NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Carolina
Not much more to say, really.
Archive for October, 2023
Your loser update: week 5, 2023.
Sunday, October 8th, 2023Biz news.
Friday, October 6th, 2023I thought this was a mildly interesting business story, mostly because it starts out in one direction and then goes in another.
Molekule Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Molekule made (makes?) air purifiers. I remember a time when they advertised pretty heavily on some of the podcasts I listened to.
The claimed reason for bankruptcy seems to be wanting to get out of their office lease, because San Francisco.
Molekule started a seven-year lease spanning the entirety of the building in February 2019. The monthly base rent began at $209,231 with an annual 3% increase.
The bankruptcy petition alleges that the company abandoned its headquarters in May “out of concern for its employees’ safety” and attempted to negotiate with its landlord to terminate the lease.
“San Francisco’s homeless crisis created a dangerous environment around the SF Headquarters, especially in the area between the SF Headquarters and the nearest public transit stop,” Tyler stated in his declaration.
Except:
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One of the other factors in the company’s bankruptcy listed in its legal filing was a fractured partnership with Aura Smart Air, an Israeli air purifier company.
Aura’s failure to submit source code for a product known as Molekule 360 Hub led to the product’s suspension shortly after its launch and “severely impacted the Debtors’ revenue and growth strategy,” according to the bankruptcy filing.
What gets glossed over in the coverage: Molekule was a scam.
Wirecutter (back in the day when they were decent) called their products “Some of the worst air purifiers we’ve ever tested“. Molekule was forced to withdraw almost all of their advertising claims. Consumer Reports panned it.
How big a scam was it? Big enough that at least one of those podcasts went back and removed the ads, and any mention that Molekule was ever a sponsor, from their feed. There was at least one class action lawsuit which appears to have been settled.
So, yeah, at the very least, this looks like a dodge by a troubled company to get out of their lease by blaming San Francisco’s problems, not a legit example of the Bay Area’s ineffective government.
Obit watch: October 6, 2023.
Friday, October 6th, 2023Dick Butkus, one of the greats. ESPN.
At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, good size for his era, Butkus stuffed running plays up the middle. He was also speedy and mobile enough to drop back and foil opponents’ pass plays. He was cited as a first-team All-Pro five times and was chosen for the Pro Bowl game eight times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.
Sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, so the number of times Butkus smothered opposing quarterbacks remains unrecorded. But he was considered to have intercepted 22 passes and recovered 27 fumbles while playing for the Bears from 1965 to 1973.
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Butkus was chosen by the Bears in the first round, third overall, in the 1965 N.F.L. draft and by the Denver Broncos of the American Football League in its second round. He went with his hometown team, a storied N.F.L. franchise owned and coached by the future Hall of Famer George Halas. In his rookie season, he intercepted five passes and recovered seven fumbles.
But the Bears fell on hard times during Butkus’s years. They won 49 games, lost 74, tied four and never reached the playoffs. In his last few seasons, Butkus played on with a badly injured right knee despite having undergone surgery. In May 1974, having retired, he sued the Bears for $1.6 million, contending that the team had not provided him with the medical and hospital care it had promised in a five-year contract he signed in July 1973. The case was settled out of court.
He also did some acting.
Joe Christopher, one of the original 1962 Mets.
He was a part-time player in 1962 — the perfectly awful “Amazin’ Mets,” as their manager, Casey Stengel, called them, had a 40-120-1 record that season — when he got batting tips from a Mets coach, the renowned Rogers Hornsby, who hit over .400 three times in the 1920s.
“He was sitting in hotel lobbies,” Christopher recalled in an unpublished interview in 2010 with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times. Christopher recalled Hornsby telling him that the secret of hitting was “don’t let the pitcher jam home plate” and “it’s not about contact, it’s impact.”
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In June, when he was hitting .307, he talked about getting a chance to play full time.
“I always knew I could hit, but nobody up here believed me,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always hit well in the minors, but when I got to the majors nobody had any confidence in me.” He added, “They just wouldn’t give me a chance to play regularly. There was always that worry that if I went 0 for 4 I’d be on the bench the next day.”
He finished the season at .300, 16th best in the National League and only the third time a Met had reached that level. (The Mets’ Ron Hunt hit .303 that season.) He also led the Mets with 76 runs batted in and was second in home runs with 16.
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He had a career batting average of .260, with 29 home runs and 173 R.B.I.
Keith Jefferson, actor. IMDB.
Russell Sherman, pianist.
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Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.
On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.
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Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”
Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.
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I’m just a poor, dumb white boy from Hampden…
Thursday, October 5th, 2023Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.
Wednesday, October 4th, 202330 years ago yesterday and today, a group of UN soldiers (including US Special Operations troops, and units from Malaysia and Pakistan) went out on a mission to capture high-ranking members of the Somali National Alliance (SMA) in Mogadishu.
Things went bad. Then they went very bad. When it was all over, 18 US soldiers had been killed, and another 73 were wounded. One Malaysian Army soldier and one Pakistani soldier were also killed.
Battle of Mogadishu from Wikipedia.
Also killed:
- Staff Sergeant Daniel Darrell Busch.
- Sergeant First Class Earl Robert Fillmore, Jr.
- Master Sergeant Timothy Lynn Martin.
- Sergeant First Class Matthew Loren Rierson.
- Corporal James E. Smith.
- Specialist James M. Cavaco.
- Sergeant James Casey Joyce.
- Corporal Richard W. Kowalewski, Jr.
- Sergeant Dominick M. Pilla.
- Sergeant Lorenzo M. Ruiz.
- Staff Sergeant William David Cleveland, Jr.
- Staff Sergeant Thomas J. Field.
- CW4 Raymond Alex Frank.
- CW3 Clifton P. Wolcott.
- CW3 Donovan Lee Briley.
- Sergeant Cornell Lemont Houston, Sr.
- Private First Class James Henry Martin, Jr.
- Lance Corporal Mat Aznan Awang (Malaysian Army, posthumously promoted to Corporal).
I have been unable to find a name for the Pakistani soldier who was killed.
Black Hawk Down is still a heck of a book, in my opinion. The movie’s pretty good, too, but I’m not going to stake my life on it being 100% accurate. (Though I do believe the movie makers tried very hard.)
“Folly and Redemption: Thirty Years After Black Hawk Down” from The American Conservative.
We have a new winner!
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023That is, a new winner of the highly un-coveted Saturday Dining Conspiracy “Die In a Fire” award.
Yes, I am pretty peeved right now. Yes, I am using the power of my blogs to work on a grudge: but if you can’t do that on your blog, what’s the point of having one?
I used to (sort of) like Mod Pizza. We have better local pizza places, but sometimes it was just nice to be able to get a small personal pizza with exactly the kind and variety of toppings I wanted.
There’s one within easy driving distance from the house out here in the hinterlands. Mom was craving pizza, and I thought a small pizza sounded good myself. So I placed an online order.
Below is the feedback I left Mod Pizza corporate on their website. I’ve left out the original order number (referenced in the email) because it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except corporate.
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I placed this order at 3:30 PM for pickup at 4:15 PM. When I got to the store (around 4:10 PM) I gave the employee my name. He wasn’t clear about what was going on. I waited about 30 minutes for my food.
Finally, one of the other employees informed me that the store had CANCELLED MY ORDER (my because “they didn’t have enough people to make it”. I counted four employees in the store at the time.
I was further told that if I wanted my food I would have to place my order all over again, while I was in the store waiting, because they had enough people (in the store with no other customers) to make it now. No offer to place the order themselves based on my original receipt, just “you have to do it all over again”. That’s ridiculous.
I left and went to another local pizza place. I will NEVER EVER order from ANY Mod Pizza ever again. Especially this one, as this is the second time in a row they have messed up a pickup order.
Y’all need to shut this location down, as it is doing real harm to your brand.
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I should add to this: the Mod Pizza claims to have refunded my card for the order I placed, but I see no evidence of that in my account yet.
(Crossposted to the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)
Edited to add 10/4: I did get a refund credited to my card this morning, just for the record.
Obit watch: October 3, 2023.
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023Jim Caple, sportswriter.
I sort of remember the name: I was probably reading him back in the good old “Page 2” days. My feelings about lyrical happy horsepucky baseball writers are well known, but it seems like he wasn’t one of those guys:
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This is intended to enrage you. (#10 in a series)
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023I’m going to put a jump here, for those of you who want to avoid being enraged. Something else will be coming along eventually.
Blood in the streets!
Monday, October 2nd, 2023Phil Nevin out as manager of the Los Angeles Angels.
ESPN calls this a firing, while other sources say they “declined the option on his contract”. That to me is functionally indistinguishable from a firing, but maybe it makes some sort of difference to someone.
Obit watch: October 2, 2023.
Monday, October 2nd, 2023Lucy Morgan, Florida journalist. She wasn’t someone I had heard of before, but the obit (which I encourage you to read) makes her sound fascinating.
She specialized in uncovering political corruption. In 1973, she went to jail because she refused to reveal her source for grand jury proceedings.
She shared a Pulitzer (with Jack Reed) for exposing the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.
She also exposed the sheriff of Gulf County, who got sent to prison for extorting oral sex from female inmates.
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Russ Francis, former tight end for the Patriots and 49ers, was killed in a plane crash on Sunday. Also killed was Richard McSpadden, a vice-president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).
It appears they were taking off from Lake Placid Airport and there was some sort of problem. Reports say they tried to make it back to the airport but couldn’t.
Mr. Francis, in additional to a successful NFL career (first round NFL draft pick, three time Pro Bowl player) was also an avid pilot. He’d recently bought an interest in Lake Placid Airways, a local charter and scenic flight service.
Mr. McSpadden, in addition to being an AOPA VP, was a former commander and flight leader for the Thunderbirds.
Tim Wakefield, former Boston Red Sox pitcher (and a past winner of the Roberto Clemente Award). Cancer got him at 57.
Chris Snow, of the Calgary Flames. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, and passed away after a “catastrophic brain injury”.
Your loser update: special MLB 2023 edition.
Monday, October 2nd, 2023How did our high hopes for the MLB season turn out?
Well, the Oakland Athletics finished at the bottom, 50-112, .309 winning percentage. That’s bad, but it isn’t quite historically bad: Wikipedia’s list cuts off at .300.
Kansas City finished slightly better: 56-106, .346.
Colorado: 59-103, .364.
And the White Sox: 61-101, .377 winning percentage.
Firings watch.
Sunday, October 1st, 2023Another one down, another one down, another one rides the bus bites the dust…
Buck Showalter out as manager of the Mets.
I was initially a little confused by this: was it a firing, or a retirement, but later articles make it clear it was a “forced resignation”.
ESPN:
Also ESPN:
New York is 74-87 and 29½ games behind National League East champion Atlanta.
Your loser update: week 4, 2023.
Sunday, October 1st, 2023Lawrence asked me last night which of the remaining teams I favored to go 0-17.
My answer: da Bears and Carolina. I don’t believe the Vikings are that bad, and Denver at least has a coach who’s won a Superbowl.
How did that work out for me? Actually, pretty well.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
da Bears
Carolina
da Bears play Washington on Thursday this week, while Carolina plays Detroit at noon next Sunday. Right now, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network favors Washington (but not overwhelmingly) and Detroit (overwhelmingly). I’ll be joining FotB pigpen51 in rooting for the Lions, and the entire civilized world in rooting for an asteroid strike on FedEx Field.