5 Things on a Friday returns for a special NFL Playoff/MLB Cheating edition. Enjoy!
I don’t want national media respect anymore. I want them to have to cover the Tennessee Titans in the Super Bowl which is their worst nightmare.— Two Tone Fanatics (@twotonefanatics) January 14, 2020
1. A Bandwagoners Guide to the Tennessee Titans (Two Tone Fanatics)
So you’re intrigued about the football team in Nashville?
Maybe your team has been down and out for a while or just got knocked out of the playoffs. Maybe you don’t watch much football, but your friends and family won’t stop talking about the Titans. Maybe you’re just a bandwagon professional; jumping from team to team each year with no regard for anything except excitement.
You’ve picked a fun team to latch onto. It’s been a wild ride for the Tennessee Titans this year. We’ve had twists and turns and plenty of drama, both on the field and within the fan base. Let’s get you caught up on what the Titans are all about so when you’re at a watch party this weekend, you sound like you’ve been a fan for decades.
It’s weird to think of myself as a bandwagon fan having been a real-life fan of the Titans since 1999. That was the year they went to the Super Bowl. It was also the year I was in Korea. I sat with my buddy Joe in 4-7 Cav’s Saber Club on Super Bowl morning watching the game over a brunch watch-party organized by the squadron, and I agonized as the team fell literally a foot short of making an improbable comeback for the ages. I then returned to Tennessee in 2000 to find that the Titans were arguably the best team in the League. I watched in person with my father as the Baltimore Ravens bounced the then #1 seeded Titans (13-3) from the playoffs in the Divisional round, and so it was that I experienced a moment of sweet revenge this past weekend when Tennessee finally returned the favor.
And yet. I’ve been living in the Greater New York Area since 2002. Following the Titans hasn’t been particularly easy, especially since it’s been a good long while since they’ve been consistently relevant.
So here we are.
For what it’s worth, Derrick Henry ran over the Chiefs in the regular season. The rematch is Saturday at 3:05 pm Eastern.
An Astros hitter can line a hit and motor into second base. From that perch he can stare at the opposing catcher and set to stealing pitching signs. Then he can break dance or do jumping jacks or anything else he can contrive to let the batter know the identity of the next pitch.
That is baseball legal, and worth a giggle.
By contrast, a team apparatchik can sit in an airless office and stare at the television screen and decipher those same pitching signs. He can relay his findings to the bench, where players proceed with yips and howls and thumping of garbage cans to communicate to their batter that a fastball is a-coming.
That is baseball illegal, and a high crime.
On Monday, we learned the Astros committed many high crimes during the 2017 and 2018 seasons. Infamy was instantaneous. Major League Baseball released a blistering report, and the Astros owner Jim Crane fired his general manager, Jeff Luhnow, and his field manager, A.J. Hinch, less than an hour after baseball’s commissioner had suspended them for a year. The team was stripped of top draft picks and will pay a large fine. In one afternoon, the Astros went from colorfully outfitted darlings who played in the World Series last autumn to cheats living in shadowed ignominy.
The Times’ writer acts like he doesn’t understand the difference between using an eyeball to look nearly 200 feet around a pitcher and into a catcher’s glove and using cutting-edge high-speed technology to do the same thing. Ridiculous. Not mention the fact that stealing signs from second base implies getting a runner onto second base consistently -- not easy to do -- versus using technology all the time.
Ugh.
By the way, every MLB team would trade $5M and four draft picks for a World Series title. Draft picks and money are intended for the purpose of winning WOrld Series titles.
It’s maybe worth mentioning that the hated Boston Red Sox also fired Manager Alex Cora. Cora was with the Astros when they set up their surveillance scheme, and he seems to have brought it with him to Boston.
Seriously, though, if you don’t understand the difference between watching an opposing team to try to figure out what they’re going to do with your unaided eyeballs and using 21st Century technology to systematically survey every team in the League to gain an unfair advantage on a real-time basis, I don’t know what to tell you.
I would rather face a player that was taking steroids than face a player that knew every pitch that was coming.— Alex Wood (@Awood45) January 16, 2020
The beginning of the film very much picks up from The Last Jedi in that the First Order has cut off all communication between planets in order to suppress a rebellion inspired by Luke Skywalker’s stand off at the Battle of Crait. So the spark of the rebellion did work in this version of the movie. In fact, the opening sequence of Duel of the Fates finds Finn (John Boyega), Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), and BB-8 stealing a Star Destroyer that’s chock full of Imperial weapons. During the heist, Finn sees a Stormtrooper with his helmet off that he recognizes, with his story arc in Duel of the Fates nicely concluding the one that began in The Force Awakens. Oh and Rose? Apparently front and center through the whole movie, which is a damn shame given that she’s completely sidelined in Rise of Skywalker.
As for Reylo, well, Kylo Ren still dies at the end of Duel of the Fates, but his arc in the film—as well as Rey’s—is completely different. For one, there’s no Emperor Palpatine. At the beginning of the movie, Kylo Ren has vanished off to Mustafar (Darth Vader’s lava planet) and is wallowing around in Vader’s old castle. There, he’s “haunted” by the Force Ghost of Luke Sykwalker (Mark Hamill’s return) and even fights a hallucinatory version of Darth Vader a la Luke’s fight in the cave. He comes into contact with the Sith teacher of Palpatine, Tor Valum, via an ancient Sith device as he’s trying to put an end to the Jedi and the Sith once and for all. But he’s bad, bad, bad in this version of the story—he’s gone full Heisenberg, so to speak...
The finale of the movie finds Rey and Kylo Ren duking it out on the mystical planet Mortis, with Rey getting an assist from the Force Ghosts of Luke, Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor, presumably), and Yoda. The Jedi try unsuccessfully to bring Kylo Ren back to the light, but he’s too far gone and in the end he is “extinguished.”
Some of this made it into Abrams’s version of the film already, and a good bit more of appears to have been planned. At least that’s the rumor. I guess my only quibble is that I really liked The Force Awakens, so I wasn’t upset when the breadcrumbs from that movie were picked up in lieu of the crumbs from The Last Jedi, which I liked a lot less -- and increasingly less with repeated viewings.
The finale of the movie finds Rey and Kylo Ren duking it out on the mystical planet Mortis, with Rey getting an assist from the Force Ghosts of Luke, Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor, presumably), and Yoda. The Jedi try unsuccessfully to bring Kylo Ren back to the light, but he’s too far gone and in the end he is “extinguished.”
Some of this made it into Abrams’s version of the film already, and a good bit more of appears to have been planned. At least that’s the rumor. I guess my only quibble is that I really liked The Force Awakens, so I wasn’t upset when the breadcrumbs from that movie were picked up in lieu of the crumbs from The Last Jedi, which I liked a lot less -- and increasingly less with repeated viewings.
Seriously, I could either way with a thing like who Rey’s parents were, but dropping the Knights of Ren completely was a really aggravating story choice.
Agree so much. Cc @TheIdDM https://t.co/g1RvsJKqJo— NewbieDM (@newbiedm) January 16, 2020
4. Morbius
This might be a great movie, but yo, these guys are reaching way deep into the archives for this one. Skeptical.
5. A Walk in the Park
I took these at lunch yesterday. I felt like I needed a better camera, a ladder, and maybe an hour of uninterrupted quiet to figure out what I was seeing and how I wanted to try to capture it, but I decided not to let any of that stop me from attempting a little art.
This first shot comes the closest to expressing what I was actually attempting to do. No one in my immediate family much cared for it, alas, with my wife calling it an ad for Citibike and my daughter Hannah complaining that it was "too busy" for her tastes.
Those are both fair points.
* * *
This first shot comes the closest to expressing what I was actually attempting to do. No one in my immediate family much cared for it, alas, with my wife calling it an ad for Citibike and my daughter Hannah complaining that it was "too busy" for her tastes.
Those are both fair points.
The next two are different edits of the same shot. The first one looks a little darker than intended. The second one is done that way on purpose, as-for-Batman.
I didn't love this last one, but my wife and my kids did. Go figure.
* * *
That’s all we’ve got time for this week. We're finally getting snow in New England, and that's good, but I'll be at a dance competition with the girls instead of out on the slopes. That's not bad by any means, but it does sort of make the snowstorm irrelevant to me personally.
Happy Friday, folks!
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