Starting Five

1. H20-no!

California is so desperate for water that they’ve even asked me for most of my surname. The Golden State is turning brown, and I’m not just talking about their recidivist gubernatorial voting tendencies.

Anyway, what happens when the most populous state in the Union experiences its worst drought in 60 years and finds itself running low on the world’s most valuable resource? And how will this affect the production of Sharknado 3?

2. Wholly Cow!

No one ever claimed Philadelphia’s native cuisine was healthy. This is a city that either produces or celebrates cheese steaks, Tastykake, and scrapple, the last of which is a hardened form of the stuff that accumulates at the edge of your grill after frying stuff.

But the Philadelphia Phillies seem particularly determined to wreak havoc on their fans’ coronary arteries this summer. The Phils will sell both hard liquor and will introduce a nine-patty, 2200-calorie cheeseburger at Citizens Bank Park this season. It’s Always Artherosclerosis in Philadelphia…

3. Don’t Minchin It

So if you didn’t hit the link and watch Tim Minchin’s commencement speech yesterday, I’m posting it again here because it’s really, really good. And so of course I YouTubed a few Minchin comic bits and found him quite compelling. I really enjoyed this bit on Religion, which may offend some of you even though it contains (almost) no profanity.

The snippet that arrested my attention concerned evolution. The set-up is a mutated fish named Tony, the first fish that, due to a genetic mutation, grew feet. I’ll let Minchin take it from there (7:51 mark):

“And imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet, at the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it, if he could look forward just a few short hundreds of millions of years, to see one of his descendants, an Israeli Jew by the name of Jesus, having a nail hammered through his feet, the very feet that Tony provided him with, as a punishment for having a sort of schizophrenic discourse with a god who was created by man to explain the existence of feet in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of Tony.”

Happy Easter, everybody.

4. Yessirree, Bob

On Saturday night in Phoenix at a charity event, GoDaddy founder and CEO Bob Parsons bid $2 million for a dinner for four at the home of Reba McEntire (she was the event’s emcee, and it was her 60th birthday).

That’s a steep price to pay for a meal, but Parsons also knew he had some cash coming his way a few days later. On Tuesday night GoDaddy had its IPO (GDDY) and the price soared 31% in its first full day of trading, from $20 to $26.15.

A quick word on Parsons, 62, who currently personally owns 28% of the company: grew up in Baltimore’s inner city, nearly flunked out of high school, joined the Marines at age 17, served in Vietnam, was injured and received a Purple Heart.

5. Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Hockey Players

 

I love watching hockey–in person. And I always hear how much nicer they are than other professional team sports athletes, and I know women who are absolute, unabashed groupies, and the game looks like a lot of fun to play…if you can skate backwards.

But I never missed not playing. Why? Because I’m way too vain. 🙂 Sure, football’s dangerous, but hockey has ice, skate blades, projectile-missile pucks, and that area between the bench and the pole holding up the fiberglass into which you can fly and destroy a kidney. Mostly, though, I like my face way too much to play hockey.

This is what happened to Detroit’s Drew Miller on Tuesday night when he took a skate to the face. “He’s tough, he’s a hockey player,” says ESPN’s Steve Levy. But Levy is a pretty boy. It’s easy to say that from the studio.

Music 101

How’s It Gonna Be

A logjam of homogenous-sounding and -looking rock bands emerged in the void left by Kurt Cobain’s murder suicide on April 5, 1994: Tonic, Fuel, Candlebox, Bush, Goo Goo Dolls, Sister Hazel, Vertical Horizon, Sugar Ray, Matchbox 20 (sticking finger down my throat at that final one), etc. Of all of them, the one band that created the most worthy tunes was San Francisco-based Third Eye Blind: Jumper, Can I Graduate, Never Let You Go and this one, from their eponymous 1997 debut album.

It’s too bad the band petered out. Not sure if it was the rock-star life or what. Also, here’s an acoustic version….Cultural note: NBC used this song to introduce Game 4 of the 1996 NBA Finals, the implication being that this could be MJ’s final game with the Chicago Bulls as they had a 3-0 series lead over the Sonics. The Bulls lost this game and the following one before wrapping up the series in Game 6. And, of course, MJ remained two more seasons for a pair of epic NBA Finals series against the Jazz.

One more note: Lead singer Stephan Jenkins graduated from Cal-Berkeley, whereas Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz dropped out of that august (and everything after) institution.