Ridiculous, Sublime, Filler

Just changing the drapes for a new look in here. Do enjoy this absurd catch by Daulton Varsho on a drive by Jarren Duran. Hat tip to the Teej for sharing.

I Guess There's Only One Thing Left to Do

My local professional footy side has been in the news lately, and it's not a good thing. 

Defender Robby Dambrot's father was
LeBron James' high school hoops coach

Loudoun United tops the USL Championship Eastern Conference table seven matchdays into the season, having won six and lost just one of their matches. This is a marked improvement for the Ponies, who've never once made the USL playoffs in their six seasons in existence. But that's not the news.

Veteran soccer journo Pablo Maurer published a piece in The Athletic with the following inauspicious headline: Bad turf, cold showers, wash your own kit: life at the top of US minor league soccer. The article detailed a litany of indignities faced by Loudoun United's players, ranging from an unfinished stadium (truly an embarrassment for the club and my county, and a legacy of D.C. United's penury and lack of leadership) to substandard investment in staff (players have to wash their own kits, as the team let its equipment manager go and didn't replace him) to indifferent and unengaged ownership.

The club just signed an agreement with Virginia Revolution, a deep-pocketed local youth club, which should inject some cash and at least stabilize things. Except that the rumors that followed the announcement suggested that Ryan Martin, the only coach in club history, would soon be sacked. Well-liked General Manager Oliver Gage was let go immediately. Half of the club's non-soccer staff have left the organization in the past six weeks. It's pretty bleak.

In the midst of all this fuckery, the team is off to a flier, with the best record in the entire division, the most goals scored, and the best goal differential. It's reminiscent of something. Said a member of the team, “We have one common enemy. Ownership. In my words? It’s ‘f— the owners.’ All we have is us, at this point. And who knows how long we have left together. A lot of us will be gone. Unless we keep winning.”

Vamos Loudoun! Up the Ponies!

GhPT

This post will make my children angry. That it will become recurring filler all the more so. 

Angry because, you see, generative AI still uses a metric fuckton of energy to work properly, taxing our resources far beyond the value of most outputs - especially those developed just for fun. That was their reaction when I sent this AI-created image recently:

And here's one I use for work-related purposes (Zoom avatars and such):

I'll be working on a GhPT gallery for all the Gheorghies, in a style and manner befitting each of your noble personalities. 

Fill 'er up. This'll keep the content bucket overflowing!

Run the Damn Ball

Spencer Hall is one of the best college football commentator in America. You won't see his work on a major network (for the most part, though he occasionally pops up on ESPN), but he's managed to build a brand around his singular combination of deep cultural insights, keen observation, lightly-breaded cynicism, and above all, a love for the uniquely American institution he follows.

This is what the best college football brain
in America looks like

We first knew him from his work at Every Day Should Be Saturday (EDSBS). That site has long since gone dormant, but you can catch Hall now at Channel 6, the multi-media empire he runs with fellow journalist Holly Anderson. He's also a frequent guest on Bomani Jones' podcast, where the two unlikely pals are as likely to talk about Steve Wonder as they are Lane Kiffin.

I say all of this as preface to a more important endeavor Hall and his Channel 6 cohorts have just completed. The team has been running an annual giving drive for nearly two decades to support New American Pathways, a refugee resettlement non-profit in Clarkston, GA. The event is called the Charitibundi Bowl, and it pits alums and fans of college football (mostly) teams against one another to compete to see who can raise the most money.

This year's event just ended, and as has been the case for the past several years, the University of Michigan and its prodigious alumni base topped the Money Cannon standings with a total $181,310 in donations. Your scrappy William & Mary Tribe came in a very respectable 29th out of 468, with just shy of $9k. Only Washington & Lee (?!?) and Virginia Tech gave more out of all of the schools in the Commonwealth, going to prove once again how much UVA people suck.

All told, the EDSBS community raised a record $1.3m this year, a remarkable achievement. In celebrating the final tally, Spencer Hall gave us some useful wisdom.

Run the damn ball. Advice for football, and for life, when life means resisting fast-running authoritarian takeover of your country. Three yards and a cloud of dust. Move the sticks. Run the clock. Riggo Drill, over and over. Make a little progress today, then a little more tomorrow, then blast your way into the end zone. Metaphorically. 

We can do this. Be like Spencer

Heartbeats, Part Next

I’ve written about my balky heart and the smart, capable people who attempt to keep it and me ticking. I’m beyond grateful for their efforts and for the fact that in many other places I might have expired by now. My heart doesn’t beat synchronously or efficiently, and I have an abnormally low heart rate, a red flag trifecta that’s resulted in numerous tests, procedures and installation of a pacemaker in June 2022. 

Recent photo of OBX Dave. 
Should get more sun.

To look at me, you wouldn’t immediately think: ‘I hope that guy has his affairs in order.’ I’m not overweight. I eat relatively well. I walk a mile or two almost daily. I do yard work and housework without issue. I’m always up for trips and outings and the occasional pub crawl. Over the past 15-18 months, however, I’ve begun to tire more quickly when I exert myself. 

When I informed my cardiac docs, they suggested that a pacemaker upgrade may be in order. Which is how I landed at the Norfolk (Va.) Heart Hospital recently, on National Tax Deadline Day for what it’s worth, for a procedure that the experts think will help. Check that: for the second time this year for a procedure that the experts think will help. 

I was supposed to have the procedure in January. The electro cardio specialist who performed two ablations on me was going to do the pacemaker upgrade. But when I was on the operating table and he opened me up, he discovered a blockage and tissue tangle that made extracting the thin wire leads and inserting new ones trickier than he was comfortable performing. So he simply closed me back up. He apologized profusely afterward, but that didn’t lessen the frustration and WTF? Factor, starting with: You geniuses had no way of determining that there was a blockage or that you couldn’t perform the operation *before* you sliced me open? 

Anyway, he referred me to a specialist’s specialist, a colleague who was comfortable and experienced with more complicated extractions and procedures. During a consultation with him in March, he said that pacemaker technology had made significant improvements, even since my first installation less than three years prior. He believed that a new device would help my heart beat more in sync and thus improve blood flow and limit fatigue. He allowed that, yes, there are ways to determine if a procedure might be more complicated than expected before surgery, but that doctors don’t employ them often enough for his liking. That said, he was completely on board with his colleague aborting rather than attempting something he wasn’t comfortable with. I was sold, which is how I ended up in Norfolk on April 15. 

A few words about my doctor, a gent named Erich Kiehl: early 40s, about 6-2 and thin, tousled brown hair, boyish face covered by about two weeks’ worth of stubble and facial hair flecked with gray; Brown University medical school; residency at the University of Virginia Medical Center; two fellowships at the Cleveland Clinic, where he studied under the guy who developed many of the techniques currently used for pacemaker extraction and installation; Master’s degree in clinical research from Case Western Reserve University; settled in Hampton Roads and said he's performed about 350 procedures similar to mine, and he and his cohorts have done more than 500; a reassuring confidence in his work and his ability; engaging and persuasive. In short, a professional badass. You want him handling your heart. 

We had hoped for a relatively speedy day that instead became a 15-hour slog, due largely to emergency situations in-house that pushed back my operation, as well as the fact that what the doc optimistically estimated would be an approximately two-hour procedure became 3½ hours. He also paved the way for me to be part of a National Institute of Health-funded clinical trial that will gauge the effectiveness of two different pacemaker install procedures. There's no compensation or costs waived, but patients in clinical trials, he said, statistically do 30 percent better than regular patients because of more diligent monitoring. 

Sure, sign me up. 

We left our house on the Outer Banks at 7:30 a.m. and didn’t arrive back home until 10:15 that night (it will forever be mind-boggling to me that a heart-related procedure can be an outpatient practice). The heart is a marvel, a mechanical pump and electrical organ and if poets and songwriters are to be believed, a wellspring of love and sorrow that makes life worth living. A lot to ask from a 10-ounce organ that’s about the size of a closed fist, don’t you think? No wonder it needs an assist from time to time. 

There’s no telling how my new little battery pack will affect me. I don’t need to run half-marathons or swim 50 laps a day. Even if it only keeps me vertical for a few more years, I’ll count that as a win.

The Worst of Us

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” -- Joseph Goebbels

Back in the earliest days of this here weblog, in a far more innocent time, we birthed the concept of an Anti-Gheorghe. If our namesake represented joy and childlike wonder, his antitheses were cynical, grasping, self-serious. Dan Snyder comes to mind. Today, we find ourselves in a hellscape of Anti-Gheorghism run amok.

I detest Donald Trump and everything he represents. I despise his grotesque coterie of racist, grifting sycophants, their number far too high and far too powerful at this dark moment in our history. But I reserve my deepest enmity for the worst of all, a morally repugnant, soulless, joyless golem of a man who seems incapable of anything other than fomenting hate and demonizing the other.

Indeed, the Trumpist who disgusts me the most, to the absolute core of my being, is Stephen Miller.

I've had a hard time writing this because the mere act of thinking about that execrable fuck angers me. His shriveled, corrupted conscience animates some of the most vile acts attributable to Trumpism. His furious unwillingness to acknowledge basic humanity and opportunistic remora-like instinct to attach himself to the emptiest of all moral vessels is a match made in sulfurous fire.

CNN's Daniel Dale has done yeoman's work across Trump's fetid time on our political scene. Here, he's barely able to conceal his fury at Miller's repeated, easily debunkable (though too rarely actually debunked) repetition of a big lie. 

I'm not here to list Miller's manifold sins. That's been done and will be done well into whatever future we get. I'm not here to offer solutions, because I fear we don't have a good one at the moment. All I really seek to do is go on record, to record for posterity my disdain at our country's failure to understand the nature of the people we chose to elevate to power, the grossest, misfigured, damaged souls that ravage our body politic.

Goebbels' fate isn't good enough for Miller. Would that he lives long enough and we recover our moral center enough to consign him to the prison he belongs in.

zPSA: Donald Trump is Fucking Up

Elected Democrats have been doing a piss-poor job communicating to the American people despite the political gifts handed to them lately.  Their first instinct is always to pussy-foot around an issue, both-sides it a little bit to avoid offending anyone, and use 5,000 words when five would do.  They're also afraid of sounding crass, or being assholes, and if they ever swore it wouldn't sound authentic.

For example, Hakeem Jefferies recently offered the opinion that “Tariffs, when properly utilized, have a role to play in trying to make sure that you have a competitive environment for our workers and our businesses.  That’s not what’s going on right now. This is a reckless economic sledgehammer that Donald Trump and compliant Republicans in the Congress are taking to the economy, and the American people are being hurt enough.”

"Utilized"?  Really?  Who talks like that?  "I utilized some toilet paper to blow my nose because we're all out of Kleenex.  Good thing we had the TP otherwise I would have utilized my finger."  Sounds perfectly normal and relatable.  And more importantly, why is he providing cover for Trump's tariffs?  Why couldn't he just say "Trump's tariffs ruined the economy"?

Everyone who reads G:TB knows that I have an inordinate fondness for Cory Booker, but did he really have to talk for 25 hours to draw attention to DJ Trump's stupidity?  He couldn't boil it down to maybe 25 minutes?  Does anyone know what Booker actually said?  I don't.

Trump is fucking up and someone needs to call him out in a way that resonates with people who were stupid enough to vote for Trump in the first place.

You know what this moment calls for?  Someone who can swear and be crass authentically, for whom being an asshole comes naturally.  Like Chris Christie, only not a big fat slob who sold out to Trump and did a 180 only after being dumped from Trumpworld.

I think the Democrats need to cut an ad with someone well-known and well-respected from outside the world of politics and run it throughout the NBA playoffs.  It needs to use short, pithy sentences.  It needs to be overly reductive and devoid of nuance so that Trump and his supporters need to babble like Democrats to try to explain it away.  The ad's point needs to be clear even if you can't hear it because you're watching in a sports bar.  It should feature someone who has represented America on the world stage, who achieved major wins, and who has fucked up epically.  This person could then say "I have represented our country on the world stage.  I know a lot about winning, and I know about fucking up.  I'm here to tell you: Trump is fucking up."  And that's the theme.  Four words.  Trump is fucking up.  Bleep the "fucking" if you have to but don't blur the speaker's mouth.

Then really quickly have them say something like "The Trump tariffs tanked the stock market.  Since he took office the market is down about 9%.  That means Trump's tariffs took one out of every eleven dollars in your savings.  Trump is fucking up."  Run video of Trump talking on one side of the screen while the stock ticker plummets on the other.

They could also say "Trump promised to deport illegal aliens.  But his own lawyers admitted that they accidentally deported the wrong guy.  So the illegals are still here and the wrong guys are in El Salvador.  Trump is fucking up."  At the same time, run video of Kristi Noem rocking her ICE cap, flak vest and Daytona.

Then they conclude with "I know a lot about winning and this isn't it.  Trump is fucking up."

My first thought was Michael Phelps.  He represented the US at the Olympics, he won more than anyone ever, and he got into a bit of a jam with a bong.  So when he says "I have represented our country on the world stage.  I know a lot about winning, and I know about fucking up," the ad would run a picture of him on an Olympic podium with the flag, then a picture of him with a shitload of medals, then the photo of him and the bong.  

Everyone knows Phelps.  Many people like him, or at least respect him.  I don't think anyone hates him.  Apparently he dislikes Trump and he strikes me as having some assholery in him, but I don't know how authentically he swears.  This seems like a good option though.

My next thought was Tiger Woods.  When he says "I have represented our country on the world stage.  I know a lot about winning, and I know about fucking up," the ad would run a picture of him holding the Ryder Cup, then a bunch of iconic pictures of him with trophies and/or fist-pumping, then ... well, there are probably a lot of fucking up photos to choose from but I'll just go with his mugshot.

But Tiger is friends with Trump so he wouldn't go for this.

I was stuck after Tiger.  I ruminated and finally struck on an amazing idea.  You know who can take on a raging asshole from Queens?  Another raging asshole from Queens, one who famously swears and acts badly but won a lot and who put representing America above almost everything else. 

Like John fucking McEnroe.  Johnny Mac viewed representing the US in Davis Cup play as a holy grail and he did more for the US Davis Cup team than just about anyone.  He won 77 titles on the tour including seven majors.  And he was famously thrown out of the Australian Open for cursing out an umpire.

Everyone knows him, I think he's generally respected, and he likes to smoke weed and shit on Trump.

And he has a great story about how his father, also named John McEnroe, sent Trump a letter in 2015 and Trump thought it was from the tennis star.

Anyway, I'm sure there are plenty of other candidates to star in my PSA.  I invite you to nominate some in the comments.  But please hurry because the Democrats can't get out of their own way.