My daughter's friend Kat has had a rough go of it during her short time on what can be a cruel planet for teenagers. But she's got an amazing voice and a way with lyrics, and she just released her very first EP, Melancholy State of Mind. (The link takes you to the record's Spotify page.)
There's pain and regret and hope in her music, and she's got a cool sound. Enjoy, and spread the word.
Did you have a spot in college where you could meander over to a historical area and get a nice little snack for a few bucks? You know, something akin to bread scraps with a delicious sauce for dipping. I think many of you did.
If I were developing such a sauce, this is how I’d do it. Ingredients pictured above just give a perfect blend that’s a great addition to sandwiches and burgers, and is also great for dipping bread, fries, and just about anything else.
*Any resemblance to an actual establishment’s recipe is purely coincidental.*
4 parts Duke’s Mayo (accept no substitutes – the twang is essential here)
1 part Woerber’s Sandwich Pal Sweet & Spicy Mustard ( the Hot & Spicy is good too, if you can find it)
1 part Horseradish Sauce ( I use Woerber’s, but any will do)
½ part A1
Mix together and adjust to get your preferred taste and color. Enjoy!
A friend recently suggested the series "Babylon Berlin" from Netflix. It's great. Much like Peaky Blinders or Boardwalk Empire, it's about shell-shocked WWI veterans assimilating back into normal life (but in Berlin, not Birmingham or Atlantic City). One of them is a cop investigating a murder which spirals into a whole kerfuffle.
I'm halfway through the third season and, like most modern TV shows, you have to give it a few episodes to set everything up but once you do it pays off. Turns out Berlin was pretty wild in the 1920's, lots of booze and prostitution with a little cocaine and fluid sexuality to boot (Das Boot?). Despite being a relatively straightforward procedural it occasionally veers off into Teutonic Lynchian weirdness, which I enjoy greatly.
It's also very literary, with aspects of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises coming through.
Any excuse to use that video again. At some point I thought to myself "This must've been a book originally, there's no way a television scriptwriter came up with this" and sure enough, it's from a series of books by a guy named Volker Kutscher. So I got the first book and started reading it. So far so good. Check out the show or the book unless you're Dave, in which case you already read the books.
Missed it by a day, but rise up young funksters to celebrate the 80th birthday of the legendary George Clinton. Noted funk chronicle NPR dropped this fascinating little vignette about the bandleader's history and influence, centered on the epic Maggot Brain.
I heard Blackbyrd McKnight play Eddie Hazel's solo a few years ago. Melted shit all over the place. Cheers up to the Mothership. May the Duke of Funkenstein have 80 more years. Free your mind and your ass will follow.State Fairs back? STATE FAIRS BACK
This, of course, is a deep fried, thinly veiled excuse for me to post probably my greatest work on this here website: my trip to the Indiana State Fair 12 years ago. Come, relive the journey with me.
I grew up with the Beatles playing in the background. I'm a fan. You probably are too so you should watch "McCartney 3, 2, 1" on Hulu.
Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin hang out in front of a mixing board and talk about how various McCartney songs were inspired, written, and recorded. Sometimes they isolate individual tracks and McCartney explains how that particular aspect of the song came to be. It's great.
There's no introduction to the series, no throat-clearing explanation of who these guys are, no hackneyed diatribe about the music or the musician's importance. It isn't necessary--everyone knows the deal.
Each of the six episodes is only 30 minutes long so it doesn't require a big time commitment, and I guarantee you'll enjoy watching two old dudes geek out on music. The reaction when Rubin drops "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in episode 1 sets the tone. Check it out.
Given that we have crushed Covid with a combination of natural immunity and voluntary uptake there is no reason anyone should be compelled to take the vaccine. Restrictions/mandates/vaccine passports all uncalled for. https://t.co/m7UF09WwAx
The link at the end of that tweet takes you to another tweet that links to an article in the Daily Mail in which a man who claims to have invented mRNA vaccine technology says that the risks of the covid-19 vaccine outweigh its benefits in people under 22 years old. (Parenthetically, this guy does have patents to DNA vaccines and mRNA vaccines.)
In response to the temporary ban, O'Scanlon said:
That that tweet somehow triggered an algorithm, or worse some hyper-sensitive Twitter employee with an agenda ... is outrageous. There was no misstatement of fact, and there was a legitimately and respectfully stated opinion. This is Orwellian and everyone - on all sides of every social media debate - should be scared by this outrageous overreach.
This is why people hate politicians.
You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. I didn't make that up. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it--in fact he said "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic .... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree." Schenck v. U.S., 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). Justice Holmes was a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican whose visage is chiseled into Mount Rushmore, put him on the Supreme Court. This is not a left-wing socialist communist Antifa Squad Pelosi Marxist CRT-addled position.
And, of course, Justice Holmes was talking about when the government can silence speech, not private citizens or corporations. It doesn't apply to Twitter.
What if I went on Breitbart and made the following comment in every posting: "Reading Breitbart makes you impotent because, in my opinion, all you commenters sound like limp dick motherfuckers." I'm pretty sure I would be banned from Breitbart at some point.
Similarly, I could go onto the Fox News website and post comments that watching Fox News makes you less informed. I could point to these data:
I could point to studies from 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2020. I could point to Rudy Giuliani's being disbarred for his involvement with the kraken.
I wouldn't necessarily do this all in one comment. I could pile on, day after day, highlighting all the bullshit they shoveled over the past 24 hours. It would not surprise me if I lost my posting privileges at some point. Fox News doesn't have to foster my speech on their website because they aren't the government (but don't tell Sean Hannity).
The folks at Twitter sanely believe that, given the ongoing pandemic that killed over 600,000 Americans and another 3.5 million-or-so more people globally, telling people to avoid getting vaccinated because it's too dangerous is like yelling fire in a crowded theater and that these circumstances are "of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils" they don't want to deal with. You don't have to like that view or agree with it (although if you hang out here you know that I agree). Twitter is a company, not a government entity, so they can kick you the hell out whenever they want even if you don't present "a clear and present danger."
Now, if you want to have a rational conversation about eliminating a vaccination, we could talk about polio. There hasn't been a case of polio in the United States since 1979. That's before Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Elise Stefanik were born. One hundred and sixty-seven people have received federal compensation for polio vaccine-related injuries since 1988, roughly five people injured per year. I agree with mandatory polio vaccination--someone could bring it back after a visit to another country or, god forbid, a terrorist group could weaponize it. But we've been vaccinating essentially everyone for over 40 years, potentially hurting five people a year, without a single outbreak. No one complains about this, it's just the cost of doing business. Why on earth wouldn't we vaccinate everyone against covid when it continues to kill 200-300 people a day? Oh right, because that might help this guy get reelected?
But he lost, so can we just prevent needless deaths now?
People like to debate greatness. Greatest boxer of all time, greatest basketball player of all time, golf, tennis, and so on. The same names come up over and over. I think people strangely forget about Kareem (dominated at all levels, 5 rings, 6 MVPs, most professional points ever) and Americans don't care about Formula 1 or Lewis Hamilton (most titles (7), most wins (98), most pole positions (100), most podium finishes (171)). The Federer/Nadal/Djokovic debate carries on but everyone forgets about Rod Laver. Someday I'll remedy that with a post. But not today.
Instead, I'm here to sing the glory of fat men and their gluttony. Joey Chestnut won his 14th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4th taking down 76 hot dogs and buns (or "HDB" as the cognoscenti say) in 10 minutes. That's one HDB every 7.89 seconds. Insane.
Even more insane are his statistics. Click on that link and tell me it doesn't make you gag. Here are a few of my favorites:
What Chestnut does is as physically difficult, and possibly harmful, as almost anything any other athlete tries to do. He even eats in hail storms.
I won't embed his record-setting gyro performance because it's painful to watch but here's the link. He's in second place behind Matt Stonie (a badass in his own right who only weighs 130 pounds?!) for much of the competition but he kicks it into a higher gear around the 10 minute mark of the video. It's stunning. Also stunning: two young women finished in the top six with 13.6 and 18 gyros.
I realize this is wildly different from traditional sports but you have to agree that it's much more physically taxing than darts or bowling or curling or archery. And yet no one mentions Chestnut when discussing great athletes.
It wasn't always this way. Fat men were celebrated 100 years ago. Perhaps the best thing I've read online this year was a New York Times article from 1885 describing a baseball game between the Brooklyn Fat Men's Club and the Fat Men's Club of Flushing. Click on the little "CONTINUE READING: PDF" link on the left to see it larger. Here are a few of my favorite gems if you're too lazy to click around:
They were all baseball men of the days of the Mutuals and Eckfords, since grown obese on beer and politics, but they were a lusty set of athletes, and they declared that they could run their own bases and only wanted two small boys to assist the catcher.
His general appearance, which he claimed was the result of good nature pure and simple, was that of the man in the moon in the gibbous state.
A full-blown Dickens's fat boy rested indolently on third base.
The Brooklynites were highly indignant and so were the spectators, and their rage was with difficulty modified by frequent potations of the amber flood, but the great match of the season was postponed.
What bombast! There were other Fat Men's clubs too, like the New England Fat Men's Club. I think Vince Wilfork was a member. There was a Connecticut Fat Men's Club and a guy named Philetus Dorlon was its President in 1884. He was really really fat. I know this because in 1884 the New York Times wrote:
Philetus Dorlon would not be happy without clams, and no self-respecting clam swims to the bottom of the [Long Island] Sound that would not die happy and sing triumphantly while he steamed his young life away if he knew he were to be sepulchered in Philetus Dorlon .... Mr. Dorlon is huge, he is ponderous, his obesity borders on the infinite; and the most hardened lean man cannot gaze upon his magnificent proportions without being unconsciously made purer and holier.
Magnificent prose. Texas had a Fat Men's Club too, of course. "The clubs’ purpose? According to an address by the president of the budding Fat Men’s Association of Texas, W.A, Disborough, the goal was 'to draw the fat men into closer fraternal relations.'" A frat for fat guys, or fat guy frat guys, if you will.
Gluttons were feted all over the country. The Mineola Monitor ran an op-ed in 1899 about why women should like fat men: "It may be observed, without intentional offence [sic] to any young lady who might be enamored of some skeleton-like young man that, as a rule, fat men, besides being the most jolly and convivial of the male species, are also apt to be the most considerate of and charitable to others .... The fact still remains that seven out of ten fat men make excellent husbands."
The German Fat Men's Club made friends with the New York Fat Men's Club and then they shared a clambake. Five thousand people attended fat men's footraces. Fat men held eating contests emceed by the man I assume founded White Manna. Many police were fat men--some things will never change. Fat men were lauded for being honest, good surety risks, and graceful dancers. The turn of the 20th century was peak phatness for fatness.
It wasn't all fun and games though, as you can see from this blurb in the Brownwood Bulletin in 1909:
The point of this rant? Every once in a while you need to indulge your inner glutton. It will make you happy and jolly and generally fun to be around. Whether you are preparing to hunker down in a surf shack with 15-20 other guys to suck down caseloads of yellow beer with platefuls of conch fritters and coco loco chicken, or just looking forward to pizza night with a dozen buffalo wings, I encourage you to go forth and eat. With gusto.
Bonne fête nationale to those celebrating! 🇫🇷
— Rugby League World Cup 2021 (@RLWC2021) July 14, 2021
As it's #BastilleDay, what better time to check out the @FFRXIII emblem and pattern for #RLWC2021, filled with symbols of the nation's rich history and diverse culture. pic.twitter.com/1l3Wd1wQB7
I have found it difficult to cogently articulate my thoughts about certain aspects of this juncture in our common history as a nation. Mostly it's because of the inchoate rage. We are being intentionally misled and divided by any number of actors foreign and domestic, and our institutions aren't up to the task of separating fact from fiction from fuckery.
I'm gonna get the words out now, though, because OBFT XXIX starts on Thursday, and I want this off my chest so I have a clean mind and a full heart as I make the drive south.
"He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” [Rufo] tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”"
Repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. Where have we heard that before? The Tea Party comes to mind. The entirety of Donald Trump's movement, as well. Hell, it's Fox News' unofficial SOP. It's some bold-ass shithouse jiu jitsu to transform an academic examination of systemic racism and use it to paint non-whites and their allies as the bad guys.
It's shitty on its face, but it's made worse by the fact that it's so goddamn successful, the willfully misled being influenced by the willfully misleading. Author and professor Ibram X. Kendi stated it plainly in The Atlantic this week, saying "[Republican operatives] have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster."
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| The dingus at left lives a few blocks from me. The crazy is too goddamn close. |
There's lots to read about what's going on in Loudoun, so I won't belabor it. I believe (hope?) that it's a very vocal and very small minority giving us a bad name, but I know that all of this nonsense is being fomented by forces far beyond the locals. But it's of a piece with the division that cuts across so many dimensions of our current body politic.
Which leads to me to the real point of this post. I think we're living in a simulation. (Didn't see that coming, did you?)
You may be familiar with Swedish philosopher/academic Nick Bostrom's 2003 paper entitled, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?". Rather than synopsizing it, here's the entirety of the abstract:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
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| This man might not actually exist. |
This explains a lot of shit, frankly. No way the Boston Red Sox go 86 years between World Series titles in a real world, for example. The USA probably doesn't beat the Soviets in hockey, either. And it's impossible that Donald J. Trump becomes President of the United States of America in a real plane of existence.
It helps me clear my mind, too. Charlatans like Rufo and Prior will endeavor to divide, dissemble, and distract, but now that I know they're not real, I can ignore them and focus on the important stuff. Like finding the red pill.
Oh, crap.
As some of you know, I have an Instagram account. I use it for low-brow entertainment, to stay loosely in touch with others, and to look at attractive women. Not necessarily in that order.
I love a quality, inane account to follow. And I have found the Holy Grail of inane accounts. The man behind that account is the Holy Grail of party animals. Is it too late to rush him for Pi Lam?
The account is @featherstonerusty on Instagram and @rustyfeatherstone on TikTok, where he has 188K followers. I assume Rusty Featherstone is a fake name. Rusty is a college kid somewhere (Oregon?) with a simple mission in life. It's called Rusty Rates Beers. Rusty rates beers by drinking a 12-pack of them. He announces the beer, gives updates after he's four/eight/twelve deep, and then gives a score. It goes exactly as you might expect, every single time.
I embedded my favorite review below, and another one below that. I'm a sucker for a Harry Potter reference. Enjoy.
@rustyfeatherstone Tiktok I’m a trained professional please let me post this
♬ original sound - Rusty
@rustyfeatherstone Audio was off had to repost... Enjoy
♬ original sound - Rusty
Brand new covers of Metallica by...
Jason Isbell
Miley Cyrus (and Elton and Chad Smith and, weirdly, Robert Trujillo)
Old covers of Metallica by:
Motörhead
Umphrey's McGee
And some kids (check the guitar solo)
Sorry to bump TR's worthy post, but it's a timing thing.
It seems like just yesterday, but it was 100 years ago today. Do you all recall? I think I see a few of you in this pic.
Happy 4th, gents. What's more American than a baseball story?
So the long and short of it is that at this point, everything is gravy. My kids kicked ass early on. They won a tight one and won a laugher. They cheered and rooted and made the right plays. My decision to enter us into the tourney was validated.
Momentum was on our side early on. But momentum is a fickle thing, my friends. It moves in a pendulaic fashion, much like geriatric scrota. Our third game Saturday was at 2 PM in ~90 degree heat. Our ace was fully rested and we faced a team that was 0-2. But our ace was suffering from after-effects from his second vaccine shot the day before and was clearly out of sorts. He couldn't dig out a hole in front of the pitching rubber when he warmed up. Tears ensued. He hadn't even thrown the first pitch. He had no success throwing a strike to his first three batters. The tears and sweat told me he was mentally done before he ever got started. I pulled him with the bases loaded and no outs. It gutted our team. This was our big dog. And our other good pitcher slated to pitch was a last-minute scratch with an illness that passed around the school that week.
So yeah, we were toast. I had to use our subpar pitchers b/c I didn't want to waste a good arm. It ended up as an ugly 11-1 mercy loss. The other team was in desperation mode and threw their ace, who threw three pitches, at three speeds, for strikes.
We were 2-1 heading into our final game. Our opponent was also 2-1. The way the tiebreakers fell, we had to win to advance. We got out to a 6-1 lead in the 4th, using speed, power and defense to dominate. But it's a six inning game. Our starter ran out of gas and left a couple kids on. Our second pitcher struggled just enough to give them a 7-6 lead. And our opponent put in a crafty pitcher with a fantastic pickoff move. He picked off two of our better baserunners on 2nd base, once in the 5th and once in the 6th, both with two outs in a one run game and a quality hitter at the plate. The last one ended the game. Tough.
The kids teared up, understanding the run was over. It was their seventh game in nine days, and all but two were very close for most of the game. We went 5-2 in that stretch, winning our spring title game and our first summer league game (a throwaway against a terrible team).
In the days since, I've seen multiple kids wearing their Ripken t-shirts proudly. We had a party last Friday night to celebrate the spring season. An assistant set it up at his house b/c he finally wanted to be able to party with the peanut gallery in the outfield. And we surprised the kids with trophies. Hopefully they'll keep the trophies and remember a fun spring and a nice run against the big boy squads in our area. And hopefully they'll keep their focus on the summer season, where we are 3-1 and face a trio of tough opponents this week.
Like a lot of change, the movement towards allowing collegiate athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL) happened at a glacial pace, right up until it accelerated to plaid.
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| Haley and Hanna Cavinder have already signed deals with Boost Mobile and Six Star Pro Nutrition |
* - Ain't it nice to see that phrase, so redolent of antiquated legal trickeration, going the way of the dodo?
It is far to early to see how college athletes' newfound freedoms will change the competitive landscape. Some argue that the playing field will level, as kids at schools like Memphis and Wichita State - the only games in their towns - will find their limited supply causes their value to be bid up in comparison to other locales. Others think the rich will stay rich, as Alabama's national footprint leads Ford to outbid Chevy for the next Najee Harris's commercial appeal. Still others say that the massive influx of money and interest in a short period of time is a recipe for fraud, hucksterism, and burned collegiate athletes.
Meanwhile, former collegiate stars lamented the timing of their births. J.J. Redick said on Twitter, "From 2004-2006, I would have made a bag 💰 on NIL endorsements. Sadly- I would have blown it all on Natty Light and Lacoste polos (with the collars popped, of course)." Chris Webber said he'd have stayed in college for four years if he was getting paid (legally). Reggie Bush immediately agitated for the restoration of his Heisman. Not bloody likely, that - we've got a whole bunch of drug convictions to overturn, first.
With all that as prelude, let's get to the point. This post isn't a prediction. Rather, I come here with a very much intended consequence.
We're very pro-athlete around here. And we love the underdog, especially if she wears green and gold. I propose to you today, friends, our first sponsorship deal. If the executive committee ratifies it, we're going to offer $250 to the 12th man and woman on William & Mary's men's and women's basketball teams to be the official spokespeople of Gheorghe: The Blog. Additional promotional considerations are also on the table, including guest blogging privileges, free G:TB t-shirts, and naming rights to the next child born to a Gheorghie or his/her family.
Please provide your approval in the comments, as well as any other ideas for compensation for our spokesfolks.
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