In a testament to modern medicine and dumb luck, I turn 65 at the end of September, which means I’m in the crosshairs for that singular American joyride, Medicare.
I’ve spent much time of late researching various parts, plans, supplements, coverage gaps, co-pays, deductibles and assorted minutiae related to health care. It’s as entertaining as you imagine.
As I’m older than all of you here in the digital tree fort, I’d gladly be the doddering, arrhythmic sounding board for the group, but my adulting skills are limited. I pay bills on time and follow traffic laws; beyond that, it’s sketchy. Besides, by the time the rest of you approach 65, President Tuberville will have abolished Medicare in favor of some sort of health care Hunger Games. We’ll all be peddling our organs on the futures market and dumpster diving behind Trader Joe’s.
I’ll keep the details to a minimum because this site has an ethos to uphold, and extended exposure will numb you. Medicare signup is a fairly straightforward process. Folks are required to register with the government in the six-month period before and after their 65th birthday. They can delay health care through Medicare if they’re insured through their jobs or some other preferred outlet.
Medicare doesn’t cover everything, nor is it free.
Unless you’re a Marvel superhero or inclined to roll the dice, it’s generally advisable to sign up for separate plans that cover prescription drugs and fill in gaps that basic Medicare doesn’t cover, such as dental and vision. Supplemental plans are standardized by the government in what they must provide, though cost from one insurance company to the next is not. Think of it like buying a Coke at the grocery store and at 7-Eleven. Same product, different prices.
Many insurance heavy hitters are also in the Medicare marketplace. I could easily wallpaper my bathroom with literature I received from a bunch of them congratulating me on my “milestone” birthday and touting their services. In my previous life as a newspaper keyboard jockey, I researched lots of subjects, though insurance and health care rarely came up in explorations of field goal percentage and third-down efficiency. Not my areas of expertise. As I tried to compare prices for various plans and providers, insurance companies wanted just enough personal info to permit them to flood me with more promotional materials.
An inordinate amount of dog walking took place during the research process, since it seemed more beneficial than staring at the computer screen and sticking spoons into my eyes.
I then learned that there are companies dedicated to helping people navigate Medicare enrollment. They may have arrangements with 20 or 30 different insurance companies, but don’t push specific insurers or plans. Their agents walk customers through options and provide them with multiple price quotes and comparisons. You don’t get a bill from the company or agent, but my understanding is that they get paid through the arrangements to said insurers.
Guy I spoke to at one such advisory company was mega informative and helpful, if only so that I didn’t have to fend off a half-dozen sales pitches.
Armed with just enough info to be dangerous, it was left to me to choose insurance providers and plans and commit money for the next year, without knowing how any of it would play out, only that I would be somehow “covered.” It was more nerve-wracking than asking girls to dance when I was in middle school. Probably part of the whole adulting thing.
Anyway, I’m now part of the gargantuan, government-subsidized system. There are legit ideological and policy discussions to be had about government reach versus personal responsibility. I wouldn’t attempt to persuade anybody one way or the other, though I’m in the camp that believes countries taking care of their citizens shouldn’t be confined to weaponry and soldiers, particularly in a nation as affluent as ours. To what extent that should include health care and various safety nets is for brighter minds.
I go forward with fingers crossed, hoping that when I need a doc or a scrip or a procedure, that they’re available and don’t require a transfer of funds or to sell my car. I don’t think it’s covered by Medicare, but hit me up if anyone has a line on a decent shaman.
I failed to properly thank Zman for touting Les Coole and the Cukes recently. Cheers, mate.
Zed really teed up the Tiny Dictator and all you other road-trippers, commuters, and other bored listeners with some good extended-play sonic soul-quenching. Honestly, marathon trip that it is, you've got more music than time ready and waiting for you, rob.
Just remember what that strange bird Luis once quipped to me... you know, that special variety of advice that somehow lasts for 30 years in my noggin: "I just say FIDO... Fuck it, drive on."
Drive on, indeed.
...if you're so motivated, drop a public playlist on the Spotify to keep us engaged.
Well, you posted that ask last week, and that there is a #10 tin can o' worms and such that you opened for me. I went to work straightaway. And threw a whole mess of tunes into it.
What it became is the equivalent of "Clean Out the Walk-In Soup" at the diner. What it's intended to be is an eclectic set of sounds for you to play straight through, shuffle, skip about within, and (I hope) enjoy.
I tried to include songs you've never heard, or at least haven't heard in a long while. May or may not have succeeded at that.
At the very least, it's a time-eater.
I hereby present to you for your aural consideration
257 (and growing) songs
that occupy
17 hours and 20 minutes (and growing)
I worked very hard to come up with a clever name for this Public Playlist on Spotify. Well, I just named it "Car" at the outset and left it like many a roadside clunker for sale... As Is.
Safe travels, and I'll be curious to see if any of these tunes stick with you.
I've been fucking around with various AI text to image tools just to get a sense of what's possible, keep myself up on the latest tech and such. I've been using stuff that's available for free, because unemployed-ish, and I don't really have any kind of need for the fancy creator things.
The technology is fun, and interesting, and as you'll see momentarily, still got some bugs to work out - at least the free stuff. I've seen some stunning images created by professionals, things that I'd not hesitate to call art, even though it wasn't made using "traditional" means. As if Van Gogh would see a photograph and not think it the work of some god. Things like this image, which was created using Midjourney and won first prize in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair:
My doodlings, not nearly that good.
The first image below is meant to be a logo. I've been doing a bit of consulting, and if I decide I like it, I figure I'll need a business, and a logo might be nice. Here's what I've got so far, using Microsoft Bing's image creator, which is powered by DALL-E:
I pretty quickly dispensed with semi-purposeful imagery, though, turning to things derived from the Ghoogles hall of fame, including this, which came from the prompt, "bert ernie battle rap realistic":
As I said, the technology isn't all the way there yet.
Bing apparently has a pretty sensitive threshold for potentially controversial imagery, and wouldn't let me use "alfonso ribeiro shirtless steampunk". So you'll have to settle for this:
And finally, at least for the moment, I felt the need to honor our hero. I think this is a pretty excellent rendition of "gheorghe muresan washington bullets gladiator triumph anime":
Do feel free to play along at home, and paste your art below.
This time with our fraternity brother Paci, aka Pogue Shane MacGowan.
And hair. She looks lovely. And with a sweet love song completely devoid of angst, rage, venom, sadness, or political message. This isn't how she'll be remembered, but it's quite nice.
This is a blog post doubling as an assignment for Professor G. Truck. See, I recently got my honorary degree in serendipitously-timed reading, courtesy of OBX Dave. And I'd like to see someone who actually knows how to do literary criticism take on this double-header.
Our man at the beach has a wonderful habit of sending me stuff to read from time to time, which has come in handy during my sabbatical. Over the past month or so, I finished Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson and Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. The first is a carefully researched non-fiction work about how America from its founding onward informally and formally created a social hierarchy that's relegated Black people to the bottom. The second is a work of fiction about a poor boy from one of the places in America bypassed and then forgotten by progress.
They would seem to have very little in common. And yet there are some fascinating threads that tie the two together.
Wilkerson's 2020 book is sobering, adding weight and detail to some of the issues I first read about in Ta-Nehisi Coates' famous essay on reparations in The Atlantic - and others have known about, and lived, for a long time. One specific historical item that continues to linger with me concerns the connection between Nazi Germany and America.
As the Nazis came to power and sought to write the Nuremberg Laws, which codified the dominance of the white race and the subjugation of others, like Jews, they traveled to the U.S. to study our system. And found it, at least in some ways, too harsh for their tastes. In particular, the practice in several U.S. states of defining Black people by multi-generational legacies. Writes Wilkerson, “[The Nazis] could not abide ‘the unforgiving hardness’ under which an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins is counted as black.”
Tennessee, it seems, was worse than the Nazis. At least by one measure.
Caste examines similarities between the U.S. system of hierarchies and that of India, where one's options have long been predetermined by the caste to which they were born. Wilkerson tells the story (likely apochryphal) of Martin Luther King, Jr. traveling to India and being introduced before a speech to a group of Dalit schoolchildren as a "fellow untouchable". Says Wilkerson, “In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America."
Demon Copperhead is not a book about race. In the entirety of the book there are three non-white characters, and all of them are portrayed in a positive light. Ironically in the context of my reading, one of them, a convenience store owner named Mr. Golly, who employs the title character briefly, is a Dalit who came to America and found his untouchable status erased, though he wasn't welcomed to the elite.
But where Caste focuses on race as a means of systematic stratification, Demon explores a different dimension of social strata and the difficulty in moving up them in poorest rural America. Lee County, Virginia, where the novel is set, ranks 2,967th out of 3,143 U.S. counties in median family income. As the book opens at the turn of the 21st Century, the mills have closed, as have the mines. The nearest big city, Knoxville, might as well be a million miles away, as is the ocean, something the title character has never seen.
Young Demon starts off rough. As he puts it, “I was a lowlife, born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash." Things go steadily downhill from there. He's thrown into a series of foster homes, most of them headed by people using the system for the payments that come from the Department of Social Services. He's poorly supervised, barely educated, and it doesn't even take him to his teenage years to develop a recreational drug habit.
The segmentation in Demon's world is between us and them. To wit, he says, “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. … We can actually hear you.”
As he matures, filling all the way out to a strapping 6'4" as a ninth-grader, Demon finds he's valued for his size and athleticism as a tight end on the Lee High School Generals. From a nobody, he's a hero. For a minute.
After a serious injury casts doubt on his football career, the story's real villain comes to the fore. Kingsolver is unsparing in her disdain for Purdue Pharma and the way its formidable sales engine took advantage of Appalachia and ground down county after county on the way to record profits on the broken backs of the poorest in America. Dreamland does an excellent job of reporting the facts of the opioid crisis; Demon Copperhead puts human faces on it.
There are redeeming moments in Demon Copperhead, and the protagonist's sardonic self-deprecation covers over a goodness at his core that shines briefly here and there throughout the book. As I read it immediately after Caste, I found myself marveling at the systematic way entrenched power has worked on an entire race and an entire class of people in our nation. And I was more than a tiny bit ashamed at the way I've viewed people who I'd perceived as voting against their self-interest when their self-interest was and is preservation against a system they rightfully view as being stacked against their kind.
I'm still grappling with the themes of both books, and how to make sense of the ways they intersect. On matters of race, I'm convinced there's been a systemic effort to ensure blacks have been kept in their place, one that'll take generations to unravel. And class distinctions, while perhaps not as intentional in their implementation, have created a seismically tense division between people who probably have more in common than they think.
After that free-associated word salad, I leave the pieces of my scattered brain for my good friend Professor G. Truck to pick up and assemble. Godspeed, sir.
rob recently asked for musical recommendations for his lengthy roadtrip to Colorado. Offering musical opinions is one of my core competencies here. And postcount is huge. So here are some suggestions.
Starting in-house, you should check out We Defy Augury, especially the one about Charismatic Megafauna because you probably never think about these beasts. Also, Les Coole and the Cukes, available here on Spotify. I celebrate their entire catalog. And our resident professional musician, Rootstone.
Sometimes I let someone else do the driving musically when I'm driving automotively--I let the folks on the radio pick the music for me. I've touted WFMU here many times, and you can stream it from your phone to your car. In fact they have four different streams at all times: their radio live stream, Rock 'n Soul Radio, Give the Drummer Radio, and Sheena's Jungle Room. And they have an insanely deep archive. Rex Doane's Fool's Paradise is my personal favorite and he has over twenty years of shows available to stream. The Halloween and Christmas specials are always outstanding. You can also stream WBGO--Felix Hernandez's Rhythm Review on Saturday and Sunday mornings is my favorite. They have archives too but the interface is clumsy. I've found myself listening to WFUV during the day lately and you can stream them too.
Those three stations will take care of you. To w(h)it, whilst running a few errands yesterday and flipping between FMU and BGO (FUV is useless on Sundays, they play Irish folk music), I heard "Revolution Rock" by the Clash, "Me and My Baby Brother" (on BGO) and "Summer" (on FMU) by War, "Too Busy Thinking About My Baby" by Marvin Gaye, "Never Can Say Goodbye" as done by Gloria Gaynor, "Brick House" by the Commodores, "If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight and The Pips, "Master Blaster" by Stevie Wonder, and "You Outta Be Here With Me" by Annette Snell. I even heard "Don't Cha Wanna Ride" by Joss Stone and the song that it samples, "Soulful Strut" by Young-Holt Unlimited.
I don't listen to a ton of podcasts but I greatly enjoy The Bulwark's offerings. Charlie Sykes is always good. Here's one with Chris Krebs and Adam Kinzinger. Anything involving Tim Miller is fun, like this one with the Tribe's own Jen Psaki. Mona Charen will irritate you but I do think it's good to hear opinions that conflict with my own. Will Saletan's "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham" is a three-part tour de force.
Anyone with other/better ideas should list them in the comments. I eagerly await photographic reports from rob along the way.
Check out this one below -- it features New Orleans rapper Juvenile with some quality guests. The performance is boisterous, officially described by NPR as "one of the most rambunctious experiences at the Tiny Desk."
You may recognize G:TB fave Trombone Shorty in the clip. You may also recognize recently gheorghed artist Jon Batiste.
You probably don't recognize the cellist who enters at the 19:00 mark to add some strings to the funky beats, alongside a violinist colleague at the Louisiana Philharmonic.
But you should.
At least in name only. Check him out. Jake Fowler. Cellist extraordinaire.
Tomorrow morning at 3:00 am Eastern Standard Time, the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup kicks off at Eden Park in Auckland, NZ, as the co-host Football Ferns take on Norway. For the first time in history, the women's tournament will feature 32 teams, same as the men (at least until 2026, when the men's event bloats to 48 nations). The larger field is both a sign that the women's game is growing leaps and bounds across the globe, and a harbinger of some lopsided group stage games (USA v. Vietnam, we're looking at you) as we don't yet have the same depth across the tournament.
As always, we're here to get you ready for a big event. I am a big backer of women's soccer, a supporter of the game as both a spectator and a coach. Even so, I don't claim to know as much about the global ladies' game as I do the men's, simply because it's not as accessible. Lack of expertise, however, has never really been an obstacle for us here.
Onwards, then, with the story lines we'll be watching:
Stine Larsen, annoyed
First and foremost, a story line that we won't actually get to watch. An incredible rash of injuries has beset the women's game over the past several months, depriving us of an all-star roster of talented athletes. Very few of the elite teams in the tournament have been immune to tournament-ending knocks. A partial list of the potential difference makers who won't be in Australia/New Zealand for the tournament includes the United States' Mallory Swanson (who was in amazing form before she did her knee), Catarina Macario, and captain Becky Sauerbrunn, England's Leah Williamson, Fran Kirby, and Beth Mead (last year's Ballon d'Or runner-up), New Zealand's Katie Rood, Canadian midfielder Janine Beckie, Norway forward Stine Larsen, Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema, and France's Amadine Henry and Marie-Antoinette Katoto.
The game's growth and overall increase in quality is a big deal, and we'll see it play out during the tournament. While the United States is a clear favorite, it says here that no fewer than nine nations can legitimately hope to be the last team standing. In addition to the USWNT, Australia, Germany, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, and Japan are in with a shout.
Zambia 3, Germany 2!
At the other end of the spectrum, eight nations are making their first-ever appearance at a World Cup, with three others in only their second trip to the finals. While most of the newcomers will struggle, at least a few will be competitive. Zambia beat Germany, 3-2 in a friendly earlier this month, while Ireland played the USWNT tough in a pair of recent friendlies, as well.
Given that we're nothing if not homers, at least when it comes to the USWNT, our team's quest for the first-ever three-peat in World Cup history is a pretty big headline. Head coach Vlatko Andonovski had some early growing pains as he took over for two-time World Cup champion Jill Ellis, not the least of which was the USWNT's semifinal loss to eventual gold medalists Canada in the 2020 Olympics. Since then, though Andonovski has blended decorated veterans like Alex Morgan, Kelley O'Hara, Julie Ertz, and Megan Rapinoe with talented newcomers like Sophia Smith, 18 year-old Alyssa Thompson, Naomi Girma, and Trinity Rodman fairly seamlessly.
The Americans bring the deepest team to ANZ, but the absence of Sauerbrunn, in particular, brings some questions about how well the young centerback tandem of Girma and Alana Cook will play under steadily increasing tournament pressure. The U.S. will score our share of goals. How well we prevent them may tell the tale.
As the quality of the global game has increased in total, individual excellence is more distributed than ever. Here are some of the players we're focused on:
Australia's Sam Kerr is a badass. Full stop. She's one of the best goalscorers in the history of the women's game. She's tallied 63 times in 120 appearances for the Matildas, and 54 times in 67 games since 2020 for Chelsea. She's fast, physical, skilled, and relentless. And in an interesting subplot were unlikely to see in the men's game for at least a decade or two, her partner Kristie Mewis is on the USWNT roster - the two countries could meet in the final if both win their groups as expected.
Marta is the all-time leader in women's World Cup goals with 17. The legendary Brazilian can become the first person to score a goal in six World Cups if she tallies down under. At 37, though, and recovering from a knee injury, she and her teammates need Debinha to be brilliant in order to make an impact in this year's event. The 31 year-old attacker scored 42 goals in 115 matches for the North Carolina Courage in NWSL before moving to the Kansas City Current this season. She'll be Brazil's most important offensive weapon.
With Swanson and Macario unavailable and Rapinoe nearing the end of her career, Trinity Rodman has the potential to make a huge impact for the USWNT. The 21 year-old winger is 5'10", blazingly fast, and both physical and technically gifted. She's just coming into her own as a professional with the Washington Spirit - she'll be a cornerstone of our nation's program for years. And yeah, if you didn't already know, she's that dude's daughter.
Alexia Putellas was almost on the list of injured stars above. The Spanish superstar and two-time Ballon d'Or winner injured her ACL while training in June 2022, causing her to miss the 2022 Euros and most of her club season with Barcelona, for whom she's scored 126 goals since 2012. She returned to the field in late April, but it's not clear yet whether she'll be back to anything close to her top form, which has earned her wide regard as the best player in the world. And in fact, there are reports today that she left Spain's training early, which casts doubt on whether she'll be fit to play against Costa Rica on Friday. It would be a gigantic shame for the game and a huge blow for Spain if she can't go.
Bunny Shaw is near and dear to me because she plays a style similar to one of the kids on the JV team I coach. When that kid (who is African-American, in addition to being built like Jamaica's Shaw - tall and strong) asked me for tips on players to watch, I turned her on to Shaw, who played for the University of Tennessee in college before joining Manchester City. Showing that kid a role model who looks and plays like her was a cool moment. Shaw was the CONCACAF Player of the Year in 2022, the first non-American to win that award. And if the Reggae Girlz are going to do anything in this tournament in a very tough group, she's gonna need to be exceptional.
Since you've made it this far, I assume you're looking for gambling advice, and I'm happy to oblige, you degenerates.
The variance in talent makes predicting the group stages somewhat straightforward. Sure, the Netherlands could pip the USWNT for first in Group E, but both are likely to advance. I could see mini-upsets happening in Group D, where China could edge Denmark for second behind England and Group A, where co-host New Zealand may sneak past Switzerland to take second behind Norway. And Group H is clearly the most competitive, as Colombia and South Korea will battle to see who joins Germany in the knockout rounds. But for the most part, we should expect a pretty chalky group stage. Something like this:
Advancing from Group A (in order): Norway, Switzerland
Group B: Australia, Canada
Group C: Spain, Japan
Group D: England, Denmark
Group E: USA, Netherlands
Group F: Brazil, France
Group G: Sweden, Italy
Group H: Germany, South Korea
Which gives us the following Round of 16 matches:
Japan over Norway
USA over Italy
Spain over Switzerland
Netherlands over Sweden
Australia over Denmark
Brazil over Korea
England over Canada
Germany over France
Quarterfinals:
USA over Japan
Netherlands over Spain
Australia over Brazil
Germany over England
Semifinals:
USA over Netherlands
Australia over Germany
Final:
Part of me is really drawn to the idea of taking the host Matildas to upset the Americans in the final, which will be played on August 20 in Sydney. The Aussies are a sports-mad people in the best of ways, and they'll show out for their team, which is one of the reasons I like them to advance beyond their expected result. But in the end, I think the USWNT are just too deep and too talented to be denied a third consecutive World Cup title. Megan Rapinoe rides off into the sunset, taking Kelley O'Hara, Alex Morgan, Alyssa Naeher, and Julie Ertz with her as they all solidify their places in the U.S. Soccer pantheon.
A little footie with a dash of food is stupid to end your weekend. Do enjoy.
Former Japanese international Kazuyoshi Miuraextended his loan deal with Portuguese second-division side Oliveirense last week. Pretty run of the mill soccer news, you'd think. Except for the fact that King Kazu is 56 years old and entering his 38th year of professional soccer. He says he wants to play until he's 60. Me, too, Kazu. Me, too.
We've featured the interview show Hot Ones here before, but it's worth reupping the mention because several of the online program's Season 21 episodes have been really fun. In particular, and for very different reasons, the shows featuring John Mulaney (who barely breaks a sweat), and Jennifer Lawrence (who absolutely does) are worth watching.
In actual huge soccer news here in America (that probably deserves a more thoughtful treatment than it's getting here), the United Soccer League (USL) announced this week that it plans to vote in early August to adopt a promotion/relegation system across its multiple divisions. Currently, the USL runs two leagues, the Championship (which is the second professional division in the U.S. soccer pyramid) and League One (the third division). The proposed pro/rel setup would add a third USL division and operate on the model employed by most of the rest of the world - the bottom teams in a division would drop to the level below and be replaced by the top teams from the lower division each year.
There is a large and vocal segment of the American soccerati that have clamored for pro/rel in our professional ranks for some time. The primary obstacle in MLS has been the reality that most owners paid significant sums of money to purchase their franchises and are unwilling to risk the negative impacts to revenue and valuation that would accompany relegation. The USL, with its less-expensive buy-in and larger number of franchises, would seem to be more suited to experimentation.
The fascinating kicker here is that USL leadership hasn't been particularly shy about their ambitions to have the league ultimately sanctioned by U.S. Soccer as a first-division entity, putting it in direct competition with MLS. Having a pro/rel system that allows American fans the same experience they get with the Premier League and the other major European leagues may create a competitive advantage that gets the USL closer to that first-division objective. My only objection is that Loudoun United, my local side, is odds-on to be one of the first relegated teams.
And finally, in more really stupid/really inspired food news, some demented genius just put dreamed this into the world:
I assume we'll be quaffing it in large quantities at OBFT XXX in a few weeks.
Word that the New York Times intends to shutter its sports department was predictably discouraging or discouragingly predictable or, for those averse to adverbs, a heavy blow or just plain sad. It was a surprise only to those who drive while focused solely on the hundred feet of pavement and taillights directly in front of them and suddenly wonder where the storm clouds came from.
The Times will still have a sports *section* but will fill it with material from The Athletic, the subscription site that it purchased last year for a hefty $550 million. The Times’ move, in the vernacular, will eliminate a redundancy. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that the redundancy is comprised of actual human beings, but it follows the current newspaper ownership prescription for fiscal health: a cyanide drip for the help, along with targeted organ harvests and amputations.
The Times’ sports department has always felt a little like a Jell-O shot station at a black-tie affair. This is less a criticism of the sports staff and more a reflection of how the Times views itself. National paper doing Important Work. The Gray Lady. All the News That’s Fit to Print. Almost as if covering games and athletes was obligatory or a concession to the way papers were always constructed.
The Times’ sports department has employed plenty of heavy hitters and marvelous writers through the years – Dave Anderson, Red Smith, Arthur Daley and more recently, Pulitzer winner John Branch, to name a few – and did terrific work related to concussions and performance-enhancing drugs. But few people read the Times for its sports coverage, and in what was undoubtedly a consideration by the bean counters, few will cancel their subscriptions because management wants to turf the existing sports department.
Bosses said that there will be no layoffs, which is accurate but hardly true. Present staff, they said, will be relocated to other departments such as business and breaking news. Understand that few journalists get into sports writing because they aspire to write obituaries or cover train derailments. If they refuse their new assignments and leave, well, they weren’t laid off. In six months, when Corporate concludes that the bottom line will be less costly with fewer reporters and editors, people will be given the opportunity for buyouts or streamlined or some other euphemism for: you’re no longer wanted. But every bit of future downsizing will have no connection to that unfortunate business with the sports department, nosireee.
Passive aggressive that’s more “aggressive” than “passive.”
There’s an organized labor component to this situation. The Times is a union shop, The Athletic is not. The Guild is understandably torqued off and plans to challenge. In a statement, the Guild said that the company “is attempting to outsource union jobs on our sports desk to a non-union Times subsidiary under the preposterous argument that The Times can ‘subcontract’ its sports coverage to itself.” To which we say: good luck with that fight.
The Times’ announcement was half of a bi-coastal thump to sports coverage this week. The Los Angeles Times announced that it would no longer run box scores, standings or game stories in its print edition. It will still carry them online, but the sale of its printing press and increasingly early deadlines meant that it was unable to get evening results into the next morning’s paper.
In a letter to readers, LAT sports editor Iliana Romero wrote that the Times’ sports section introduces “a new era” that will “take on the look and feel of a daily sports magazine.” … “We are making this change to adapt to how readers follow news and sporting events each day while managing rising production costs. You no longer will see box scores, standings and traditional game stories, but those will be replaced by more innovative reporting, in-depth profiles, unique examinations of the way teams operate, investigations, our distinct columnists’ voices, elite photography and more.”
Romero is correct that people follow sports differently and that change is afoot. Many daily papers now have dinner-time deadlines due to consolidation and printing press and distribution issues. What she didn’t say is that all this innovation and investigation and new era hooha is in addition to the day-to-day grind. A depleted staff whose needle is already red-lined now has even more to tackle. You still have to get the box scores and gamers and standings and trades and contract negotiations and injury reports to the website. Otherwise, folks get out of the habit of clicking in, which is hardly ideal for reader engagement. You cannot pivot away from daily stuff to emphasize big-picture, investigative work, because daily work is precisely what provides the foundation and entre’ for whatever in-depth and innovative things you dream up for the already overworked staff.
The guess is that Romero is well aware of all this, but enjoys her paycheck and plays along so that the Reaper focuses elsewhere. Like the Big Apple.
New York Times brass touted the decision to use The Athletic as an opportunity to expose readers to a broader array of sports coverage, while Athletic bosses talked up the idea of reaching new readers. In theory, a national and at times international lineup of sports coverage dovetails with the Times’ overall journalistic reach. But the Times already does that to some degree, sending folks hither and yon in addition to covering the Yankees and Knicks and Jets. And again, no one picks up the Times solely for sports, and they won’t do so because suddenly they might find an interesting piece about TCU’s football coach or Ronald Acuña Jr., or even local practitioners Jalen Brunson or Gerrit Cole.
Nope, this is an employee dump dressed as an upgrade and an example of the First Rule of Plumbing and Business: shit flows downhill.
I have great affinity for the ocean. One of the best things I know is to be alone in the surf at around sunset, preferably with a little bit of a buzz, floating and bobbing in the waves. There are few things I find more peaceful.
I've boogie-boarded, and body surfed. I've even ridden the waves on a kayak a time or two. But I've never surfed. Not even once. And still, I find the surfer aesthetic - in and out of the water - mesmerizing, magnetic even. The devil may care pull of the big wave combined with the extreme athleticism, balance, and bravery of the best men and women, mixed with the go for it attitude as it relates to land-bound pursuits - that's a heady cocktail.
Until this week, I didn't know who Mikala Jones was. Turns out he was one of the greats, as much for what he pioneered in terms of how people saw surfing as for his ability - which was remarkable.
For all of his acumen in the water, it was his innovation with a camera that Jones was most known for. Starting in the 1990s, he was the first surfer/artist to experiment with taking pictures of himself while riding waves. His Instagram account is filled with amazing images that give a brief glimpse into the way he combined art and surfing.
The image below was the cover photo from an edition of The Surfer's Journal from 2017. Surf photog Woody Woodworth calls it the best surf photo ever taken, saying, "It's 10 points on the surfing and 10 points on the photography technically and 10 points on the concept. This is like, hands down, the Olympic-winner-of-all-time photograph."
That's glorious, ya'll. I wish I'd known about the beauty Mikala Jones brought to the world before now, and I wish I'd learned about it a different way. Something to ponder next time I'm floating in the Outer Banks surf as the late-afternoon sun diffuses and refracts around me.
As many of you know, I'll be driving my youngest back to college in a little more than three weeks. We'll be leaving Leesburg, VA on August 5, and have to be in Boulder, CO by 4:00 local time on August 7 so she can make the Buffs' first cheer practice of the Coach Prime era. I assume he'll stop by.
I'm warming up for that 1,678 mile, 25-hour trip by doing some light driving on the East Coast in the days prior. To wit (and to Whit), I'm headed to Richmond on the first to see my kid do her first-ever poetry reading, then to Norfolk on the second to pre-game for OBFT XXX, then to the Outer Banks for a far-too-brief overnighter at the aforementioned beach extravaganza, then back to NoVA on the fourth to back before we hit the road for Colorado.
Now is the moment I seek the assistance of the assembled community of Gheorghies. I have a few requests.
First, I'm looking for advice on things to see, eat, and drink along our route west. Our first stop is in South Bend, Indiana. If we leave on time, we should get there around 5:00 local time. We're staying in a hotel about half a mile from the Notre Dame campus, which I've never seen. So that's a bit of a no-brainer, but if you have recommendations for good grub and cold pops in and around the campus, and any must-see sights (like Touchdown Jesus), I'm all ears.
We roll out of South Bend and through Illinois and Iowa before stopping for our second night in Omaha. Our hotel is right across the street from Charles Schwab Field, home of the NCAA College Baseball World Series and just a few blocks from Creighton University. I've been to Omaha once, years ago, and I don't really remember much about it other than it's pretty brown. If you've got ideas for things to do, see, and eat that don't include beef (I don't dig on the cow), hit me up.
Our run finishes across the plains, as we go through most of Nebraska before we get into Colorado. I'm guessing it'll be flat, so it's important that we have ways to entertain ourselves. I've been working on a few playlists, for example. But if Mark wants to add to the Tiny Dictator rap primer with some new stuff, I wouldn't complain. And if Dave could record a bunch of new 'We Defy Augury' episodes, I'd be much obliged. As for the rest of you, any ideas for podcasts that might appeal to a middle-aged dad and a 19 year-old college sophomore would be welcomed. Or if you're so motivated, drop a public playlist on the Spotify to keep us engaged.
And if there's a giant ball of twine or a local version of Wall Drug out there on the path between Leesburg and Boulder, you gotta let me know about it.
There are people that will tell you that soccer isn't an "American" sport. You should ignore those people. Charitably, they don't quite see the whole picture. Setting aside the fact that soccer only trails basketball and baseball in terms of youth participation, if we turn our sights on the most elite levels of the sport, the U.S. is clearly the top soccer-playing nation in the world and has been in the argument as such since the early 90s.
Since 1990, only Germany can match the United States' four World Cup titles. The Germans have been more egalitarian, spreading their titles equally across their men's and women's programs. Here at home, the American women have carried the full weight, with their four wins including the last two Women's World Cups.
This is not, despite the way it's started, an American soccer polemic. Nor is it a preview of the 2023 Women's World Cup, which kicks off in less than two weeks in Australia/New Zealand. This post is a celebration of joy, faith and hard work rewarded, and good old-fashioned catharsis.
In recent weeks, U.S. Soccer has been chronicling the calls USWNT head coach Vlatko Andonovski made to tell players that they'd been selected to the 23-woman roster headed Down Under. From first-timers like Kristie Mewis, who never thought she'd make the World Cup, Sophia Smith, who's tearing up the NWSL, and Savannah DeMelo, who has never appeared in a USWNT match, to veterans like Lindsey Horan and Kelley O'Hara, the videos catch elite athletes in moments vulnerable and then joyous. It's the good stuff:
Amy Olson is a journeywoman professional golfer. The 30 year-old North Dakotan is competing in her 10th season on the LPGA Tour. She's earned $2.7m in that time, though she's never won on tour. She finished second in the 2020 U.S. Women's Open, among her career highlights. She's had a nondescript 2022-23 season, only making one cut in the three events she's played, earning $4,804 for a T61 in the LOTTE Championship presented by Hoakalei.
Kinda hard to play golf when your body is changing every day, though, which is a pretty good excuse for her performance this season. Olson, you see, is 30 months pregnant. And at 7:22 am PST this morning, she teed it up at the U.S. Women's Open at Pebble Beach.
— U.S. Women's Open (USGA) (@uswomensopen) July 4, 2023
Olson won medalist honors at a 36-hole, one-day qualifier in Mendota Heights, MN in May, bouncing back from an even-par first round to shoot a six-under 66 to book a spot in the first women's Open to be played at Pebble. The 405th-ranked player in the world is unlikely to win, or even make the cut, but we know who Team G:TB will be pulling for.
Let's keep the flags waving and the celebration* rolling, shall we?
* Not to include concussive explosions, which scare the shit out of my poor anxious dog
Keira D'Amato is a 38 year-old mother of two. She went to Oakton High School in Northern Virginia, then attended American University. She resides in Richmond, where she's a realtor.
Both of the stories linked above are worth a read. The TL:DR version is this: after a successful collegiate career, a series of foot injuries quashed D'Amato's competitive running aspirations. Or so she thought. After having her first child, she started running to relieve stress, and realized she was pretty fast. She reconnected with her post-college coach, started training in earnest, and became one of America's best distance runners, while working and raising a family.
Happy 247th birthday to the United States of America. And I thought I was old.
May your fireworks burn brighter and longer than ever today, gheorghies. Just don't lose any digits today -- I mean like JPP, not Phil or Rikki.
Spend time today in free revelry, and enjoy the excitement only a free man can feel, as Red once said.
Maybe think about what and why we celebrate.
And maybe just drink some beer and listen to some good old America music. Not American music, per se, since these guys went to high school and subsequently got their start in London (though 2/3 were indeed American), but America music. America. The band.
Especially a song about the open highway and driving around in the sunshine in a car that Z would love and Dave would hate. A song that coined the term Purple Rain.
What the hell, let's take that Purple Rain thing a little further and offer up the Purple One himself... singing "America." It could only get more American if this live clip had been recorded on July... or been in the US. Oh well.
My least favorite law school class was Constitutional Law because, as I posited over a decade ago, "[a]ll that counts is what five out of nine middle-aged-to-elderly judges think." What is constitutional one day might not be the next, simply because a president swapped in a new judge. Similarly, what is constitutional one day might not be the next, simply because five of nine elderly judges want a different outcome.
For example, in 303 Creative LLC et al. v. Elensis et al., the Supreme Court held that a website designer does not have to design a website for a gay wedding when the designer believes that gay marriage is a sin and abetting the wedding would run counter to her Christian faith. Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch observed:
Under Colorado’s logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic—no matter the underlying message—if the topic somehow implicates a customer’s statutorily protected trait. Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty. The government could require “an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message,” or “an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating Evangelical zeal,” so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages. Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.
I understand what he's saying with these hypotheticals. But does this also mean that a racist White person can refuse to make a website for an interracial wedding, effectively refusing to provide services to a Black person? Justice Gorsuch refers to "all manner of artists"--how far does that extend? Does the work of high-end chefs constitute art, and if so, can they refuse to provide their food to classes of people they don't like? In other words, could a racist chef refuse to serve their food to Latinos?
Justice Sotomayor points to all of this and more in her dissent. But the law of the land today appears to say, on First Amendment free speech grounds, that you can't force a business owner to provide "artistic" services to customers if the business owner does not agree with the content of the artistic work product. I don't know how to reconcile that with discrimination.
In another recent case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court held that public and private universities cannot consider race during the admissions process. The Court pointed to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and said that this affirmative action process was discriminatory. Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion interestingly says:
At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.
That's weird. I never worked in a college admissions office, but I assume that no one other than the admissions staff reads the essays. No one knows what any particular essay says other than the applicant and whoever reads it. How can anyone police essay review? Does this mean that applicants can't address their race in their essay unless they discuss "discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise"? What does that mean? And most importantly, doesn't this limit what the applicant can say in their essay--doesn't this restrain the applicant's speech?
Maybe not. Perhaps the applicants can write whatever they want and it's up to the admissions staff to ignore inappropriate sentences. But does forcing the admissions office to ignore those sentences effectively curtail the applicant's free speech? What good is free speech if the audience isn't allowed to consider it?
More succinctly, I think Con Law is bullshit. Sometimes free speech trumps anti-discriminatory laws, while other times anti-discriminatory laws can limit free speech. When and how the rules apply depends on how nine old people in DC feel about the matter at hand and the outcome they desire. Mitch McConnell's gaming of the Supreme Court confirmation process got us these decisions. No matter what you may hear, the Supreme Court is a nakedly political body. And as much as I approve of naked bodies, we don't need any at 1 First Street.
The latest offering from one of the handful of house bands here at Gheorghe: The Blog and Music Source has hit the streets.
Now that I mention it, who's on the roster of those rostered G:TB&MS bands?
Random Idiots
Rootstone
Greasetruck
Almighty Yojo? Was that a musical act?
Les Coole and the Cukes
Who else?
There are likely other acts and offshoots I've forgotten or never heard. Please pipe up if you've been omitted (Z as in Zamfir, Timmy and the Tubesteaks, etc.).
Anyway, here's the freshest scoop to keep you in the loop. The dopest track from the old New Jack. (A certain Weenie used to call me New Jack Lester.)
It's . . . well, it's new. That's good enough.
Here's an up-close work at the artwork, replete with a photo take in Igor's 2 weeks ago,
And here's the track. Anyone with video-making skills (or with a youngster whose skills invariably put ours to shame), I'd love to craft something visual so that these YouTubes aren't so dull.
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