Just Me Over Here Solving Basketball Forever

I don't wanna be the old man yelling at those goddam kids to get the hell off my lawn, but I think it's a fairly universal feeling that today's NBA misses a certain balletic feel of ball movement from decades long past due to it pretty much being all 3s/dunks all the time now, and I guess I don’t have a more workable solution but if I was the richest person in the world I'd pay everybody 4x their normal salary to play without the 3-point line for one year, after which a decision could be made about whether or not to continue playing that way based on the preferences of both the players & fans.

According to my bff ChatGPT (hi ChatGPT! 👋👋👋👋): 

Without the 3-point line, you’d probably immediately get: way more midrange play
more post-ups
more cuts/screens/ball movement
fewer “drive-and-kick endlessly until someone’s open”
different body types becoming valuable again
defenses collapsing inward, which could actually create prettier passing sequences

And the biggest thing: players would stop spacing the floor 28 feet from the hoop all the time, which absolutely would create a more compact, choreographed-looking game. “Balletic” is honestly the right word. 

YOU’RE WELCOME, EARF!!

Oh Dear du Jour

Due to the fact that I rarely ever see other human beings in my building despite it having like a hundred apartments and the fact that it’s about 10 minutes from the airport, longtime Xmastime buddy Marley has a theory that the building's actually a layover station for professional assassins, an idea we all had fun chuckling at until I saw this shit outside earlier today.

 

Me!

I don't have clinical depression but I do have a penchant to attach melancholy onto unearned nostalgia, but much like people talk about being able to recognize the onset of depression I'm able to recognize it and laugh at myself about it, so.

Know Thyself

Because I have crappy long-distance vision I was moseying around Wegmans wondering if the scenario ever presented itself wherein I found myself walking toward someone with a deformity & appeared to be gawking at them would I have what it takes in that moment to pretend I was blind?

"It was for everybody, not just Paul"

Like a lot of documentaries this one could've been cut in half, but the story itself about the half-century journey by the most famous musical instrument in the world is amazing and you know you'll sit through anything to see him get his bass back: 

One evening in 1972, Horne was with Wings in the studio until late. Afterwards he dropped off his brother-in-law in Notting Hill, in his van full of equipment. “You couldn’t park outside his house, so I parked close by on the corner of Cambridge Gardens. Then I went back to his house and spent the night. That area was all squats.”

The next day Horne returned to the van to find the padlock broken. “My heart sank. Somebody had taken two AC30 amps, another acoustic guitar in its case — and Paul McCartney’s original Höfner in its case.”

And of course in the end, Macca was McAmazing:

McCartney doesn’t blame George Glenister much, telling the documentary that his “petty thievery” was not unlike what he and the Beatles might have got up to, growing up poor in Liverpool. “We got out of that pretty quickly, luckily. The Beatles took over and we found an honest profession. But I can sympathise with people who don’t have that kind of luck.”

Something I Learned Today

"Lovely Jubbly!" is always near the top of any Greatest BBC Catchphrases of All Time list, and yet Del Boy never actually said it until Season 6's Yuppy Love, the 41st episode out of 64.

Which seems crazy to me? 😲🤯🇬🇧

 

Buy 9 Get the 10th for Free Wow He Really is a Genius

ALSO: I suddenly find myself available to consider sponsorship from Subway. Eat fresh, losers!  

AN XMASTIME PRAYER CARD, by Xmastime 😔🙏

PREVIOUS PRAYER CARDS HERE

 

Podcast Moment du Jour

Here's Obama talking about the current situation and by that I mean here's Obama talking about what a shitshow disaster fuckwad Trump is: 

You know, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing, working with younger leaders, is refuting the notion that things have never been worse. I say, no, no, you know what, Civil War, really bad.

Jim Crow, tough. And I say that not to try to pull rank on them, but rather to pull them out of any kind of sense of hopelessness about the situation.

I know when people say this they think they’re being reassuring, but if they’re right wouldn’t that just prove that since people did something once before they can do it again? How can “people have been exactly that capable of being terrible to each other so recently in our history that there’s plenty of video footage of it” possibly be more reassuring than “nobody’s ever done that before”?

Also, when was the last time I mentioned Obama here? I MISS YOU BUDDY 😭😭😭😭 

I'm Sorry John Sullivan I Still Love You!!!! 🤗😜🇬🇧

What's the German word for when a fan base things the exact opposite about something as you do; exempla gratia, the Only Fools and Horses episode To Hull and Back is not only near the top of every episode ranking I’ve ever seen but usually it’s at THE top and yet – as you nice people remember from my own rankings that I posted a coupla weeks ago – the Only Fools and Horses episode To Hull and Back is not only around the bottom of my own rankings but it’s at THE bottom…how can this be? And it’s not like how I don’t put Rubber Soul anywhere nearly as high as most Beatles fans do, MANY of whom put it at #1, but I still give it an A-; To Hull and Back gets a C- from me & the only reason it doesn’t get a D is that with its 90-minute runtime & no laugh track et al I like its ambition...putting me miles off from pretty much every other Only Fools and Horses fan, which is kind of a bummer.

 

 

Quite a Friday Night I'm Putting Together Here.

I'll Just Sit Here Waiting for MLB to Ask Me to Save It, That's Fine

Just one day after rather brilliantly suggesting Major League Baseball should make their outfields more expansive because the players just keep getting bigger & bigger, and now what do you know, the Yankees are about to become the first team to ever have two 6'7" position players on a roster, so.

And yes, they're both outfielders.

NOTE: if the masses demand I be made MLB commissioner, I must be honest: I would seriously think about it.

A New Breed of Abraham, Martin & John

Xmastime favorite piece of shit shithead John Roberts has been in the news lately, whining like a little bitch, surprise surprise, that not everybody’s throwing him a barn dance party for licking Trump’s wrinkled balls as much as he desperately tries to, and a new article today wonders if his lily-white Beaver Cleaver if Beaver was rich upbringing has something to do with what a disappointing piece of shit he’s turned out to be.

Obviously not everything this piece of shit has done can be directly correlated to his origin story, but it’s hard not to see it as a big part of the fabric.

Meanwhile, at the exact moment set in time that would one day be seen as ground zero for a movement culminating in the most basic of human rights for black people - something we’d one day take for granted as a course of human dignity - as the millions of people who bravely marched and fought and sweated and cried and bled embraced these new rights and dignities, moving right alongside them the entire time were two white males born into affluence who never had to lift their own feet off the ground (while being more generous to Roberts than I would have been, the writer of the article has no problem calling out his bullshit about growing up like some sort of Hoosier farmboy) actively doing whatever they could to reverse the course of those rights & dignities, and more than half a century later these two white males are two of the most powerful people on the entire planet and have joined forces to crush that very movement they lived alongside, first as young men & then as men of varying influence & wealth, and are now in full-on beast mode to erase the entire Civil Rights era as it if never happened. Fucking chilling.

BREAKING: Teenager's Hair About to Be @#$%ing Hilarious

SHEP! 🤗🐶❤️🕺

Why Yes I Am Still Single, Whysoever Do You Ask?

Current Events

Xmastime Fixes Baseball, No Big Deal, Whatever Who Cares

On one hand I'm surprised that eliminating the shift in Major League baseball hasn't had a bigger effect on batting averages; on the other hand I don't know how you can dance around trying to find a solution without landing on moving the fences back A LOT to create a vastly more expansive outfield, therein allowing more doubles & triples. Please allow me to make my case:

1. plenty of ballparks back in the olden days when everybody loved baseball were cavernous and that's why you had a million doubles & triples 

2. teams always fuck around with moving their fences based on their own lineups so let’s not start with the integrity bullshit

3. this seems like an easy fix if your goal really is to make the game more exciting via more contact at the plate and baserunning

4. this solution aligns perfectly with the reality that today’s outfielders are just so much bigger and MUCH MUCH MUCH more athletic & can chew up much more space than their pastoral ancestors

5. and they're only gonna be getting MUCH bigger & MORE athletic

6. this could also start chipping away at the “no black kids wanna play baseball anymore” problem too, but I only feel like taking credit for one brilliant idea at a time thank you very much.

Again, this seems so doable and such a perfect fix that I’m now doubting it based on the fact that if an idiot like me has thought of it then surely many people much smarter than I have as well & so there must be a reason (other than just money, which is always the reason) it hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.

Is It...Immigrants?

Episodes of THE OFFICE We Were Denied

I'd like to see what happened the first day back in the office after Jim declared his love to Pam & she rejected him; instead we just skip happily to Jim in Stamford and I for one agree with the Dowager of Downton herself in this case: "I hate Greek drama where everything happens offstage."

We can't get an episode where Jim makes up an excuse for starting work at 3am so he can be gone by 11am? How is it possible this didn't make the gossip rounds of the office and when I say that what I mean is OMG THEY COULD'VE DONE AN ENTIRE EPISODE OF MICHAEL SCOTT MAKING FUN OF JIM!! ugh!! 😡 😡 😡 😡