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2024-10-05 04:31:33
We have enjoyed multiple trips to malls together in the past, and recently hit the Wildwood boardwalk for a T-shirt report; we believe our work has built bridges between the Mets and Phillies fans communities, or at least demonstrated that members of both groups can get pizza and walk around together for a little while without trying to harm each other. And we believe, too, that we can fit a chat about this topic into that format, because baseball is like a mall, in that baseball stadiums also have escalators.
2024-10-05 02:22:27
On Thursday night, ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke some surprising news: The 65-year-old Francona will manage again, in Ohio but not with the Guardians.
2024-10-05 01:23:49
Do you find yourself involuntarily salivating for Twin Snakes or Starmix? Are you standing tippy-toe for a handful of Sour Patch Watermelons? Is there a nonstop conveyer belt of tart treats going down your gullet? There is another way. I want to open a muscadine clinic for all the Haribo loyalists in the world. Nature's gummy candy could fill the void as summer turns to fall.
The muscadine is a grape, but not the kind that populates fruit salads and Ziploc baggies. Those are mushy, easily yielding to the teeth, tossed into the mouth and eaten whole. Instead, the muscadine is an imposing orb that forces the eater to meditate upon its structure. Its skin might be a dull green with a purplish blush, or a wine-dark purple with a pinkish blush; it might have a dusty metallic sheen. It might be rough and speckled on the surface, a little leathery, and strangely taut. If that doesn't sound like a pleasant bite of fruit, that's fine—you won't actually be eating that part. Think of the muscadine as an individually packaged treat.
2024-10-05 00:34:20
For all things that made Thursday such a gravy-balloon fight—Pete Alonso’s heroics, Terry Francona’s refusal to stay retired, the one person who didn't vote for Caitlin Clark as WNBA Rookie of the Year and their savvy choice to stay anonymous, Antonio Pierce’s suspension in exile by the NCAA—nothing beat this:
2024-10-05 00:09:21
It is fall, and along with football, sweaters, and pumpkin spice latte memes, this time of year is reserved for marathon film screenings at the New York Film Festival. It's a pivotal period in which the best movies expected to arrive just before the year's Oscar cutoff get an early screening. This year's edition has amassed a roster of greatly hyped and neat surprise movies from all over the world. Some of these movies, like the sure-to-be favorite of the extremely online Anora, the masterful Nickel Boys, Luca Guadagnino's ambitious William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer, and David Cronenberg's latest The Shrouds, deserve their own blogs as the wider public gets to see them. In the meantime, here are a collection of movies I enjoyed and wanted to say a little something about.
2024-10-04 22:04:45
David Foster Wallace had a thing for boredom. He had such a thing for it that he turned it into a kind of last legacy. According to a lengthy (and pretty great) piece in The New Yorker by D.T. Max published a year after Wallace died by suicide in 2008, he left behind a third of his final novel, The Pale King, for which he had spent countless hours researching boredom. A typed note he also left behind laid out the book’s central intention: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
This interest of Wallace’s has been closely connected to mindfulness, but the two things are a little different. Mindfulness is an awareness of things as they come, it is a kind of riding out, but that’s not exactly bliss you find through it so much as a kind of acceptance—which, to a person in constant distress, can no doubt, relatively speaking, feel like bliss. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find.” I didn’t realize this would be Joker: Folie à Deux.
2024-10-04 21:02:20
On July 8, an all-star team from the Northwest Washington Little League (NWLL) faced off against Mamie Johnson Little League to open the D.C. city championship tournament, the first round in the global annual tournament for ballplayers 12 years old and under that ends with the Little League World Series. The game came to a halt in the middle of the sixth and final inning, when the NWLL first baseman picked up the game ball on his way to his position, prompting the home plate umpire to loudly declare that the first baseman now had to pitch. With NWLL up 6-0 and three outs away from advancing, manager Mike Klisch walked onto the field and spent several minutes conferring with the umpire. The first baseman had already pitched the first four innings before being relieved, so he was likely ineligible to return to the mound. It took a phone call from the ump to Little League headquarters to untangle the rules.
“Is there a 24-hour line to answer questions about rules?” an NWLL mother in the crowd asked as the game resumed.
2024-10-04 04:22:59
On the morning that our former GMG buddy and current bestselling author Jason Schreier joined us to record this week's Distraction, our producer Eric noted that his podcast feed featured three other shows on which Jason was a guest. While Jason's new book—it's called Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, And Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, and comes out next week—will in some sense sell itself due to Schreier's status as a titan in his field and Blizzard's massive following, in another and more literal sense the guy still has to go out there and sell it. All we could do was our part to help, which in this case was talk about the current New York Jets and our varied experiences of the Keith Van Horn Administration with the New Jersey Nets for 12 minutes before turning to Jason's (fascinating) book.
2024-10-04 02:22:16
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, through here. Drew is out this week and Ray Ratto is pinch-hitting, which is to say fouling the franchise.
The NFL and DraftKings/FanDuel have generally been pretty savvy and always been very cynical in their hostile takeover of our brains, but the Amit Patel story reminds that there is always more than one way to bleed a bettor.
2024-10-04 01:45:23
The challenge this week was to make Paul Hollywood's recipe for eight miniature Battenberg cakes, filled with freshly made jam and draped in a tight-fitting marzipan outer coat. We were tasked with completing this technical challenge with no instructions whatsoever, just a list of ingredients. What is a Battenberg, you ask? I have been trying to tell you this the entire time: We don't know.