Saturday, December 21, 2024
The "Heat" are now 13-13
I have tried for several years now to ring the alarm bell on the system problem with "Heat" Culture: hard work prioritized over talent. It is literally Pat Riley's soul. The soul is malleable but Riles' and this team's has not been. 45-37 (average) with a standard deviation of only five for ten years running is the most telling stat I can even imagine with a professional sports team. You can make a liar out of me but nobody has. Nobody has paid me any mind. I emailed cogno Barry Jackson last season. "Correct", he responded. "And two trips to the Finals". Okay.
You show me a team that has won a pro sports championship at a yawning talent disparity and I will confess error and we can go on another decade going 45-37 and maybe we will win the Larry O'Brien Trophy. But until somebody does I look at the "Heat" and I see 45-37 on every jersey, no hope catching the elite teams and others pushing and leap-frogging us keeping us around 8th place. Where's the fan's reason-based hope supposed to be?
There needs to be a book, or at least a ballad, written on The Wreck of the Manchester City
THIS is truly something I have never seen before.
Ohio (8) 28 Tenn (9) ten, 7:35 3Q
I thought Boring Blow Out Saturday was going to last all day until the 4th quarter of the "Magic"-"Heat" game😂
Well, you look like a young un', it's happened before and will again. It's the first time for me with a decent (45-37/ten yrs running!) blowing a TWENTY-FIVE point lead to a good team with its soul cut out by injuries to its two best players! I was a "Heat" charter season ticket holder and it is the most embarrassing loss by this franchise that I can remember.
FULL TIME! ORLANDO 121-114. ALL-TIME 🥶45's 4Q EL FOLDO (37-8)!!!
Fo' in a Row, Spo Must Go!😂*
*Twee but it rhymed.
A team leads by 20 at half-time
It's
A. A College Football Playoff game.
B. Anybody playing Orlando in basketball.
Opening kickoff 75 yds 5 plays Ohio (8) 7 Rocky Top (9) 0, 12:46 1Q
Rocky's best play here is to wear winged helmets.
Disney 28 Cold 45's 40, End 1Q
Diz is without their two best players, the composer Wagner and Bandolero, and have 3L. J-Buts is out with an illness...no, sprained ankle...no, illness.
HT Texas (5) 28 IPTAY (12) 10
Okay, I have seen enough:
(6) 38 (11) 10
(7) 27 (10) 17 (27-3 until 1:27 4Q)
(5) 28 (12) 10 HT
The College Football Playoff is at least four and likely eight teams too big. These games are not competitive. What business does a double-digit seeded team have playing for the national championship? None. Reduce it next year to four or eight. Enough of this crap.
Friday, December 20, 2024
Text message exchange with friend
Him: Going to Costa Rica tomorrow am
With my kids
Me: OH! and with boys! AWESOME. how long for?
Him: Sat to Friday
Me: you havw a good life, well-lived. remember this, weinbaum.
Me: american, white, male, money, live on miami beach, married, two sons. true, you're jewish but that doesn't wipe out EVERYTHING else.
Him: Nodding vigorously
Me: 🤣
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
I toldja that Beans-Zollner Pistons game (ONE HUNDRED NINETY EIGHT TREY ATTEMPTS) would draw Adam's ire. Rightly so. The Assiciation is flirting with the West Coast Offense Syndrome that infected the NFL, the offenses all look alike. Adam is ON it!
He also said criticisms of offenses becoming "cookie cutter" in approach and that teams are copying each other is something he thinks the league should take seriously.
...
"Whether there's some tweaks we should make, and my sense is *I do think we should take seriously this notion of more diversity [DEI! DEI! DEI!]* in offense. I watch as many games as all of you do, and to the extent that it's not so much a 3-point issue, but that some of the audience, some of the offenses start to look sort of cookie cutter and teams are copying each other. I think that's something we should pay attention to."
The new CBA is too complex,👇 "the best basketball people" on the teams, the "Heat's" Andy Elisburg at the very top, didn't grasp it fully and foot faulted. It makes the top 1% of NBA players richer while eviscerating the middle class players. Sound familiar? Adam took advantage of a new NBAPA head. He also wanted to punish owners like Joe Lacob, GSW, Steve Ballmer, LAC, and Mat Ishbia, PHO. The CBA, imo, is one of Adam's very few fuckups as commish. But he is open to correcting any error he made.
Silver said the new collective bargaining agreement is working as intended when it comes to limiting the way highest-spending teams can operate in going over the "second apron," and that the CBA was intended to make life much more difficult on teams that do so. But after saying *"maybe some of the teams didn't quite understand how inflexible the system becomes,"*
...it was too early to tell whether there could be a chilled trade market this season because of the new rules that have been put in place.
"It's my job to be concerned, but we'll see."
The fans, I among them. wanted fewer games. Adam gave us slightly more with the Silver Cup tournament, which I find execrable. But owners did not want fewer games so regular season games were incrementally increased and the playoffs, which had been 16 teams forever. was expanded to ten teams in each 15-team conference, six automatic ins and four who play in. And teams and players, who had already been stretched to breaking and were trying, with "personal days" di minimis "injuries" and load management to preserve their teams' quality play were met by Adam with more restrictive rules: two stars cannot sit the same game without showing cause, to be eligible for personal awards players had to play in sixty-five games--all of these new demands on players put stars and the integrity of teams' rosters at more, not less risk. Imo, these were all fuckups by Adam. But, as above, he is not turning a blind eye and telling extravagantly compensated slaves to just do it. He will monitor all "intensely" as the GOAT commissioner in any sport.
Male Deer 61 The Next Dynasty 53, 9:12 3Q
Monday, December 16, 2024
Just kill me
Zollner led practically the entire game--by 16 at the start of the 4Q! But Miami scorched them, Tyler Herro tying it at 114 with 5 secs left and we went to overtime. Detroit was stunned and the "Heat" took an 8-point lead with 2:14 in extra time and looked like they would get the dub. But Tim Hardaway, Jr., ice-water in his veins and clutch, hit three consecutive treys to give Detroit the lead back, 123-122 at 1:10. Still Miami fought on and regained the lead via Jimmy Butler 124-123, :44.1. The next possession Cade Cunningham drove to the rim to give Detroit the lead for good, 125-124. Hardaway comitted a turnover with 14.1 left. Jimmy missed a layup, Tyler missed a trey at 1.1 and Ausur Thompson grabbed the rebound to secure the win for the "Pistons." This is the second OT loss by the "Heat" to Detroit. They lost in Motown Nov. 12 123-121. They improve to 11-16. Miami has its 4W snapped and is 13-11. The "Pistons" are much improved over last season. They are 10th in the East, the "Heat" are 6th.
HT Z 63 M 59
Jimmy has 21 of our points. Fifty-nine at the half orojects to puhlenty enough to win a game of basketball, ceptin' when you don't play no D.
Zollner Pistons 58 "Heat" 54, 1:55 2Q, Fort Wayne Full Pit Stop
No D in Miami "Heat": Z shooting 58.3%; have led by 15. :(
Gunman Kills ___ In ___
Abundant Life Christian School shooting in Madison: Teen student, teacher killed; 6 students hurt
The suspect, a teenage student at the school, is also dead, police said.
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Yes, even cutting his hair.
Hemingway wrote disparagingly of her in A Moveable Feast as well, as a "pilot fish," as part of the "rich" who attached themselves to Hemingway in Paris and broke up his marriage to Hadley Richardson, of whom Hemingway never wrote ill. She was the mother of Patrick and Gloria, ne Gregory. Patrick is still alive, 96 years old. Gloria was a University of Miami trained physician who died in custody in the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center on charges of indecent exposure. Ernest said of Gloria that they were, "the biggest dark side in the family except me".
Bitcoin to $800,000?
Trump Confirms Bitcoin Reserve Plans—$15 Trillion Price Boom Predicted
"The stock-to-flow model says it's going to be at over $800,000 by the end of next year."--Perianne Boring, the founder of crypto trade association The Digital Chamber, told Fox Business this week.
Having gotten too close to the Cleveland infection last week I am not going to get closer by reading cleveland.com's autopsy on this game. I will note that at present it is Feces Color 0 Chefs 21 early in the second quarter and, that Cleve. has lost a fumble and that Jameis Winston has thrown two interceptions. KC is 12-1. Cleve. is 3-10. If you invested, hope you took Chefs -3.5.
I don't remember, or if I ever knew, what years Ernest Hemingway was working on The Garden of Eden. It was posthumously published but that doesn't mean anything. According to Charles Scribner, Jr. Hemingway "was working on a number of writing projects" when he blew his brains out. Three of them, Islands In The Stream, True At First Light and this one were published as full-length books after his death. He had titled The Garden of Eden. Scribner writes that "only the second part was incomplete". There are four Books. Book One is only 31 pages long. Book Two, 40 pages. Three is 130 and Four, 38. What the "second part" consists of, I don't know. Beside the point, this is all beside the point.
Since I do not know when he last wrote the last sentence of The Garden of Eden I don't know if it was proximate to his suicide. I do know that it is the darkest book he ever wrote. Book One in particular shows Hemingway's writing ability at its most exquisitely precise. I have written previously that I had to get a second copy because I had so heavily underlined, etc. my original copy (that and I couldn't find the first one). In my opinion, at least "the first part" has no equal in Hemingway's oeuvre. It is impossible that "the first part", Book One and whatever else, was written after Hemingway concluded he could not write any longer. On first reading years ago I thought that Hemingway didn't want the manuscript published. The sexual reversal is so at odds with his man's-man image that I imagined it was experimental and embarrassed him. If that is anywhere near the truth then Charles Scribner, Jr. deserves his own Nobel Prize for publishing this bravest of Hemingway's writing known to me.
OH MY GOD FT CITY 1 UNITARD 2!😂
A PK in the 88' and a 90' goal piles more misery on City. Have to cry so hard I laugh.
City have now won only once in 11 games in all competitions--Reuters for ESPN.
Mirrors reverse things.
"And you love me just the way I am? You're sure."
"Yes," he said. "So much yes."
"Because I'm going to be changed."
"No," he said. "No. Not changed."
"I'm going to," she said.
...
She pulled the striped shirt over her head and then shook her hair back and then sat in the chair in front of the mirror on the dresser and brushed it back looking at it critically. It fell to the top of her shoulders. She shook her head at the mirror...
"I have to ride up to Aigues Mortes," she said.
"Good," he said. "I'll come too."
"No. I have to go alone. ...(12-13)
...she...got up sleepily and washed in the big basin and slouched in front of the mirror of the armoire and brushed her hair and looked at the mirror unsmiling...(20)
"...Kiss me and look at us in the mirror on the bathroom door."
He kissed her and they looked into the full length mirror. (43)
She looked into the hand mirror and watched the comb and scissors lifting and snipping...
...Then he snipped more rapidly and finally turned the chair so the big mirror was reflected in the small one Catherine held. (79-80)
...
Catherine stood up and looked at herself very seriously in the mirror...
She looked in the mirror as though she had never seen the girl she was looking at (81)
...
He looked once more in the mirror...(82)
...
After she was asleep David got up and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror...Then he came back and picked up her big hand mirror.
"...You've...had it cut the same as your girl's and how do you feel?" He asked the mirror. ...
He looked at the mirror and it was someone else he saw...(84)
Of course he did not know exactly how he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the mirror. (85)
...We'll get a mirror for it. A bar's no good without a mirror." (102)
"...You can't fool a bar mirror." (103)
"Do I look any different?" Catherine asked. "I wish they'd brought the mirror. Do I look any different to you?" (110)
...she stood a long time and looked at the bed and then went to the bathroom door and opened it and stood and looked in the long mirror. Her face had no expression...she looked at herself from her head down to her feet with no expression on her face at all. (115)
"Hello," she said. "They didn't bring the mirror."
"Hello, Devil," he said. I'm sorry I was late."
He was shocked at the dead way she looked and at her toneless voice. (117)
David and the girl were sitting at the bar having a drink together and the girl said, "They never did bring the mirror."
"What are all the architectural reforms?" David asked.
"The new miroir for the bar?
...the bar with its new and handsome mirror...he sat on the bar stool and looked into the mirror...
"Hello darling," Catherine said to David. "Oh look at the mirror...(133)
They looked at each other in the mirror. (141)
"This isn't any damned bar," Catherine said. "This is our own special bar and we bought the mirror..."(144)
...Catherine watched him come in by looking at the mirror. She did not look at him, only at his reflection in the mirror.
"Where did you put them, Devil?" David asked.
He welcomed his father's presence at the bar until he glanced in the mirror and saw he was alone. (147)
He looked at his face in the mirror with one side shaved. (167)
David was watching her in the mirror and whe looked calm, handsome and normal. (191)
"She turned away from the mirror and looked at him. "I won't tell you," she said. "I took care of them." (219)
She went over to the door of the bathroom and looked at herself in the full length mirror. Then she smiled at the mirror. (244)
-30-
And that is the last mention of mirror in the book. It's only 247 pages long. She smiles in the mirror at herself after destroying David's reviews clippings and all of his unpublished, hand-written manuscripts.
The work is what you have left.
...He was completely detached from everything except the story he was writing and he was living in it as he built it. ...
It was not him, of course, who had stood there that morning...
...
It was not him, but as he wrote it was and when someone read it, finally, it would be whoever read it...whoever read it would find what there was there and have it always.
"But I wasn't unfaithful. Really David...How could you say I was? Why did you say it?"
...
"I didn't say it, Devil."
"Somebody did. But I wasn't. I just did what I said I'd do. Where's Marita?"
...
"...Once you took it back I was all right....
"...I'll go and get her. Do you mind?"...
...
"...When I knew I was unfaithful. I never was before you know. You go and bring her, David. Then she won't feel bad. No don't bother, I'll go."
...
"She's coming in just a minute," she said. "She's lovely, David. I'm so glad you brought her."
He held her close and hard and inside himself he said goodbye and then goodbye and goodbye.
...his heart said goodbye Catherine good-bye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye.
