Jerk those sodas

Tuesday 5/26/26

There are things I plan to write in here regarding upcoming sporting events--everything else will keep and I eventually get to it--that I don't end up writing because I don't get a chance to do so in time. One of those things I had filed in my mind to make a note of here after the Knicks beat the Cavs in Game 3 was that the Knicks would win Game 4 by at least 30 points.

Turns out they won by 37 last night. That Cleveland team was done after Game 1. They quit. I'd say the remainder of that series was as clear-cut an example as you'll get of a team quitting on that stage. Impressively, the Knicks didn't even have a single player reach 20 points last night. Just an all-out balanced attack.

The Threads headline:

Knicks' NBA Finals Fate Decided

That's awful writing. Awful AI-writing. Their Finals fate has been decided? Not what "fate" means. And it just doesn't make sense. Sweeping your way into the next round isn't your fate being decided.

God damn are we such an illiterate society. How are you supposed to live in this world if you aren't stupid? Because if you aren't stupid, everything you see and hear is like another blow. You're just assaulted with constant stupidity. Your problem is that you know what things are. The smarter you are, the more you do, and the more horrific living in this world is unless you have the money to remove yourself from it, and a few people you bunker down with in what's tantamount to a walled-away enclave with this trap door through which you occasionally exit to do whatever you need to do out in the main world, as quickly as possible, dealing with as few people as possible, before entering back in through the trap door and locking it with six bolts. You can't escape the stupidity if you're out in the world or you need to be. It's in just about everything everyone says and rights. But if you're stupid? You don't have a clue. You're unbothered. You don't know. You're oblivious. Washes right over you. And as we have fewer and fewer sentient humans, people even capable of thinking at all, stupidity consumes all, like a great flood, rendering every last thing in its image.

Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson said this on Sunday:

"I think analytically, I think we've won the--I said three out of three [games in the series], we're two out of three in the expected wins. I don't know if you guys follow that--the expected score. We've won two out of three."

We've won two out of three. As we're getting swept.

What a messed up, broken world we live in. A world where people think some AI bot is their friend or significant other. A world full of crazy people incapable of realizing how mentally ill they are, let alone doing anything about it. A world of delusion and running away from reality and not being able to deal with reality and constructing fantasy instead--but without any imagination--that is meant to stand in for reality.

I'm telling you: Eventually games won't even be played. They'll all be simulated. People won't understand why you'd bother to have humans play them when there are simulations instead. There might athletes, but only to harvest biometrical data to feed into the simulations. That's where we are headed. And I don't think hardly anyone else out there has a clue. Has any idea how screwed humanity is. That we are essentially extincting ourselves in any real ways and that we're only a species in the reproducing sense. Reproducing broken, babbling idiots. Senseless beings. And we're making so that you need to be stupid to survive. The less oblivious you are in this world, the harder it is.

I say that I can't believe someone said the above, the same as I say I can't believe that publishing works the way it does, but of course I can believe it. It's like it has to be both. You say the thing and yet you know. But you still feel like you need to say it. Maybe you can't not say it, in a way. Because you have to give voice to how insane it is. For your own sanity.

That's an amazing remark by Atkinson. That you are paid millions of dollars--millions of fucking dollars, for such is this society--and you are someone who stands there in that role for which you are paid those millions of dollars and says the likes of that...I mean, even if you somehow thought it in some crazed mental moment...because everyone has things flash through their brains...but then you say it out loud? Into microphones? To the world?

So it's not just some thing that flashes through the brain. You know it isn't. It's what he believes and it also speaks to how people think. People don't do accountability. What are the rarest commodities in our world? Selflessness, decency, intelligence, the ability to communicate well, the ability to read and write, depth, growth, authenticity and realness. Look at publishing. Look at just what I detail from inside the Bunker Hill Monument. A granite-lined pocket of the world. And even there you see the world as the world is writ large.

Imagine if you were riding home in the car with your dad after you played a hockey tournament and not only did you get smoked in all three of your games, you visibly quit. Dad works hard, he's paying all this money so you can play this game you say you want to play. He's driving to the rink with you at five in the morning on a Saturday. And he watched you not do your best. Those shouldn't be jolly car rides, no?

And there you are, and you tell your father that you didn't really lose those three games, but you won two out of three on account of analytics, once you really get into the numbers, and the models predicting what should have happened. It didn't happen that way, but it should have, so, you know, same difference, you basically won the tournament.

My father would have kicked me out of the car. I can't imagine saying things like this personally. I know it's becoming the norm. I've lived with so much insanity because of publishing. Where people set you on fire, torture you, throw more gasoline on the flames, and then react with rage, and tell their cronies to hate you, ban you, rob you, do horrible things to you but in bitchy, cowardly behind-the-scenes ways, because you tried to put the flames out and asked them not to do that to you again after years of it being down sans a peep of protest from you...as you still tried to work with them. None of them are capable of saying, "Wow, that is messed up, I should do less of that kind of thing." Not even that. Not even that. You got a better chance of putting the planet Neptune in your backpack and going off on a hike with it.

Publishing is an echo chamber--an echo chamber high-end hotel (or sanitarium, if you prefer)--for the privileged and mentally unwell. The embittered, petty, nasty mentally unwell. It's shut off. A private society. But we're so disconnected now out in the real world, that the real world itself has become a form of a closed-off, one-person, private reality for each of the people in it despite the appearance of throngs. It's really a massive honeycomb of private chambers of dysfunction. We don't interact and connect. I don't care if someone has a family. They probably just live with those people. Because they didn't want to be alone, chances are, and they were able to make that happen. First with one person, then by creating two or three others.

We don't have the language skills to communicate and connect. It's words-based. You can hug people until your arms are blistered. Exchange all the meaningful glances you want. Ultimately, connection comes back to how well we use our words with others in the saying and sharing and understanding of special truths. Not generalities. You can't use "I'd on that hill," and "not on my 2026 bingo card," and "chef's kiss" and all of that other stock nonsense. You can only use your personal, specific, honest, from the heart words.

And people can't do it. They don't have the skills. They don't have the brain power because their brains are flab from never being used. And they don't have the strength, the courage, because they're fragile and mostly broken and they need to be lied to and need to lie to themselves. And as everyone becomes this way, this becomes the way, the only way, with no resistance. Right now, our world is about getting rid of the holdouts.

You think this is just sports or this is just a sports entry in this record. It's never just a sports entry. And sports is never just sports.

As for the Finals: I give the Knicks something of a shot. Call it thirty percent. They have a nice thing going on right now. It's a team that has earned a place in their fans hearts and will be remembered fondly.

The Colorado Avalanche lost Cale Makar and are about to lose their season, being down 3-0 to Vegas. That Vegas franchise--they've done big things in less than a decade. More than quite a few other NHL teams have done in their much longer histories. Take the Buffalo Sabres. Lots of Hall of Famers over the decades, but the Knights are already a more successful franchise, are they not?

I wonder what Bruce Cassidy thinks right now. He probably isn't surprised and also knows the deal and to focus on his next opportunity. Would Vegas be doing this if was still their coach? Well, it's hard to argue with the results they've had in moving on from him. They couldn't be doing better.

I find Jack Eichel to be an underachieving regular season player, but you win with him in the postseason. He's the kind of guy I wouldn't have in the Hall of Fame, but the standards for modern day players are coming down, so he'll make it.

When one says that Hall of Famers standards have diminished, people always take that to mean in terms of players from the more distant past getting in, but it's not what I mean. For instance, you're going to see pitchers getting into the baseball Hall of Fame with 130 career wins if you want to include pitchers from this era, and it's not like they'll all be left out.

Also contrary to what everyone else believes: rate stats don't equal productivity. There are bottom line bulk numbers, and that's where the real value is. Bottom line totals. That means you were there, you did it, you kept doing it. Being there and doing it are paramount.

What people also don't understand is that WAR and things like OPS+ and ERA+ have a lot to do with how bad everyone else as well as how good you are, and sometimes--make that often--a lot more. But now we're thinking critically and applying our brains and moving through some nuance, and you know that's not going to happen.

I thought the Canadiens had a really good chance to move past the Hurricanes, but I felt differently after Game 2 and have all the more reason to after Carolina prevailed last night. Montreal simply doesn't generate offense. They had that game earlier in the playoffs where they won with something like just 9 shots on goal. That wasn't some crazy exception of a total from them. They'll go basically a period without a shot on net. It's a thing of theirs. Very hard to keep advancing when that's the case. They have some talented offensive players but this keeps happening.

The Red Sox are 8-17 at Fenway so far this season; they’re 14-13 on the road. There’s a story behind that. I’m not sure what it is, but to me that’s more than regular game stuff. What are the chances these Sox recover enough to finish .500 at home? Even bad Sox teams are usually decent at Fenway. Not the 1965 and 2012 teams, though, who both went 34-47 at Fenway. At least in ‘65 you could have watched hometown kid Tony Conigliaro lead the league in homers.

The 8-17 record is indicative, in my estimation, of something off-field, mental/psychological, or a lack of professionalism (being unprepared, for instance), or a combination. Because no Sox team should be that bad at Fenway between the white lines unless there are other contributing factors.

Is everyone partying? Getting to the park late? That's the worst home record in baseball, by the way, as you'd expect. It used to be a given: Sox teams hit at Fenway. Non-contending Sox teams hit at Fenway. Thus, non-contending Sox teams won their fair share of home games. The Celtics and Bruins also have home issues, but those don't show up until the playoffs, which they do annually.

The Red Sox open up a three-game home series with the Braves--a good team--today, so that record looks like it's about to get worse. Let's say they get swept. They'd be 8-20 at home. What then? You're talking something really notable at that point. Like a legit "Yikes" situation.

This team isn't going to be able to finish .500 at home. It's practically off the table already. Let's say the Braves don't sweep them and the Sox take a game. That would make them 9-19 at Fenway with 53 home games remaining, meaning the Sox would need to go 32-21 to have a .500 record. A measly .500 record.

Obviously you can only have a garbage season with a sub-.500 home record. I guess, in theory, they could do the 32-21 thing, though there's no reason to think they will. But you'd think you'd need to be at least ten games over .500 at home to make the postseason, right? Do you ever see a team that's five games over at home make it? And for the Sox to do this, they'd have to turn into a Fenway juggernaut.

This isn't happening. They are so done. Back in 2012, you followed along for a while thinking about the postseason and whether the Sox could make it, before it was clear that there was no way. Then, after the thing was over, you'd have looked back and been kind of embarrassed that you ever had the playoffs in your mind with that team. As in, "What was I thinking going through those mental gymnastics? Do I know nothing about this game?"

This feels similar to me and like I should be at that point now if I don't want to do a version of the above where I to look back at this record--or for someone else to be reading it--after the fact of this 2026 Red Sox season. I don't care that they're only X amount of games back in the Wild Card. Throw that thinking out. They might as well be 15 games out of the poncy third Wild Card.

They have a new problem as well. Just as the offense gets it going a tiny bit better, the pitching starts to falter. Garrett Whitlock was serving it up the other day like a 1950s soda jerk. There you go--classic kind of throwback reference to a time when baseball was the biggest sport in the land.