Oh hey there! Whoa, been a while. Sorry about that. For anyone who took the Under in “How many weeks until Tyler is inconsistent with his gambling column,” congratulations, strong bet. Collect your winnings at the nearest window.
The best part of riding a roller coaster is often the first lift hill. While waiting in a way-too-long queue, the anticipation for the ride only simmers because the mind is restless and bored. Is this terrible wait time-to-ride time ratio even worth it? Yet, somehow, during that slow climb to the first drop, excitement builds exponentially. All of the sudden, the brain thinks, “This is really happening and holy shit, it looks incredibly dangerous.” The imminent thrills are typically right in front of the riders, in plain sight, but that does not take away from the natural release of endorphins that occurs when the coaster lets gravity take over. After that drop, it does not matter if some of the loops and bunny hills cannot compare to the very start of the ride because the initial acceleration was strong enough to carry everyone to end so fast that they barely noticed. The only people who get off of roller coasters without a smile on their faces are the ones who should not have gotten on the ride in the first place.
What that gratuitous, paragraph-long allegory is trying to say is this: the experience of watching a great television drama is a lot like riding a roller coaster over the course of days, weeks, months, or years, depending on whether the viewer was on the train at the beginning or just binged it all on Netflix during one rainy weekend. Mr. Robot’s first season was a near-perfect thrill ride, much like the Coney Island Cyclone often present in the background, and its promise of more crazy loops and fun drops in the future seemed like a sure thing. Unfortunately, the second season did not deliver smooth navigation through inversions and instead opted to jerk the audience sideways through a series fits and starts.
USA Today
The English poet Francis Quarles, noted paraphrase royalty, once wrote, “The way to bliss lies not on beds of down, And he that has no cross deserves no crown.” As was more or less his M.O., and the standard run of play in seventeenth century literature, he was drawing largely from The Bible, though you could be forgiven if in a vacuum you thought he may have been discussing the rise of Stan Wawrinka, 2016 U.S. Open men’s champion.
Four sets: that’s all Stan Wawrinka needed to upend Novak Djokovic in the men’s final of the U.S. Open, which he captured in a magnificent 6-7 (1-7), 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 win that elicited some of the best shot-making either player has ever flashed. Once an underperforming prodigy, Wawrinka is now, against most well-meaning odds, a three-time major champion as well as, for the moment, the king of New York.
Football is back. Can you believe it? Last night, sitting in my favorite bar with two of my favorite people, I got to yell “WIDE LEFT” drunkenly at a muted television screen just before Graham Gano made contact with the football and turned my words into reality and an 0-1 start to the season for the Carolina Panthers.
I felt alive.
And now that football is back, so is the Hypothetical SuperContest. It’s our fourth year here! We’ve had our ups, our downs and probably a few to many references to Jon Gruden. For those that have been here from the jump (Hi Rory! Hi Dad!): thanks so much for supporting my degenerate dreams. For those new to this space, welcome to my gambling nightmare.
Well, it’s not necessarily a nightmare. Not every week at least.
Courtesy of yours truly
Putting a torch to a flame: that’s one way of dealing with the vexation of presumed certainty turning to capricious doubt. Nothing is certain, and doubt can be a useful progenitor for inspiration. Even Jesus looked around in anger.
Down a break in the fourth set to Ilya Marchenko, Stan Wawrinka looked inward, his steely resolve having forsaken him, and, as has happened on many occasions before, dispelled the rage within him via the destruction of a racquet, an inanimate Judas for lack of anything else.
The thing about Netflix original programming is — well, first of all, it’s mostly great. But the thing about it is, sometimes you spend a weekend binging a show, and you love it, and then you completely forget it exists for a year, until the next season comes out. That’s kind of what happened to me and Narcos (the one about the cocaine).
But, because Netflix is kind and generous, they’ve blessed us with a brand new season on Labor Day Weekend. Of all weekends! You know, in case you needed that third day for your binge (but like, honestly, who needs that?). And the thing about Narcos — which is about Pablo Escobar vs. the DEA and the Colombian government, if you needed a refresher and/or didn’t really pay attention to the English subtitles and couldn’t pick up on all the other context clues, is that it takes place mostly in the 1970s and ‘80s, when Escobar was a) alive and b) in charge of basically all the cocaine in the world.
Getty Images/Quinn Rooney
If, at the beginning of 2014, I would have asked you to guess what Swiss male tennis player was going to win two majors over the following two years, you almost certainly would have guessed Roger Federer[1]. Steady Fed did not win a major the previous year, but a nagging back injury limited him, and in periods of health you could still see his heady mastery of the game on full display. A recovery was inevitable, and anyway, it wasn’t looking like the next generation of tennis talent was prepared to challenge the Big Four. It mostly still isn’t.
Almost three complete seasons later, however, another native of the neutral country has emerged as a worthy adversary to the quartet that has dominated the men’s game for the last decade. The son of farmers, Stan Wawrinka is a two-time Grand Slam champion and, at 31, may be playing the best tennis of his life.
Congratulations, college football fan – you made it!
After six months of trudging along through the hissing of untamable lawns, Frank Ocean’s endlessly dull carpentry show and, worst of all, baseball, you’ve made it. You’re here and you can leave one of the worst international capers not named The Thomas Crown Affair remake (don’t @ me) in the rear view.
College football is back, and we’re here to sell you all of the fantastic fruits and veggies that the farm of opening weekend has to offer as we head into autumn’s bountiful harvest of football. We’ll just warn you that farm-to-table doesn’t always mean that it’s the freshest. But hey, one dash of candy red paint will turn that moldy thing into the ripest beefsteak tomato.
Are you closely monitoring Arian Foster’s preseason reps with the Miami Dolphins? Do you think he has the potential to come back and run for yardage totals anywhere close to the impressive numbers he amassed during his pre-injury peak?
If you did not immediately have some kind of answer to these two questions, then congratulations, you most likely did not spend the month of August combing through pages of statistics, which may or may not only slightly increase your odds at monetary gain. You are also probably not keeping up with reports from sports media shills who are in the business of fabricating news out of athletes’ mundane daily routines to get clicks[1]. You might even be enjoying the summer sun. You made the right choice. Everyone else, keep reading as I talk myself through this dumb hobby.
Tuesdays With Horry 