Spring, sweet spring, is here
Plus: A new podcast on a sex club... Good books... How NBA basketball is changing... and Something special from Sweden
Spring has sprung. The cherry blossoms are blooming in Washington, DC. But Old Man Winter still is hanging around. Earlier this week I was driving through Ohio and Pennsylvania and flurries were falling.
I won’t lie: I really love spring. There are more and more hours of daylight. The weather is warmer but isn’t sweaty hot. Flowers erupt from the ground. More people are out and about. It as if the world is being reborn.
I am particularly fortunate to watch this process play out at the nearby Potomac River. During the winter, it is a cold, desolate place. The water moves but little else. Then spring erupts. Eagles, cormorants, ospreys, and other birds are everywhere. Shad mad with lust create ripples and splashes. Massive blue catfish stir from their winter stupors and blast out of the water while gobbling the shad.
If I had to choose one word to describe spring it would be…. Life!
Books that caught my eye
Nearly every night before I turn out the lights I read. Not magazines. Not social media posts. Just books. Some old. Some new. In the past few months I have enjoyed:
Agatha Christie, N or M? (So clever! Such fun!)
Edna O’Brien, James Joyce: A Life (Joyce was a genius and a wet, hot mess.)
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (A short, stark fictional depiction of an America that is increasingly hard to find.)
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (An outrageous story and an accurate depiction of men craving purpose.)
Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History. (The title says it all. The CIA bamboozled the Soviets, America, and the world.)
I have started enjoying audio books while in the car. I recently finished Richard Norton Smith’s terrific biography, An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. (Republicans like Jerry Ford are hard to find these days.)
Right now I am most of the way through Peter Frampton’s memoir, Do You Feel Like I Do? It’s a treat—not least because Frampton does the reading. Who knew that he was so good at doing imitations of others?
Some of the new titles that have caught my eye are:
Buddy Levy, Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin's Press)
Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield)
Art Bell, What She’s Hiding (Ulysses Press)
Wait, what?
A broke guy with a family but no life plan sees the film “Eyes Wide Shut” and decides to create his own snazzy, mask-wearing orgy club for the super-rich. And he succeeds—for a while. Hunter Biden reportedly was a member. Then… Goodness, what a tale. Listen to this crazy story on the Sanctum Unmasked podcast. (Read more/listen)
Yes, professional basketball really has changed
Yes, the game still is played by very tall men in shorts. But look at how the strategy for scoring has changed as depicted in the figure above.
This is the money ball or analytics effect. How teams play is heavily data driven, and the data say shoot lots of three-pointers and play the paint. While money ball made baseball a lot less interesting to me, I don’t mind what it has done to the NBA. The game feels more exciting to me—lots of slick passing, long, arc-ing shots, and thunderous dunks.
If you like Jimi Hendrix…
Thanks to Spotify, I came across this 2018 tune by the Swedish group, Graveyard. I nearly drove off the road because I kept hearing riffs that sounded like they came from the Experience. This is just one of the fine tunes on the heavy, bluesy album, Peace.