Monthly Archives: June 2021

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

Bez Lightyear

To infinity and beyond… The world’s wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos, is off to space. Bezos, whose net worth is approaching infinity ($186 billion), will be a passenger next month on the maiden voyage of his own Blue Origin space tourism rocket. The flight will hit apogee at 62 miles above the Earth’s surface—your 747 passenger jet goes between 7 and 8 miles high (hence the song). Or, as you know it, the thermosphere.

If you’re wondering, Bezos is virtually uninsurable. You have to admire the moxie, but this is a great case study as to A) If you had all the money in the world, what would you do with it? and B) All the money in the world will not buy you more time.

Look Who’s Back

Today our favorite business show, CNBC’s “Squawk On The Street,” returned to their set at the New York Stock Exchange for the first time since mid-March, 2020. Host Carl Quintanilla, David “The Brain” Faber and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer are reunited on-set for the first time in nearly 15 months.

Seven Up-Side Down

https://twitter.com/lindsaycrouse/status/1401705587516260352?s=20

Over the weekend gymnast Simone Biles won her 7th U.S. Gymnastics title. What is there to say that looking at the above video wouldn’t say better?

CONCACAFe Latte

The U.S.A. defeated Mexico in the CONCACAF championship in extra time, in Denver. Christian Pulisic, who only eight days earlier was on the pitch in Portugal for Chelsea as it won the Champions League final, scored the winning goal on a penalty kick. Then backup keeper Ethan Horvath made the save of his life to secure it.

No-Fly Zone?*

*The judges will also accept “Pant-demic”

Twitter was giddy over the weekend when it looked as if Donald Trump was wearing his slacks backwards during his appearance at a GOP rally in Greenville, N.C. Something about it doesn’t matter where the fly is if you’re wearing diapers. Some folks in digital media pored over the video footage as if it was the Zapruder-film and the verdict is appears to be that even though Trump’s political goals are to move this country backwards, his pants were in fact on forward.

Also, have you ever noticed how Trump’s arms hang sort of limp at his side often? As if his elbows don’t work. What is that?

29:06.82

In her adopted native country of the Netherlands, Ethiopian-born distance runner Sifan Hassan shattered the women’s world record for the 10,000 meters with the time above. Hassan’s 10-K feat bettered the existing world record, set at the 2016 Rio Olympics by Ethiopian Almaz Ayana, by more than 10 seconds.

Two notes: 1) In the past 10 months, the men’s and women’s world records in both the 5,000 and 10,000 (four records in all) and 2) Hassan, a refugee who fled Ethiopia at age 16, now owns the world record in the 5,000, 10,000 and mile, and 3) the men’s WR for the 10,000 is 26:11.

The Early Eighties Super Bowl We All Wanted

That’s Alabama’s Montana Fouts (no relation to either), who on Friday night pitched only the fifth perfect game in the history of the Women’s College Softball World Series. Fouts struck out 14 UCLA hitters as the Tide defeated the Bruins, 6-0. This was the first WCSWS perfect game in more than 20 years.

And to top it off, Fouts pitched this gem on her 21st birthday.

Montana Fouts. But yeah, we’d have loved to see the San Francisco 49ers versus the San Diego Chargers in a Super Bowl in the 1980s. Dan Fouts slingin’ it to Kellen Winslow, Wes Chandler and Charlie Joiner versos Joe Montana tossin’ it to Dwight Clark and Jerry Rice. Too bad those Chargers never got there.

Whaddaya Think, Skipper?

The Kid

…. won with his Suns pick last Thursday night. He’s now 12-7 and at $920.

We’ll wait to see who he picks today.

UPDATE: About two hours ago The Kid texted and said he was taking Vietnam minus-260 versus Indonesia in an Asian World Cup qualifier. The Kid actually had intel on ‘nam (if only Gen. Westmoreland had had it… too soon?).

So risking $260 to win $100 with Vietnam. Beware the quagmire.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 5 Comments

by John Walters

Coach 401-K

Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, the most successful, and perhaps most influential coach of the past four decades, announces that he will retire after next season. Coach K, 74, has won five national titles in Durham and won 1,170 games (361 defeats). Among D-I men’s coaches, only John Wooden has won more national titles and nobody has won more games.

Homicidal Hokie?*

*The judges will also accept, “Isi Innocent Or Guilty?”

In Blacksburg, Va., early enrollee freshman linebacker Isi Etute may be entering the transfer portal to a maximum-security prison. Etute, from Virginia Beach, has been charged with 2nd-degree murder. Not much else is known at this time but he’s off the two-deep chart.

Jet-Propelled

Before remarking on the nastiness of this hit, notice the score. Montreal leads Winnipeg 4-3 with less than a minute remaining in Game 1 of their series. The puck has been cleared, it’s an empty net situation, and the Canadiens’ Jake Evans is about to drop in the clincher here. But then the Jets’ Mark Scheifele lays out a high check that sends Evans into the Northwest Territories.

Evans, not that anyone was paying too much attention, did score. He was also carried off the ice on a stretcher.

No word thus far on Evans’ condition or how long Scheifele will be suspended. Evans did remain motionless on the ice for a few minutes, but he was not taken to hospital (as Canadians say). Some hockey folk are saying this is a clean hit, and we’re not hockey experts (to say the least). Regardless, we imagine that going forward Scheifele will be a (dons sunglasses)…Mark’ed man.

Rule No. 1 (Again)

Above, the summit of Mount Russell in Sequoia National Park in California. Seems a little precarious to be walking so casually and you know what? It is. Over the Memorial Day weekend a 56 year-old hiker from San Jose plunged 500 feet to his death not far from this spot. Honestly, this wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Maybe about 20 years older than 56, but all things considered…

Herd Community

In China, a peregrinating pack of pachyderms have wandered more than 300 miles north of their habitat and they’ve been “stealing” food and even liquor. You might call them rogue elephants. They’re now approaching Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, a city of some 6 million residents. Related: there are lots of Chinese people. Not as many Chinese elephants.

Of course, this may sound like a cute story but the real story is that their habitat is being destroyed and they’re hungry. They’re refugees, in a sense. It would be nice if man did his part to protect these incredible (and highly intelligent) creatures. Let them live.

The Kid

(Close-up of me looking at The Kid after he told me he was taking the Clips yesterday)

…took one on the chin last night as the road team in the Mavs-Clippers series won for the fifth time in as many games.

He falls to 11-7 and $795 (or $205 under water).

Tonight he likes the suns +125 at LAKERS. $125 if he wins, down $100 if he loses.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 1 Comment

by John Walters

The LeBron We Know

I won’t argue if you call LeBron James a Top 5 all-time player in terms of accomplishments and talent. I’d certainly argue if you think of him as The GOAT.

This Phoenix series, though, has been a case study in why I’ve never been a fan. After the Lakers and Suns split the first two games in Phoenix without much drama, the Lakers punked the Suns in Game 3. Not only did LA lead by as much as 20 points in the third quarter, but LeBron turned the 4th quarter into LA Fitness rec game, clowning the Suns’ Jae Crowder as his boys on the Laker bench went all Arsenio’s studio audience. He’s 36 years old and he’s behaving like this just three games into a 7-game series? At the time I thought, I hope karma makes a comeback.

And it has. While you have to love Anthony Davis’ game and his behavior, the injury of the guy Charles Barkley now refers to as “street clothes” was a portent of doom for the Lakers. The Suns were only up 4 late in the first half in LA in Game 4 when Davis went down and then jumped out to an 18-point lead.

Late in the game LA made a run. Cut it to 7 when Dennis Schroder drove for a layup with under 90 seconds to go but missed. LeBron was under the hoop. Neither he nor Schroder hustled back on D, Phoenix had a 5-on-3 and Mikhail Bridges, or Crowder, hit an uncontested corner 3 to put Phoenix up 10. Ballgame. Maybe the Suns win anyway but it mighta been nice if your GOAT had gotten back on defense.

Narrating the highlight on “SportsCenter,” the ESPN announcer (Michael Eaves) forgave LeBron by noting that LBJ knew the game was over when Schroder missed his shot. Really? Wow, cuz I don’t think Frank Vogel did.

Jump to last night, Game 5, as the Suns take a 30-point first half lead in Phoenix. Now, LeBron played great and he was clearly giving a herculean effort. At one point Grant Hill of TNT says, after a LeBron three, “You know LeBron isn’t going to give up without a fight.”

But then, the game clearly out of hand, Vogel pulls him in the fourth quarter. And LeBron exits the floor with five minutes to play. It’s purely a symbolic gesture, but it’s what I’ve never respected about LeBron. He does this because he can get away with it and no one else on his team can. How doe that make his teammates feel? In the end there’s just too many instances in his career where, sure, LeBron is the best player on his team and yeah his effort is phenomenal on the court, but when his team loses, it’s someone else’s fault. Not his.

Then again, I am a Suns—and Warriors—fan. I’ve always been a fan of whoever LeBron is playing.

Skypool, Skyfall*

*The judges will also accept “Laps In Judgment”

The Darwin Awards are just watching and waiting. Skypool, located 115 feet above terra firma between the swanky Embassy Garden luxury apartments in London, is 84 feet long and has a glass bottom. One imagines its douchebag-to-bather ratio is at least 1:1.

Button Up, Button Down

https://twitter.com/WUTangKids/status/1399386748220850177?s=20

Don’t think I ever realized this about Seinfeld. Larry David, co-creator, returned to write the series finale (which has been largely panned, perhaps for being overly ambitious in scope). Anyway, the first line of the series and the last line of the series are the same.

Blog Off, Donald

May 4, 2021—June 1, 2021

Less than one month into its existence, the blog “From The Desk Of Donald J. Trump” has been permanently shut down. Chances are that whoever wrote it began to realize that doing a blog every day can be time-consuming and for the most part unrewarding. Unrelated: MH turns nine years old in August.

From Alpine Rescue To Cold Case

This has the Zen Master parable from Charlie Wilson’s War written all over it.

On a wintry night in January of 1982 in a remote area of the Colorado Rockies, Alan Lee Phillips’ pickup truck skidded off the road into a snowdrift. Phillips opted against leaving the cab of his truck and trekking out into the wilderness; instead he used his headlights to flash out S.O.S. (three short, three long, three short) into the night.

A local sheriff in a plane overhead spotted the signal and recognized it. Phillips was rescued.

“How wonderful,” the townspeople said.

We’ll see.

Authorities never got a straight answer from Phillips (he said he’d been returning home from a bar) as to why he was out in such a remote area late at night.

And no one quite put together, not for decades, the disappearance of two young women that night and Phillips’ apparent mishap.

But in February detectives used DNA evidence to link Phillips, now 70, to the murders of Annette Schnee, 22, and Barbara Jo Oberholtzer, 29. Both women had been hitchhiking that night, independently of one another, near Breckenridge. Each was shot to death. They were dumped far from one another. One was discovered the following day, another six months later.

Phillips has been living in Denver for decades. It’s too early to know whether these women were his only victims. Seems a little unlikely that he’d go on a one-night killing spree and never have done so before or after.

This will soon be a 26-part Netflix series, we predict.

The Kid

… sure was right about the Phoenix Suns, who beat the Lakers by 30.

He moves to 11-6 and he’s back above water at $1,095. This is an important chance tonight to move to a 66.67% win percentage. Who’s he taking?

Tonight he likes the CLIPPERS minus-300 versus the Mavs and Damaged Doncic. $300 to lose, $100 to win.

The home team is 0-4 in this series but something’s gotta give, no?

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

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by John Walters

She Gone

Talk, apparently, is not cheap.

Naomi Osaka, 23, is the reigning women’s singles champion of the U.S. Open and the Australian Open. Those are the last two grand slam tennis tournaments played. Just before the French Open began this weekend Osaka, ranked No. 2 in the world and the No. 2 seed in this tourney, announced that she would not be speaking to the media. The French Open responded by stating originally that they’d fine her and then banded together with the other three Grand Slams to state that Osaka would be in danger of defaulting (being expelled from) the tournaments.

Osaka saw their raise and called their bluff. She kicked herself out of the French.

This is one of those classic 2021 issues where you’ll only be hearing, at least on Twitter, from either one extreme side or the other. At MH, we’re more in the middle. Which doesn’t make us wishy-washy, just rational. Or so we think.

Osaka is 23. She is an adult. A young adult, but still an adult. She wants media on her terms. Last year Osaka earned $37.4 million from endorsements alone. Granted, it was a difficult year to make money playing tennis, but she’d never have made that much money on the courts even in a normal year. The Grand Slams have played a major role in her “creating her brand,” and of course she did her part by being so successful. It’s a partnership. They help you and you help them, which is what her doing media is.

You don’t arrive empty-handed to a pot-luck supper.

Still, kudos to Osaka for ripping off the band-aid. She heard the rules, took the $15K fine after the first match, and then decided not talking was going to be a bigger story and distraction than talking. So she left. And yet, this is a woman who has won four of the past nine grand slams in women’s tennis. There has to be a better solution here.

You Said It

Before yesterday I’d never heard of the 1949 film Battleground. Then I saw a tweet about how it was the film the creator of Band Of Brothers felt did the most justice to the Battle of the Bulge. Then I read how it cost Louis B. Mayer his job, since he refused to green light it, let Dore Schary walk it over to another studio, and two years later Schary took Mayer’s job at MGM. Oh, and it was MGM’s top-grossing film for a few years and was also nominated for Best Picture.

So I watched it.

And here’s the scene I won’t forget. Hearing this speech on Memorial Day 2021, at least 72 years after it was written, well, that’s quite something.

They should play this clip every single damn day in the halls of Congress. And on cable news. And certainly on Memorial Day. Maybe this is on me, but I cannot fathom why I’d never heard it, or heard of it, before yesterday.

Murdur Durdur

Dove into HBO’ Mare of Easttown last night, and now I understand this SNL clip, “Murdur Durdur,” from a couple months back. Between this and his Vin Diesel impersonation for “The Movies,” Beck Bennett had a most solid season on SNL. Somewhere between a Phil Hartman type and a Bill Hader type.

Woe, Canada

Here’s the situation for those of you who don’t pay attention to hockey or Canada: the Toronto Maple Leafs have won 13 Stanley Cup championships, but their last triumph was in 1967. They have not even won a playoff series since 2004.

This season, however, the Leafs finished atop the NHL’s Canada-only (for pandemic reasons) North division. They had the league’s leading goal scorer in Auston Matthews. And they were up 3-1 in the opening playoff round versus their arch-rival, the Montreal Canadiens.

So, of course, they lost the last three, including Game 7 at home last night. The Canadiens had already won both Games 5 and 6 in overtime, where sudden death decides the outcome.

Just devastating. On a good note, it’ll be above 70 degrees in Toronto this week.

The Kid

… was prescient enough not to take Naomi Osaka in the first round at the French Open, but instead Serena Williams, who won 7-6. 6-2. So he’s now 10-6, at $995, or a Lincoln below the surface.

Tonight he likes the SUNS minus-200 at home versus the Lakers. A little risky when Brooklyn at home is a much surer bet and he could’ve taken Nadal, who is a guarantee on clay.