NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Cincinnati
Tennessee
Las Vegas
Atlanta
Carolina
Not a whole lot to say this week. I didn’t catch a minute of any of the games.
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
Your loser update: week 2, 2022.
Tuesday, September 20th, 2022Firings watch.
Monday, September 19th, 2022Herm Edwards out as football coach at Arizona State.
He was 20-26 overall (about five years) and 1-2 so far this season. AZ State lost 30-21 at home to Eastern Michigan, who was playing their backup quarterback.
The bigger issue, though, seems to be that AZ State is under a major NCAA investigation.
That investigation is still ongoing.
Sun’s up!
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022Mike the Musicologist asked for a ruling on this one: which, frankly, I wasn’t even aware of until he asked, because I’d been busy with Godard and work and stuff.
The ruling here is: no, this does not count as a firing. Generally, I consider a defined length suspension to not be a firing by itself. If someone gets a one-year suspension and the team then announces they’re letting the guy go, that’s probably a firing. An “indefinite” suspension to me, counts as a firing. But in this case: not a firing, but still newsworthy.
The NBA statement said the firm’s investigation concluded that Sarver “engaged in conduct that clearly violated common workplace standards, as reflected in team and League rules and policies. This conduct included the use of racially insensitive language; unequal treatment of female employees; sex-related statements and conduct; and harsh treatment of employees that on occasion constituted bullying.”
Among the key findings:
• Sarver, on at least five occasions during his tenure with the Suns/Mercury organization, repeated the N-word when recounting the statements of others.
• Sarver engaged in instances of inequitable conduct toward female employees, made many sex-related comments in the workplace, made inappropriate comments about the physical appearance of female employees and other women, and on several occasions engaged in inappropriate physical conduct toward male employees.
• Sarver engaged in demeaning and harsh treatment of employees, including by yelling and cursing at them.
More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network:
Obit watch: September 13, 2022.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022An era has ended. Jean-Luc Godard has died at 91: per his legal advisor, he chose assisted suicide in a Swiss clinic due to “multiple disabling pathologies”. Alt link. THR. Variety.
As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
Although “Breathless” was not the first New Wave film (both Mr. Chabrol’s 1958 “Beau Serge” and Mr. Truffaut’s 1959 “400 Blows” preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Mr. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.
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In 2010, Mr. Godard, long at odds with Hollywood, was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, but not without controversy. The award brought into focus long-simmering accusations that Mr. Godard held antisemitic views. He did not attend the ceremony at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed the honor, and when an interviewer afterward asked him what the award meant to him, he was blunt.
“Nothing,” he said. “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”
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When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Mr. Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.
He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with “Paris Belongs to Us.”
“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.
After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and, in 1952, landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Mr. Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.
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As the 1960s unfolded, Mr. Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace, turning out sketches for compilation films — including “RoGoPaG” (1963) and “Paris vu Par ” (1965) — alongside features like “Band of Outsiders” (1964), “Une Femme Mariée” (1964), “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Masculin Féminin” (1966).
In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard plucked a character from the French popular cinema, the private detective and secret agent Lemmy Caution, along with the expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine, who had played Caution (or variations on the character) in many films, and dropped him down in a dystopian future ruled by a giant computer.
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As he grew older, Mr. Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarreled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the New Wave directors. He was especially scathing toward Steven Spielberg. In the 2001 film “In Praise of Love,” he portrays Spielberg representatives trying to buy the film rights to the memories of a Jewish couple who fought in the French Resistance. Commenting on the film’s sourness, the Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2002 that it “completes Mr. Godard’s journey from one of the cinema’s great radicals to one of its crankiest reactionaries.”
Mr. Godard’s personality was as difficult to warm to as many of his films were. Biographers filled paged after page with details of his feuds and schisms. He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. When a talk show interviewer reunited Mr. Godard and Ms. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard’s indifferent response to a question about their romance caused Ms. Karina to leave the set.
This goes unmentioned in the obits, but I have to bring it up: “Made In U.S.A.”, about which I have written before. In brief: Goddard adapting a Westlake Parker novel, except he changed it around considerably and didn’t actually pay Westlake, leading to legal action. Pay the writer, you clown!
Lance Mackey. He won the Iditarod four times.
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But after his string of wins, he was burdened by personal problems, health scares and drug issues that prevented him from ever again reaching the top of the sport.
The treatment for his throat cancer cost him his saliva glands and ultimately disintegrated his teeth. He was then diagnosed with Raynaud’s syndrome, which limits circulation to the hands and feet and is exacerbated by the cold weather that every musher must contend with in the wilds of Alaska.
In the 2015 race, he couldn’t manipulate his fingers to do simple tasks, like putting bootees on his dogs’ paws to protect them from the snow, ice and cold. His brother and fellow competitor Jason Mackey agreed to stay with him at the back of the pack to help him care for the dogs.
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Mackey and his wife divorced after splitting up in 2011. She had earlier had three children who Mackey embraced as his own, Outside reported. During Mackey’s last Iditarod, in 2020, he raced with his mother’s ashes. He was later disqualified after testing positive for methamphetamine, and he entered rehab on the East Coast.
Months after the 2020 race finished, his partner, Jenne Smith, died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. They had two children.
He was 52. Cancer got him.
Javier Marías, prominent Spanish novelist. I’d never heard of the guy, though his name got mentioned a lot as a Nobel Prize candidate. But he sounds like someone I would have enjoyed drinking with.
Mr. Marías occupied a reputational perch in Spanish culture that would be almost inconceivable for an American author. His novels were greeted like blockbuster summer films, he received practically every prize available to a Spanish writer, and he was regularly considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the few awards to elude his grasp. Most critics considered him the greatest living Spanish writer; some said the greatest since Miguel de Cervantes.
He was more than just a famous novelist. Mr. Marías wrote a widely read weekly column in El País, Spain’s leading newspaper, where he set down his thoughts on everything from bike lanes (he hated them) to the Spanish government (which he also detested, regardless of the party in power).
He cultivated a public image as a curmudgeon, but in person he was generous and witty, inviting interviewers for long conversations in his dimly lit study, his fingers tweezering an ever-present cigarette. (One column he wrote in 2006, for The New York Times, castigated Madrid’s antismoking laws as “far more befitting of Franco than a democracy.”)
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He wore his fame lightly, and joked that such comparisons said less about his talents than they did about a general decline in literary achievement. When “The Infatuations” won the state-run National Novel Prize, one of Spain’s highest literary awards, he rejected the $20,000 in prize money, saying he did not want to be indebted to a government of any kind.
He did maintain one such relationship, though: In 1997 he became king of Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. The fictional Kingdom of Redonda is something of a running in-joke among European artists, who occupy the throne and make up most of its peerage. After his predecessor, the author Jon Wynne-Tyson, abdicated in his favor, Mr. Marías took the royal name Xavier I.
Like most modern monarchs, his role was largely ceremonial, his primary duty being to dispense noble titles to other artistic worthies — he named the director Pedro Almodóvar the Duke of Trémula and Mr. Ashbery the Duke of Convexo.
As of press time, a successor to King Xavier I had not been named, though several pretenders claim the throne as theirs.
Your loser update: week 1, 2022.
Tuesday, September 13th, 2022NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
New England
Jets
Cincinnati
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Denver
Las Vegas
Dallas
Detroit
Green Bay
Atlanta
Carolina
San Francisco
Arizona
Rams
I happened to be out at lunch with my mother on Sunday, sitting directly across from a TV playing the Houston-Indianapolis game. When we sat down, it was 20-3 Houston and the Texas seemed to be playing well. When we got up to leave, it was 20-6 and Indy was in scoring position after a Houston fumble.
Houston teams will always disappoint you.
Frost bitten.
Monday, September 12th, 2022We’re only two (or three, depending on schedules) games into the college football season, and we already have our first firing. (As far as I know: at least this is the first major school firing.)
Scott Frost out at Nebraska. Rather unceremoniously: they fired him now, three games in, rather than waiting until October 1st. On the first, his buyout amount would have been halved.
Frost was pretty well regarded: as a quarterback, he led Nebraska to the national championship in 1997. Nebraska hasn’t won a championship since. As a coach, he led Central Florida to a 13-0 season in 2017.
Then he came to Nebraska. His record in four and a quarter seasons was 16-31, “worse than any of the previous four Husker head coaches who had been fired this century”. His record in “one-score” games was 5-22.
The final straw seems to have been Saturday’s game against Georgia Southern, a cupcake team that Nebraska paid $1.423 million to play in Lincoln. Nebraska lost 45-42, at home, after being a a three touchdown favorite. They’re now 1-2 this season.
Norts spews.
Friday, September 9th, 2022Stolen by me from my beloved and indulgent aunt:
Edited to add: I went through this list of Cleveland Browns starting quarterbacks and tried to come up with a count. I may be off, but I didn’t come up with 59.
I came up with 64.
Obit watch: September 8, 2022.
Thursday, September 8th, 2022I started preparing the obit watch this morning, before things happened. Mike the Musicologist sent this over:
kinda sucks to be Bernard Shaw today#RIPBernardShaw
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) September 8, 2022
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s passing…on November 22, 1963.
Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor.
Shaw was CNN’s first chief anchor and was with the network when it launched on June 1, 1980. He retired from CNN after more than 20 years on February 28, 2001.
During his storied career, Shaw reported on some of the biggest stories of that time — including the student revolt in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, the First Gulf war live from Baghdad in 1991, and the 2000 presidential election.
NYT.
Anne Garrels, NPR correspondent.
As much as Anne Garrels loved Russia, she is probably best known for her reporting during the 2003 Iraq war. She was one of a handful of foreign reporters who remained in Bagdhad as the war began. As she told Susan Stamberg, she used a satellite phone for her reports and went to great lengths to conceal it from Iraqi authorities.
“And then I decided it would be very smart if I broadcast naked, so if that, god forbid, the secret police were coming through the rooms, that would give me maybe five minutes to answer the phone, pretend I’d been asleep and sort of go ‘I don’t have any clothes on!’ And maybe it would maybe give me five seconds to hide the phone,” she said.
NYT:
Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq war. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 American correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad…
Once she was home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She told of subsisting on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights, bathing by gathering water in huge trash cans, and powering her equipment by attaching jumper cables to a car battery, which she lugged up to her hotel room every night.
She was 71. Lung cancer got her.
Don Gehrmann. Hadn’t heard of him before, but he had an interesting story. He was a runner. In the “1950 Wanamaker Mile”, he ran the race in four minutes and 9.3 seconds.
It took him 314 days to win the race.
In the 1950 Wanamaker Mile, on Jan. 28, Gehrmann seemed to catch Fred Wilt at the tape, or did he? Both first-place judges said Wilt had won. Both second-place judges said Wilt had finished second. The finish-line picture from the phototimer was inadvertently blocked by a judge. And so it was left to the chief judge, Asa Bushnell, who was at the finish line, to make the call. He declared Gehrmann the winner, with a time of 4 minutes, 9.3. seconds.
But that did not settle the matter. Wilt, an F.B.I. agent when not competing and a future inductee of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, protested, and 13 days later the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s registration committee, reversing Bushnell, declared him the winner.
Then Gehrmann protested that decision, and the matter carried over almost a year later to the A.A.U.’s national convention in Washington. By a vote of 314 to 108 — 314 days after the race — that ruling body’s board of governors upheld the chief judge’s decision and declared Gehrmann, forevermore, the victor.
Some were skeptical. As Howard Schmertz, the Millrose Games’ assistant meet director in 1950, told The New York Times in 2011, “The final decision was made by maybe a dozen people who saw the race and a few hundred who didn’t.”
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CleCon!
Tuesday, September 6th, 2022That’s Cleveland content, for my peeps in Ohio.
Daniel Stashower (The Beautiful Cigar Girl) has a new book out: American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper, about the Cleveland Torso Murders.
He also has a good piece up at CrimeReads tied to the book and his family history in Cleveland. I had no idea he was a good Cleveland boy.
I’m probably going to wait to buy this one, but that has nothing to do with Mr. Stashower, and more to do with the fact that I’ve read a fair amount about Eliot Ness and the hunt for the torso murderer. That includes a good write-up in Bill James’s Popular Crime and (I think) the original version of In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders.
On the lighter side, Field of Schemes has a good piece up on the quest for a new Browns stadium:
As I’ve said before, FoS runs a little left for my taste, but the one thing we agree on is opposition to giving money to sports teams.
(For the record, my Cleveland relatives who are sports fans informed me that they have given up on the Browns this year, as they are completely disgusted with their handling of the Watson debacle. I think this also means I can make jokes about the Browns without feeling guilty.)
This is stretching the definition of “Cleveland content” a little bit: Cedar Point is about an hour from Cleveland, but that’s close enough that a good number of Clevelanders go there. Anyway, Cedar Point is shutting down the Top Thrill Dragster coaster.
The Top Thrill Dragster gained fame for reaching speeds of 120 mph in just 3.8 seconds…
At the time it opened in 2003, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. But it was later eclipsed by the Kingda Ka ride at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.
The coaster had been closed since last August, after a woman was badly injured. Top Thrill Dragster entry on Wikipedia.
Obit watch: September 2, 2022.
Friday, September 2nd, 2022Earnie Shavers, boxer.
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Lauded by his opponents for his overwhelming power, Shavers fought in two heavyweight title fights, suffering defeats in each. In 1977, he lost to Muhammad Ali for the WBA and WBC belts at Madison Square Garden via unanimous decision, but earned the GOAT’s praise after the bout.
“Earnie hit me so hard, it shook my kinfolk in Africa,” Ali said after the fight.
I am seeing reports that Frank Drake, noted astronomer (famous for the Drake Equation) has died, but I don’t have a reliable source to link to.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author. (Nickel and Dimed.)
Loser update update.
Friday, September 2nd, 2022The NFL regular season begins Thursday, September 8th.
The loser update will return on Tuesday, September 13th (since we have to wait for the results of the Monday night game).
In honor of great and good friend of the blog, pigpen51, we promise that we will try to avoid Detroit Lions jokes as much as possible this year.
In honor of great and good friend of the blog, Manhattan Infidel (who recently returned to blogging), we promise that we will try to avoid New York Football Giants jokes as much as possible this year.
The Agony of…something or other.
Wednesday, August 24th, 2022It isn’t exactly defeat. This makes falling off the end of a ski jump look tame.
By way of a comment on Reddit’s “Hobby Drama” sub, I learned that there is such a thing as the International Tank Biathlon World Championship. The 9th one of those is either wrapped up or just wrapping up. Yes, it did go on: it was not called on account of WAR, though the page linked above seems to be confused about whether this is the 2022 or 2021 edition.
But wait, there’s more! We have a Twitter thread! With video! And commentary!
All of the group races at the tank biathlon at the army games have now finished, so here’s a thread of all the best videos from this years races. Starting with the Venezuelan commanders reaction to his crew missing all their targets with the main gun. pic.twitter.com/z335R3y6lG
— CNW (@ConflictsW) August 23, 2022
Two highlights. Number one is a clip from “Fast 12: Tank Drift”:
The Armenian tank crew almost flipping over their tank after losing control whilst taking a corner at high speed pic.twitter.com/LFjsDk2CIC
— CNW (@ConflictsW) August 23, 2022
Number two: everything is better with music.
Here you go buddy! pic.twitter.com/Eeq79PfbcD
— Robert Krom 💻🛩🔭 (@maskedfly) August 23, 2022
And this goes out to the Saturday Night Movie Group:
Obit watch: August 24, 2022.
Wednesday, August 24th, 2022Len Dawson, one of the greats. NYT.
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In 1987, Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just 20 miles from his childhood home of Alliance, Ohio. Dawson, inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1979, also was selected 1972 NFL Man of the Year, an award that honors a player’s contributions both on the field and in the community.
Dawson’s work as a broadcaster was recognized in 2012, when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 25 years after he was enshrined as a player. Dawson, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf and John Madden are the only members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also received the Rozelle Award, which recognizes “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.”
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More important to Dawson was the contribution he and the Chiefs played in Kansas City, a town searching for its major-league identity.
“The games themselves don’t mean that much,” he said. “You tend to forget the details. But our success was important to Kansas City. I like to think our football team played a part in changing the minds of people about Kansas City. That is the most significant thing to me.”
Tim Page, Vietnam war photographer. (Alt link.)
A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war — and was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his 1977 book “Dispatches,” called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam, who “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”
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He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Issued in 1997 and co-authored by his fellow photographer Horst Faas, it was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was put on permanent display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (affiliate link to used copies on Amazon). I’ve mentioned it before, but I think this is a great book.
His closest encounter with death came in April 1969 when he stepped out of a helicopter to help offload wounded soldiers and was hit with shrapnel when a soldier near him stepped on a mine.
He was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the United States, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work.
During this time, in an event that consumed much of his later life, two fellow photographers headed on motorcycles down an empty road in Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the following decades, Mr. Page made repeated forays into the Cambodian countryside in a futile search for the remains of the two men, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.
This goes unmentioned in the obit, and isn’t strictly relevant, but I find it an interesting historical footnote: Sean Flynn was Errol Flynn’s son (by his first wife, Lili Damita). To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone have never been found: “In 1984, Flynn’s mother had him declared dead in absentia.”
Personal indulgence: Doris Emily Bedford Gerlat. She was the mother of my beloved and indulgent Uncle Allan (who is married to my beloved and indulgent Aunt Cheryl: the two of them are responsible for the Major Award among other things).
Obit watch: August 23, 2022.
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022Gary Gaines, former football coach at Odessa Permian.
His record from 1986-89 was 47-6-1.
Gaines led Permian to the fifth of the program’s six state championships with a perfect season in 1989, then left to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech.
Yes, this is the coach from “Friday Night Lights”, the book (affiliate link) and movie (ditto).
“I just can’t find the words to pay respects,” Ron King, a former Permian assistant, told the Odessa American. “It’s a big loss for the coaching profession. There are a lot of coaches he took under his wing and mentored.”
Gaines, who was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 2004 movie, said he never read the book and felt betrayed by Bissinger after the author spent the entire 1988 season with the team.
Vincent Gil, Australian actor. Credits include “Chopper Squad”, “Riptide” (the 1969 series), “Cop Shop”, “A Cry in the Dark”, and “Nightrider” in the first “Mad Max” movie. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Obit watch: August 22, 2022.
Monday, August 22nd, 2022Virginia Patton, actress. She had a short career: most notably, she was apparently the last surviving adult member of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” cast. (Karolyn Grimes, who played “Zuzu”, is still alive, as is Jimmy Hawkins, who played “Tommy”.)
Josephine Tewson. She did a lot of British TV, some of which made it to PBS here. Most notably to my people, she was “Elizabeth”, the neighbor of “Hyacinth Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”.
By way of Lawrence: Alexi Panshin, SF author.
Tom Weiskopf, noted golfer.