The two hottest teams in pro sports play in my backyard, pitchers and catchers have reported, and Playboy is reintroducing nude photos.
Does life get any better than this?
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It was Leslie Knope who coined the term “Galentine’s Day,” but if the gals from UConn’s top-ranked women’s basketball team prevail tonight against sixth-ranked South Carolina, the holiday will be forever theirs.
For those of you not following women’s college hoops, the Lady Huskies tonight are going for their 100th consecutive victory. One hundred. Their Harlem Globetrotter-like dominance of the sport over the past few years has been almost obscene, yet I’m going to love for it to continue.
Move over, Knope. These gals have got it all.
I very rarely “tune in” to watch anything on actual TV other than live sports, but every once in a while I make an exception to this self-imposed principle. Last night’s premiere episode of The History of Comedy on CNN was worth breaking the rules.
Breaking the rules was sort of the theme of last night’s episode, which featured mostly clips of “old” comedians—mostly from the 1960s—whose material was considered at the time dangerous, scandalous, or even criminal. The life and work of Lenny Bruce was featured prominently, as was the work of Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin. In fact, the best parts of the show were the clips themselves. Of course you wanted to be there, in the club, in the moment, but you’d settle for 10 seconds here and 10 seconds there on your TV at home 50 years later. Seeing comtemporary comedians speak about the old-timers in documentary fashion was the least entertaining part of the program, though it’s tough to come up with anything new to say about how great the seven words you can’t say on TV really are.
I rarely say this, but kudos, CNN, for putting out another series I’m actually interested in watching. Following their success with The Sixties, The Seventies, and The Eighties (all of which I thoroughly enjoyed), CNN again proves that even communist cable channels can produce quality programming from time to time.
Already lost by now in the sea of constant news re: President Trump is his assertion this week that the mainstream media has forgotten and/or underreported terrorism in the past three years, ostensibly covering for the man who used to have his job.
In the 40-hour-a-day news cycle in which we now reside there is hardly a swatted fly that goes unreported or underreported. There is, however, one event, from April 2009, that is, in fact, the underreported terrorist act of the past generation and I take this opportunity to remedy that.
April 3, 2009, 13 people were killed at the American Civic Association, in Binghamton, New York. The shooter then turned the gun on himself, bringing the death total to 14, the deadliest mass murder in New York State since September 11, and still one of the worst such occurrences this century.
Trouble is, you never hear about it.
My usual joke is that Binghamton can’t even get a mass shooting right, but this isn’t about Binghamton, it’s about reporting, and underreporting, as it were.
It’s the great forgotten mass murder of our time.
I think the best explanation for this is not one of politics or journalistic misfeasance. Simply put, nearly all the victims at the ACA were not white. They were not black or Hispanic either, and I don’t think the media (and, sadly, many people in Binghamton), have given them due sorrow.
Underreported?
Well, news teams were there in droves that awful day.
Not much since then, though.
Hard to believe it’s been nearly eight years.
And way too many shootings since.
Seriously?
That was like if at 3 a.m. this past November 9 it somehow magically came true that Hillary won the election in overtime after Trump blew a 25-point third-quarter lead.
Guess I’d rather have the Patriots win it again than I would the Clintons though.
For sure.
A groundhog in Pennsylvania tells me there will be six more weeks of winter.
More?
How about a start to winter?
Ain’t really winter until they cancel school at least once, Phil.
April 2, 1990: the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels defeated the Blue Devils of Duke 103-73 in the most lopsided championship game in NCAA Tournament history.
That was the first title game I watched with both anticipation and interest. I taped it that night, and in the years that followed I saw it probably 300 times. I had every word of play-by-play memorized.
It happened to be the final game at CBS for legendary broadcaster Brent Musburger, though the name and voice meant nothing to me at the time.
Last night I watched Kentucky beat Georgia in overtime on ESPN, with a 77-year-old Musburger on the call. Twenty-seven years after that “final” broadcast he was giving his real final broadcast, and this time the name and voice sounded to me like broadcasting manna.
In an era of who can be the loudest on air or in 140 characters, the voice and style of Brent Musburger is a refreshing oasis. Classy to the end, Musburger’s final sign-off last night hit all the right notes. “The Frank Sinatra of broadcasting,” he was called by his EPSN colleagues. That’s not a term I through around lightly, but yeah, that’s pretty much how it is.
I think the best summary of Musburger’s work I heard last night went something like this: You know it’s a big game when Brent Musburger’s on the call.
Yup, that’s it. And last night’s game between Kentucky and Georgia—one-sided on paper though it was—did not disappoint. It’s going into overtime was just God’s way of saying He wanted five more minutes of Brent Musburger.
Just five more minutes, please.
I think that was my excuse to watch that game back in ’90 too.
With all that is going on in the world these days it is nice to know we have sports, sweet sports, to divert our minds from the calamities upon us.
Then I open yesterday’s Washington Post and flip immediately to the sports section to find a front-page article about the trials and tribulations of a Muslim basketball team in Donald Trump’s America.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
Last week I said that our local sports teams were “finding their groove,” and I’m happy to announce that not only has this trend not been jinxed, in fact it has accelerated. Heading into the all-star break the Capitals of hockey have the most points in the NHL, following last night’s 5-2 victory over the New Jersey Devils. That the Caps scored five goals is about as surprising as the sun’s rising these days.
Similarly, the Wizards of basketball have won nine of their last eleven games, and are poised to move within a half game of fourth place in the Eastern Conference with a win tonight over the Atlanta Hawks.
You heard it here first: Caps, Wiz, then Nats. This is the year for D.C. sports.
Hey, Dad. Me again. I keep thinking of things I want to mention to you, things that you missed in the last 10 years.
Remember the book I was working on back in ’06? In fact it was about to be published when you passed. Well, I got the first copies of it just a few days after we last talked. I wish you could have seen it, but maybe you did somehow. Anyway, we ended up calling it The Other Side of the Coin. I think it’s sold about 12 copies.
And remember Senator Libous? The guy I said was a crook all those years and no one believed me? He got busted a couple years ago and was convicted of influence peddling and all sorts of ethics violations. Would’ve gone to jail except he was dying of cancer at the time anyway and the judge let him spend his last few months on house arrest. Seriously.
Since you’ve been gone, though, politics and elections haven’t really been as fun for me. I never ran for anything else and I never got Doug Drazen elected mayor, but if you can believe it Donald Trump actually got elected President. This was just after the Cubs won the World Series and I really thought the Apocalypse was set to occur right there. It hasn’t yet.
The Yankees won another title in ’09, Notre Dame was good for a few minutes in about 2012, and they completely messed up the Big East basketball conference.
Other than that you haven’t missed much.