a Sydney Carton-like fate straight out of A Tale Of Two Cities. He makes the hero’s choice.
Two lines from last night’s finale stuck out for us, and remember that the series was created and written by Craig Mazin, who roomed with Ted Cruz freshman year at Princeton and was hyper-aware that he was writing this series in the Age of Trump:
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
“To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it.”
This was an incredible, and just-the-proper-length, series. Based on actual events.
Window Seats For All
The good news is that Dutch airline KLM is funding the development of this futuristic V-shaped plane that will apparently be 20% more fuel-efficient. The bad news is that it really is “futuristic” as they don’t expect it to be operational and in service before 2040.
The “Flying V” was the brainchild of Justus Benad, a student at the Berlin Technical Institute at the time. It really is hype, as the kids say, and reminds us of one of those wing suits. We propose the back middle area of the module be made into a cocktail bar/lounge area. That’s our contribution to aeronautics.
Rodley
This is our friend Rodley, one of our favorite servers and one of the best employees ever at the cookoutateria (he is now an IT specialist).
Music 101
Take Me Home
There was no bigger solo artist in the early Eighties than Lionel Ritchie, but he yielded that crown in the mid-Eighties to the former drummer of Genesis. There were flashier music acts, there were more iconic figures (Prince, Madonna, etc.), but no one ruled radio quite like Phil Collins. The British former child-actor went on a Beatlesque run, recording SEVEN No. 1 hits. This was not one of them (it peaked at No. 7), but you gotta love the audacity of thinking, Oh, sure, I’ll use my world tour as a backdrop to shoot a video.
Remote Patrol
Barry
HBO
We don’t want to oversell this comedy starring Bill Hader and now in its second season, but it’s solid. The bumbling Chechens remind us of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz and any series whose No. 2 character is played by the always-working Stephen Root is going to have a lot going for it. Look for the subtle dig at Ted Danson’s fake coif from Cheers in the second episode.
This … is incredible. American televangelist Kenneth Copeland never foresaw that buying a private jet with money raised by his church would prompt difficult questions. Reporter does an AMAZING job. The man actually looks unhinged. pic.twitter.com/JK0zwUdSvO
Charlatan. Stick around for when he says, “Not the people, baby. Not the people.”
Starting Five
Fat And Furious*
*The judges will not accept “Answering The Taco Bell”
Andy Ruiz, Jr., entered New York a relative unknown and exited Madison Square Garden late Saturday night as the heavyweight champion of the world. If you can make it there…
Ruiz, 6’2″ and 268 pounds, knocked out (and knocked down four times) undefeated and 6’6″ champ Anthony Joshua of England. We’ve seen men of Ruiz’s girth come to New York City this time of year and be crowned champion, but only at the Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. Boxing’s biggest upset since Tyson-Douglas?
I don’t know how you say “Rocky” in Spanish, but Ruiz, who is from Imperial Valley, Calif., only landed this fight one month earlier after Joshua’s scheduled opponent, Jarrell Miller, tested positive for ALL THE DRUGS. This was Rocky Balboa by way of Taco Bell
Kevin Can Wait*
Minus Kevin Durant for a seventh straight game, the Warriors found themselves trailing by at least a dozen in the first half for a sixth straight game. No matter.
The Dubs asserted their will in the third quarter, opening with an 18-0 run against the Raptors in Canadia, wresting both the game and control of the series away from the Raptors. Draymond Green (above) was again spectacular, a “wrecking ball” of sorts, as he finished one assist shy of becoming only the third player (Wilt, Magic) to post consecutive triple-doubles in NBA Finals games.
Cook and Livingston came off the bench and came through
As Doris Burke said afterward, and we agree, this was all about championship mettle. Minus Durant, minus Kevon Looney after a first-half injury, and minus Klay Achin’ for the final seven minutes, the Dubs held on to win.
How does Kawhi fail to get this steal and how might the series have changed if he had?
We were amused by the assertions of JVG and Mark Jackson in the first half, decrying the Warriors’ dearth of good bench players. With so many starters hurt, Quinn Cook (three for three on threes in the second half), Andrew Bogut (three second-half alley oops!) and Shaun Livingston gave the Dubs huge second-half minutes. Toronto, meanwhile, looked like a moose in the headlights. They shrank in the spotlight and, except for Kawhi and Fred Van Vleet, looked timid. Fragile.
Also, if I’m an enterprising Bay Area resident, I print up 10,000 “We The West” t-shirts (blue with yellow lettering) and sell them for $20 a pop outside of Oracle Arena starting early Wednesday afternoon.
They Went To Jared
Holy shit Jared Kushner is even more of an embarrassment than I thought. This clip is brutal. pic.twitter.com/yvxxNPc5J6
This video needs no introduction. Or commentary. Watch.
Minor League, Major Change
In El Paso, a city that knows the fecklessness of walls, the Diablos have sent a AAA-best 122 balls over them this season already
We were listening to the Red Sox-Yankees game on Friday night when YES announcer Michael Kay, in a conversation about comparing offensive numbers of modern players versus yesteryear, introduced the aspect of the juiced ball. Kay noted, as evidence that there must be something different about the baseball now being used in the big leagues (which is made in Costa Rica), that this is the first season that MLB insisted that its AAA teams also use the same baseball that’s being used in The Show. And, he noted, home runs at the AAA level are up an astounding 50%.
Jose Vargas of AAA Rieleros de Aguascalientes has 27 home runs in 49 games this season. That would project out to about 85 home runs in an MLB-length season.
We trust Kay’s reporting—he was a New York Daily News beat writer before landing this gig in 2002 (Kay was also the Fordham University roommate of Mike Breen, who is calling the NBA Finals right now). Still, we looked it up and it’s true. Whether the ball is packed differently or the seams are lower, making the ball more aerodynamic, baseballs are flying out of parks like never before. And it’s not just that hurlers are throwing harder to stronger men, though that too is part of it.
Sunday Silence
The Sopranos: January 10, 1999—2007
The Wire: 2002-2008
Mad Men: 2007-2015
Breaking Bad: 2008-2013
Game Of Thrones: 2011-May 26, 2019
What do these television shows have in common? Besides being the five most influential, and in our opinion BEST, dramas of this century, they also all aired on Sunday night. True, not every single Sunday the past two decades has had a fresh episode of one of these series, but for more than 20 years at least one of them has been in circulation without cease. We were either watching one of them or anticipating the next season of one of them.
No more. When Game Of Thrones wrapped up two Sundays ago, we found ourselves without an all-time classic Sunday night watch for the first time since the first Sunday of 1999. That was a time before smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and really, much of what you currently consider to be the internet.
Some Showtime fans may mention Billions as the natural successor to this quintet, but I don’t think it rises to that level (going on what I’ve heard, not seen). Will something come along to fill the void or can we just appreciate what a peak period just ended and that it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that type of standard? I guess we’ll just have to return to being satisfied with 60 Minutes and, for part of the year, Football Night In America?
Music 101
Despacito
Look at the views on this. We’ll wait….that’s right, more than 6 BILLION views for a song that came out two years ago and is sung entirely in Spanish. You can wear a MAGA hat to a rally and howl at the wind or you can press the SAP button on your life and accept reality.
Remote Patrol
Chernobyl
9 p.m. HBO
The finale of the mesmerizing and horrific 5-part series about a 33 year-old disaster that offers countless lessons about what is percolating in the world today. Creator/producer Craig Mazin and star Jared Harris are going to hear their names called on Emmys night and deservedly so.
*The judges will also accept “Canadian Clubbing” but not “Pascal’s Try Angles”
In a Game 1 that felt like a Canadian coronation, the Raptors defeated the Warriors 118-109. Third-year forward Pascal Siakam, from Cameroon by way of Las Cruces (that well-trod path to NBA stardom), scored on 11 straight attempts and finished with 32 points.
The Reptiles led pretty much throughout. The Dubs looked rusty. And if you looked, Steph Curry (a game-high 34 points) was slapping hands with his teammates as the buzzer sounded as if to reassure them. Will Durant be ready for Game 2 on Sunday? Will President Trump invite the Raptors to the White House if they win this series? Stay tuned…
Oh, Bee Hive
In what some will hail as a victory but our MH editorial staff sees as a death-knell for the event, last night an octet of champions were announced at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Eight different spellers survived 20 grueling rounds after organizers of the 94th annual bee figuratively threw the book, i.e. the dictionary, at them. At last the organizers surrendered and announced a perfect octet of champs.
Dig: First of all, as Susie B. notified us yesterday, this year the Bee allowed certain “worthy” individuals to enter the National Bee provided they put up a $1,500 entry fee and afford six nights at the $300-per-night Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, Md. More than half of the field’s 565 entrants took this Felicity Huffman Route to the finals and, as Susie B. opined, you gotta wonder if the fact that every year all the finalists (and champion) are pretty much of Indian descent had anything to do with that decision.
Dig also: the Bee is a finite competition. There are only so many words, most of which in the last dozen rounds have never been uttered by anyone other than a PhD in neurobiology or anthropology. The Bee is not a referendum on spelling prowess, but on memorization ability. As such it is a wonderful primer for the kids in the top-most echelon as they prepare for the inevitable medical school studies for which their parents are priming them. Make no mistake: I fully expect one of this year’s winners to be conducting my colonoscopy or performing my hip replacement in 30 years.
If we could just add an element to Navy SEAL hell week to the competition, that would winnow out some of the weaker contestants
Which is fine. It just doesn’t make for a compelling competition. If everyone wins, no one wins. The only loser is the competition itself. One suggestion: add an athletic component to the Bee. After each round of spelling, the contestant must do 10-pushups.
A second suggestion: In the final round you must spell the name of one of your competitors correctly.
A third suggestion: the competition consists of nothing but competitors being asked to remember their User IDs and Passwords.
Yet a fourth suggestion: Add a time element. As they do in pole vaulting, when someone wins even when more than one entrant has cleared the same top height by seeing who had the fewest misses beforehand, why not elevate the speller who required the least time to spell his or her word above those who kept procrastinating by asking for it to be repeated, or to be used in a sentence, etc?
Tirade Wars
Wednesday: Special Counsel Robert Mueller stands in front of a nation and says, “If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Thursday: President Donald Trump stands in front of a device and tweets, “On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied.“
Not that imposing tariffs has much to do with illegal immigration, but then that’s hardly the point, now is it? From the Gospel according to Donald Draper: “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”
Uber Unter
When your grandpa wakes from a Van Winkle-esque nap and realizes the Nazis won…
Earlier this month Uber issued its IPO. Yesterday the company announced earnings for the first quarter of 2019 and showed a $1 billion loss. Also, the company grew at its slowest rate since it began disclosing quarterly results two years ago.
It’s not that fewer consumers are using Uber. It’s that as the company becomes legit, it has to behave like a real company and stop paying its drivers in Dave & Buster’s tokens and the like. You know what would put Uber out of business? What if a company just started selling paddles, like the ones you see at auctions? Now, I pay $1 for that paddle and hold it up whenever I need a ride. If a random driver passes by and stops, that driver knows I need a ride (I’m trying hard not to use the term “lift”). They can ask where I’m headed and the two of us can negotiate a price. No promises. And yes, this service would be a boon for kidnappers and other violent criminals. But if you operate on a trust basis, who’s to say such a service couldn’t put Uber out of business?
The Birthplace of the Martini?
Earlier this week we met a gifted transgender mixologist named Lucky (a sentence I’ve always wanted to write). Anyway, when I wasn’t improperly using “he” and “him” pronouns around Lucky (sorry about that), she was sociable enough to inform us about the origin of the martini.
While most contend that the classic cocktail owes its origins to Italian immigrant bartender Martini di Arma di Taggia at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City just prior to World War I, Lucky suggested another beginning: a bartender at the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, Wyoming, conjured one up in the 1870s for a miner who laid a gold nugget on the bar and asked for something special before he returned to his home in Martinez, Calif.
True? Would such an apocryphal anecdote leave you shaken? Or stirred?
Music 101
Brown Sugar
What’s the Stonesiest of Rolling Stones songs? “Satisfaction”? “Honky Tonk Women?” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash?” “Wild Horses?” If you had to go with a signature tune, you’d likely pick “Satisfaction,” but I don’t know if any song better illustrates the band’s playful, bad-boy edge and Mick Jagger’s not-ready-for-Ed Sullivan lurid streak while also containing an inimitable Keith Richards riff.
This tune, one of eight songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, did so in 1971.
One of the incredible aspects of rock-and-roll is that the clamor guitars and drums, and Mick’s vocal stylings, sort of disguise the English that’s being thrown right at your ears. This is the first stanza of the song, which I’ll admit I’d never really paid attention to:
Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields Sold in the market down in New Orleans Scarred old slaver knows he’s doin’ all right Hear him whip the women just around midnight
Remote Patrol
Champions League Final: Tottenham vs. Liverpool
Saturday
3 p.m. TNT
The top two clubs in Europe, both hailing from England, meet in Madrid in a 90-minutes plus winner-take-all match. No way either can top the drama of the second legs of their respective semis, is there?
Remember: Vladimir Putin DID install Steven Seagal as a “special envoy” to the U.S. last summer
Above The Law
Special Counsel Robert Mueller came out yesterday and said, “The special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice and by regulation it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.”
Amber said WUT?
Why not? Isn’t it weird that the chief executive of the United States is the one person who cannot be charged with a crime by prosecutors/law enforcement? And, by the way, did you already know that? Did your favorite cable news channel, in all the hours it spent over the past two years mulling Mueller’s investigation, make that clear to you? It was never clear to me.
Was Donald Trump right all along: “I can walk out on 5th Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it?”
Mueller said that it the Constitution “requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”
First of all, DOJ policy is not some intractable writ that cannot be revisited under extreme circumstances (I think we’ve found some). Second, numerous legal scholars disagree with Mueller that it is unconstitutional for a sitting president to be indicted.
Mueller’s point, we believe, is that if anyone is going to press charges against Trump, it must be Congress. All he was charged to do was provide the investigation and unearth evidence. In this edition of Law & Order: Agent Orange, he played the role of Lenny Briscoe.
More Mueller
A few more thoughts on Robert Mueller’s appearance yesterday:
–First, watching him, my sense was, “Oh yeah, this is what ‘presidential bearing’ looks like. I’d almost forgotten.”
–Mueller’s level of dispassion is both admirable and infuriating. He is the anti-Giuliani, and as such even Trump finds it difficult to to coin a nasty nickname for him or make it personal. Not because he is Trump’s toadie, but because he never puts any emotion or vitriol in his voice.
–We agree with The Washington Post: while this was a nice showing, it’s about six weeks late. There’s no reason Mueller couldn’t have delivered this same 9-minute address on the day that the 400-page report was released. Or maybe he just never expected his boss, William “Dis” Barr to flat-out lie in front of a nation.
–Barr did lie, by the way. He said that Mueller’s team would have indicted Trump if they’d found sufficient evidence, but as Mueller made clear yesterday, in his mind that was never an option.
Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax…And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,…..
–Most importantly, and most disappointing, was that Mueller began and ended his statement with what is for him an emphatic plea for Americans to realize that the Russians systematically worked to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections without noting that all of their efforts were concerted toward favoring one candidate and smearing the other.
This would be like NBA commissioner Adam Silver announcing that Drake had paid off the officials to interfere with the outcome of the 2019 NBA Finals, which the Raptors won in seven games, without ever once noting that Drake was explicitly paying them off to make calls in Toronto’s favor.
For Mueller, that fact may already be understood. But it was important for him to have said it. He failed.
Raccoon Dogs
We’re all about raccoon dogs, two of which are roaming the English countryside in the village of Clarborough. Leave them alone. They’re not bothering anyone and besides, they fancy your rubbish.
Speaking Of Quentin Tarantino
You know how every porn film is basically the same film, it’s just that the settings are different? Well, just about every Quentin Tarantino film is, like pornos, just an excuse to set up the same set piece.
In porn, the setting may be a dentist’s office or a car dealership or a lonely rich MILF’s house, but it doesn’t really matter. In a certain amount of time two people are going to take their clothes off and the sax music will begin.
Watching The Hateful Eight the other night (thumbs down), we realized that every Tarantino movie we’ve seen (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and this one) have the same scene: violent men, suspicious of or outright hostile to one another, in an enclosed space with guns at the ready. Instead of doffed clothing and horns, though, we get pontificating and gunplay.
If you’ve seen these films, you can recall the scenes we’re talking about. It’s a set piece, like in soccer. And most of the time the play is designed for Samuel L. Jackson to take the shot on goal.
She’s A Man, Baby! (Or She Was)
Last weekend CeCe Telfer, a senior at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, won the Division II women’s national championship in the 400-meter hurdles. What makes that odd is that in 2016 and 2017 Telfer had competed for the school’s men’s track team. Because she was a he then.
This is all getting a little ridiculous, no? Announcing that you are going to take hormones and go transgender is not the same as coming out of the womb a certain sex and growing up as that sex your entire life. How many more examples on the track do we need to see?
Craig Telfer, as this story illustrates, never ranked higher than 200th in his event as a male in his freshman or sophomore years (he/she did not compete last year while undergoing transgender therapy, we presume). This year, as Ce Ce Telfer, she won the national title over the nation’s best D-II female athletes by a nearly two-second margin. That’s pretty dominant. And patently unfair.
Coincidence or tribute? Yesterday, on the 24th anniversary of Derek Jeter making his New York Yankee debut, San Diego Padre outfielder Hunter Renfroe (not that one) made a patented Jeter throw…from centerfield. Intentional? Or happenstance?
Music 101
Right Back Where We Started From
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhgY4Te0uFs
The film Slapshot, arguably the funniest sports film there is, was released in 1977, which is how an unapologetically disco tune such as this found itself as the first track played in it. Released in 1975 at the dawn of the disco era, this song with vocals by Maxine Nightingale rose to No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
Remote Patrol
NBA Finals, Game 1
9 p.m. ESPN
Kawhi: The North Star
The Warriors have not gone nine days between games since before the preseason began. Kevin Durant will not play. The last time Kawhi Leonard faced Golden State in the postseason, he’d staked his team to a 20-point lead at Oracle and that squad was no more talented than this Raptors unit. We like the Dubs: no matter how many times Steph, Klay and Dray put on their 5th-gear show and erase 18-point leads in a few minutes, or take tie games and make them blowouts in the same span, people seem not to appreciate or respect what they’re seeing. Simply put, no one plays on their level when they’re in synch.
— Kansas City Media (@KansasCityMedia) May 27, 2019
Starting Five
Climate Change Gonna Necessitate Primate Change
–In the past 30 days, federal weather forecasters have logged reports of 500 tornadoes from the Great Plains states eastward to Ohio. And even if those numbers may be inflated due to multiple reports of the same tornado occasionally, that’s quite the alarming figure.
–The past year was the wettest on record in some cities in the northeast.
–Meanwhile, as the Arctic Circle thaws, China is not viewing that development as alarming but rather as an opportunity to find new sources of energy and for a top of the world maritime route. Greeeeeaaaaaat.
–And then there’s the White House, which has gone from refuting arguments of scientists to now not even funding the types of reports that allow scientists to demonstrate what the effects of climate change and and a rapidly warming planet will be. Nothing to see here.
He’s screwed now. Your kids will be screwed in 30 years.
It’s absolutely fascinating, and also severely depressing, to be witnessing these developments while also watching HBO’s Chernobyl. What did the nuclear engineer who was in charge of the room that initiated the error that caused the explosion say to the investigator who insisted that she was not aiming to assign blame but only find out the truth? “There is no truth,” he said, which is basically the first rule of being a Trump apparatchik.
At least in Chernobyl they got religion, so to speak.
In the mid-1980s the Soviet Union, one of the world’s two most truth-averse and totalitarian nations (along with China), was finally compelled to act on the devastation its own workers had wrought for the good of its people. To watch the show is to see a lone nuclear physicist, played by Jared Harris, stand up to both General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and the KGB because he knew that he knew, far better than they did, what the catastrophic effects of nuclear radiation were.
So you’re saying we were negligent?
And give Gorbachev a little credit, too. As much as he hated to do so, he listened. And he committed the resources to cleaning up as much as was possible.
No such leadership exists in the United States today. We could tender a guess as to the reason: oil money. Look at the two foreign governments to whom the president and, by extension, the Republican party, are most beholden to: Saudi Arabia and Russia. What’s that all about? Oil money.
The moment you admit climate change is a problem that must be dealt with, you are pinning the blame on oil. And if you’re going to do something about that problem, really attempt to solve it, you’re going to have to find an alternative source of energy, which is to say that you’re going to pull your mouth away from the teat you’ve been sucking on for decades.
So the world will slowly burn, tornadoes and hurricanes will become more commonplace, federal money will be sent to those places (because tornadoes and flooding seem to happen a lot in rural areas that have a major boner for Trump, if you hadn’t noticed), produce and livestock prices will go up, the economy will dive and eventually the catastrophe will be so horrible that America will put a Democrat in the White House and demand, “Do something about these dire circumstances!”
Haven’t we all seen this movie before? And wasn’t it not that long ago? Except that climate change is far worse than a global financial crisis.
Call me an optimist, but I’m somewhat heartened by the words of Harris’ character Valery Legasov, who notes that the devastastion they’ve wrought could last for 24,000 years. Is that all? Seems a small punishment to pay for mankind spoiling the beauty of the planet. If you could wipe out mankind but pledge that the earth could make a fresh start in less than 25 millennia? I’d take that deal. You know why? Because we all know the nature of man, and in particular the nature of the man in the White House: man (and the president) will not act to solve a problem until it’s far past time to solve that problem.
Just ask Stormy Daniels.
Where Are They Now?
As details emerged about the sale of Sports Illustratedto the same company that owns Juicy Couture, there was an undeniable touch of melancholy and regret among those of us who were lucky enough to work there before the internet. After Jamie Salter, the founder and CEO of the Iowa-based company that bought SI, said that he envisioned a wide-ranging array of possibilities for branding that even included “medical clinics,” one former SI scribe quipped, “They do realize that Dr. Z wasn’t a real doctor, don’t they?”
Also, Dr. Z., a.k.a. Paul Zimmerman, is dead.
It’s funny. When I arrived at SI in the summer of 1989 I was introduced to a computer system (I’d never spent more than a few minutes on a computer prior) that had an ATEX feature. What ATEX was, and we loved it, was a way for us to send messages back and forth to one another on a computer. We didn’t even have to pick up the phone!
The world was already changing, but unlike ATEX, most advances in technology would only come at a steep price for the publication that was celebrating its 35th anniversary that summer. ESPN’s SportCenter was picking up momentum, replacing your local TV sports guy. SportsCenter showed highlights from every game, not just the ones your hometown team played.
Then the internet came along. The idea of waiting until Thursday to read about the most important sporting event (The Masters, the Super Bowl, the Olympics) that had taken place the previous week ending Sunday suddenly became as preposterous as it must sound to you reading this if you were born after 1990.
And so, as for SI, we must ask the question the magazine has asked every July for more than 20 years: Where are they now?
We plucked this telling item from The Washington Post:
Asked specifically whether Sports Illustrated would prioritize investigative stories, Salter wrote: “Sports Illustrated will continue to be a resource for its readers, providing up-to-the-minute sports news and coverage, thoughtful analysis, and entertaining stories. Our partnership with Meredith is key in continuing to re-build Sports Illustrated into a global platform while disseminating information with integrity and respect.”
That’s not a yes.
You cannot serve two masters. There’s a reason Time-Life publications such as SI used to bang the “separation of church and state” drum so frequently and fervently. Yesterday, SI took its latest step, and perhaps its last, in crossing over to church and state being one and the same.
All Over Again In The Family
We missed last week’s live All In The Family episode, but it got us to thinking about the lyrics and how, 49 years after the series premiered, so little has changed. Remember, these characters are parents who came of age during the Depression and World War II singing these words (we’ve added some updated edits to demonstrate the timeliness of the song in 2019):
Boy the way Glen Miller played, (Elton? Billy Joel?) Songs that made the hit parade, (American Top 40 with Casey Kasem) Guys like us we had it made, (“Guys like us” = white males) Those were the days, And you know where you were then, Girls were girls and men were men, (No transgender bathrooms) Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again, (Ronald Reagan) Didn’t need no welfare states (farming subsidies) Everybody pulled his weight, (or inherited their wealth) Gee our old Lasalle ran great, (Dodge Dart) Those were the days
Far Hampton*
*The judges enthusiastically approve all references to “How I Met Your Mother”
From Little Elm in east Texas to New Zealand in the south Pacific. Why not? R.J. Hampton, a 6’4″ 5-star guard who was poised to choose between the Longhorns and Kansas, has instead announced that he’ll be playing for the New Zealand Breakers next winter in the National Basketball League.
The NBL has 9 teams, eight of which are based in Australia. The closest NBL city to Auckland, where the Breakers are based, is Sydney, which is more than 1,300 miles away. Kinda like flying from New York to New Orleans. The furthest is Perth, which is located about 3,500 miles away. Kinda like flying from Dallas to Honolulu.
Who’s to say whether Hampton is making the right move or not? It’s certainly going to be an adventure, and the NBL season roughly corresponds to a Division I season both in terms of number of games played and time of year. Hampton just won’t have as many of his sweet dimes appear on SportsCenter‘s “Top Plays.”
Oldie But A Goodie
If you find yourself in Las Vegas over the next two weeks, you have a chance to catch Postmodern Jukebox, Scott Bradlee’s rotating band of talented vocalists and musicians who put more classic spins on popular music, perform live. Bradlee, the pianist in most every PMJ video, the sum of which have garnered more than one billion views, was a struggling jazz pianist from New Jersey living in Queens when he hatched the idea for these incredibly addictive videos. We’re hooked.
PMJ has been doing these videos for more than seven years now, but here’s a favorite: Invited by Cosmopolitan mag to come to their offices and do a mash-up of the most popular songs from 2013, Bradlee and friends (including the very popular “Tambourine Guy”) rendered this in just one take.
PMJ definitely has a following, but we won’t rest until we’ve made you sick of us heaping praise on the outfit.
(One of our favorite examples of PMJ’s genius. There are dozens of PMJ covers on YouTube.)
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