IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 2 Comments

by John Walters

Starting Five

“I Just Signed Your Death Warrant”

In East Lansing, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentences Dr. Larry Nassar to up to 175 years in prison and brings both barrels in a blistering 30-minute address. Collateral damage: Lou Anna Simons, the president of Michigan State University, resigns.

2. Amherst: 51 and Counting

Gromacki has built yet another women’s hoops powerhouse in New England

More than 25 years ago your trusted scribe was dispatched to Mitchell College in New London, Connecticut, to report on a women’s junior college basketball team that was in the midst of a 223-game regular season win streak. The engaging and funny coach was a man named Dan Mara, whose assistant coach was a Samoyed-and-collie mix named Pep and who sat besides him during games. Dan was and is a great guy.

Dan Mara

About seven years later I headed back up to Connecticut, this time to spend a season with a women’s basketball team from the University of Connecticut with an equally engaging and funny coach named Geno Auriemma. That coach would later put together an NCAA Division I-record 111-game winning streak.

Hard to believe, but true: There’s a women’s college hoops coach in New England who’s coached more than 500 games and has a better win percentage than Geno

Now, a little to the north and west in Amherst, Mass., the Division III women’s hoops teams at one of the premier liberal arts schools in the country, Amherst, has compiled a 51-game win streak. Two years ago the Lord Jeffs (Lady Jeffs?) had their 121-game home winning streak ended by Tufts. The only school ever to put together a longer home win streak was Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky squad in the 1940s and 1950s. And Amherst’s coach, G.P. Gromacki, has a record of 476-62 (.884),which in terms of in percentage exceeds Auriemma (1,101-135, .882).

Also, Amherst won their first national championship last season.

3. RIP, Warren Miller

If you ever took a shine to alpine skiing, it may have been because you came across a Warren Miller ski film in the 1980s or after. If you already loved skiing, then watching one of Miller’s 700 or so movies about the sport may have inspired you to take another weeklong getaway to Jackson Hole or Telluride. What Bruce Brown was to surfing—Brown filmed and produced Endless Summer—Miller was to skiing.

Miller passed today at the age of 93. It should be noted that Brown, who was 80, died just last month. Two major pioneers of outdoor lifestyle filmmaking.

4. Taking Stock

Sounding like a record where the needle keeps skipping (ask your parents), but consider this a friendly reminder that we are in the midst of one of the great bull markets of our lifetimes and if you’re not in the market, you are seriously missing out. And here’s the thing: IT’S NOT TOO LATE.

As long as 45 is running the show, this market’s gonna stay lit for awhile. And even if he were to leave, Mr. P isn’t going to alter any of his fiscal policies. It may be 70 degrees in Duluth in February and we may all be jailed for speaking out against Putin or Kellyanne Conway, but the stock market ain’t gonna be wheezing any time soon. Just a few companies, well-known companies, that you should have been in on the past four years (and which you can still buy today and make money owning).

All original prices are as of December 30, 2014:

Amazon (AMZN). Then: $388 Today: $1,366    Change: Up 252%

Netflix (NFLX). Then: $52 Today: $262 Change: Up 400%

Boeing (BA): Then: $137  Today: $339. Change: Up 148%

Your average checking or savings account is going to pay you LESS than 1% interest per year. Your REAL bank should be E-Trade or Charles Schwab, kids. HELP ME HELP YOU!

5. To Be Or Not To Be

Carole Lombard. A Hollywood knockout

Our roommate, a nine-pound feline, likes to watch TCM when we’re out. So early last evening we arrived home to find him watching a film that should’ve made our Remote Patrol below, a film we’d never heard of.

The movie? To Be Or Not To Be, starring Jack Benny, the luminous Carole Lombard and a young Robert Stack. Here’s why we’re sharing this with you. It’s a screwball comedy about a Polish Shakespearian troupe that outsmarts the Gestapo and Herr Hitler and saves the Polish resistance in Warsaw. But here’s the thing: the film was released in 1942!

Lombard, Benny and a swastika in the background

If you ever have the chance to see it, you’ll notice elements of The Producers, Inglorious Basterds and Shakespeare In Love within. In fact, even Hogan’s Heroes may have pilfered from this, as the bumbling captain who plays the henchman is named Schultz. Some of the jokes are just totally in bad taste (“What you did with Hamlet, Hitler is now doing to Warsaw”) and I’m just trying to imagine someone making an ISIS comedy today. Benny’s own father walked out of the theater when he saw his son wearing a Nazi uniform.

Now here is where we get all Paul Harvey on your ass. To Be Or Not To Be was filmed in 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), but released in February of 1942 (after Pearl Harbor). In betwixt the filming and the release, Lombard was killed in a plane crash. By the time To Be Or Not To Be was released, Lombard was already dead. One of the final scenes in the film has her aboard a plane.

The details of Lombard’s death? Her flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles veered off course and the plane crashed into a mountain. She had been returning from a war bonds tour in her home state of Indiana and was accompanied by her mother. Lombard was only 33 and married to Clark Gable, who at the time was the king of Hollywood. It is said that he never got over her death and that when he passed 18 years later, even though he’d been twice remarried since, ol’ Rhett Butler was buried next to her.

Music 101

Living After Midnight

If they staged a contest between bands challenging them to describe the rock ‘n roll life in one four-line stanza, Judas Priest would win:

Living after midnight,

Rocking to the dawn,

Loving ’til the morning,

And I’m gone, I’m gone

Not to mention that that is one hell of a name for a heavy metal band. It tells you what lead singer Rob Halford and the rest of his mates knew that this tune was the second track of Side 2 on their 1980 album, British Steel. In 1998 Halford came out as homosexual, which may have miffed a few of the Beavis-and-Butthead type fanboys who’d been turning this up to 11 in their Chevy Camaros for nearly two decades.

Remote Patrol

Broadchurch

Netflix

Imagine True Detective in a seaside resort town on the southern coast of England and you have this crime drama from ITV. An 11 year-old boy is found dead on the beach, and it’s the job of a female investigator whose son was his best friend and an interloper from Scotland who knows what he’s doing but makes no friends while doing so to solve the case. Adding to the mystery: one out of every three sentences uttered you cannot understand unless you go back and watch Trainspotting again. Also: Look close and you’ll see Walder Frey from GOT in a supporting role.

U2 40: Part I

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Longtime friend and fellow quasi-native Arizonan Dino DeMillo suggested, after Vulture did a worst-to-best ranking of all U2’s songs, that I take a stab at it. Dino knows U2 is my favorite band, knows I take pride in having attended the November 1, 1987 show in which they came out in costume as “The Dalton Brothers” and that I also attended the $5 shows seven weeks later at Sun Devil Stadium when U2 needed to fill up the venue for the filming of Rattle And Hum.

Asked by Wenner what he’d tell his younger self, Bono replied, “Stop second-guessing yourself. You’re right.” Is that not the Bono-est quote ever?

Two years ago I “met” Bono, which is to say that I stood in a red carpet line and asked him a question, which was not “Can I just give you a massive hug?” although that’s the question I wanted to ask. Anyway, the erstwhile Paul Hewson is on the cover of a recent Rolling Stone, if you want to read the interview with the magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner.

That tune is one of a few you’ve heard of that did not make my Top 40 list, along with “Desire,” “Lemon,” “Bullet The Blue Sky,” “Out Of Control”or “Van Diemen’s Land.” Let’s be clear here: this isn’t a list of U2’s 40 greatest songs, it’s a personal ranking of one fan’s 40 favorite U2 songs. When I told my musical soulmate and close college friend Randy McDonald that I was going to undertake this challenge, he quipped, as someone who also came of musical age in the Eighties, “So your first 1o songs are off The Joshua Tree…then what?”

In other words, your mileage may vary.

The list will appear in four parts. Direct all your outrage to me (or Dino at @dinodemillo).

  1. Until The End Of The World

Achtung Baby, 1991

I’ve always thought of Achtung Baby as U2’s Revolver: their first psychedelic album and the reason it works so well is because you can hear the band’s unshakeable confidence, if not outright arrogance, in every song. They know they’re exploring uncharted territory, but they also know they’re crushing it. This tune embodies that as much as any on the album.

  1. One

Achtung Baby, 1991

If this prayer of brotherhood is in your personal Top 10, I can’t fault you (if you have it ranked eponymously, I can’t blame you for that, either). These are some of Bono’s most intimate lyrics and it’s the Irish version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That downer bass line by Adam Clayton, though. It fits, but it just bums me out.

  1.  City Of Blinding Lights

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, 2004

“Oh…You…Look…So beautiful…toniiiiiiiight!” The lads used this upbeat, positive-vibe rocker as the show opener on the Vertigo tour and it won a Grammy in 2006 for Best Rock Song. Deserved.

  1. When Love Comes To Town

Rattle and Hum, 1988

I’ve never understood why critics slagged U2 so damn much for this album, but it was songs such as this that really, really got under their skin. Who do these Dublin blokes think they are, paying tribute to New York City, blues and jazz musicians? Hell, they can’t even get the names of our American towns right. This is just a fun song, though, and does anyone really have a problem with B.B. King getting to sing the chorus? Also, you can sub in “Angel Of Harlem” for this choice and I won’t mind. 

 

  1. The Refugee

War, 1983

Early, angry and idealistic Bono. This is when U2 sounded an awful lot like The Alarm and Big Country, but stood out just enough.

  1. Even Better Than The Real Thing

Achtung Baby, 1991

See # 31. 

 

  1. Hawkmoon 269

Rattle And Hum, 1988

This song evokes images of wide-open spaces, which fits, because the title purportedly comes from a North Dakota town through which the band passed while on tour. The problem is that there is no Hawkmoon, North Dakota. There is a Blackhawk, South Dakota, though. Blackhawk, 269?

 

  1. Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000

Bono wrote this song as a fictional argument between himself and his mate Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS, who had committed suicide a few years earlier. He’s said that he felt he owed it to Hutchence not to pay tribute with “some stupid soppy song.” It all came out of a gospel melody The Edge had been working on.

39.

Mysterious Ways

Achtung Baby, 1991

I’ve never been a monster fan of most of the lead singles from most of U2’s albums (e.g., “Desire” from Rattle and Hum). This tune pushed “Staring At The Sun,” “Lemon,” “Numb,” and countless others off the list. And though the list is heavy on songs from this album and The Joshua Tree, I’ll make no apologies. It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright…

  1. 40 (Live)

Under A Blood Red Sky, 1983

Before there was “One” or “All I Want Is You,” this was U2’s emblematic slow-it-down anthem. The closing tune off Live at Red Rocks proved that the band understood how to slow your pulse while lifting your heart.

 

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

Starting Five

MH Worldwide Headquarters

1. Is There Such A Thing As Too Wealthy?*

Thank God for stomachs. See, no matter how much we love pizza or chocolate cake or nachos, eventually we reach a point where our tummy tells us, You’ve had enough. Like the governor on a U-Haul truck that does not allow you to go faster than 55 m.p.h.,  our stomachs let us know when we’ve had too much to eat and in a sense protect us from our own appetites.

Not so with money. Avarice has no governor other than common sense and/or decency. I thought about this yesterday when two news stories flashed before me on the inter web screen. The first had the headline ”

‘World’s richest 1% get 82% of the wealth’

which was based on a report by the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, a.k.a. OxFam, which noted that the gap between the super-wealthy and the rest of the world widened last year. OxFam noted that 42 individuals have as much wealth as half the world, that there are a record number of billionaires (2,043) and that two-thirds of those billionaires acquired their wealth via inheritance, monopoly or cronyism.

The second headline read, “Matt Lauer Kicked Out of Hamptons Home By Wife Annette Roque.”

Now while Lauer is not a billionaire, he was the highest-earning employee at NBC for years, making $25 million per annum. But he’s a scumbag of a person in how he treats his wife (Savannah and Hoda knew about this for years, because even I knew about it from fellow NBC employees). So now he’s just a very wealthy pariah, but as the story explains, Lauer owns three homes in the Hamptons, so he can just move into another one.

This person is as responsible for his economic plight as Donald, Jr. is his wealth

Is capitalism bad? Per se, no. Life at the other economic extreme, communism, is far worse. The idea that everyone should be compensated equally is not only antithetical to natural selection, but as Russia and Cuba have illustrated, it leads to a maximum of state-sponsored corruption while stifling the creativity and ambition of the individual. Communism is never the answer.

However, on the other extreme end, how many more humans have to live in extreme poverty while an entitled few possess so much, much, much more than they will ever need, or their descendants will, before your average capitalist apologist notes that maybe the system is dysfunctional?

And why do I bring Lauer into this conversation? Because it has long been my experience that men who are compensated like gods often begin to behave as if they are gods. As if laws and human decency no longer apply to them. Lauer is only the most visible role model (this week).

I don’t know the answer. I just know that we are skewing in the wrong direction and at what figure (82% currently) does it become outright obscene in terms of the percentage of overall wealth that the top 1% control? Because, as the OxFam report illustrates (inheritance, cronyism, monopoly) most of those super-wealthy did nothing themselves to earn that wealth. And most of the time, but not always, people who did not work hard themselves to acquire wealth have no appreciation for it or empathy for those who have less.

What if we had money stomachs? What if we had some internal governor that told us, “Okay, you’ve got enough. Now go devote your energy to something else in this life?”

*The judges are certain there is a better way to say this, but we only give the author one shot at it and then he has to move on. Things to see, people to do, etc.

2. Mulligan Man

Speaking of how the super-wealthy feel entitled to behave differently, here’s what Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a prominent evangelical activist group, had to say about the president committing adultery with a porn star just a few months after his wife gave birth to their son in 2006: ““We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.'”

As someone pithily put it on Twitter,

 

3. Blockchain Explained

 

 

Give this video six minutes….By the way, @ValaAfshar is the wisest follow on Twitter, far as we’re concerned.

4. Look, Mom, More Gun Violence!

At Marshall County High School in Bento, Kentucky, a 15 year-old shoots two of his classmates dead and wounds 17 others. No, it’s not the 2nd Amendment’s fault, but geez, this is becoming so common that it barely makes the CNN homepage any more.

Meanwhile up in Michigan, a man was arrested for calling CNN 22 times last week and threatening, “”Fake news. I’m coming to gun you all down.” (I didn’t even realize I had relatives in Michigan, but whatevs). He called again: “I’m smarter than you. More powerful than you. I have more guns than you. More manpower. Your cast is about to get gunned down in a matter of hours.”

“I am coming to Georgia right now to go to the CNN headquarters to f—ing gun every single last one of you.”

As someone else on Twitter wondered, “Who radicalized him?”

Oh, yeah, that’s right….

 

5. Fjord Freeway*

 

*The judges will also accept “Norway To Heaven,” “Norse By Northwest” or “The Highway At The Top Of The World”

When you see stories like this travel piece on BBC.com about E69 in Norway, the world’s northernmost highway, you see the extent of what the inter web is capable of doing. This is magnificently shot, magnificently told. It awakens your spirt of wonder and exploration, no?

Music 101

Cracklin’ Rosie

It’s easy to overlook what a super-duperstar Neil Diamond is and has been, and yeah when we were in high school we thought of his music as “cheesy.” And maybe it is. But like John Denver and Barry Manilow, the man was a 70’s hit machine and how many artists have their songs belted out by 100,000 fans each week between the third and fourth quarter of Penn State football games? Diamond, who turns 77 today, announced that he has Parkinson’s on Monday and is retiring from live performing. This 1970 tune, a plea to an Ontario DJ, Rosalie Trombley, to play his record (“Play it now!”) was the first of Diamond’s TEN No. 1 hits.

Remote Patrol

Waco

10 p.m. Paramount

Taylor Kitsch, who once played Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights, now takes on the role of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh. What is it about this actor that he loves playing brooding Texans so much? Part one of a six-part series. Spoiler alert: It all burns down in the end and 76 people die.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

Starting Five

Get Out, Mrs. Bear!

Tsunaminations*

*The judges will also accept “The Shape Of Water”

As Tuesday opens, the big stories are a monster tsunami possibly bearing down on Alaska following a 7.9 magnitude earthquake off the coast and the Oscar nominations bearing down on Hollywood. The winner in both instances is GET OUT!

2. Early Predictions (Should Win and Will Win)

Best Actress

  • Sally Hawkins, The Shape Of Water
  • Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
  • Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
  • Meryl Streep, The Post

Should Win: Meryl Streep or Saoirse Ronan

Will Win: Frances McDormand (UGHH!!!!)

Best Actor

  • Timothee Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
  • Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
  • Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
  • Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
  • Denzel Washington, Roman J Israel, Esq

Should Win: Daniel Day-Lewis

Will Win: Gary Oldman

*We haven’t seen Call Me By Your Name, but maybe the kid pulls off a surprise.

Best Supporting Actress

  • Mary J Blige, Mudbound
  • Allison Janney, I, Tonya
  • Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
  • Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
  • Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Should Win: Laurie Metcalf

Will Win: Allison Janney

Best Supporting Actor

  • Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
  • Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Richard Jenkins, The Shape Of Water
  • Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
  • Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Should Win: Willem Dafoe?

Will Win: Sam Rockwell

Best Animated Picture

CoCo 

Surest thing at the Oscars, and it deserves it. Should’ve been a Best Picture nom.

Best Picture

  • Call Me By Your Name
  • Darkest Hour
  • Dunkirk
  • Get Out
  • Lady Bird
  • Phantom Thread
  • The Post
  • The Shape of Water
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Should Win: Get Out 

Will Win: Three Billboards

3. From Shutdown To Shut Up

Alas, it’s Miller Time

A 32 year-old white supremacist whose entire approach to humanity is modeled after that nervous Martin Short character on Saturday Night Live, Nathan Thurm, back in the Eighties is shaping national policy.

We don’t understand the entire story, admittedly, but Stephen Miller appears to have held the government hostage by telling the Dems, “Look, if you want child health care then you are going to have to vote for THE WALL.” And the Dems caved. A reminder that Miller associated with Richard Spencer while an undergrad at (David) Duke University and worked for Jeff Sessions a few years back. America used to laugh at people like this. Sad!

4. In Plane View*

*The judges will reluctantly accept “Marilyn Hartman, Marilyn Hartman”

This 66 year-old Illinois woman, Marilyn Hartman, looks more Downton Abbey than Homeland, but it turns out she’s potentially quite lethal. Potentially.

Last week Hartman slipped past security at O’Hare Airport and flew to London, where customs officials detained her. She has previously flown from San Jose to Los Angeles and Minneapolis to Jacksonville without a ticket. Arrest her? Why, she should be giving TED talks.

5. CNN’s Second-Generation Tubers

You already know that Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, and you probably also know that Chris Cuomo is the son of former New York City mayor Mario Cuomo (and current New York governor Andrew Cuomo). Did you know that CNN White House correspondent Pamela Brown is the daughter of erstwhile CBS NFL Today uberbabe Phyllis George (and former Kentucky governor John Y. Brown)? Well, she is.

Ask your parents: Phyllis George was the original Erin Andrews.

 

Music 101

Psycho Killer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM9SHDNAbPw

Smarter than most, eccentric and slightly aloof: the Talking Heads were the psycho killer of bands. This song was written in 1974 but became their breakout hit in 1977 (relatively speaking, as it peaked at 92 on the Billboard chart), a time when the Zodiac and the Son of Sam were still on loose and Charles Manson had only been imprisoned a few years earlier. Related: We may be watching too much Mindhunter of late.

Remote Patrol

No. 5 Kansas at No. 12 Oklahoma

7 p.m. ESPN

If you have yet to watch Trae Young, who leads all of Division I in both Scoring (30.5 per game) and Assists (9.7 per), here’s your chance. OU is going to have the nation’s Heisman winner and Naismith winner this academic year. The Jayhawks won the Big 12 outright or tied for it in the regular season 13 consecutive years.

 

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 6 Comments

by John Walters

Starting Five

Love Is All Around

Even the New England Patriots knew they had no business beating the Jaguars (Jag-wires?) in the AFC Championship Game. Gronk left the game in the second quarter as birds chirped around his head, 40 year-old Tom Brady had 12 stitches in his throwing hand, and both coordinators, Josh McDaniels and Matt Patricia (above), are headed to greener pastures.

This is probably the 1,000th time Robert Kraft has told Brady, “I wish you were my son”

Then Dion Lewis fumbled at the end of a double pass play after a gain of 22 yards. Myles Jack stripped him of the ball. Jags led 20-10, early fourth quarter, with the ball. They could’ve put the Patriots away right then, pretty much put the dynasty to bed.

They failed. If you have to point to one play, point to Brady converting a 3rd-and-18 when New England trailed 20-10 (that’s the same score Alabama trailed Georgia by in the 4th quarter of the NCG). Belichick and Brady will make their eighth Super Bowl appearance together. It’s as if Brady looked at the young Jags and barked, “The **** out of the way!”

And yes, even the zebras, who flagged New England ONCE yesterday, seemed in awe of this franchise.

2. Is Nate Silver Meaningless? (Spoiler Alert: Yes)

 

 Yesterday afternoon, after the New England Patriots scored a 4th quarter touchdown, self-proclaimed and ESPN-annointed probability guru Nate Silver posted the above tweet. I immediately, as is my habit, ripped it as meaningless (I guess I could’ve called it Fake News, but we’re all tired of it). Then one of Silver’s minions, an analytics dude, called me “innumerate.”

Here’s my point: the assumption that the factors that lead one to determine that the Jags, with a 20-17 lead at Foxborough in the 4th quarter of the AFC Championship game against Brady and Belichick, the assumption that any analytics prior to that moment are predictive of that moment, are absolute—how can I put it quantitatively?—horse sh*t.

Amendola’s go-ahead/winning TD catch was somewhat improbable, too, if you have NOT been watching New England the pas 17 seasons

The sport games, they involve people and emotions and certain teams reacting certain ways at certain moments. Moreover, unlike say a weather pattern or flipping a coin 100 times, the variables to this game are unique: they have never occurred before and will never occur again. To discount those variables and instead use cold analytics from, say, every NFL game the past 10 seasons when the visiting team held a 3-point lead midway through the fourth quarter, is to be so obtuse as to how sports work as to be a willful idiot.

New England won, of course, thereby “defying” Nate’s probability odds. But so what? That doesn’t make the outcome of the next game New England plays with high stakes any more or less likely. Because the conditions will not be anywhere near the same.

3. March-a, March-a, March-a

Sacramento

As females far and wide took to the streets Saturday for the second annual Women’s March, the curious coincidence of it being the first day of the government shutdown made everything just that much more poignant.

Meanwhile, the president was either being obtuse (there’s that word again) or simply trolling all the ladies:

 

 

But at least he was “working hard” at his desk (notice all the paperwork and the high-tech gadgets):

“Where’s the TV? Where’s the clicker?”

4. Too Heil A Price

At the famed Barrett-Jackson auto show in Scottsdale this weekend, a 1939 Mercedes-Benz 770K Grosser Offener Tourenwagen that once served as the official vehicle for Adolf Hitler was put up for auction.

Someone bid $7 million for it, but that price failed to meet the undisclosed minimum that the seller had set for it. Had the car sold, the seller had promised that 10% of the proceeds would go to a Jewish human-rights organization. When sheikhs are spending $450 million for paintings, $7 million for the Fuhrer’s ride is a little low. You’ve got to bid more than that, Mr. Miller.

5. Sixty Shades of Gray

This report from the BBC was startling: Moscow, Russia, received a total of six minutes of sunshine for the entire month of December, 2017. Imagine that: If yo went to take a dump at the wrong moment you missed the only available sunlight of the entire month. Above, I imagine, is one of the brighter moments of last month.

Reserves

 

Yes, but did Schefty undergo concussion protocol?

***

Manchester City has lost since we wrote about them being undefeated in EPL play earlier this month, but down in Spain F.C. Barcelona remains undefeated in La Liga. Barca is 17-3-0 after a 5-0 win at Real Betis.

****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQERftlJWz4

“I am Kristen Bell, and I am a narcissist” was the host’s best line from last night’s SAG awards. Three Billboards cleaned up again (Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Ensemble Cast) and please someone tell me that this film makes any sense to them. One example: the ex-military dude, whom we will later find out could not possibly be the suspect, enters the grieving mother’s curio shop and throws a cup at her head when he’s not the murderer and in fact doesn’t even live in that town??? That makes any sense, why? And this is like the 17th-most implausible thing that happens in this movie….

Music 101

In The Light

This haunting Led Zeppelin tune from 1975’s Physical Graffiti was used, nearly in full, to overlap the final five minutes of the first season of Netflix’s Mindhunter. If you’ve seen the show, this songs will stay with you for awhile.

Remote Patrol

Mindhunter

Netflix

Kemper (middle) with the real-life FBI agents who inspired the book and series

Finished Season 1 and you MUST watch. A few reasons: the interview with Richard Speck, the final scene with Ed Kemper in the ICU unit, the interview with the Georgia tree trimmer/murderer, Anna Torv, and last but not least, the sense of foreboding every time the words “PARK CITY, KANSAS” appear onscreen.

This video is a good intro/companion to the series, if you’ve yet to watch.