by John Walters

Tweet Me Right

John Beilein was just trying to coach 😂 pic.twitter.com/SW5TFg2tmA

— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) March 1, 2019

The best part is that the Wolverines were leading by at least 20 points at this stage.

Starting Five

The Bryce Is Right*

*The judges, being Jennifer Garner fans, will also accept “13 Going On $330 Million”

Thirteen years, $330 million, from the Philadelphia Phillies. Bryce Harper, come on dowwwwwwn! Not only is Harper a perennial MVP favorite for at least the next five years (though he did have a down year last season), but his I’m-just-as-hunky-as-Chris Hemsworth looks and big bat will make him a big favorite in the City of Brotherly Love.

We’re a little surprised. Harper grew up in Las Vegas and, knowing he was choosing where to spend the remainder of his career, we thought he might opt for a West Coast club such as the Dodgers. Nope.

Phillies at Nats, April 2. The boo birds will be singing.

And yes, whoever signs Mike Trout next year will probably have to give him a state or an outer planet to retain him.

2. Morality and Michael Cohen

New York Times columnist David Brooks frequently catches flak for being the ultimate in out-of-touch elitist populism—and we know that some of our readers already skipped beyond this item after reading its first three words—but we just want to say that we read this column last night and kept thinking, “Uh huh. Yes. That’s right. Yes. You get it. True.”

Read it for yourselves. We found it an accurate summation of the conundrum facing this republic of ours, and how we got here.

3. Fair Or Foul?

At the Connecticut Indoor State Championships last weekend, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood finished 1st and 2nd in the 55-meter sprint. Meanwhile at the collegiate level, CeCe Telfer of Franklin Pierce University is the top-ranked 55-meter sprinter in Division II.

Miller and Yearwood are both transgender athletes, while Telfer only a year ago competed on her school’s men’s team under the name of Craig.

It’s a little early, perhaps, to understand all the physiological effects and nuances of the gender transformation process, but we hardly think that if you question it that you are not woke. Or that you are just as bigoted or pig-headed as someone who didn’t want Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier.

It’s at least fair to ask if this is fair. People who are born as males and develop musculature as males and then suddenly alter their hormone intake for a year or so…well, does that make them females in terms of competing on a level playing field? The results suggest that people at least need to study this more.

4. Catch Of The Day

This is a seven-foot long hoodwinker sunfish that washed up on the beach in California not far from Santa Barbara this week. The oddity here is that the hoodwinker has only been spotted off the coasts of Chile and New Zealand. So how did it come to cross sub-tropical waters and find itself near California?

This goes back to the MH theory of “What would happen if we just shipped a bunch of polar bears to Antarctica?” Answer: There’d be a hell of a lot of unhappy penguins, but what else? Anyway, the world is coming to an end but don’t worry, Jesus is going to get off the Barca-lounger and save us all because, certainly, we deserve it.

5. Ty-rain-osarus

Days of unrelenting rain has transformed entire Northern California communities into islands, stranding thousands. https://t.co/idea4RPUBL pic.twitter.com/x3PL5iYnv1

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 1, 2019

This is where photo captions can make a big difference. Our intrepid canoeist is not starring in Jurassic Park 4: Drenched World, but rather a resident of Guerneville, California, paddling through a flooded miniature golf course. Props to the photog who saw the potential here.

Music 101

Little Red Corvette

There are, to our knowledge, no songs about Ferraris, Jaguars, Porsches, Lamborghinis or even McLarens. No one knows what a Barchetta looks like other than that it’s red, the song “Tesla Girl” precedes the vehicle by at least two decades, and Mercedes only got a line in an Eagles song about an unearthly desert lodge. But Prince wrote a famous ode to America’s signature high-performance vehicle even if only as a metaphor. From 1983…

Remote Patrol

Gran Torino

7 p.m. (& 9:30 p.m.) AMC

If there’s a “Get Off My Lawn” genre of films, this and Falling Down belong as the highlight double feature. Grouchy Clint Eastwood, which is his default mood in films these days (he’s always been grouchy, he was just too handsome for you to notice before), a bunch of Crazy Lower-Middle Class Asians, and a red-headed priest (whom we served at a party last summer and who sheepishly acknowledged, Yeah, it is I).