π€― Saw one of these guys crawling around on the dining room table this morning. Had no idea such a creature existed. What a world.
π Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
A shocking look at the inner workings at Boeing from Maureen Tkacic at The American Prospect.
Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor.
What will it take for corporations like this to start putting something–anything! safety! literal lives!–ahead of stock price?
Alone Time
As a kid, we lived out of town and there weren’t really other kids my age in safe walking distance. I had a little sister and we definitely played together a lot, but, like any brother and sister, we needed some time apart and had different interests. As a result, I learned to have a lot of fun by myself. I have vivid memories of tossing a baseball in the air, hitting it as far as I could, then walking after it to hit it back the other direction. The same game worked for throwing a baseball or a football, or for shooting a basketball, or for just walking around and exploring our yard. The common theme for these activities was that I was alone with my thoughts. This inevitably led to various iterations of “narrating” or calling fake play by play for myself. I loved these times and, maybe as a result, I still cherish time alone to think and work through problems or decisions with my inner monologue (or sometimes dialogue) as the only participant.
As a parent, my kids have a much different life. We live in a neighborhood with several other houses very close by with children of a similar age, and they’re all friendly and play well together. A large majority of time outside leads, sooner or later, to group play. I’m super grateful for this. I love our neighborhood. Even though I loved the way I grew up, I’m glad my kids have easy access to friends. They still get some alone time (and sometimes seek it out), but it’s not the default. I’m curious to see how this might affect their individual preferences as they grow and mature, but I think the bottom line, and my ultimate point, is that I don’t think there’s necessarily a “better” way of growing up. I wouldn’t trade my solitary playing as a kid for anything. I’ll bet the house that my kids, when reflecting back thirty years from now, will feel the same about the group play made possible by impromptu neighborhood meetups.
Finished reading: _A Creature Wanting Form_ by Luke O'Neil π
βοΈβοΈβοΈβοΈ Bookshop
Pretty creepy honestly how faithfully these stories reflect some of my own anxieties, particularly around the 2020 pandemic and other kind of contemporary tragedies. I suppose that’s probably true for a lot of folks around a certain age who grew up a certain way and live a certain kind of life now. These took me a long time to get through, but not due to any fault or flaw in the writing–it was all just kind of a lot so I needed to keep switching back to something else. As stories, they’re not what I would call “propulsive” but they certainly do capture a certain not so pleasant vibe extremely well. Some favorite passages below. ο»Ώ
I can’t believe all these animals we have are real and we just take it for granted I said before drinking half of my glass. Growing up our parents tell us there’s no such thing as monsters so we’ll go to sleep but a bear is a monster and a moose is a monster and a bird is a monster too. Every bird in the world would rip your head off if it were somewhat larger and you were somewhat slower.
Imagine if whales didn’t exist and then one showed up out of nowhere? We’d never stop talking about it Joe said. We would never get over it.
It’s probably no coincidence that the most famous novel ever written was about how fucked up a guy got after knowing about one particularly angry whale.
It’s just that we get used to the things that are scary Joe said. The real action is in novelty.
A day is so long but a life is very short.
As they float further and further away from the original dive spot they bicker and blame one another and grasp for something different they could have done that would have sared them from this ordeal.
As if logic is a shield against chaos.
Eventually the realization that there is no order to things and that two people can in fact be left behind like this dawns on them.
It’s never a good sign when your parents ask you if you remember so and so because that dude is fucked.
Then I was thinking about how the video for “Criminal” which came out in 1997 was my version of Puberty 2. Puberty 1 is just regular puberty that we’ve all heard of but Puberty 2 is when your brain unlocks what kind of pervert you’re going to turn into.
Finished reading: Something in the Water by Luke O’Neil π
Finished reading: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut π
Really enjoyed Wonka with the kids. πΏπ½οΈπ₯
Good year for our cherry blossoms
Thanks, sign!
Finally watched Oppenheimer. Lived up to the hype! π₯πΏπ¬
Finished the Hulu series Death and Other Details tonight. Can’t say I thought it was good, but it was certainly a wild ride. Plus, Mandy Patinkin. πΊ
Now Playing: Liam Gallagher & John Squire π΅
The real action is in novelty π π¬
I can’t believe all these animals we have are real and we just take it for granted I said before drinking half of my glass. Growing up our parents tell us there’s no such thing as monsters so we’ll go to sleep but a bear is a monster and a moose is a monster and a bird is a monster too. Every bird in the world would rip your head off if it were somewhat larger and you were somewhat slower.
Imagine if whales didn’t exist and then one showed up out of nowhere? We’d never stop talking about it Joe said. We would never get over it.
It’s probably no coincidence that the most famous novel ever written was about how fucked up a guy got after knowing about one particularly angry whale.
It’s just that we get used to the things that are scary Joe said. The real action is in novelty.β
β Luke O’Neil, “Kingston Street” from A Creature Wanting Form
Finished Reading [The Overstory](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-overstory-richard-powers/17315941) by Richard Powers π
Loved the scope of this and its overall kind of aura. But, man, the back third really dragged ass. Satisfying conclusion and it’s the kind of book that has forever changed my brain in good ways. Really wish I could read The Secret Forest β but maybe The Hidden Life of Trees will suffice.
It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out.
On feeling the divine in a work of art
Luke O’Neil has a way of putting his finger right on that thing about music or literature or whatever that’s so hard to pin down for so many of us. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I’ve been back into reading so much more and have remembered again the way that the right song or album can completely turn a bad day good. From his newsletter today:
This probably applies to all of you – people in possession of human souls who have at least on occasion felt the divine in a work of art – but everything I write myself and everything I love to read or listen to or watch has one bedrock foundation to it which is this:
Oh my god I am alive right now and you are alive right now and someday we will not be but for the duration of this we are both stupidly and beautifully alive.
Please bear witness to my humanity and take some small portion of it for yourself.
Wonderland Tea Party with the little princess. She was slightly intimidated by Alice and the Mad Hatter who were there to take photos; she was not intimidated by the dance floor. πππ
Finished reading: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler π
And maybe something in every single person is broken, and we just keep moving forward as if it were all normalβall of itβlike insects with their heads torn off who keep crawling toward a shadow to hide in. Until that thing that has already destroyed us catches up with us, and we stop moving.
I’ve been on a music nostalgia kick lately. A few weeks ago, we were out with the kids and, for some reason, the phrase “American Girls” worked its way into the conversation and I, of course, immediately needed to listen to the song of that name by a band named “HOMIE1”. Turns out, this song is not part of the available music on any of the three major streaming services. I know I had this song as part of my old iCloud Music Library uploaded via the old iTunes Match service at some point (my collection of random Weezer-adjacent B-sides was, for a few years from like 1999 through 2002 or so, immaculate), but it wasn’t showing up in my library of songs on Apple Music either. Needless to say, it became my personal mission to find and rip a copy of the Meet the Deedles: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack that included the only officially recorded version of this song. Luckily for me, a Goodwill in Racine, Wisc., had a copy of the CD for sale for less than three bucks, shipped, on eBay. It arrived and I’ve since ripped and uploaded it to my Apple Music library and my “American Girls and Boys” playlist is now complete.
Relatedly, sometime in the days between the inciting incident mentioned above and the arrival of my eBay purchase, another song from my Apple Music library uploads came on while I was driving around with my 3-year-old daughter. This song, as far as my records indicate, is named “Hello” by a band I have listed as Planet Janet. My daughter LOVES this song and we’ve listened to it probably six thousand times in the weeks since. I also love this song and remember downloading it from a Weezer message board some time around the turn of the century – it’s filed next to “Dr. Frank Was Right” by The Benjamins in my brain which leads me to believe I was introduced to both of these songs around the same time and probably had them on a cool mix CD together and that song is from an album that came out in 2001. Anyway, this is the only song that I remember ever hearing from this band and I can’t remember if the reason the song was shared on this message board was because they opened for Weezer or opened for Ozma or were just a band that one of the other commenters on the message board liked (or maybe even was in) or something. Weezerpedia does not list Planet Janet as a band that ever toured with or performed with Weezer and the rest of my internet searching has turned up absolutely nothing on this band or the song. It’s a little frustrating because it’s seriously a jam and my daughter and I would both love to hear any other songs they ever did. I’m going to transcribe the lyrics here to the best of my ability just so they exist somewhere on the internet.
40,000 ways to say “Hello”
And I forget how to walk - oh nevermind
How do thirty seconds pass and I give up
And figure “This’ll take another week”
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
…
Thirty times a day I’ve looked your way
Tongue-tied I fantasize about what I would say
If you were to waste your breath on me
But then I blink and I’m back suffering through my reality
But another week comes and another day
Another awkward silence trying to find a simple way to say
To say…“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to doAnd maybe I try too hard to make you notice me
So I’ll count my lucky stars and look distracted and sleepy
I’ll bet that Kara Beardsley never had to go to such great lengths
But as her bra size grew her brain seemed to shrink… do do di do do do do do do di do . . .
“Won’t you stop and talk to me?”
Acknowledge my existence
I know I’ve been persistent
But won’t you stop and talk to me
[some words I can’t make out]
And I don’t know what to do
-
HOMIE (which I realized was stylized in call caps through the process described in this post) was a random, one-off (as far as I can tell) side project of three of the guys who were at that time in Weezer (Rivers, Matt and Pat) along with a couple of at-the-time members of Soul Coughing and Cake – a real supergroup for a certain type of music fan. ↩︎
Year in books, 2023 π
Here are the books I finished reading this year.
This was a very good book year for me. Probably the best in a decade or so in terms of both quantity and quality. Here are a few themes and highlights.
- I got back into reading physical books this year and realized that this is my preferred medium. Of the 15 books that I finished in 2023, three were on my Kindle and the rest were all physical hard copies. I did not listen to any audiobooks this year.
- My favorite book I read this year was, without a doubt, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I cannot wait for the follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction, which I’ve already pre-ordered and is scheduled to ship on January 16th. I loved everything about this book.
- I also read several others that I would give a full five-stars to: Heat 2, Demon Copperhead, A Walk in the Woods, and This Census-Taker.
- Every book I finished this year was worth the time. One of the changes to my approach that I’d credit with this “good book year” was a new policy to give up on a book more easily than I’ve done in the past without any guilt. Sometimes, a book just doesn’t click for whatever reason and I think that’s OK. This has been a sticking point at times in the past where I’ve tried to keep making it happen and felt like I couldn’t' move on to something else until I’d finished what I’d started and then wound up reading nothing instead of just moving on. Life’s too short and there are way too many books for that. The one exception to this was Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, which I did not like but read to the end anyway, even though it was also the longest book I read this year. Even though I didn’t like it, it had some really interesting ideas and at least one or two interesting characters that made it worth the slog.
- I read the two Narnia books with my six-year-old son. He really loved them and I loved experiencing them with him. I even enjoyed revisiting these books, despite some negative associations stemming from an undergraduate C. S. Lewis survey course. I expect that we’ll continue exploring this series together this year.
Looking forward to reading even more in 2024. Bring on the weird.
Quotes of the Year, Sports Edition
From Defector’s Ray Ratto’s December 4th article “The 49ers Are Big Dom Now”:
But in whomping the Eagles and briefly incapacitating quarterback Jalen Hurts in to [sic] process, they also invoked the wrath of the Eagles' security chief, Big Dom DiSandro, a a restaurant refrigerator with ears who looks like he gets a royalty check every time someone says, “Philadelphia.”
Also from Ratto, in his “100 Wins Doesn’t Buy What It Used To”:
All playoffs must have a theme, no matter how flimsy–at least until a champion is crowned and everyone involved is promoted to Super Genius (trademark Wile E. Coyote). This postseason has its theme already: Because division winners are dropping like flies, the regular season has been reduced to six months of garbage and the character of baseball is destroyed. . .
The regular season doesn’t matter when you’re looking to define enduring excellence. This year was just its logical extreme–when 404 regular-season victories (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Tampa Bay) translated into one total victory in October. . . The mighty have sucked and the modest have been running the vacuum.
No sport has changed itself in the last decade more than baseball, and it will continue to do so in search of a younger generation that is abandoning sports in general as a viewing vehicle because all sports suck when watched on a phone. Increasingly expanded playoffs are just part of the price that must be paid in search of that dollar that can never be obtained. If this helps, think of the new format as a plunging neckline as established most assuredly by those trollops in Philadelphia. This isn’t the regular season being diminished, it’s just sexing up a game that used to be played in flannel.
One more Ratto, from “All Glory To The Beam":
Your time-honored allegiances are destroyed, and you are now Children of the Incarnate Beam.
I think that last one really captures what I love so much about reading Ray Ratto. No other writer made my laugh as consistently in 2023. It’s just a throwaway line in an intro about the wonderful story that was the Sacramento Kings, but it’s awesome.
Now for some non-Ratto sports quotes.
Many, many excellent quotes in Cody Stavenhagen’s run-down of Jim Leyland stories at The Athletic, published on the eve of Leyland’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Forgive me for quoting extensively, but this was probably my favorite article of the year in terms of the amount sheer joy received from its reading.
The man who met [Kirk] Gibson at the airport was the mustachioed 33-year old manager of the Class A Lakeland Tigers. Almost as soon as Gibson settled into the passenger seat, the manager about half his size starting tearing into him. “Gibson, you’re not s—!” the skipper said, and he was just getting going. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care how much they’re f—- paying you. You’re gonna be at the park at 8 every morning. You’re gonna get to work.”
The guy to call [for Leyland stories], outfielder Andy Van Slyke told [writer David O’Brien], was bench player Gary Varsho. “That was Jim’s voodoo doll,” Van Slyke said. Varsho had stories, all right. The first one he told was of the day he was traded to the Pirates in 1991. He was sitting at his new locker in the clubhouse when Leyland ran out of the manager’s office in his underwear. The coaching staff’s March Madness pool had been decided. “He’s got $20 and $50 bills hanging on his jockstrap,” Varsho told O’Brien. “He’s bouncing around saying, ‘Who won the basketball pool? Who won the pool, Varsh?’ I said, ‘Oh my god, this is our manager.'”
Here’s how Leyland tells the story of the day the Tigers signed him in 1964. Their scout came to the door in Perrysburg. Leyland’s father answered. “Mr. Leyland, we would like to sign your sogn for $1,000,” the scout said. “Sir,” Leyland’s father replied, “we don’t have that kind of money.”
A good Leyland tirade, Brandon Inge once said, could go 10 minutes. “He’d walk down the hallway still yelling, but you could hear his voice fading out down the hall. And then you’d hear him coming back and his voice getting louder. Everybody would go, ‘Sit back down. Here he comes again.'” Ryan Dempster tells a version in which Leyland came and went five times, then said, “I’m going to go into my office and have a whiskey and a cigar. If I come out in this locker room and there’s anybody sitting here when I come out, I’m calling the cops and having you arrested for impersonating a major league f–ing baseball player.”
[Sean] Casey had been traded from the Pirates to the Tigers the previous year. His first day with Detroit, Leyland pulled Casey into his office with assistant coaches Gene Lamont and Lloyd McClendon. Leyland went over some basics, then Lamont gave Casey a crash course on the team’s signs. At one point, Leyland interjected. “If you get on base, I don’t want you looking to third at Gen-o,” he told the slow-footed veteran. “I want you looking in the dugout. I want you to look at me. If I come to the top step of the dugout and we catch eyes, as soon as we catch eyes, if I jump up and never come back down, that means I want you to steal.”
Another of my favorite articles of the year was Drew Magary’s “Now That I Think About It, The Unwritten Rules of Baseball Are Actually Cool”, also at Defector.
I have complained about umps for the majority of my lifetime, to the point where the idea of replacing them with computers genuinely excited me. But sometime this fall, I realized that it’s the stupidity of baseball that makes it fun. I love seeing managers bump chests with umps. I love ejections. I love seeing batters give the home plate ump a dirty look after a bullshit called third strike. I live for the DRAMA.
And you know what? I even like all of the unwritten rules shit, too. That’s right. When I saw Adolis Garcia get beaned by Bryan Abreu in Game 5 of the ALCS, I was fucking riveted. Abreu plunked Garcia for having the temerity to spike his bat–also way cool–after homering off of Justin Verlander in his previous at-bat. Did tempers flare? Buddy, you know they did. Benches cleared. Stocky relievers came pouring out of the bullpens. Everyone got all up in everyone else’s business. I had stood against MLB’s bro code for so long that my opinion on it had become automatic: it was bad. All of the written rules should be written down. No one player should feel slighted because, in his mind and perhaps his alone, some other player lacked proper ethics.
But do I really want, like, a fucking discipline committee to legislate all this shit? The NFL already makes rules for everything. Do I want another sport to be like that? I don’t. We can keep the pitch clock, but otherwise, I’m all for anything that, justified or not, stokes visceral hatred between two teams and encourages frontier justice. I want more fake fights, more real fights, more beanings, more imaginary strike zones, more arguments, and more bases pulled out of the ground and thrown in anger. All of that is fun. All of that is baseball.
This year’s award for “Article Written Specifically to Align with Brett’s Personal Tastes and Interests” goes to Grant Brisbee, Rustin Dodd and Stephen Nesbitt of The Athletic in their August 21 entry entitled “MLB Power Rankings: Mariners, Dodgers see some gains; We make a team-themed ’90s playlist”, which included the following gem from Dodd.
Chicago White Sox
Record: 49-75 Last Power Ranking: 27
Track: “Undone (The Sweater Song)” by Weezer
There’s a history of clothing coming to pieces in Chicago. Not only that, Rivers Cuomo’s lyrics from this classic on Weezer’s debut album feel especially apt: “Oh no, it go, it gone, bye-bye.” In fact, as I type those lyrics, I feel like those lines could be repurposed into the greatest home run call in baseball history.
Let’s set the scene: It’s September in Chicago. Royals are in town for a series on the South Side. Dylan Cease throws a fastball to Bobby Witt Jr., who demolishes it to deep left. “Oh no,” Jason Benetti says, solemnly. “It go. It gone. Bye-bye.”
Steven Goldman at Baseball Prospectus wrote a fantastic article about baseball’s Opening Day with “Opening Day is Your Last Chance”.
As one who has struggled to control his weight for much of his life, I understand the potentiality and the pressure of Opening Day. When I was a child, every summer my parents would load me, my younger sister, and up to three cats into a mid-sized sedan and drive across America for more than a month, arriving home the night before my personal Opening Day, the first day of school–except for those years when something went wrong and we didn’t make it back in time. . .
Opening Day is your last chance. The first day is the last day. Initial impressions are often final impressions, and once your season has begun it’s usually too late.