The craziest thing I saw in the past week – *exasperated, bleeding out of my ears, walking away from the podium* – we’re just going to get this on record.
The craziest thing I saw this week, funnily and tragically enough, involved Cristiano Ronaldo by proxy. Welcome back to the White House, one of the most obviously tan people in recorded history! They know and love you here.
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While the W was juggling its own expansion considerations over the summer, the men’s league was keeping its fist tight: the long-expected dual announcement of Las Vegas and, crucially, Seattle getting teams[1] came to nothing. Adam Silver has a commission going, and governors are now going to decide how to weigh the long-term revenue sharing benefits of two more franchises against losing all of the special events Vegas now hosts on the NBA’s behalf.
As all of that was happening, though, actual basketball teams put their plans into motion. A decade later than expected, it’s the world against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Frustrations are mounting in every direction, confusion its bunkmate; can you believe the Buss family would ever want to sell the Lakers? Bones Hyland is in Greece Minnesota now.
We’ll get to this later, but I named my dog in large part after Russell Westbrook, who is now a *checks notes* …Sacramento King? Inside The NBA still exists, albeit on The Worldwide Leader, and “Roundball Rock” is back. In any case: we ball.
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I don’t know if the last night in Louisiana was necessarily the time to introduce gator to my body, but as a final taste, it felt apt. As a reversal of fortune the next morning in the Louis Armstrong New Orleans Airport, it still felt apt, but much, much worse.
What happens when you throw four Fordham dudes, one guy who went to Western Illinois and then the only graduate of either of the two universities directly involved? A curious gumbo indeed. Here are snippets of a recent trip to Baton Rouge to see the University of South Carolina Gamecocks football team go against the Tigers of Louisiana State University. If you wanna know the rest, hey: buy the rights.
Special thanks to John, Fati, Tom[1], the oldest-not-older brother, Tom and Gavin for pulling and keeping this together.
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You know, it’s the damnedest thing – just the night before, last Monday, I watched Field of Dreams for the first time in a long while, and it reminded me that my favorite part of it is Burt Lancaster’s description of a dream that even the reincarnate hitchhiker version of himself wouldn’t achieve.
A fellow legend of apocryphal baseball ephemera, an erstwhile actor in a Rod Serling joint among many other things that mattered, Robert Redford passed away last Tuesday morning at 89. To echo the masses, we all moved up one slot in the world’s handsomest people rankings at his TOD.
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In order to tell you about the best rendition of “New York, New York” I’ve ever heard, I first have to tell you about the longest day I’ve ever spent in the state of Indiana.
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Let’s leave aside the obvious for a moment — Jorge Martin’s injury, Pecco Bagnaia’s defrocking, Marc Marquez reclaiming the best bike on the grid, KTM’s financial stay of execution, the whole Liberty Media court case, CryptoData’s now expectedly collapsed vendetta against RNF — and focus instead on one very specific type of person: the much coveted theoretical fan of MotoGP who lives in the world’s largest market for sports entertainment.
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“I don’t do anything that’s scary.” – Nico Harrison, Dallas Mavericks general manager, February 2nd, 2025, right after taking one of the wildest, most inexplicable swings in NBA history.
Firstly, no: I have no idea why the Dallas Mavericks would do this, “this” being trading Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis, which is exactly what they did late Saturday night. Secondly, yes: I do think LeBron and Luka can work it out as an oversized Tatum-Brown spanning generations and leading a dynamite offense, if only anybody on the Lakers could defend anymore.
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The very first sound anyone hears on the Band’s debut LP Music From Big Pink is that of an organ, melancholically ascending ahead of introducing the other instruments and Richard Manuel’s voice, a kind of knock on the front door from an old friend. It’s sad and haunting, familiar and forlorn, an extension of Bob Dylan’s “wild, thin mercury” sound of Blonde On Blonde.
“Tears of Rage” opens Big Pink, having traversed from a slow folk grind in Dylan’s hands on The Basement Tapes to a steady, driving lament. Behind the organ was the oldest and last remaining member of the Band, Garth Hudson, who passed away in his sleep on Tuesday morning in Woodstock at 87.
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One thing that you need to know about my viewing of A Complete Unknown was that I saw it with a couple of coworkers from college work-study in the heart of Times Square on Christmas Day. Later on that night, I ate some of the best risotto I’ve ever had at the home of a separate college friend from the same job in Astoria. It was a normal day, before I rung the fallout shelter bell.
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The first time I got an inkling it had gone right, not left, was when a woman cloaked head to toe in MAGA gear boarded the bus on my ride home. I’ll leave aside the notable aspect that this was a bus in downtown Chicago after 11 at night: Sat alone all the way up front, I happened to notice over her shoulder from rows back that she was glued to her phone watching a map of projections that had the country awash in red. At such a remove and with my eyesight not exactly up to the task, it was impossible for me to tell which channel she was streaming, but to make the rest of my long ride home from Thalia Hall less mentally taxing — and taking in some very conspicuous context clues — I figured it was Newsmax.
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Tuesdays With Horry 