Notes

Mike Ditka, RIP

Mike Ditka died today at 86, his family announced. No cause was given.

His football résumé would carry anyone. He was the first tight end in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and he coached the 1985 Bears, who went 15-1 and crushed New England 46-10 in Super Bowl XX. It’s still the franchise’s only Super Bowl title.

The personality was even bigger. Ditka fought openly with his own quarterback, Jim McMahon, and his own defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan. Then he turned himself into a cottage industry: restaurants, commercials, Halloween costumes, some acting and, of course, the famous SNL sketch.

Defector’s Ray Ratto argues that no sports figure ever fused with a city the way Ditka did with Chicago. The Bears traded him as a player and fired him as a coach, and he came back anyway. In Ratto’s words, he “wore his town like a sweater vest.”

JumpStar

My ex-wife taught me how to play Chinese Checkers, and we used to play quite a bit. I have a nice marble gameboard set, but I don’t play the game very often anymore.

Maybe that’s about to change.

JumpStar is the world’s strongest Chinese Checkers AI engine. Designed to emulate AlphaGo and Stockfish, but for Chinese Checkers.

You can play it online or download an iOS app.

How to Stop Being Outraged

JA Westenberg:

If you spend 45 minutes a day angry at strangers online, you’ll give them about 270 hours this year. That’s nearly seven full 40-hour work weeks, handed to people you’ll never meet, about events you can’t change.

I used to spend at least that. For about two years, I woke up, grabbed my phone, and read something that made me furious. By 7:30 I had posted a reply. By lunch I had checked the replies a dozen times. I would spiral, doomscroll, research, and rage, and through it all, I told myself I cared.

…And then I read a study that made me feel utterly ridiculous.

I really like her 14-Day Outrage Fast.

Worse

Justine Calma: Trump finalizes rule to make cars less fuel efficient

The US Department of Transportation finalized its plans today to weaken fuel efficiency standards, calling it “among the largest deregulatory actions under the second Trump Administration.”

Republicans don’t care about you. They care about corporations and shareholders making money. They care about their stock portfolios. Gas is too high? Tough shit. Groceries super expensive? Eat more ramen.

Stop voting for these people.

Between

It’s somewhere between autumn and Indian Summer here. Soon, I’ll stop wearing nice shorts to work and switch to jeans and golf pants. The light jacket is next.

As always, by Halloween I will miss the passing of summer. It’s a mental shift, but a good one. I’m thinking about quarter-zips, chili and soups, and stacking the print books and magazines to curl up with in the evenings.

I need a wind-down drink that isn’t alcoholic. I wonder if we have any Chamomile tea in the house?

New Music

A couple of albums dropped that I think everyone should listen to because I think they’re pretty amazing.

The first is Introverse by Basement Alchemy. I reviewed it back in March when I purchased an advance copy from Shai Pelled himself.

If you like indie rock with a 90s flair but a modern sound, this is for you.

The second is Dancing While the World is Ending by Stanley Simmons. It’s the sons of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS coming together to put together a traditional rock and roll album.

Their influences are strong in each song. A couple of tracks have a strong Fleetwood Mac vibe. A couple of others sound like Tom Petty. The title track riffs on “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” so hard. “Starve the Beast” could be a B-Side from The Black Crowes.

Like Wolfgang Van Halen’s music not really sounding like Van Halen, Evan Stanley and Nick Simmons don’t sound like KISS. And that’s a good thing.

John Torra and Quiet Riot

This weirdly made me happy.

I had heard that Quiet Riot held open auditions to be their new lead singer. One of the auditions actually went viral. John Torra just nailed it. He sounded exactly like Kevin DuBrow.

The band picked him, and his first show was just the other day. Quickly, I found the clip of him singing “Cum On Feel the Noise” and “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” and it was phenomenal.

Sure, he kinda looks like Meatloaf singing Quiet Riot, but that voice is awesome.

UPDATE: The full show just dropped.

Jack Smith Did Not Conspire Against Donald Trump While Watching Steph Curry Score 60 Points In An Overtime Loss To The Hawks

David Roth, writing at Defector, absolutely nails this moment in time.

The most salient part of the accusation that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt lodged against former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a Senate hearing on Tuesday is that it was wrong. It was ecstatically and grandiosely wrong, and obviously wrong in ways that even a rudimentary blog-level fact check would have caught. It was wrong in ways that would only be possible at this particular low ebb in American political and broader executive function—based on unverified and unvetted information given only to Republican Senators by the Department of Justice, too-hastily put to oafish misuse by well-credentialed chumps of roughly equal laziness and ambition in the pursuit of a spiteful but otherwise opaque end.

In that sense, it is extremely familiar. If it hadn't ended with Schmitt dangling upside down and blustering like the previously undiscovered suburban version of Yosemite Sam after becoming ensnared in his own malfunctioning perjury trap, it might not even have been news at all. In absolute terms, it was as stupid as more or less anything that's happened on the floor of the United States Senate in a century or so, a half-assed 16x-speed gloss on McCarthyism from people who do not really know what that or anything else was, and whose attention spans have left them incapable of parsing even your wordier memes. In relative terms, this is just what our government is like much of the time.

It is not difficult to see what Schmitt was trying to do, and it is extremely easy to see how and why he and his staff of pale and chittering Renfields screwed it up. That failure is grounded in a tragicomic lack of Ball Knowledge, but also in either a more overtly comic inattention to detail, an aversion to even light investigative work, or both. Schmitt et al went through the DOJ's dump of Smith's text messages and believed they had found evidence of him secretly attending an Atlanta Hawks home game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 3, 2024. Accusing someone of attending a Hawks game is rude on the merits, but neither libelous nor scandalous in its own right; why Schmitt believed this was newsworthy, let alone a suitably bouncy springboard to soft-launch his own Vice Presidential ambitions, is something else entirely.

I love reading Roth more than almost any writer when describing the political environment we are in currently, but it’s important to remember this continues to be utterly exhausting. These people all just suck so much. In the real world, all of these people would be fired on the spot for incompetence.

Timelines

If the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 is what broke the world as we know it, (which has long been my theory) would the White Sox winning it reverse it all?

Got to Choose

I learned recently that Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has been the number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 for 24 weeks. It doesn’t surprise me because I hear this song every damn day.

To be fair, it is a conventionally written country song with a conventionally normal voice in Langley. There’s the barest hint of twang. There is slide guitar in it. It fits in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. It has just enough pop sensibilities to cross over, which is why I hear it every day.

For the longest time, I had no idea what she even looked like.

There is absolutely nothing cutting-edge or, frankly, musically interesting about this song. It is a well-crafted Nashville song. It has a relatable story, which I guess helped it break out of the country demo.

Personally, I liked it the first 100 or so times I heard it, but now it is so overplayed that I have an irrational tick every time I hear that opening guitar riff.