January 30, 2022
Unexpectedly, improbably the Cincinnati Bengals are going to Super Bowl LVI. I was five years old the last time that happened. I was seven the last time any Cincinnati sports team played for a championship of any kind. I need some time to process this.
I have two weeks to unpack this. Until then, I'll tie it into Sunday Morning by bringing up that Tracy Smith is from the Cincinnati 'burbs and currently based in LA. The Super Bowl is in LA. I don't know when she would moved away or if she's a Bengals fan, but Bengals fans/Sunday Morning recap bloggers are clamoring for Tracy Smith-Joe Burrow interview to hype the game. I know that media rights pretty much prohibit because NBC is carrying the game this year, but crazier things have happened this year - see the above picture.
Heroes & Villains
Please forgive an obsessive tennis fan a few words about the Australian Open.
Halfway through the Świątek/Kanepi quaterfinal, I texted the following to a friend:
Overlooking that Anisimova should have be included in that list of consecutive Americans to go down at the hands of Barty, Ashleigh Barty is the hero Australia deserves. She's 5' 6" and basically served everyone off the court. One could point out that she got through the draw without encountering another top 10 player. I, however, am not going to discount the depth of the women's game currently. Her game is based on pinpoint accuracy on a serve that regularly clocks around 110 mph, a slice backhand, a dominating forehand, and probably the most solid net game on the women's tour. She's too modest to accept the comparison, but ignoring the two handed backhand, she looks remarkably like Roger Federer when she plays. Crazy proclamation: Barty will make the finals of all four slams this year.
The underdog, Danielle Collins, the Danimal, is more than worthy of her own write-up. Another times perhaps.
Before a quick word on the men's final, a brief fashion detour.
Most of the athletic-wear companies that sponsor players release new kits just prior to each slam. Much was made of the prevalence of Nike sponsored players competing against each other in identical kits making matches nigh impossible to follow. It might be a little easier if said kits were not also accompanied by the same white visor and blond ponytails.
Nadal always gets a special kit from Nike (usually pink), but even if an opponent had the same, Rafa would be easily picked out due to thinning hair. Shots from the skycam are not kind to our friend Rafa.
However my fashion hero is Barbora Krejcikova. Here she is at the slams over the last year sans the one that requires the all white outfit:
Maybe Barbora just really likes the kit or maybe Barbora got a little extra-stitious after rising to #3 in the singles rankings over the last year, but let's appreciate the delight that is Barbora Krejcikova. Trendy fashion be damned - her joyful tennis is the fashion.
On the men's side:
I'd be lying if I said I was rooting for Nadal to win 21. I honestly didn't give him a chance to win until the fifth set. Even when when was up a break in the fifth, I wasn't convinced. In fact, when he failed to serve it out at 5-4, I was convinced that Medvedev would end up pulling it out. I still don't think Nadal would have won had the had the temperature and humidity not dropped significantly after the first set when he seemed to be losing roughly five gallons of sweat per minute. He appeared destined to become wet tennis's latest victim.
Why do I root for Medvedev, the Russian McEnroe (in temperament if not playing style)? He has charisma and engages with the crowd, for better or worse. It only adds to the charisma that he is willing to do it on a "wrestling heel" basis - something we've been begging Novak to embrace. It's more fun when the players have personalities and sometimes it's fun to root for the "bad" guy. His histrionics are usually harmless enough, but are problematic on occasion, making it slightly uncomfortable to pull for the gangly Russian when he gets a little personal in his attacks on umpires or mocks other players. But I root for entertainment, which means I root for narrative - at least in the absence of good tennis. If you can get both, it's a bonus.
I could say I root for him because I'm past ready for the era of tennis's Big 3 to come to an end and over the past two years he's come the closest to seriously disrupting men's tennis hegemony at the top. But I'm probably being overly generous with myself by assessing things that way. As a Federer stan, a Medvedev major means that Nadal and Djokovic aren't winning.
Roger Federer is and likely always will be the most popular player for all times. Nadal is a close second. They are both magnanimous and generous in victory.
And I think Medvedev has exposed that personality-wise, they are, in fact, a bit bland. (Her?)
Djokovic is his own category. Ever since he stopped doing goofy impressions of other players in his early twenties, fans at large have famously declined to embrace him. I do think this partly comes down to a combination of the established Federer/Nadal duopoly on goodwill and a general anti-Serbian bias left over from various Balkan conflicts. However, Djokovic, who probably has designs on becoming president of Serbia some day, also suffers a popularity gap because he acts a bit like a politician, with his family playing Fox News style reality spinning hype machines. People pick up on that. He wants to represent rank and file players while also receiving special accommodations. He's a demonstrative chest-thumper on court, but wants to be loved and thus tries to play the humble champion post-match. Fair or not, he seems inauthentic.
With Medvedev, irascible elder of the zoomers, what you see is what you get. We'll tolerate some villainy, faux or real, for the sake of entertainment. Equally important, Medvedev seems to be the only player willing go through the Big 3 instead of just waiting them out and since at least Federer and Nadal are heroes for all time, he seems to implicitly understand that will make him the villain of the piece - at least for now - and he is willing to not run away from that.
The true measure of the greatness of the Big 3 is that they require that you prove it before you take it from them, elevating their game, the games of each other, and the games of others. I wanted to resist calling this final another five set epic - they can't all be five set epics - but it was. In exchange, I'm downgrading the 2017 Australian Open final - a scratchy affair between two all time greats. Entertaining, full of drama, but not an epic.
So in the end, I am happy for Nadal for getting #21. He can continue to be our hero for a little while longer because, honestly, I wouldn't have woken up at 4 AM for a Medvedev/Berrettini final. Tennis will go on without the Big 3. But I'm all for them sticking around if we keep getting matches like that.
The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
1) David Pogue
How this for a click-baity teaser for Pogue's peice:
It's the segment that Glenn Youngkin doesn't want you to watch.
It's very possible that Sunday Morning, for all it's wholesome, gentle nature, lost the last of any conservative viewers it once had with this segment. Which is a shame because this shouldn't be controversial. You know the saying, "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it"? Well if you learn the what without also learning the why and the how, you're not really learning anything except trivia so maybe you can dominate at Jeopardy! but there's not much point to it otherwise. Right wing culture warriors, (i.e. the opposition to social justice warriors), of which Youngkin is a symptom don't want to get rid of just CRT - which they cannot possibly actually understand fully (I don't) because they have never taken a graduate level history course - they want to get rid of anything that could make them feel bad. Oh, right wing snowflakes. So we can't talk about the enslavement and death of millions of Africans that was used to fuel our nascent economy. It might make us feel bad. We can't talk about the Tulsa Race Massacre or various other lynchings, because we might accidentally mention why they happened ascribe responsibility to some party. We also can't talk about how manifest destiny caused mass death of indigenous peoples or dozens of other ugly parts of history.
When you watch Schindler's List, do you feel bad that ten million Jews died in the Holocaust? Yes? Do you feel personally responsible? No? Do you feel it is important to remember it as a way to ensure that similar events do not happen again? And what Bryan Stevenson is doing is different how? For what it's worth, similar things have happened since the Holocaust, so anyone that thinks we've fixed everything or that I'm not the problem, I'm sorry, but we're coming up short somewhere.
As for other aspects of Bryan Stevenson's career, I saw the movie Just Mercy. It's a quality middlebrow film, in the non-pejorative sense. And women seem to find Michael B. Jordan attractive, so I hope Bryan accepts that as flattering to him as well. He's personally helped save 145 lives. The count of lives I've saved, to the best of my knowledge, regrettably remains at 0. Someday I hope to put a point up on that scoreboard.
So yes, call me a naive left wing hippie if you must, but I am against the death penalty. Ignoring the racial iniquity of it (which you really can't), when it comes to matters of life and death, I don't see how you can say a system that gets it right maybe 9 times out of 10 is acceptable.
2) Ted Koppel
Speaking of unreasonable left wing activists, since Pogue decided to dabble in the criminal justice system and racial inequality, Ted Koppel decided to take on Jazz. It's like they swapped bodies or something.
Whenever jazz is brought up, I'm obliged to break out this clip from one of my all time favorite movies, 24 Hour Party People.
But it's quite possible that I've just never listened to good jazz before. Certainly the music of Preservation Hall or Jon Batiste (Yes, I'm a Colbert guy.) is more joy than musical masturbation (sorry, if that offends, I thought it was a good line). Hell, I'm perennially disappointed that the New Orleans Pelicans are terrible because I'd like nothing more than for there to be more halftime clips of Trombone Shorty in my life.
I know I can be a music snob straight out of the early days of Pitchfork, but when I watched Ken Burns's Country Music, I was humming country music songs for weeks. I still have a mental list of favorites from the series that I'd like to revisit some day. I should probably watch Jazz some day. But damn if Ken Burns's series aren't looooooooooong. It's a commitment.
Bill Whitaker applied the Sunday Morning Power Rankings cheat code: reference The Simpsons:
It was a pretty endearing piece though. Bill Whitaker is an architecture buff and the 60 Minutes regular gets to use Sunday Morning as his playground to revisit his artistic hero again (he interviewed Gehry roughly 20 years ago).
Gehry's structures are a marvel to behold. True works of art. I guess if you could lodge a complaint against the work of the world's most famous architect, it's that his buildings stand out too much. It's hard to put a Gehry building in an existing space because it always feel like it needs its own. Do his twisting towers feel out of place when nestled next to more conventional structures? Eye of the beholder I guess. If it were me, every building would be Art Deco, because I want everywhere to look like a potential location for a noir film, so what do I know.
It's also kind sweet how much of his work is a family affair.
In the prepandemic days, Cincinnati had a city wide art festival of sorts called Blink where a large number of of the installations were projection mapping pieces. Although Blink was not specifically mentioned (Binghamton, NY - shout out Mr. Tony - gets the nod for projection mapping capital of the US), I kind of assume that some of the people Serena talked to were involved in some of the installations put on during Blink. It is by far one of the coolest things Cincinnati has ever done as a city, but you know, maybe Joe Burrow is giving Blink a run for its money. Anyway, here's some stuff Blink 2019. Please come back soon. Stupid pandemic.
Please do not throttle the any swans. Even though geese are not swans, leave the geese alone too.
Also, birds, yada yada ya... brought to you by Florida Audubon.
6) Luke Burbank
My god do the restrooms at Buc-ee's look glorious. I don't live near one and the overriding factor in where I stop for gas is almost always price. But wouldn't it be lovely to relieve oneself in style at a Buc-ee's? I also tend to pack food to eat at a rest stop instead of stopping for fast food because this is how I was raised.
Although this past summer, I was driving back home from DC. Running low on gas, I realized there aren't many places to stop on I-68 in western Maryland so I ended up at a Citgo that had a place called The Oak Barrel cafe attached to it. It was mostly clean, but there was a bathroom situation. A Buc-ee's it was not. Other than that, the food was good as were the homemade deserts I left with. I stopped longer than I intended, insisting that I had to "make good time". But I was delighted. Here's the unexpected nice gas station.
Would I stop at Buc-ee's if I drove by one? I like that they pay all employee's at least $15 an hour. I'm trying to cut down on my meat consumption, but I'm still a sucker for BBQ. And fudge. So Buc-ee's would not be healthy for me. I'd also be intimidated by the bigness of it. It's certainly Texas sized and that's not really my style. However a fun giant beaver mascot goes a long way. And, again, my god, the bathrooms.
Verdict: I would stop at a Buc-ee's.
7) Tracy Smith
Update: It's official. Tracy Smith is a Bengals Fan.
For what it's worth, I'm a fan of Kristen Stewart. I've watched more than one movie just because she was in it - although none of them were related to Twilight. Somehow, I did actually watch the first Twilight movie, but it was something of an ordeal, but I was at least distract by another task through most of it. I think I became a fan after watching The Runaways where she played Joan Jett alongside fellow child-to-adult actor Dakota Fanning's Cherie Curie. I thought it was better than the a lot of the reviews said, primarily because of Stewart I think. I did like the music too, and it sort of sent me down a Joan Jett rabbit hole for a few weeks. A lot of it had to do with this particular clip I found on YouTube of a live performance of "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" in Houston. Joan's not a great guitarist or anything and it's a cover of a Gary Glitter song (unfortunate), but she's got a stage presence. She's also very sweaty and knows she's very sweaty.
For some reason, the word "overt" got stuck in my head during the interview. Kristen is overtly Socal, overtly gay. Which got me thinking about Advanced Genius Theory. Kristen isn't a rock music artist, but she's played one on screen and sort of comes off as one. Kristen Stewart, advanced or overt? I don't think either applies, but she's young. I'm sure she'll go on to do a lot of weird stuff.
It was kind of fun to be reminded that Kristen Stewart was the kid in Panic Room alongside Jodie Foster.
8) Hua Hsu
I rarely go to an Asian restaurant of my own volition. I get a little self conscious about ordering at places that serve anything approaching an authentic dish because I will butcher the pronunciation and just saying the number feels like a cop out to me. Also many times, I'm not entirely sure I get of what I'm ordering from the description. I am a little more comfortable ordering at Korean restaurants than say Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Vietnamese because I briefly had a Korean house-mate. I know, it's my loss.
The me of 15 years ago would be familiar with Japanese Breakfast and have a strong opinion I'm sure. But I'm the me of now and I am not and I don't.
Jonathan visits a diner in tornado ravaged western Kentucky that serves up hot comfort food for those that could use some comfort.
I tend to cook most of my own meals, but I could probably stand to find a place that feels like a second home, where I could be regular - if I weren't too socially awkward. You know, a place where everybody knows your name. Not you Applebee's.
10) Faith Salie, Jane Pauley (tie)
I started playing Wordle. It's like a linguistic version of one of my favorite math games, Mastermind. I used to have a copy of that - I bet it's with my parents still. If you understand the math and how to most efficiently extract information, you can get most any Mastermind puzzle in four or five turns. I got Wordle 226 - which I think became sort of infamous - in 3. Yes, I'm bragging. I'll have to try it in hard mode.
No Teichnerizations. Should Jane have been higher? Yes, but it was hard to squeeze her in and she's had a few double duty #1's recently. I still feel a little bad about it.
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