Cup of Coffee: October 10, 2024

Good morning! And welcome to Free Thursday!

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Let’s get on with it.

And That Happened 

Here are the scores. Here are the highlights:

Mets 4, Phillies 1: After the Phillies’ Game 3 loss, Nick Castellanos was quoted as saying, “This is the closest to death we’re ever going to get. So, in a way, we should feel the most alive.” I spent much of yesterday trying to get my mind around the fact that Castellanos is mentally strong and mature enough to understand and accept how the very fact of human mortality is what gives life meaning only to then think that "before Game 4 of the NLDS" is when to whip that kind of shit out. No matter how wise it was, it just did not create the vibe anyone wanted. So, of course the Phillies lost.

Actually, no, the Mets won because Francisco Lindor hit a grand slam in the sixth inning, but I started this recap out with a bit because you almost certainly knew that already. Helping the Mets get to that point was making Ranger Suárez work for 97 pitches before getting through even five innings and getting to the soft underbelly of the Philly bullpen. José Quintana was solid for five and three Mets relievers shut Philly out for the final four, sending the Mets to the NLCS.

Dear god I hope that someone checks on Nick Castellanos this morning. I’m concerned.

Tigers 3, Guardians 0: Detroit keeps running the same damn play — a bunch of bullpen chaos and a handful of clutch hits — but no one seems to know how to stop it. Six Tigers relievers combined on a six-hit shutout and the Tigers staff has now held the Guardians scoreless for 20 straight innings. Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson had run-scoring hits and Matt Vierling hit a sac fly. The Tigers can advance to the ALCS with a win tonight.

Yankees 3, Royals 2: Giancarlo Stanton’s RBI double put the Yankees on the board in the first and his eighth inning home run broke a 2-2 tie after which New York held on thanks to four and a third shutout innings by Clay Holmes, Tommy Kahnle, and Luke Weaver. The Bombers lead the series 2-1 and will try to close things out tonight.

Dodgers 8, Padres 0: When I saw that the Dodgers were going to throw a bullpen game with their backs up against the wall I was immediately put in mind of this tweet from August:

But I’ll be damned, it worked out, with eight — eight! — Dodgers pitchers, none of whom were Joe Kelly, combining on a seven-hit shutout. The Padres used six pitchers of their own, so this was a crisp affair. Those Dodgers pitchers had room to work with thanks to Will Smith’s two-run homer and Mookie Betts’ solo shot and RBI single. Shohei Ohtani singled in an early run as well, putting the Dodgers up 5-0 after three. The Dodgers scored three more in the seventh, the first of which came without even needing a hit thanks to a plunking, an error and a squeeze bunt. After that Gavin Lux smacked a two-run homer and became more than apparent this wasn’t the Padres’ night.

A decisive Game 5 is in store for tomorrow night.

The Daily Briefing

Milton shredded the roof off of Tropicana Field

Crazy scene in St. Petersburg hours after hurricane Milton came ashore, basically shredding the roof off of the Tampa Bay Rays home park, Tropicana Field:

When these videos first emerged they seemed even more terrifying given that the stadium was being used as a base camp/shelter for first responders and electrical linemen in the area, housing up to 10,000 people, but it turned out that the building had been used for staging earlier but was mostly empty by the time the damage was inflicted. There were no reported injuries at the stadium as of late last night.

I’m certain, however, that we will be hearing a lot of not-good news from elsewhere in Florida as the sun rises this morning.

They imploded the Tropicana Casino  

In an instance of unfortunate synchronicity vis-a-vis the previous item, yesterday morning the folks in Las Vegas pushed the plunger and imploded what was left of the Tropicana Hotel:

The Tropicana was the last mob-built, mob-operated casino in Las Vegas. It’s being replaced, in part, by the new stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, assuming of course that project actually gets off the ground. The A’s, of course, are owned by John Fisher who, like the mob, understands how to get fat off of an entertainment enterprise without really caring about the underlying business.

Dibbly-dobbly

MLB wants to be a global business. To that end, it’s sponsoring cricket bats:

This was sent to me by Cup of Coffee’s Southwest Ireland correspondent, Thomas P., who tells me that this is Harry Brook, a 25 year cricketer from Yorkshire who was part of the England cricket team that won the 2022 T20 World Cup. Now, you just continue on to the next item and don’t think too hard about whether I know what any of that, or the headline to this item, actually means.

“Game 7”

Saw this press release about a new series from Amazon:

NEW YORK—October 8, 2024—Today, Prime Video released the official trailer for GAME 7, a new anthology series that will premiere on October 22, exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide. GAME 7 is the latest addition to the Prime membership. Prime Video members enjoy savings, convenience, and entertainment, all in a single membership.

GAME 7 brings the two greatest words in sports to life in a new five-part anthology series. With first-hand accounts from both the winning and losing athletes that participated in these high-stakes showdowns, each episode goes behind the scenes to revisit the most iconic moments of the most memorable games in history.

That’s a pretty good idea for a show, and between MLB, the NBA, and the NHL, there is obviously no shortage of material for this series. My only concern is that they’ll eventually be tempted to try to figure out how to get the big dog that is the NFL included in the series by devoting an installment to a “Week 7” Jacksonville-Tennessee matchup from a random Thursday night. Which, much to my annoyance, would no doubt be the highest-rated episode in the series.

Other Stuff

Make it stop

You know you live in a great state when a duly-elected member of the legislature eagerly shares conspiracy theories online about how the government is controlling the weather:

A Butler County state representative posted on X a link to a conspiracy theory that the government was controlling the weather and directed where Hurricane Helene and the approaching Hurricane Milton would land.

Jennifer Gross, R-West Chester Twp., posted the link to the story with “Best Reporter. Great Read for naysayers. Worth your time.”

The link was to this Substack horseshit, so it seems as though that place is still humming along as usual. As for the legislator: she came to office on the power of vaccine denialism and once invited a so-called expert to testify in front of the legislature about how, she claimed, vaccines render people magnetic. Like, the woman tried to stick spoons to her body to prove her point. She also once tweeted that “unvaccinated sperm is the next Bitcoin.” She’s a real winner.

Representative Gross is what you get under extreme gerrymandering. In a sharply gerrymandered district all that matters is winning the primary and winning the primary is all about appealing to the most extreme partisans in the district. Those types love wacko conspiracy theories and insanity is not a dealbreaker.

Hell, even if Gross is right and the government is controlling the weather, you’d think she’d be smarter about things. I mean, what’s to stop Kamala Harris or The Deep State from zapping the weather lasers at the big retention pond behind the Ikea, turning it into a tsunami, and taking her out? Think a little, Jennifer. Jeez.

The Nutterverse

Nabisco’s Nutter Butter cookies have been the subject of a strange viral marketing campaign of late. It focuses on video clips, which you can see on TikTok, which include Nutter Butters with human tongues and teeth, dancing Nutter Butters overlaid on cats and bicycles, and fresh shrimp on top of a Nutter Butter. One that has gotten particular notice is a house laid out like a crime scene with “dead” Nutter Butters and peanut butter smeared everywhere as if it were blood.

It’s like nothing I can remember seeing since at least 2003 when Quiznos gave us the Spongmonkeys (which ruled by the way). I have no idea if this campaign is selling more Nutter Butters but, I always appreciate something different and unsettling with my capitalism. Not that Nutter Butter commercials from even decades ago were any less weird.

Read more about the campaign in the New York Times.

Medical Tourism

From Business Insider:

. . . millions of Americans travel abroad for medical procedures each year, saving anywhere from 40% to 90% on the services they receive. Many don't have health insurance or don't get coverage for the procedures they seek out — dental work and cosmetic procedures like breast implants and liposuction are by far the most popular. There's also a small but growing market for people seeking thorough checkups and testing abroad. An ascendant medical-tourism industry is offering these types of screenings, including MRIs and electrocardiograms, in beautiful locations around the world and packaging them with transportation, accommodations, food, shopping, and sightseeing. 

The story is framed by a story of a 60-something man from North Carolina who injured his shoulder, could not afford an MRI to see what the problem was. So he waited two years until a work trip sent him to Thailand where he could get an inexpensive MRI with only a couple of days notice. It was only then that he knew what was wrong and learned that he could fix the problem with physical therapy.

Americans are conditioned to believe that we have the best of everything in the world but we so totally do not. We are also conditioned to believe that we cannot expect our healthcare system to improve but it so totally could. The people who profit from it simply don’t want that.

John Lennon at 70 

Yesterday, whilst killing time on Twitter, I mused about which deceased rock stars would’ve ended up being Trumpers or RFK Jr. weirdos or whatever had they lived. No, there was no real reason for it. There was just a lot of downtime before the games started.

Anyway, I suspect that Jim Morrison would be a right wing figure now. I don’t think Janis Joplin would be a Trumper necessarily, but I do think she’d hold a lot of problematic and cringey views. Jimi Hendrix would probably not be a Trumper but I could see him detouring into some serious new-agey stuff and maybe having a Dylanesque religious period, albeit with MUCH better religious music than Dylan managed.

Then there’s John Lennon. I started all that musing because yesterday would’ve been his 84th birthday. I often think about what might’ve happened had he lived. I’ve never come to any hard conclusions on that score but at the very least I’m pretty sure that an 84 year-old John Lennon would’ve filled the past four decades with some pretty bad opinions by now. Though, being John Lennon, he probably would’ve cycled through many different sorts of bad opinions over time as the man was, at the very least, changeable. And he was always press-friendly and least-circumspect when it came to his public persona so we would have likely borne witness to every little thing that crossed his mind, for bad and for good.

After some of that tweeting Stephen Silver reminded me of the Vanity Fair article from 2010 which imagined an interview with a 70-year-old John Lennon who had survived the shooting back in 1980. I talked about that article in this space when I first stumbled upon it four years ago, but this was a much smaller community then and most of you probably didn’t read that, so let’s do it again.

First, though, an excerpt for flavor:

I’ve driven up to his estate in Delaware County, 160 miles northwest of New York City, for the ostensible purpose of discussing the 40th-anniversary reissue of John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band and the highly anticipated live shows that will accompany it. Lennon’s publicist, Elliot Mintz, has warned me off any deviations from the topic at hand, but I quickly discover, as so many interviewers have before me, that there’s no distinction between on- and off-topic where Lennon is concerned. He cheerfully waves away my softball inquiry about whether he is excited about the album’s re-release, laughing at the flagrant commercial opportunism of the whole enterprise.

“Look,” he says, “every month is the anniversary of something that the record company can repackage and resell to you in re-digified-nanofied-retromastered form for a luxury fee. ‘Here’s the 47th-anniversary edition of the alternate take of “From Me to You” with John playing lead because George was off having a wee. Pre-order now on iTunes!’ It’s a con. But a brilliant one that keeps me in ruby-spangled codpieces and caviar hosiery.”

And from there, there’s no stopping him . . .

The speculative fiction that follows includes John having an early 1980s midlife crisis and losing Yoko. There’s stuff about Lennon’s solo career from the 80s-on being weird and less than the sum of its parts. That included an odd, but well-received experimental project with Sonic Youth, but I’m not buying that one. To the contrary, I think that Lennon would’ve joined Johnny Cash and others do so some mid-90s stripped down Rick Rubin-produced thing called “Lennon.” There’d be a couple of good records sprinkled in alongside a lot of filler and confusing choices, interrupted by long periods of inactivity. Which makes sense because that’s pretty much what he did in the 1970s.

The stuff in there about imagined Beatles reunions half-hits. The author had them doing a slapdash reunion at “Live Aid” after which they got back together for an almost immediately-dated 1987 reunion album that was so unfortunately of-that-time. That seems less-plausible to me because while The Beatles were a lot of things, they were above all else savvy and calculating, so I don’t see them doing anything embarrassing as opposed to merely safe and boring, which pretty aptly describes the Beatles Anthology project of the mid-90s. The only thing I agree with about the speculative reunion is that, as was the case in reality, the album which came of it was helmed by Jeff Lynne and was an overproduced mess.

All of that notwithstanding, I highly recommend you read the article. For one thing it perfectly captures the mood and voice of a Vanity Fair celebrity profile which makes it seem quite damn real. It does a good job capturing the essence of John Lennon as he really was as opposed to how he has been mythologized since his death. Clever as hell but somewhat dorky and silly. Unfocused and often lazy and not as deep as he or his fans portrayed him as being. So supremely talented that he could get away with all that stuff in ways that almost no one else could.

It’s great fun, really. Even if I still think that Lennon would have been cancelled and rehabilitated about 17 times over the past 25 years. Even if most of us would be absolutely exhausted with him by now. Even if, despite all of that, we still listened to John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band multiple times a year because it remains an absolute banger which stands as the best thing any of the Beatles did as a solo artist.

Have a great day everyone.

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