On this very special episode of We Defy Augury, I interview our good friend and fledgling author Rob Russell. We discuss his new book "JoJo the Small Town Hound: Volume 1, Leesburg, Virginia and the Curious Case of the Dog Money."
Although the book is for 7-10 year olds, Rob and I get into some fairly deep topics: the subjectivity of consciousness; structural racism and systemic prejudice towards black Americans, human and canine; the principles of drama; and the fleeting nature of our mortality.
By the end of the episode, we develop an idea for the greatest children’s book that will never be written.
Recording this interview with Rob on Zoom was quite easy, so if any other Gheorghies read something (or write something) and want to talk about it, let me know.
Saw the news this week that the Washington Commanders announced plans to retired Darrell Green's #28. My first reaction was something along the lines of, "what took them so long?". There aren't many ex-Skins more iconic than Green, nor many moments more memorable than him walking down Eric Dickerson.
But after I dug into it a bit, I realized that the Washington franchise really doesn't retire numbers, or it didn't (with one notable exception) in the Era That Shall Not Be Discussed. In fact, not one player from the Golden Gibbs Era has his number retired. Nary a hog, regretfully not a Riggo, monstrously no Monk, terribly not a Theismann, mournfully no Mann, distressingly no Dexter.
The Washington franchise has been pretty stingy when it comes to retiring numbers (and ain't that in keeping with Little Danny Starfucker's ethos: waste money on washed up big names, skimp on stuff that might make fans happy). Turns out they're not alone.
Retire Riggo!
Since the franchise's inception in the 1930s, Washington has honored just four players by retiring their number: Sonny Jurgensen, Sammy Baugh, Charlie Taylor, and Sean Taylor. One of those is obviously not like the others. Of the teams with histories of similar duration, only the Steelers have retired fewer (three). Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, and the Raiders notably do not retire numbers, nor do the Saints, who actually unretired a couple of numbers under the current management. The Ravens are open to it, but haven't done so yet, which makes Ray Lewis and Ed Reed a bit curious.
The Bears (14), Giants (14), and Niners (12) are profligate, while the Bengals (speaking of stingy owners) and Jags have one retired number each, one of which you'd easily guess, and the other you never would.
I enjoyed my little trip down NFL numerological history. Hope it'll keep you entertained for at least a few minutes.
Rob recently checked in on the WFCSAGS recurring feature and provided an update. Not sure Zman can with WCSAGD, other than to keep saying "Nobody's bought one yet!"
Well, here's an update nobody even asked for -- the Notify News! Welcome back to the Notify show, the one where we highlight songs not on Spotify!
And here's the latest, including which songs we highlighted that are now available on Spotify after all. [If you think I'm implying with such a post as this that the G:TB Notify posts have influenced the powers that be at Spotify, well, yes, yes I am.]
Here are the songs that I brought to that platform for you:
Arcade Fire, "Guns of Brixton [live at BBC Culture Show]"
The Clash, "Listen"
Aztec Camera, "Jump"
CvB, "Eye of Fatima"
Strontium 90, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
The Police, "Nothing Achieving"
Dropkick Murphys, "Guns of Brixton [live]"
Wyclef Jean, "Electric City"
Pizzicato 5, "Twiggy Twiggy"
Danger Mpouse, "What More Can I Say"
The Clash, "(In the) Pouring Rain"
Cracker, "Been Around the World"
Total Coelo. "I Eat Cannibals [original]"
Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, "Prime Mover"
The Walkmen, "Greasy Saint"
Ray LaMontagne, "Crazy"
Father John Misty, "The Suburbs"
Bruce Greenwood & Circle the Wagons, "2 Ft. O' Butt Crack"
Okay, there's the recap. But what about some new Not-ifies?
Fair enough.
Who doesn't love Ween?? Well, I don't right now, since they cancelled the show that was playing around here this weekend. But then again, it was for Deaner's mental health, and I'm for that. We waited out Gener, we'll wait for his buddy.
Here are a couple of lost tracks.
Here's a tune they wrote when Captain Trips died.
And another for an All-Star pitcher's cousin. Love this one.
Speaking of dying, the Margaritaville Man died last year, and here's an old tune he did that appeared on the Urban Cowboy soundtrack.
Here's one that didn't even have a presence online until a month ago. An old tune by old VU-er John Cale, somewhere in the late 1970's.
And there there's this. 1983's sophomoric, misogynistic, ludicrous, and mildly amusing Jerky Boys precursor, "Cooky Puss!" All hail Carvel ice cream. This ain't no Fudgie the Whale.
That's all for Notify this go-around!
BUT... that's not all for Cooky Puss! Stay tuned for Part II of the Cooky Puss saga!! It's fascinating!!
Manufacturers routinely subject their products to stress tests, a wise and necessary practice that allows for improvement and reduces the chance of human suffering and litigation. Other outfits have stress tests thrust upon them while in motion. Their ability to cope and adjust on the fly determine their value.
News organizations belong to the latter group.
Each day brings new challenges, and it’s up to the group to figure out the best way to gather and distribute information within the landscape. Sometimes results are deft and seamless, other times leaks and cracks and breakdowns are apparent. Or, as the philosopher Sam Elliott said in “The Big Lebowski,” “Sometimes you eat the b’ar, sometimes the b’ar eats you.”
As an old newspaper guy and the site’s media grump, I’m often as curious about *how* stuff is covered as *what’s* covered. Which brings us to a couple of areas that caught my attention. One is the war in Gaza, or more specifically, coverage of the war in Gaza by several major news outlets. The other is who gathers and presents the news, and the filters through which they sift coverage, in this case at National Public Radio.
First, you can go to a hundred places for news about Israel and Gaza and its effects on Israelis and Palestinians. I have no additional sources or insight. But I was struck by a couple of pieces illustrating that large, smart, capable news organizations are twisting themselves into crullers simply attempting to tell people what the hell is going on.
The news site The Intercept was given an internal memo from New York Times editors instructing reporters about what language and terms they should and should not use in describing the conflict. Avoid terms such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” as well as “slaughter” and “massacre.” Don’t refer to areas of displaced Palestinians as “refugee camps” or Gaza as “occupied territory.” The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are acceptable when referring to the original Hamas attack on Oct. 7, but not when Israeli soldiers or citizens target or kill Palestinian civilians.
NYT editors say the aim is to avoid loaded words and terms that convey more emotion than fact, and to simply use precise descriptions.
However, a NYT newsroom source told The Intercept: “I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”
A handful of NYT newsroom sources claim that the paper is being deferential to Israel and Israeli military sources for details of actions and civilian deaths.
Meanwhile, NPR’s public editor wrote a recent piece saying that the most frequent criticism received is that its coverage highlights the suffering of Palestinians and downplays the pain and grief experienced by Israelis. That NPR doesn’t emphasize enough that Hamas sparked the present conflict with its initial attack or camouflage itself by blending in with the general population. Nor does it provide Israeli voices and context within stories about what are described as Palestinian civilian deaths and casualties, raids on hospitals and communities, etc.
The public editor’s response was, essentially: We’re doing the best we can; not enough hours in a day or time in our broadcasts to mention everything. Unspoken was: And no matter how much we do, some of you *still* will bitch because we aren’t tailoring coverage or using language *you* want.
NPR’s supposed Palestinian bias was also cited by a former editor. Uri Berliner was a senior business editor who recently resigned after 25 years, saying that he “cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” he outlined in a recent online essay.
Berliner wrote at length for a piece on the site Free Press that NPR’s news side has morphed from an obligation to straightforward journalism, albeit with a liberal slant, to full-on, left-leaning advocacy that attempts to tell listeners what to think.
Despite a commitment to a more diverse newsroom, he wrote that the “most damaging development” was an absence of viewpoint diversity: no conservative voices, no one to challenge when more rigorous standards of reporting or journalism are ignored.
He pointed out that several years ago, NPR’s Washington D.C., office where he worked had 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans, a ratio that was met with staggering indifference when he brought it up to superiors. Listenership is down, he wrote, and the audience has narrowed.
In 2011, twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle-of-the-road, 37 percent as liberal. In 2023, eleven percent said they were conservative, 21 percent middle-of-the-road, 67 percent liberal.
On the journalism end, Berliner wrote that the office went all-in on Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign before anything was proven, barely bothered to investigate the possibility of a Chinese lab leak as the origin of the COVID-19 virus despite credible questions that persist to this day, and dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 out-of-hand before any real reporting as a potential distraction for the task of ousting Trump. After George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, rather than explore the impacts of racism through reporting, he wrote that management accepted systemic racism in the nation as a given and charged staff with acknowledging and helping to dismantle white privilege. [Note from the tiny dictator: For what it's worth, the WaPo's Erik Hemple dug into Berliner's claims and found many of them wanting for evidence, which doesn't besmirch the media grump's broader point.]
These are tough times for the news business. As news sources dwindle in an increasingly polarized society, there’s no guarantee that if NPR reported straight down the middle and had more conservative voices that it would attract listeners and have a better balanced audience, that if New York Times reporters didn’t have to check every other sentence through a wartime sensitivity glossary that it would present a fair accounting in a combat zone. But dear lord, people, don’t overthink it. Report and write and speak and present the way you were taught. Follow common sense and your gut. Don’t erect more obstacles than are already in place. The b’ar needs no help.
Coming to you live from the ancestral homeland of Brewster, MA this weekend, where we're gathered as a clan to celebrate my great-aunt's 100th(!) birthday. Clean living and serving others does a wonder for a body, as it turns out. I may not be so lucky.
Speaking of serving others, I came across this neat little story in the WaPo a few days ago. It starts like this, "Sam McGee picked up the phone in 2022 and dialed the same number he’d called every year for decades. He had the same question he’d been asking for 20 years: Could his family buy back his late grandmother’s Ford Mustang that had been sold in 1973 to pay for her funeral expenses?"
That's a zinger of a lede that turns into a bitter (mostly) sweet tale of family, persistence, and a community-minded individual. Enjoy this award-winning documentary students at Samuel V. Champion High School in Boerne, TX produced about it.
I got so excited about the release of my dog's book that I forgot the traditional G:TB celebration of the release of a new Old 97s record. American Primitive is the 13th studio album by our guys, who are marking their 30th year together as a band. That in itself is noteworthy.
Reviews have been nearly uniformly positive, lauding the band's consistency and hailing the record as "consistently exciting and rambunctious" while claiming its 13 tracks "cut a vigorous slice through some rowdy melodies & upbeat jaunty ones". Music, one might say, to my ears.
In a splendid bit of timing, I've now sold enough books to have generated sufficient royalties to purchase a vinyl version of the record. Gonna splash some of that writer cash.
The landscape of my interior life is littered with ideas. Notably, it's a bit harder to find execution amongst the dreamer's detritus within. But in at least one way, that changes today.
I am super-thrilled to announce that today my book, The Adventures of JoJo The Small Town Hound: Vol. 1, Leesburg, VA and the Curious Case of Dog Money, is live in the world, available on Amazon.com for your enjoyment. Or that of your 7-10 year-old friends, more accurately.
The whole thing has been a fascinating experience, and I think the thing that's most fulfilling is the fact that I actually did something I'd envisioned. Only took 53+ years. Here's to the next one.
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