We’re finally at the breaking point of the cold front hovering over my house, and with more reasonable temperatures on the horizon, my mind starts unthawing a bit. People run from this cold, flee to deserts, to beaches, to far-flung locales to not brace themselves amid the bone deep nature of nature. I’ve lived in those places, and missed this. There’s something about a harsh Winter that makes life feel lived, time feel transitory and not a still forever of nothing. time is visible here, countable in the changing of moments into hours, into days, into months. Seasons have width, breadth, breath to them. To freeze is to know there is a thaw coming, a Spring beyond the wall of grey, glowing blue and green just over the horizon.
Inputs
1: When China, in its evolution of itself after Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to alter course, was looking to learn about America, it sent a young student to study the country and report back. Where did they send him to learn about the beating heart of America? Where did they seek the soul, the essence of an entire nation? Iowa City, Iowa.1I’m already imagining the Shutdown Fullcast bit about China learning everything it knows about America from the 1988 Iowa Hawkeyes
To imagine what could have been if they had picked any number of other places. A China that learned about America from Miami would have been an interesting time to live in.
2: Pablo Torre had Roy Wood Jr on to talk about how the hosting of awards shows works, the issues recent hosts have run into, and the why behind the how. Really interesting inside baseball stuff, down to joke selection and timing and knowing one’s audience.
Also, Roy and I are seemingly incredibly similar thinkers in that, we’re both very deliberate and also ephemeral as hell, with very open hearts to the bountiful variety life holds and the potential of our places within it.
3: Sports Illustrated is essentially dead today. Private equity is the worst thing we allow to happen in America. The argument that they’re clearing out the chaff of unprofitable companies belies an insistence that the only reason for anything to exist is to bring a larger than average profit percentage to a very small percentage of the nation. It’s a belief system that needs more public and fervent shame sloughed on its adherents, but won’t, because people are so easily bought off, on the one axis along which their interests converge: money.
Eat the rich.2I mean, they’re stuffing themselves full of the highest quality feed, it’s like they’re preparing themselves for consumption already.
Projects In Progress
Man, who in the hell knows anymore. This section has been less about progress or reporting of statuses and more about finding a new way to shrug in print each day. Let’s see if it returns next week, or if it’s cleaved for its own good.3I am aware of the ironic rhyming of the previous against #3 above. Different instincts entirely, but I am aware.
Notes:
- 1I’m already imagining the Shutdown Fullcast bit about China learning everything it knows about America from the 1988 Iowa Hawkeyes
- 2I mean, they’re stuffing themselves full of the highest quality feed, it’s like they’re preparing themselves for consumption already.
- 3I am aware of the ironic rhyming of the previous against #3 above. Different instincts entirely, but I am aware.