Starting Five

1. Bolt of Lightning, Bolt.

The photographer’s name is Olivier Morin and you can bet your tush this morning that he knows the definition of serendipity. On Sunday night at the World Track & Field Championships in Moscow, the French photographer snapped, with an assist from Mother Nature, one of the true iconic photographs of all time. For all the times that Jamaica’s Usain Bolt has celebrated a victory in a 100M or 200M race by posing as a lightning “bolt” strike for photographers, this unstaged photograph of the sky saluting him back will forever be the one that sports fans remember. It is track’s equivalent to Muhammad Ali looming over a downed Sonny Liston.

Before Bolt stepped into the starting blocks for the men’s 100M final at the World Track & Field Championships at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, Morin set up five cameras at his post just around the turn and beyond the finish line. He and all the photographers were aware of the thunderstorms taking place — Bolt won the sprint in 9.77 seconds in a driving rain — but the odds of capturing a lightning strike while also landing Bolt in the frame were remote.

‘I’m editing…the remote  cameras on this laptop after (from trackside). I went  through all of the remotes (cameras) and this is the last one,” Morin told The Daily Mail. “‘I didn’t see all of it at first when it was the  small images. I just saw Bolt in the frame, because the  image was a small size.  I say “Ok, Bolt is in and he looks sharp”. Then I open the picture and say  “Ooo”. There’s lightning there.”

Morin, who has shot for AFP for 24 years, has his career-defnining shot. ‘The only thing I am responsible for  is the  framing and the timing of pressing the button (for the remote  camera). The rest  is out of my control. The god of weather was with me  last night.”

2. Eldrick’s Elegy

 

Eldrick “Tiger” Woods has won five PGA tournaments in 2013. No other duffer –or Dufner — on the PGA Tour has won more than two. So, if you win 150% more often than the next most successful golfer on the world’s most prestigious golf circuit, that is fairly dominant.

Unless you’re Tiger Woods. If you are Tiger Woods, you must win majors.

Last week Woods, 37, won the Bridgestone Invitational by seven strokes, including a round in which he shot a career-low 61. This weekend, however, Woods finished 40th at the PGA Championship. He putted out his final-round 70 before the leaders even teed off. Woods has now gone 70 months and 22 majors (although he missed four of them) since winning the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in June of 2008. The world’s No. 1-ranked golf remains stuck at 14 majors, which remains four shy of Jack Nicklaus’ mark of 18.

There are those who will say that he squandered five years of his prime — in 2008 most observers imagine he would have caught Nicklaus by now — due to his reckless off-course lifestyle (to be fair, a knee injury shelved him for the remainder of 2008). They may be correct. But Woods’ problem is not that he has lost his talent; Tiger simply has lost his flair for burning bright on golf’s four grandest stages –The Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship.

Now he only has to wait nine more months until Augusta, until his next opportunity. It says here that he will somehow, someday at least tie Nicklaus. Age isn’t the factor it used to be in golf — Tiger’s fitness will be fine. And, after all, he’s still the world’s best player.

Will “2nd-Most Majors Won” be Eldrick’s Epitaph? I don’t believe so.

3. So That’s Where You’ve Gone, James DiMaggio

Fugitive-of-the-Week winner James Lee DiMaggio, who was on the run with 16 year-old Hannah Anderson, was shot and killed by an FBI agent in the

wilderness about 70 miles north of Boise, Idaho, this weekend. DiMaggio, 40, who allegedly killed Anderson’s mother and eight year-old brother and then burned

down his own house with their bodies in it last week, about 50 miles east of San Diego, had kidnapped Anderson, with whom he was smitten. As the pair drove

north from San Diego to Idaho, one wonders if DiMaggio ever heard any updates on the Ariel Castro sentencing on the radio. Creep and killer gets his due.

 

4. The Annotated Newsroom

 

In which an entire episode –aptly titled “News Night with Will McAvoy” — transpires around a singular “News Night” broadcast, providing a real-time “Inside

 

Baseball” glance a the genre. The episode jumps ahead six months (March 16, 2012) from the previous episode, so apparently nothing newsworthy occurred in

that interim. Someone should tell that to the Penn State football program.

 

 

1) Sandra Fluke

A women’s rights activist who was the object of sexist slurs by ultra-conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (who among us hasn’t been?). Maggie references

her to Jim because Streep 2.0 has been focusing on Fluke in her columns.

 

2) Alicia Keys, Halle Berry, etc.

Attractive female celebrities who have either exhibited nip or, nip’s new and improved voyeuristic sibling, sideboob.

 

3) Roswell

 

A town in southeastern New Mexico where aliens really landed. Because I saw “Paul” and it’s all true!

 

4) Pat Buchanan’s book

 

A “News Night” guest proffers that the MSNBC host was canned due to a book that he wrote, and that is why conservatives are afraid to speak their minds in

The book in question was titled “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”  (I’ll take America and give the points) and the chapter that

Buchanan at cable TV news’ unemployment doorstep was a chapter named “The End of White America”, an excerpt of which I will provide here:

 

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection … mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone”?

Buchanan was canned in January of 2012.

5) “You’ve got moxie, kid, and that’s our lede…”

 

Aaron Sorkin definitely has a thing for 1930s and 1940s comedies and the banter between male and female leads. Here he is basically channeling “Woman of the Year”, (1942) the zenith of the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy films, in which the two played rival reporters at the same newspaper. Check out this delightful little snippet of dialogue and remember, these are the darkest days of World War II:

Tess (Hepburn): “You mean our paper sends two people to cover the game?”

Phil (another actor, who will refer to Tracy here): “No, I cover the game, he just kicks it around in his column.”

Tess: “We’ve got only one man at Vichy.”
Sam (Tracy): “Vichy? Are they still in the league?”

6) “Baba Booey, Mother%#&(*%!”

The “News Night” crew nabs a man and woman who attempted to pull a prank by posing as a Syrian couple who had intimate knowledge of a Middle East bombing. This is a reference to Howard Stern’s loyal fans, who have pulled off this stunt multiple times and announced it by proclaiming “Baba Booey!” on air. Baba Booey was a Stern sidekick, real name Gary Dell’Abate, who first initiated the stunt.

7) Bonnie and Clyde

A real-life glamorous gangster couple from the 1930s, immortalized in Warren Beatty’s eponymous film from 1967. McKenzie compares the crank-yanking callers to them.

5. “And another thing about air travel…”

Speaking of moxie, Virgin Atlantic announced that it will add live stand-up comics (unless, we presume, there is turbulence, at which point they will do their act while safely donning seat belts) on its London-to-Manchester flights. Remember, your seat cushion can also be used as a hurling device.

Reserves

The final-half season premiere of “Breaking Bad” took place last night. We have yet to view it. More on that tomorrow.

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What if I told you that the New York Yankees would play a three-game weekend series against the Detroit Tigers, the hottest team in the American League (entered with a 13-game win streak) in which they never entered the bottom of the ninth inning with the lead? How many of those games would you think the Yankees won? Turns out they took two of three, thanks to a pair of game-winning (a.k.a. “walk off”) hits by Brett Gardner, including yesterday’s solo home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

Of course, I’ve buried the lede: Mariano Rivera blew both of his save opportunities, on Friday night and Sunday, and surrendered three home runs in those two games, two of them to Miguel Cabrera.

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If you missed “Megalodon” during The Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”, it was a faux documentary about how a trio of marine biologists (one of whom bore an eerily uncomfortable resemblance to Dane Cook) were in search of the 60-foot shark that went extinct millions of years ago. A lot of viewers were upset by it, but I think the fact that you could see the shore from their vessel while searching for a prehistoric shark was a dead giveaway. As were the chum bazookas. As one viewer tweeted, and cheers to Discovery for airing the tweet, “The director of Blair Witch Project thinks Megalodon is the worst Blair Witch movie ever.”

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Mary Cain: 17 years old, a high school senior-to-be, and she has advanced to the semi-finals of the women’s 1500 meters at the World Track & Field Championships in Moscow. Cain, who in May ran a 4:04.62 1500, which is both the American high school and junior record, is the youngest person ever to represent the U.S.A. at the Worlds. Keep an eye on her. A legend in the making.