Joey Wagner, writing for the Illini Inquirer, has a fantastic story on Bobby Gikas, one of the basketball managers for this year’s Fighting Illini Basketball team. The story behind “juice” is the best.

The Illini had a shiny, top-10 ranking and — though Underwood has since heaped praise on Ohio which is 7–5 and №122 in KenPom — should have won handily but instead were on upset alert. The Bobcats were loud and did everything on the bench short of bringing in a strobe light to start the party. Illinois? Not so much. Something had to change.

“That was, I think, the most pivotal moment of our season so far because we’re down to Ohio, a team we should be beating, then I look over to our bench and everyone was sad and down and not saying a word,” Gikas said. “I’m like, ‘All right, well, this is not how I want to start my senior year.’”

Illinois ended up winning and, in the process, “juice” was born. Underwood had told his team that they’d have to “bring their own juice” this season. Gikas took it to heart.

Next up was a game against №2 Baylor in Indianapolis and Gikas noticed an extra dry-erase board. He grabbed a hold and simply wrote one word: “Juice.”

That board hasn’t gone away, though it can’t be a permanent fixture near the court or it will lose its meaning. It’s intended to create a spark, to quill a big run by the opposing team or to kickstart one of their own.

“Reading that word right there makes us play harder and keep going and if you’re on the bench it makes you be louder and bring more energy,” Curbelo said. “That’s definitely a great thing. If I could advise managers on other teams, they should be looking at Bobby because he does a really good job in always taking care of everything so we’re ready to go. By him doing his job and coming to the court for the game and bringing all that energy, I think it’s great. I’m really, really happy I know that guy and I’m really happy he’s our manager.”

Love everything about this.

Miles Surrey, writing for The Ringer, has a few thoughts on the recent trend of multiversal superheroes showing up.

The biggest issue with DC and Marvel going full multiverse isn’t a financial consideration, but more of a creative one: a superhero movie landscape shaped by myopia. These cinematic universes aren’t just doubling down on superheroes, they’re doubling down on the ones that “work.” Instead of embracing more obscure heroes like, say, the Guardians of the Galaxy, we’re going to be subjected to several iterations of Batman and Spider-Man, who have already been through countless on-screen reboots in the past three decades. (Lest we forget, the list of Batman alums also include Christian Bale, Val Kilmer, and George “Bat Nipples” Clooney.)

The creative reason is the only reason to do this. It also could mean more financially in the long run, but the “anything-goes” creativity this should spark is what’s drawing actors, directors, and, you know, writers.

Matt Taibbi is one of those writers that makes me think about things in a new way. I don’t always agree with his ideas, but I admire his thoughtfulness in what he writes. In his Substack, he outlines the problems with the traditional news media today and outlines how a new type of media would ideally work.

We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

 

• not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

• employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

• embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

• operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.

The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.

Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.

This is smart, but how would it be funded?

On his personal site, freelancer Dean Sterling Jones, accuses The Atlantic of stealing his work and denying him credit and compensation for the work. Jones said in his post that Atlantic editors have declined to give him credit in spite of “whole sentences and paragraphs from a freelance pitch” he sent to Natasha Bertrand.

Personally, I’m a little confused by the word “stealing.” He sent her the story and the research. He was subsequently credited in the story and linked.

The story was published later that day without my byline, although the Atlantic did eventually agree to credit me within the text of the article (albeit reluctantly and without offering an apology or an explanation for axing me from the story). I didn’t realise my work had been lifted until October 2020, when I was inspired to reinvestigate by the Atlantic magazine’s 800-word correction — and subsequent retraction — of a story by freelance journalist/serial fabricator Ruth Shalit Barrett.

As I told Bertrand in an email, the Atlantic’s refusal to add my byline to the story hurts both of us. I lost out on a writing credit and freelance fee; as a result, her name now sits atop an article that contains copied material.

Being a freelance journalist has its ups and downs, but getting stomped on by a big publication like the Atlantic deserves to be called out, hence this item.

Maybe next time don’t send a fully researched story to a publication without getting a proper contract from an actual editor?

John DeVore, writing on his site on Medium, echoes a lot of what I think about the event at the Capitol.

It wasn’t a coup. It was more like a “fuck you.” A half-ass uprising fueled by revenge and hysteria. A theatrical production of Les Miserables KKK. There are photos of armed men dressed for battle. These men are not anchored in reality. They are fools. Dangerous, volatile fools.

Right. They were hooligans. They were not some sort of organized coup attempt. It wasn’t even a protest because they didn’t even have a position other than keep Trump in office, I guess?

They were loyal Trump supporters doing what they were told to do, which was to cause a ruckus and maybe scare a liberal. Look at the faces of these people. They’re having a good time. It’s a vacation. Burning down democracy is fun. Their king gave them permission to live a consequence-free life and they ran with it.

DeVore has a hard time trying to describe the mob.

No. This wasn’t a coup. Nor was it a protest. I’m reluctant to call it a riot. A riot is a bit more spontaneous than this shitshow. But I still don’t think these mobs breaking into the Capitol were organized. It was pure emotion. A stampede. A herd of beasts electrified by privilege and power and rage. Maybe it was a half-riot. A half-riot, half-melee.

I also don’t think this was terrorism, either. Terrorists usually have goals. Even Bin Laden or McVeigh had messages. This malignant mass panic attack was abuse. The only goal here was to maybe bully a few people into thinking “maybe if I had voted for Trump this wouldn’t be happening!” The only message a muddled demand to speak to the manager or else.

Trump, obviously did not think any of this through.

He didn’t plot a coup. He told a bunch of suck-ups and laidback turncoats to defend his honor and fight a hopeless battle. They answered his weak call. He blushed and thanked them. But nothing changed except, I suspect, turning more weary Americans against the MAGA cause.

Aside from the fact that there were several people there who actually wanted to kill members of Congress and the Vice President, it mostly was a fine example of white privilege.

We are lucky it was not worse.

Rebecca Solnit, writing in the Literary Hub, has one of the better truth bombs I’ve seen lately.

One of the indigestible facts of this country is that most of its terrorism and nearly all its mass shootings are committed by mostly conservative-leaning white men, conservative here meaning those most earnestly committed to their white supremacist-misogynist identity politics, from the unending terrorism of the Klan and other racist groups and the anti-abortion murders of the 1990s to the present-day mayhem.

It is all identity politics. All of it.

David Murphy at Lifehacker has a good idea I’m going to try and implement: a digital declutter of my digital devices.

Everyone should set aside dedicated time to review what they’ve installed on their various devices—typically apps, but that can also include games and addons. In fact, this should be an annual cleaning, at minimum. I can’t stand digital clutter, so I do it every three months, and that means actually setting a calendar reminder so that I remember to do it on a regular basis.

I’m going to try to do this all year.

Star Wars Explained has a video outlining everything Star Wars for 2021.

As you may already know, we are going to see more Star Wars “stuff” than ever before — movies, TV shows, comics, novels, games… you name it. For example, on Disney+ we are going to be getting The Book of Boba Fett, Ashoka, and Rangers of the New Republic as well as a new season of The Mandalorian.  The Bad Batch animated series will debut sometime in 2021.

Also in 2021, we’ll Star Wars: Visions, a series of animated short films. There’s the High Republic stuff too and I’m sure a bunch of video game stuff I’m not really into. So, so much.

My inner twelve-year-old is really happy.

Will Leitch contemplates how we will reconcile 2020.

We will be dealing with the ramifications of 2020 for as long as we live. We’ve lost nearly two million people worldwide, 340,000 of them (and counting) Americans, and millions more have contracted Covid-19, a disease, I remind you, no one knows the long-term side effects of. Businesses have been closed, forever, and millions have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. Children across the country have had their educations disrupted or even stopped all together; expect all sorts of “Generation Covid” stories around 2028, about the generation that never got caught back up. And we have learned so much, too much, about how our country today, both its leaders and its citizens, reacts to moments of national strife. (It turns out that We Are Not All In This Together.) How do you put pieces like this back together? How do we ever go back to normal after this?

And more to the point: How do we deal with processing this year and what it was like to live through it? Future generations will look back at this year and conclude that we were all going through a collective trauma-induced psychosis. I have tried to remember throughout 2020 that everyone is under extreme stress, that every day is a challenge, that no one is at their best right now. Those viral videos of people having breakdowns are so hypnotic because we’re all living on that edge, day by day. We’re all just barely holding it together.

Only time will tell.

“Wearing more makeup than your Mommy”

I’m a massive KISS fan. In fact, for Christmas, my wife bought me a new turntable and a 180-gram vinyl copy of Destroyer. It’s been fun to spin the old vinyl records and reminisce a bit about being in my bedroom and dreaming about what it would be like to see the “hottest band in the world.”

Over the course of my life, I’ve seen KISS nearly ten times, and while that may seem like a lot, there are obviously fans who have seen the band many hundreds of times. I’ve been about as far away as possible, and I’ve been center stage, about four rows back from the front. I’ve seen them in and out of makeup. I know what I’m getting when I see a show.

All three volumes of KISSOLOGY have amazing concerts from various points in the band’s nearly 50-year career, and I can watch the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 21st-century versions of the band anytime I like. 

In the before-COVID-times, KISS was on their END OF THE ROAD tour, counting down to their last ever concert event. I had not seen a show on the tour because I was hedging my bet that they might bring the show to the State Farm Center here in Champaign, where I would beg and plead with my wife and her DIA co-workers to get a good seat and maybe a backstage pass. I also think the band will set up a long-term residency in Las Vegas sometime soon, but I digress.

To finish off this horrible year, KISS has decided to put together a New Year’s Eve PPV streaming show on a massive 250-foot stage constructed at the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai. It looks sort of like a mashup of the Metallica: Live at Slane Castle stage and the Rammstein — Sonne Dresden stage. It certainly looks like it’s going to be the largest show of 2020.

However, I won’t be watching. At least not live. The KISS 2020 Goodbye concert experience will not be any less exciting when I watch it on New Year’s Day on YouTube instead of paying $30 or $50 on New Year’s Eve. Because it will absolutely be on YouTube the very next day, and I don’t feel like parting with any cash for the rights to watch it “live.” Seriously, the global start time is cool and everything, but that means it’s actually live at 11 am on New Year’s Eve, and nothing says rock and roll like watching KISS play a big concert over lunch. 

Maybe I’m just getting old. 

There’s obviously going to be a DVD and supposedly a behind-the-scenes documentary too. I’d say a live recording is in the works as well. I don’t “need” to see it now and I’ll be happy to purchase the products when they come out in March, probably around the same time the END OF THE ROAD tour kicks back up.

Better to rock and roll all night instead of rock and roll over lunch.

Shattered lives

Last Sunday morning, Jimmy Collins died at the age of 74.

Will Leitch, in his weekly newsletter, discusses the life and the lies of Jimmy Collins. He tells the story of Deon Thomas and Bruce Pearl and how one lie changed the trajectory of one person’s entire life. Pearl’s lie cost Collins more than just a chance at becoming the University of Illinois head men’s basketball coach. It practically destroyed him.

That was one lie, just one, just one opportunistic moment from someone who had only his own interests in mind and didn’t care what happened to anyone else because he wanted what he wanted. And that lie affected lives forever. Thirty years later, a man died full of regrets and unfulfilled dreams, with his reputation still bleeding, all because of that one lie. One lie can change everything. One lie can destroy an entire life.

He then smartly pivots to what might happen when we are subjected to thousands of lies.

What do thousands of lies do? What does an endless parade of lies, a cascading cavalcade of lies, just an eternal stream of bullshit … what does that do? I would love to believe that—while we will look back at this time with sadness, anger, frustration and despair—we will in fact be able to look back upon it. Because to look back upon it will mean that it is over.

 

I would love to believe that it will be a dark, awful period in a history, sure, but one we can tie up and place neatly away, in some storage space where we can hide from it, claim it’s something we can all move on from. I would love to believe that at some point we’ll be finished with it.

 

But I’m worried that’s not how any of this works. The results of the lies, the ramifications of this time, will reverberate for the rest of our lives, and surely the rest of our children’s lives. There are people who were destroyed by this time, by these people, who will never recover. It will be 30 years in the future, as they lie dying, and they will still be thinking about what happened to them and the people they loved and the world they cared about back in 2020, the years before, how their lives were just never quite the same after that.

This is the legacy of Donald Trump and the Republican party. They should be shunned into oblivion.

“Don’t try to understand it”

Joshua Rivera, writing for The Verge, has the best review of Tenet I’ve read.

That’s perhaps the biggest disappointment of Tenet: it wants to be an unusually clever spy film, but Nolan isn’t terribly invested in the fun of spy movies. You know: cool outfits, flashy gear, people pushed to their absolute limit and managing to wear it incredibly well. And because the mechanics of the film’s plot require a lot of explanation just to follow what people are doing in a scene, it’s very easy to miss why they’re doing it. This is a shame because the reason for all this time-warping and subterfuge is actually compelling as hell!

 

Just so we’re clear: I am pretty good at watching movies. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours, per Malcolm Gladwell’s absolutely airtight metrics, and that makes me an expert. Yet, I was still confused by the time the credits rolled. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the beautiful things about movies is how they can immerse us in stories that are bigger than us that defy easy comprehension. What unmoors me is the nature of my confusion.

 

Tenet is a film that explicitly encourages you to feel a thing and not think about it, but it doesn’t offer any emotional anchors. It’s a disorientation that comes when you don’t feel you’re in the hands of someone with complete control over the narrative. You might be able to call some twists before they happen, but even if you do, it’s no more satisfying than a coin toss. Sure, you may have been right. But unless you had money on it, does it matter?

 

Tenet is an absolute mess of a movie that stumbles doing all of the things I like about Christopher Nolan films. Directors are allowed missteps, obviously — this one is even pretty humanizing — but the whole situation is complicated by the circumstances surrounding the film’s release.

Seriously, all I wanted was a cool spy flick, and I got this crap. Sure, it looks beautiful, but it makes not a lick of sense. Inception is complicated and probably needs repeated viewings to understand it, but there is a narrative flow. Tenet has none of that, and so it makes no sense. I’ve read complete “This is what happens in Tenet” pieces, and I still can’t follow the story. There are beats that are never explained in the story. I’m sure there are James Bond movies where the plot loses all connection to reality, but that might even be the point here.

I love Inception. Tenet… I don’t love it, and I’m not even sure I like it.

Time is a flat circle

Ryan Holiday, writing on his site, has some excellent advice for everyone about how the world should react to the “new normal.”

Why should I pine for it to be over or different? What matters is right now. What matters is the quiet hour we had together on that road. What mattered was the sunrise coming up behind us. What matters is that the last eight months have been eight months of being alive—and I chose to live them.

 

How much longer will it be like this? How much longer until the next change?

 

No one can say. Nobody knows anything for certain except that change will eventually come.

 

If people could manage to find happiness and purpose and stillness amidst war, under the rule of tyrants, through plagues far worse than this one, what excuse do we have?

 

None.

 

This is normal.

 

This is life.

Yup.

This is the way

Star Wars is an important touchstone in my life. I saw the first movie in 1977 in a crowded theater in Florida on vacation. Just shy of my 9th birthday, this event was monumental in creating my fandom.

As fans speed to the ending of The Mandalorian on Disney+, I have not been more excited for the future of Star Wars. The reason is the two men at the helm of the show: Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. It is neon-flashing obvious those two writers/directors/producers/actors are who should get complete and absolute creative control over the Star Wars franchise. 

The Mandalorian is by the best live-action Star Wars when viewed next to the last few movies. There’s really no comparison. Disney and Star Wars are blessed to have true visionaries in Favreau and Filoni, who have written a lot of Star Wars and “get” the franchise at the helm. J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson created competent films that have a “feeling” of Star Wars but don’t quite hit the mark. 

One big advantage, I think, is the character creation. Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo Ren are pretty good characters. The problem lies in the feeling that they are less original and more just ciphers for the original Luke, Han, Leia, and Darth Vader. 

On the other hand, Din Djarin, Grogu (Baby Yoda), Cara Dune, Greef Karga, Moff Gideon, Bo-Katan Kryze, and Ahsoka Tano do not feel like retreads. Sure, at first glance, our protagonist in The Mandalorian looks like Boba Fett, and Moff Gideon is giving off a strong Darth Vader fanboy vibe, but scratch the surface, and you will see something else. A uniqueness that has flowed out of the mind of Filoni and Favreau. Heck, we even get to see Fett and Djarin in this season, and there’s a distinct contrast. 

Ahsoka Tano is one of the most realized characters in all of Star Wars, and her character arc is defined by her creator, Filoni. Seeing a live-action version was everything a Star Wars fan could want.

It seems inevitable that Favreau and Filoni are going to have full creative control soon. The question then will be, what happens next?

I can’t wait to see it.

Surprisingly, I did not eat too much

This is the first Thanksgiving I have not celebrated with my Mom and Dad and my brother and his family. My wife made an amazing meal. We had turkey and ham, corn, Hawaiian dressing, and mashed potatoes. We had pumpkin and apple pie. It was wonderful.

An attempted video call with everyone was a comedy of errors and bad internet connections. We certainly tried.

At the end of the evening, I started getting depressed. The pandemic has not affected me personally as much as so many others. I have a good job, and my company is doing well. I get to go downstairs to my basement office and do my work in practically the same way as before. My wife changed jobs to a much more challenging one. My stepdaughters are coping as best they can, and my daughter across the state has found good friends, and I’m grateful. I still got depressed because, finally, the pandemic affected me personally. How selfish of me, I realized. How short-sighted. I needed to count my blessings.

As for blessing counting, I’m grateful I have a safe place to call my home, plenty of food, and a family who loves me. It’s easy to overlook how lucky I am. I am eternally thankful for the patience my friends and family possess when dealing with me, and I hope I can bring that same selflessness to them.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as mine, and I hope next year we see a glimmer of hope.

Remember when Tiger King was a thing?

Will Leitch, in his weekly newsletter, talks about time and 2020.

It is clear that we will be talking about 2020 the rest of our lives. The thing is, though, when we say things like that, “we’ll talk about 2020 the rest of our lives,” we act as if it will be able to be separated from the rest of our lives, like it was a bad vacation, or a unhappy relationship we were fortunate to eventually extricate ourselves from.

 

But that’s not what 2020 will be. It will not be a tumor we’ll be able to cut out. It’ll be with us, forever—emotionally, physically, intellectually, a traumatic shock to our collective system. Families have seen their entire foundational structures upended. Careers and business have been wiped away. Kids have grown six inches while staring at their friends and teachers on a computer screen. My hair’s turning green and my heart is pounding out of my chest. The more we go through this, the harder it gets, the farther away the end seems … the less this feels like something to be endured and then discarded, and more, perhaps, the point where it all does in fact tip. We will survive this. We are surviving this. But we are not the same. We are not what we were in March. And years from now, I suspect we will still be changed because of this.

 

This does not have to be a reason to despair. Enduring strife and struggle can focus the mind, allow us to concentrate our attention on what truly matters, to appreciate each moment while we have them, while we can. I’m going to be proud of the people I care about, of all of us, for making it through this.

 

But it’s going to scar. It surely already has.

I’m so tired of this year. The exhaustion is real. I came back from a vacation in Florida in March and immediately started working from home. The mental energy it has taken to simply continue has been staggering.

I don’t know what’s going to happen today and the rest of the week and, frankly, neither do you. The not-knowing is not fun. The anticipation, one way or another, is disquieting. It’s disconcerting.

I’ve been home for more than 230 days and the continued fear of the unknown is almost paralyzing. With COVID-19, we have no idea when it will end, what will happen, how it might mutate into something worse, and what life looks like on the other side.

The election of 2020 is exactly the same.

I have no doubt Joe Biden will win the popular vote, and he will probably win by a huge number. If you look at the 538 Election Forecast , you see Biden with a 90% chance of earning the required 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency. All that being said, I’m still anxious and nervous.

The Electoral College is absolute bullshit and it should be abolished as soon as possible. Election Night would be simple if we would choose our presidents by popular vote. There would be no more swing states or contested votes, or hanging chads. There would be none of this Supreme Court deciding the outcome crap. Voter suppression would go away. Having this Electoral College is an outdated and stupid concept that does not reflect what the majority of 330 million people truly want in a representative democracy.

Right now though, none of that matters.

I sincerely believe Joe Biden is going to get the most votes and, consequently, is highly likely to have 270 plus electoral college votes. All the polling says so. It has been steady for months and nothing Trump has tried has stuck to Biden.

However, the polls can tell us nothing about the absolute bullshit the Trump campaign is about to do regarding court challenges, honest counting, and judicial decisions in dozens of states. I’m fearful of not having a clear winner by Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I hope I’m glaringly wrong, but I think it will be bad and could turn violent and ugly.

What will people do who live in an alternate reality where they are being told time and time again that their side cannot lose unless by some rigged rules? There will be anger in the streets, but what will actually happen?

Honestly, I’m not going to think about it all that much. Coming up with dozens of theories and guesses is not particularly healthy. I can play “what if” games until January 20, but I shouldn’t. Sure, there are people on both sides who have been gearing up for this fight for months, but I’m not one of them.

I’ve resigned myself to, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And that’s probably the healthiest thing I can do.

See you on the other side. Vote.

You’re the man now, Dog

Sean Connery is gone. He was 90. He died peacefully in his sleep.

My father loved Ian Fleming novels and, of course, the movies. I was named after Connery, and I was keenly aware of him through his cinematic career. When I was younger, it was always a knowing nod when I saw him in other films like Highlander, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Untouchables. He famously turned down the role of Gandalf, which undoubtedly would have given him tremendous accolades. Of course, when you’re James Bond, you don’t really need them. 

When I watch the Connery Bond films today, they feel very much of their time. Frozen in amber, it’s almost funny hearing Connery’s Bond make fun of the Beatles playing music just a bit too loud. 

I always wanted him to come back into the Bond franchise playing the villain. Of course, he’d be a former Double-0 from the 60s disenchanted with the world he saved many times over. 

This year has taken so many of the icons I looked up to in my youth. Eddie Van Halen will live on through his music. Lou Brock, through his contributions to baseball. Sean Connery will, of course, always be James Bond. 

That’s more than most of us ever get.