Finished reading: The Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚
🍿 One Battle After Another, (finally).
Finished reading: Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler 📚
Jarrell Miller Got His Hair Punched Off And Became A Hero by Dave McKenna
Laughed super hard at this article and included YouTube link.
. . . Miller stood up during the break and faced the crowd and with a massive smile ripped off the semi-detached rug off his head. He tossed it to the crowd the way end-stage Elvis Presley would a sweaty towel. All that was left on his dome was a black oval outline where the failed adhesive had been applied. Miller’s move filled the room with ecstasy.
Finished reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚
So much snow.
"between beauty and blind rage"
Writing at Welcome to Hell World, Christopher Harris hits on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: how to reconcile my desire to seek comfort and joy in distractions with the feeling that the current moment demands I stay constantly alert and outraged lest I fail to properly pay sufficient attention to what exactly is going on here.
The goal of fascism is to squeeze away joy and I guess the best revenge is striking some theoretical balance between beauty and blind rage and so we need all the music and TV shows and movies we can get, and they obviously don’t all have to take direct aim at the maniacs.
On January 13, Graham Granger, a film and performing arts major, was arrested for criminal mischief when he ripped the art, made with the help of AI, from the wall of a university gallery and ate it “in a reported protest,” according to the police report.
“He was tearing them up and just shoving them in as fast as he could,” said Ali Martinez, a witness to the event. “Like when you see people in a hot-dog eating contest.” According to the police estimate, around 57 of the 160 images on the wall were destroyed.
Jackpot. Now I just need to find all my slammers.
The eternal offering of Toadies' “Possum Kingdom” by Niko Stratis
I love this song and this essay so much.
This is the truth of a story that matters less to me than how it felt when the song belonged to me and my disastrous confidence, when “Possum Kingdom” and others on the radio were about the half-truths and legends woven into their words.
Finished reading: Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski 📚⚾️
RIP Kaleb Horton.
I did not know Kaleb Horton and, though I read and admired his work at times, his was not a name that I remembered well enough to seek out or follow around over the web enough to keep up with. Nevertheless, I find myself significantly saddened by his unexpected passing as I’ve been reading through various tributes from writers whose names I do remember well enough to seek out and follow around the web. In particular, this quote which Luke O’Neil shared in his tribute has me wishing I’d have paid closer attention before now.
If we have any imperative, it’s to keep life going, to stop it from being destroyed. Something turns to nothing constantly. Something came from nothing only once.
Finished reading: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff 📚
Finished reading: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick 📚
Finished reading: Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald 📚
Finished reading: Joe by Larry Brown 📚
Finished reading: Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Throw natural ⚾️
Absolutely loved this interview with Leo Mazzone in The Atlantic today.
An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So by Michael Powell
No one knows, objectively, what’s best for the health and longevity of baseball pitchers, and there’s certainly something to be said for all the new fangled metrics we have to measure pitch effectiveness like spin rate and movement, etc. But, as a fan, I so miss the days of the dominant starting pitchers who could go 7, 8, 9 innings at a time and put a whole team on their back in some of the most important games1. Mazzone is, from a coaching perspective, one of the best representatives of the 1990s iteration of that era of dominant starting pitching. At the time, I hated his Braves teams–but even then I couldn’t help but respect the impressive rotation and pitching staff that they’d put together. Mazzone no doubt had a big hand in that. And he sure can provide a good quote.
Here’s one of the better stories from the piece, featuring the great John Smoltz.
In 1987, the Braves traded a fine but aging starting pitcher, Doyle Alexander, for John Smoltz, who came from the Detroit Tigers’ Minor League system. People chattered that the Braves had been fleeced. Take the kid out back to a pitching mound, then–General Manager Bobby Cox told Mazzone, and tell me what we’ve got. Scouting reports suggested that the 20-year-old Smoltz had a lively but erratic fastball. Mazzone and the kid walked to a back lot in the Braves training complex. “I told Smoltzy to just throw natural,” Mazzone recalled. On the fourth or fifth pitch, Smoltz shook his head and muttered,: “This ain’t right.” “What ain’t right?” Mazzone asked. “Well, my left leg has to go here, and my right leg has to go there,” Smoltz said. “When I was in Detroit—” Mazzone cut him off. “You’re not in fucking Detroit. Throw natural.” Smoltz—who has recalled their conversation similarly—calmed down and tossed one fastball after another across the plate, beautiful as could be. From there, Mazzone worked on developing Smoltz’s off-speed pitches. A year later, Smoltz reached the majors at age 21. A year after that, he pitched more than 200 Major League innings. “I said to myself, Damn, this was too easy,” Mazzone recalled.
The whole thing was a really fun read and, if you’re a baseball fan who’s nostalgic for those starting pitchers of yore, I encourage you to check it out.
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Even as a Pirates fan who had to suffer through the “Madison Bumgarner game” in 2014. Watching Bumgarner throughout the rest of that postseason was almost worth falling victim to his dominance in the Wild Card round. ↩︎
Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt 📚
Finished reading: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg 📚