ALOHA MEANS HELLO AND GOODBYE...ESPECIALLY THIS TIME

Hey, this blog that still exists and that NO ONE will ever read...I am going back to Hawaii! The same refinery where I spent many days cooped up in a trailer listening to Izzy Kamakawiwoʻole sing "Over The Rainbow" a minimum of 1000 times has decided to buy the software that I load for my current company.

I'll get to see my old colleagues, or at least one that I know of. I'm not sure if I'll go straight to Leonard's to get malasadas when I get off the plane, but I'll get there eventually. I'll probably just head to Target to get some distilled water for my CPAP machine and then check in and go to bed. I'll wake up at midnight, play on my phone a bit, and then go back to bed and wake up at 4 am, and get ready for the first day of work.

I'm not staying at the 5-star resort I used to stay at, but this place is brand new and looks decent. It's in Kapolei, so I won't have to fight H-1 traffic except to get there and then back to the airport. I'm going to head over to the resort after work one day, if they will let me in, and walk the lagoons. I used to do that a lot when I stayed there.

I am flying via Phoenix, so it will take a lot longer than a direct flight, 15 hours both ways. I'll only be on the island for about 96 hours, so the flight time is nearly 25% of the whole trip.

I'm not sure what else I can fit in, possibly a north shore visit if I have time, but it's not looking especially great. There is definitely no time for golf on a pristine course or hanging out drinking mai tais with my boss. It's a completely different world as a vendor.

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

 https://www.kqed.org/news/11831607/shutdown-of-marathons-martinez-refinery-prompts-calls-for-just-transition-for-oil-workers

I’m linking to this news so that any of the people I know who work there and are losing their jobs who stumble upon this post as they look it up on Google can read what I have to say.

I’m not happy about this. Thousands of smart, hard-working people built this place, with many of those people risking everything to build a strong union so that they and many others could have good lives, and it gives me no joy to see it shit-canned by a fucking virus.

I only really have one reaction:

What goes around comes around.

I only allowed myself one small indulgence when I saw the news. I bought myself a milkshake. I was going to do it anyway, but I made a point to do it after I heard. I’m on a business trip, but I bought it with my own money.

If y’all need a good reference, I would be happy to do it. I don’t believe in holding grudges. It’s bad for the soul.

Good luck, God speed, and you can find me on LinkedIn.

UPDATE: NOT THE END YET

For the sake of posterity, I'm still here.

My COVID-19 experience has been largely a nothing burger. The biggest change has been an even longer period between work assignments and travel. I'd previously gone several weeks at a time with nothing to do, but we are on week 7 now since I last had to travel anywhere, which is probably a new high, but not necessarily. I was also docked 8 hours pay every week starting this coming paycheck until June 15th, but we've already received our stimulus check, which just about covers that.

Of course, we've also been wearing masks, washing our hands a lot, and not eating out at sit-down restaurants (which I never liked) but that's about it. The worst thing for me is the lack of sports programming on TV, although I'm not angry about it. I don't think anything could have been done to save the start of baseball season or English county cricket. If we lose the start of the NFL and/or the Cricket T20 World Cup in Australia, then I think you can safely say that better government intervention could have prevented it. Even the delay or cancellation of the NFL season would save me the indignity of seeing Tom Brady in a Buccaneers uniform, so I can't be that upset.

I'm catching up on tons of other TV I missed or possibly might have delayed watching had I been more busy. My current rotation consists of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" and "My Brilliant Friend" on HBO, "Better Things" and "What We Do In The Shadows" on FX, and "Better Call Saul" and "Killing Eve" on AMC. We dumped DirecTV so that we wouldn't be burdened with the rental equipment costs or the $600 in NFL Sunday Ticket fees that I either won't use at all because there won't be a season or wouldn't want to use because I don't really care about the Patriots any more (I've decided to save some money and become a Texans fan, although I'll keep an eye on the Pats from time to time). We got YouTubeTV, HBO NOW, and AMC Premiere, as well as our existing Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu subscriptions, which covers everything we want to see. We can watch it all on three $50 Rokus (bedroom, upstairs, and travel) and never have to pay rental equipment fees.

They are making noises about opening "the economy" up, whatever the hell that means. I'm not going maskless or touching any damn thing without immediately washing my hands for many months. I'm hoping I don't have to see the inside of an airport for that long, although that isn't up to me. I'm not going to any sit-down restaurants, ballparks, or any parks or beaches for a minimum of months, either. I have zero faith in any of our federal or state leaders to make scientifically sound decisions, and I don't give a fuck if any of my redneck neighbors look askance at me. You go ahead and chance it. I'm not playing COVID-19 Roulette, thanks. My likely next voluntary foray into any sort of crowd will be on November 3rd to vote against this monster, but that's only if I won't be able to mail my ballot in.

More to come later? We'll see.

THIS IS THE END?

I mean, who knows? I'm 53, in decent but not great health. I don't have any clue if I will get this thing. I'm not super-high risk, but I did just travel on an airplane as recently as Monday. That plane was probably crawling with it. It could be all over my car waiting to get me. It could be on this keyboard.

If I get it, I won't even get tested as long as I'm not dying. I might get it, lose it, and never know I had it. This is insane. I can't imagine how Dopey Dipshit doesn't get blamed for all of this. He had weeks, months even, to formulate a response and did nothing. He fired the pandemic response team two years ago and now says he didn't have anything to do with it, it was "the administration," as if he isn't in charge of the administration.

I hope I get through this alive. I want to be able to vote his ass out and watch him go to jail. Come on, universe, you owe me that. At least let me get most of my 401k back and retain my job.

THE GOOD SHIP ... SCHOLARSHIP?

I’ve been giving some thought to the California case allowing college athletes to be paid for their name and likeness. I’m enthusiastically for it, of course. It’s only common sense.

What is unclear is whether this will lead toward a pay structure for college sports. I’m enthusiastically for that, as well, at least with the Power 5 conferences. But the more I think about it, the more I see a wisdom in the current system that, while not ideal in any way, allows for college sports to exist in places where it otherwise wouldn’t and therefore, if changed to a salary system, would almost certainly end college football and basketball as we know it.

It starts with the scholarship, which is a unique instrument of value. Here are some characteristics of a scholarship that makes it unique:

1.        It is only valuable to a high school senior. Much less frequently, it’s valuable to someone older like an ex-military person who is looking to attend college, but for the sake of argument, let’s ignore those miniscule numbers of people, especially where major college sports are concerned.
2.        It can’t be exchanged for something else of like value. You can’t get a university to give you the value of a scholarship in cash if you choose not to attend. It’s “take it or leave it.”
3.        It has an expiration date. If you don’t take the scholarship, they give it to someone else.
4.        It regenerates every year. Universities are allowed by the NCAA to award a given number of scholarships each school year.
5.        Every university that belongs to the NCAA scholarship system in every small town and big city can award scholarships. You don’t have to be in a growing population center with a huge, thriving economy to be a part of this system. You can be anywhere.

By using the college scholarship as the main form of compensation (stipends are an obvious thing that colleges should be doing anyway, but stipends don’t really amount to much in value terms compared to scholarships), it allows universities to attract athletes to an incredibly varied, diverse, and widespread number of cities, towns, and municipalities throughout the nation. Over time, this has led to stadiums, arenas, and practice facilities being built in almost every location you can imagine. Compare this to a sport that doesn’t have a college-sponsored system at all – cricket. Cricket is the #2 spectator sport in the world, yet without US colleges giving scholarships for cricket, there is almost zero demand for cricket facilities in the US and very few have been built. Of course, there are many reasons for cricket facilities not being built, but the fact remains that it is the most popular sport in the world that doesn’t have US college scholarships, and this is a huge reason for the lack of US facilities.

Now, imagine a world in which colleges were forced to pay a minimum wage to athletes. The scholarship would still exist and be a valuable commodity to non-elite players, but now cash would be king. If you must pay the federal minimum wage to your athlete “employees." that works out to $7.25/hr for about 40 hours a week for about 100 football players and 15 basketball players. Figure the season at 26 weeks each, and that’s a minimum outlay of $754,000/yr for football and $113,100/yr for basketball. Of course, that’s the federal minimum. Most larger schools will allocate far more than that because state minimum wages vary and inevitably, bidding wars will ensue for the best players. When all of that is said and done, the Power 5 will more than likely spend $5 to 10 million per year for player salaries for the two major revenue sports, and more for legally required medical benefits and other compensation as well as increased liability insurance and other costs that come with having employees rather than merely students. They might get around some of that by calling them "contractors" but that's another discussion.

At those numbers, even some of the Power 5 schools will balk. Will Mississippi State in sleepy Starkville, MS have that kind of cash lying around every year? Maybe. Alabama and Auburn will. A divide will start to appear even in the Power 5 and will widen until most smaller schools and many of the Power 5 schools decide to give up these sports. When the currency is cash, and not scholarships, you can spend cash on other things of value, and accountants start getting involved and start making recommendations. A scholarship is of no value to a research scientist or an English professor or a provost. Cash is another story, and when those stakeholders see mountains of cash flowing to the athletes, they will wonder why they aren’t getting it. Most of the Power 5 will decide the cost/benefit equation works in their favor, and that’s what we’ll be left with: a structure very similar to professional sports, where roughly 30-40 big name schools stay in the game and everyone else decides it’s too rich for their blood.

This of course will have lasting and profound effects on the fans of the schools that pull out. If you live in Ames, or Corvallis, or Starkville, you might have to suck it up just like you do for pro sports and drive a few hundred miles to the nearest remaining Power 5 school if you want to continue to watch top-level college sports in person. With far fewer schools, the ticket prices, concessions, parking, and merchandise will skyrocket at the ones still playing. The stadiums, arenas, and practice facilities of the schools that leave will either be torn down or re-purposed somehow for academia, and new ones will never be built.

Now, you can make the argument that this is how it SHOULD be. I would agree with you. A multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like college sports should pay the people who keep it operating in cash, and the market for their services should dictate the macro-economics of the business. But that means huge changes are almost certainly going to happen. To pay college athletes what they are worth, or even a fraction of that, means many schools will choose to spend that money elsewhere where they can get a better return, or at least appear to be getting a better return, in the eyes of their communities.

This is what the university presidents and the NCAA must think about all the time. I’ve never seen it quite articulated like this, but I’m sure an academic study is out there. Basically, this is a problem of the small-school many dictating to the large-school few that even though they don’t make billions on these sports, they make a good bit of money, enough to like having them around anyway, and they can only do so with the draw of the uniquely valuable scholarship (valuable to players, not valuable to anyone else, etc.) as the currency of choice. If you change the currency to cash, the pressure to spend that cash on other things will be too much for most of them, and these sports traditions they’ve built for over a century will collapse. None of them want this as their legacy.

THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF BEING...WHITE

As the last stupid, stupid embers of the crumbling Trump administration start to fade out (we sincerely hope anyway), I think it's time to examine how we got here.

Why did the GOP let this traitorous charlatan take it over? The reasons are more complex than a blog post can elucidate, certainly one written by me, but the main reason is that Trump was able to get at the core of the GOP and what it now stands for - whiteness. The Democrats are a diverse party that represents America, although poorly, incompetently, and often corruptly. The GOP is also corrupt, to its very core, but mainly it wants to be and stay forever white, and that is the vision it has for America. It somewhat tolerates other types of people as workers and servants, but when it comes to power and decision-making, it wants that to stay in white hands forever more.

Trump understands this. It's one of the few things he grasps, because it serves his interests extremely well and speaks to lessons he's been taught all his life by his father and others. He possessed the utter shamelessness to go past dog whistles and say what the GOP leadership and most of its rank and file really feels. They adore him for this, and will stand by him through nearly anything, although ruthlessly and nakedly selling the US out to a foreign power for his personal gain seems like it might be even a bit far for them, we'll see.

The GOP sees the trends in the census, which is why they tried to manipulate the census. They see that the great brown wave is coming and they know that they have nothing in their intellectual arsenal to counter it, because everything in that vapid armory is predicated on the superiority of whiteness. They are tirelessly working to stop the brown people from voting and they see in Trump a lasting legacy and blueprint that can be copied by others: attack immigrants, call them "illegal" and put them in cages to deter others; choose judges sympathetic to white Christian evangelicals; relentlessly pander to enormous corporations who will put the brown population in servitude to enrich conservative white families; gerrymander brown people into electoral ghettoes for all eternity; strip environmental legislation of all teeth so that brown people literally can't breathe or drink clean water; and on and on.

The most detestable thing about all of this is the GOP clings to something that is nothing. Whiteness is a ghost, a vapor, a myth, and a lie. There is nothing special about whiteness. Two and half billion Asians, for example, know this like they know how to walk. Northern, Central, and Western Europeans are not superior in any way to anyone else and never have been. My mother's family is Irish, and the Irish were not even considered white until the 1900's. My father's family is Anglo-Saxon and about as white as possible. I consider myself white and have lived among white people most of my life. We have no special gifts, have no claim on moral superiority, and have no particular brains or skills that others don't have. I've learned this throughout my life, in college, in business and among a diverse population in the cities in which I've lived. We muddle through this life like everyone else. The only special thing about us in the US is our number, and the lies we've told each other and continue to tell our children about how we got here and why we stayed here.

I'm not sure what it will take for white people to shake this notion of specialness. It's slowly happening in Europe as more and more brown people move in. There are huge pockets of resistance, but I feel like the overall sense in Europe is that it will never be the same and the future really isn't that bad. Here, we have done such a comprehensively bad job of education that the feeling of white superiority persists and is now acquiring a hyper-violent streak due to the much wider availability of guns as white people begin to realize that their power is diminishing. Trump bided his time until he could no longer wait, and until his long-time celebrity and the coming demographic changes brought him to the forefront to capitalize. His thorough boorishness and stupidity was unforeseen by his enablers, and may prove to be undoing, but he accomplished much of what he and the GOP wanted just by getting elected.

Even if Trump goes away soon, I fear that the destruction of America has started. It seems inevitable to me that we will divide into two countries, one that respects the rule of law and celebrates diversity and rejects white power, and one that embraces white superiority and despotism. Personally, I will have to move, since my state, Texas, is a white-supremacist despot's paradise. I'm not sure where my wife and I will go. My native state of New York is an obvious choice, or possibly one of the New England states. My autumn years will be spent mourning the nation of my birth, although in truth, we rarely lived up to any of its ideals in the first place. Maybe my new nation finally will.

AND DID THOSE SPIKES IN ANCIENT TIME WALK UPON ENGLAND'S PITCHES GREEN

This was the best game of anything I've ever seen. Baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, golf, tiddlywinks, Monopoly, darts, tag, and even Thrones (I only watched the final episode). Nothing can top it for the drama, heart, determination and atomic sub-particle closeness between the two teams. If it can, I hope I luck into like it I did with cricket and can watch it.

There aren't words, really. But pictures alone won't convey what happened Sunday at the Cricket World Cup. The one above shows the winning margin, but this game deserves more than that.

Let's start with public transport. In most Commonwealth countries, fans flock to cricket games on trains and buses more than cars. The governing body, the ICC, needs to take that into account when scheduling ODI games, T20's, reserve days for bad weather, and the tiebreakers for those games that need them. If the fans can't make the last train home after a contest, they will be stuck and angry and blame the ICC for poor scheduling, and the ICC needs all the good will it can get.

Somewhere, sometime in a conference room, the sportocrats of the ICC sat around a table and discussed the tiebreakers for ODI matches. Nobody has reported when and where that was, and it may have been perfunctory: "We'll do one superover where each team faces 6 deliveries and the higher score wins, and if both teams tie in the superover, the team with the highest number of boundaries in the game and the superover is declared the winner. Right, then, let's hit the pub!" We may never know what other possibilities were considered, but one thing this method accomplishes is getting the fans out and to the train station and bus depot before the last trains and buses depart.

Wait, why are we talking about this? You'll see.

The 2019 Cricket World Cup Final took place Sunday at Lord's Cricket Ground in St. John's Wood, London, the place regarded as the "Home Of Cricket." New Zealand won the toss and elected to bat, putting their opponents, England, at home in the Home, into the field first. This choice by Blackcaps captain Kane Williamson was regarded as standard, and would likely have also been the choice of England captain Eoin Morgan had he won the toss. It was a clear, warm day, good for batting, and a good score would be tough to catch.

New Zealand struggled early, though, and never really got going. The highlight of the innings was the 55 made by journeyman opener Henry Nicholls off 77 balls. Liam Plunkett was his usual deadly self in the middle overs, taking out Williamson, Nicholls, and Jimmy Neesham to constrict the innings and allow the fast bowling of Chris Woakes and Jofra Archer to flourish. The final score was 241/8. Former New Zealand captain Brendan McCullum exhorted his old side in the comm box to 250, but they couldn't quite get there and the feeling was that 241 was not nearly enough against an impossibly deep England batting order.

England came out after the break and almost immediately lost Jason Roy on an LBW call off the first Trent Boult delivery. Williamson appealed, and the call was "umpire's call", meaning it was too close to overturn Marais Erasmus' original determination of not out. Roy only stuck around for 17, and his partner Jonny Bairstow could only manage 36 off 55 balls. It wasn't until the loss of Morgan after a mere 9 runs that England established some rhythm, and that was because of Ben Stokes.

A detour here. Ben Stokes has endured enough in the last three years to keep any number of 19th century Russian novelists employed. In the 2016 T20 World Cup in India, he was sent in to bowl in the 20th over of the final against West Indies with 18 runs to work with. He only made it 4 balls into the over. Each one was crushed for a six by Carlos Brathwaite, a name we will never forget thanks to the legendary call by commentator Ian Bishop. In 2018, he got into a fight in Bristol outside a pub with two men who were harassing two gay bar patrons. The fight was one-sided. Stokes, a 6'0" powerfully strong cricket player decked the men, and he was arrested and had to stand trial for affray. He was eventually acquitted of the crime and one of the men he punched actually apologized. Stokes missed most of 2018 and struggled to regain form on his return. In the first game of this World Cup, he made a one-handed catch running away from the wicket that was considered one of the greatest of all time. So, of course England took off because of Stokes. It HAD to be Stokes.

Morgan's dismissal brought in wicketkeeper Jos Buttler to join Stokes, and the two of them were able to get established, with Stokes staying disciplined and hitting the occasional six when it presented itself, and Buttler taking more risks and going for more shots. The pair combined for 110 runs, almost half the required total, before Buttler hit a flyer to substitute fielder Tim Southee. It was a huge break for New Zealand and seemed to turn the game. Chris Woakes hit a pop up to New Zealand keeper Tom Lathan eight balls later, and with less than 4 overs remaining, Stokes was forced to drag the tail-enders over the line. England's tail-enders are probably the best in the game, however, and Stokes had no reason to panic. Plunkett pitched in a handy 10 runs and got the game halfway into the 49th over, capitulating on a boundary catch by Boult. The next ball was enormous.

Stokes was on strike because he has crossed with Plunkett before the catch. He hit a ball almost in the exact spot as Plunkett's to Boult, but just a bit harder and deeper. Boult settled under it, made the catch, and then inexplicably took a healthy step backward and tripped over the rope, relaying the ball to Marty Guptill on the way down. Too late. It was a six, and England now needed 16 runs off the last 9 balls with that man Stokes still threatening. After a single, Archer was bowled for a duck to end the 49th over, and that set up the finale, with Stokes on strike and Adil Rashid at the other end, with 15 to get.

The first two balls by Boult, who was saved for this over beautifully by Williamson, were perfect yorkers that Stokes fended off for dear life. Boult eased up a bit on the next delivery, trying to fool Stokes with a slower ball, and Stokes slog-swept it over midwicket for a giant six. 9 off 3. Boult then either did or didn't mean to bowl a widish full toss, and Stokes smacked it down the ground toward midwicket. Guptill, the man who ended India's hopes in the semifinal with a perfect strike on the stumps to run out MS Dhoni, collected it, and then made a desperate throw from the deep to try to run out Stokes, who was going for two. The throw was on target, but the angle was bad for Guptill this time because the throw brought the diving Stokes right into play. The ball caromed off Stokes' bat and down to the boundary for an extra 4 runs. In my 10 years of watching countless cricket matches, I've never seen anything of its like. Here's where luck sided really with England, though: the umpires blew the call. They awarded England not only the four extra runs from the ball going to the boundary, but also the second run that Stokes was diving for when the ball hit his bat. Law 19.8 says that the runs awarded when the ball hits a boundary on an overthrow have to be determined from the point the throw was made. If the runners had crossed by that point, they get the extra run. If not, they don't. In this case, the runners had not crossed when Guptill uncorked the throw, so that second run shouldn't have counted.

Erasmus and the other umpire, Kumar Dharmasena, consulted with each other for over 2 minutes, but never called for the third umpire for a video review of where the runners were when the throw was made (at least the TV feed didn't show it like it usually does, anyway). They either didn't understand Law 19.8 or misinterpreted it and Dharmasena put up 6 fingers toward the scorers table. It was not a challenge-able play since it didn't involve a dismissal. Williamson basically shrugged at his misfortune and moved on.

So, then, England now needed 3 in 2 balls instead of 4 in 2. Better still, Stokes was back on strike since he was judged to have crossed Rashid. The next ball by Boult was a yorker that Stokes parried to long off. Of course he had to go for two, down 3 with 2 to go and needing to retain strike. Rashid had no chance at his end on the second run and he was run out for England's 9th wicket. The 11th and final batter, Mark Wood entered, and Boult had to keep England from scoring two runs, with a dot winning it outright and a single taking it to a superover. Boult tried yet another yorker but ended up with a full toss that Stokes hit to long on. Again, Stokes pushed for two and the win, and this time, Wood couldn't make the second, and the 10th wicket fell with the scores level. Superover! The first of its kind in a World Cup final.

They had to post the superover rules on the scoreboard at Lord's, that's how rare it is. Each team would get 6 deliveries. England would go first since they batted second in the game. New Zealand would then get a chance to answer. Remember that discussion about train and bus schedules? I promised I would get back to that. If the superover ends in a tie, to get everyone home in a reasonable time, the winner is judged to be the team with the most boundaries (6s and 4s) during the game, including in the superover. England had a commanding lead in this total by the end of the 100 overs, 26 to 16, so New Zealand would have to surpass England's superover total to win.

England sent out Stokes (of course), by now breathing heavily and covered in Lord's auld sod, along with Buttler, his best partner during England's innings. Boult bowled for New Zealand, and nothing seemed to go right for him from the outset. Stokes kicked it off with a 3 that landed between two fielders, and after a single, he hit a gorgeous 4 to midwicket. Another single put the relatively rested Buttler on strike, and he closed out the superover with a two to cover and a boundary to deep square leg. The number to beat was 15 for New Zealand, and a dejected Boult and his teammates trudged through the Long Room at Lord's to select their batsmen.

They responded with Guptill, in what almost certainly will be his last World Cup, and Neesham, a true original character in the Bill Lee mode with a devilish wit and a Twitter feed to go with it. England selected the controversial Archer to bowl. Nothing about Archer's play or behavior has been controversial. He's been terrific and a model citizen. The controversy lies in his national origin and late selection to the team. Archer is from Barbados with an English father, but worked hard to satisfy the England selection criteria of three years residency (changed in 2018 down from seven years to match ICC regulations). Many in the English cricket community questioned the timing of the change given the World Cup looming and thought that Archer had been given special treatment over more established and native players and that his selection would cause division in the ranks. Nearly everyone felt he was good enough to be in the side, though, and finally the ECB made the call right before the start of the tournament.

Archer appeared to be nervous at the start, bowling a wide to Neesham that barely skimmed the outside of the tram line. On the do-over, Neesham extricated a fine yorker from the blockhole for 2, and then a hit a wallop of a six on a full toss over midwicket. Archer steadied himself, regrouped and bowled another wider full toss that Neesham hit to Jason Roy at midwicket, who fumbled it for an easy New Zealand 2. That left 5 off 3. Archer's attempted yorker was better on the 4th ball, but Neesham fished it out for another 2 for the Blackcaps. 3 off 2 now, exactly what England needed in their 50th over. Ball number 5 for Archer was a short ball, and Neesham fought it off from hitting his shoulder and could only get a single, putting Guptill on strike for the 6th and final ball. New Zealand, little, nice, pleasant, polite New Zealand, stood on the edge of World Cup glory now, in the Home Of Cricket in front of a hostile crowd, needing just another 2 runs from their opening batsman to take it home.

As 2.5 billion people struggled to breathe, Archer tried a final yorker, swinging it into Guptill's pads. Guptill flicked it to deep midwicket. In any other part of the game this is a single, but New Zealand had no choice. It was 2 or bust. Guptill runs very well between the wickets even at 32, but this just wasn't hit far enough. The throw came to Buttler, who deftly collected it with both gloves and swept it into the stumps. You can look above to see how close Guptill was. Buttler didn't fumble or miss and it was over. The sports world's most consequential committee meeting, having started at a time and place unknown, finally adjourned at Lord's with England holding the World Cup trophy and New Zealand in agony.

EXCRETE THE METS

That's it. I'm done.

The New York Mets just completed being swept in a three-game series by the actively-losing Miami Marlins. In the final two games, they didn't score a run and combined for three hits. I can no longer sit by and watch this.

Sandy Alderson was the Mets' General Manager from late 2010 until the middle of last season. I had great hopes for Sandy, which I've documented in this space, and they came to fruition in 2015 with a World Series appearance that was one of the highlights of my Mets fandom. It was a fun team to watch with exciting veterans, promising newcomers, great starting pitching, and lots of life and camaraderie.

Unfortunately, Alderson fell ill last year, and the stumbling cartoon villains who own the team, Fred and Jeff Wilpon, decided to install a former player agent named Brodie Van Wagenen, of all things, as the new GM. BVW, as we'll call him for convenience purposes and because he doesn't deserve a full name, made the curious move of trading the team's best prospect, Jarred Kelenic, for the 36-year-old Robinson Canó, who recently came off a steroid suspension, and closer Edwin Diáz. Now, you could justify the trade just for Diáz, but also taking on Canó's contract and baggage seemed like a rookie-GM mistake, and it has proven to be so.

Installed as the #3 hitter and second baseman, Canó has been nothing short of a disaster. He is slashing .245/.293/.374, has played indifferently in the field, with his main highlight being the concussing of star outfielder Michael Conforto on a shallow popup, and his baserunning has been atrocious. He rarely runs out grounders, and in this Marlins series, he twice failed to run out weakly hit balls that resulted in inning-ending double plays. On the first one, he said he forgot how many outs there were. On the second one, he didn't pay attention to the home plate umpire, who clearly signaled his nubber in front of the plate to be a fair ball. He apologized to manager Mickey Calloway (more on him later) for the first mental error, but didn't even bother on the second one. For all of this, he will be paid $24 million dollars this year and for the following four years, upon which time he will be 40 years old. Yes, 40 years old. That is not a typo.

Meanwhile, the Mets bullpen has been in sad shape for the last three years, probably due to the ailing Alderson's understandable inattention. BVW has done absolutely zero to help outside of the Diáz trade. The off-season acquisitions by BVW for the bullpen list as follows: Ryan O'Rourke, Jeurys Familia, Luis Avilan, Justin Wilson, Hector Santiago, Casey Coleman and Sean Burnett were signed as free agents, and Kyle Dowdy was selected in the Rule #5 draft. That's it. Here's how that's gone:

O'Rourke has appeared in two games with a 2.250 WHIP and is currently in Syracuse.

Familia has a 5.51 ERA and 1.776 WHIP with 13 walks in 16.1 IP.

Avilan has a 9.28 ERA and 2.063 WHIP and is on the injured list.

Wilson has a 4.82 ERA and 1.393 WHIP and is on the injured list.

Santiago is in Syracuse and has not appeared this year for the Mets.

Coleman is in Syracuse and has not appeared this year for the Mets.

Burnett is in Syracuse and has not appeared this year for the Mets.

Dowdy was not placed on the 25-man roster and was put on waivers. He has since been claimed off waivers by the Rangers, having not appeared in a Mets game.

The Mets bullpen overall has an ERA of 4.32, ranking it 19th in the majors, and that includes Diáz's excellent 2.16 ERA in 18 appearances.

In addition to that horribleness, BVW and Calloway, who was a former pitching coach, have somehow managed to get even worse performances from the starting staff. The staff ERA is now 21st in the majors. Last year, they finished 6th overall. Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom has not been himself, being shellacked by the Marlins in the first game of the recent weekend series, and Steven Matz has a some kind of elbow nerve problem, limiting his effectiveness. There is no real 5th starter. The Mets tried the less-than-stellar Jason Vargas a few times but now he is injured, and recently have given Wilmer Font, with a career ERA of 6.81, two starts. Zack Wheeler and Noah Syndergaard have not been setting the world on fire either. What a mess.

The pitching has not been the real problem though. The hitters have been moribund for several weeks, and have reached a .716 OPS, 20th in the majors. The Mets are 23rd in homers, 22nd in total bases, 15th in on-base percentage (they are getting some walks), and 22nd in slugging. As I mentioned, Conforto, one of their best young players, is concussed and has no timetable for a return. Rookie sensation Pete Alonso is hitting homers, with his 14 being tied for 3rd in the league, but his slash stats have regressed since a torrid April. Brandon Nimmo has been terrible at making contact, although he is getting walks. Todd Frazier was injured and has been lousy since his return. JD Davis is looking promising, but Calloway continues to bench him in favor of Frazier, who was a former client of BVW. Only Jeff McNeil has emerged unscathed to this point. He's slashing .342./.430/.471 and is a joy to watch. If only they hadn't buried him in the minors for 5 years (which, I have to say, was Alderson's fault).

In short (too late), this team sucks and there seems to be no hope. They are stuck with Canó and the corrosive rot of his contract, don't seem to want to ditch Frazier, and have no answers for the pitching problems. Veteran starter Dallas Keuchel and reliever Craig Kimbrel are available in free agency, but everyone is waiting until June 2nd when they won't have to give up a draft pick to sign them. The Mets have almost no chance of signing these two players once the bidding gets going in earnest. The Wilpons have consistently refused to acquire top-dollar free agents and there is no sign this policy will end.

Then we have Mickey Calloway. Alderson hired him as a first-time manager in 2018, and he has made all the mistakes of a first-time manager and then some. Despite being the Indians' pitching coach during a successful run, he seems to have no concept how to employ a bullpen, although a lot of it is the lack of resources that I just mentioned. His lineup construction is puzzling at best and a sign of weird front-office pressures that he can't seem to control at worst. Playing Frazier as much as he does is baffling, and can only be because Frazier was signed for $9 million with BVW acting as his agent before BVW became the GM. I can't think of another reason, because Frazier is slashing .183/.222/.333 and was never a great defensive third-baseman, although he is slightly better than the current Mets options. Mickey's in-game decision-making has been so poor that the Mets had to hire former manager Jim Riggleman to be his bench coach. At this point, it's unclear what value Calloway brings, if any, to the team. It certainly isn't in motivation. His handling of Canó's double-dip of loafing was abominable, and the three game series in Miami was a portrait of a team who no longer cares what will happen this season.

This diatribe can't end without a thorough scalding of the one true problem: the Wilpons. Fred and Jeff are conniving, deceitful frauds who either stole or lost the fortunes of their friends by investing them with Bernie Madoff. The truth may never come out, but I would tend to think, based on their baseball acumen, the Wilpons actually don't have the money and fell for Madoff as much as anyone did. They have squeezed the fans for decades by charging outrageous prices for everything and providing terrible customer service. They don't know how to build the organization required in the modern world of analytics to put together a team that can compete, and they don't care how to learn, but are certainly willing to meddle in it. In any other city, they would have been run out of the ownership by the commissioner for the Madoff affair, but because they are in New York and have kowtowed for decades to the MLB establishment, they get to keep the team and keep running it into an oncoming subway train. It will never get better with these doofuses in charge, and they don't even know they are doofuses and won't let go.

Therefore, I will stop following them. I live in the Houston area, and right down the road exists a model franchise, the Houston Astros. They won the 2017 World Series, and reached the ALCS in 2018. They currently have the best record in baseball, and have five dynamic and talented superstars in George Springer, Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, and Justin Verlander. They have a host of great lesser stars, like Yuli Gurriel, Josh Reddick, Gerrit Cole, Wade Miley, and Ryan Pressly, and many other role players who have been carefully selected by GM Jeff Luhnow using the most advanced analytics operation in the game. The minor leagues are stocked, led by Cuban sensation Yordan Alvarez, who has 18 homers already this year in Round Rock. The owner, Jim Crane, is a highly competent and respected player in the oil and gas logistics field in the Houston area, and he lets Luhnow run the team with little interference. It's everything the Mets aren't.

I have been a Mets fan on and off since birth. My dad was a Mets fan when I was born, and I took after him. When I left to live in Illinois, I couldn't watch or listen to the Mets, and I became a White Sox fan (because I couldn't bear to root for the Cubs). When I first moved to Houston, I started rooting for the Bagwell/Biggio/Caminiti Astros. Then we moved to Philly, and I became a Phillies fan, until the ownership excused Brett Myers for drunkenly beating his wife. MLB.TV came about around that time, so I switched back to the Mets in honor of my late dad. I gave it the best shot I could despite the Wilpons' poor stewardship, but I feel safe to say my dad would not abide by this any more either, especially if a better alternative was readily available. So, I have let go of the Mets. Instead...

LET'S GO ASTROS!

THERE ARE STILL LIBRARIES?

Yes, I am writing this from a public library, which is a thing that still exists, apparently. I'm in Kenai, waiting endlessly for a plane that will take off in, oh, 4 FUCKING HOURS AND 15 FUCKING MINUTES! Jesus. Nobody wants to work or has any work to do on a Friday, so I bugged out of the plant (the one where I worked when I had my Alaska Year) around noon. I have another 3 hour and 33 minute layover in Ted Stevens' Palace O' Wonders.

I've already been here 2 hours. I wrote up some "Lessons Learned" from my trip. The main lesson is to invest in Apple stock in 1980 so you don't have to be doing this bullshit. I left that out.

Breakup is well upon the fine folks of the KP, and it's barely spring. Fully 98% of the inhabitants here believe that global warming is a hoax even when there is slush at their feet in March. You can make yourself believe anything, I suppose, especially when you live in the wilderness.

The trip went pretty well. The weather was good, and the new plant people were interesting to talk to. I met a guy last week who just moved here from the New Orleans area whose parents are from India. He didn't mention cricket so I didn't bring it up. I didn't want him to think I thought he was a stereotype. The other new engineer was a woman named Amber. She is moving here from Anchorage but just moved there from Washington state last year. These millennials have to do some crazy-ass shit to pay off their school loans. Amber's husband is stuck in Anchorage and may or may not ever move here, depending on his job situation. I guess she took the job because the pay was too good to pass up.

Poor Amber. She had to spend her first week at the plant this week with me trying to explain the utter clusterfuck of a kludge that is our system. She got most of Friday off, which was a blessing for her. Her poor mind must be like scrambled eggs. The other guy is a little more experienced, so I think he'll figure it out more quickly. He was gone all this week to a training course, which was unfortunate since I was supposed be training him as well.

I really wish I could live here, but I understand why I can't. My wife's dad needs attention and we can't just abandon him. She wouldn't live here under any circumstances, and I guess it would get old fast for me too if I never left. The plant is a great place that I take a lot of pride in, and that might be enough to keep me here if I had the opportunity, but I'm not sure. I'll probably never find out.

Kenai and Soldotna never really change. It's been 7 years since I was living here and almost 3 since my last trip, and it's really a time capsule. If anything, there are fewer businesses because when they go, nothing replaces them. I didn't feel brave enough to leave the immediate area this past weekend. The weather was a little rainy both days, and I hurt my shoulder when I fell on the ice the day I arrived and landed right on it, hard. I was walking to my rental car in my sneakers when it happened. It's mostly just mildly sore right now. I don't think I injured anything, but the dull pain won't go away. My only souvenir, I suppose.

The good news is, I might be coming back pretty soon. I love the summer here. It's the best. We'll see. Right now, my laptop battery is dying and...only 3 hours and 45 minutes until takeoff!

HAIL FLUTIE

I was doing some Pro-Football-Reference digging for my post about my Patriots fandom, and I was amazed at that 2001 season and how close it was to not happening. Everybody remembers the Mo Lewis hit on Bledsoe, Brady taking over, the Tuck Rule, and finally, Vinatieri closing it out in New Orleans.

What I completely forgot was the Week 5 game against the Chargers. I mentioned it in my long post, but the Pats won a close game at home in OT against the Chargers to go 2-3. If they had lost that game, they would have fallen to 1-4 with three straight road games ahead. If nothing else had changed, they would have finished the season 10-6 and with the #6 seed in the playoffs, and a long, uphill climb. Instead, they won and ended up 11-5 with a bye and a home game against the Raiders.

The final seconds of regulation in the Chargers game were especially precarious. Brady had just hit Jermaine Wiggins in the end zone to tie the game at 26. Doug Flutie, of all QBs, took the ball after the kickoff and started to lead the Chargers on what they hoped would be a game-winning drive with 31 seconds left. After a LaDanian Thompson 14-yard run and their final second-half timeout, Flutie hit Curtis Conway on a roll-out pass near the sideline at the Pats 39 yard line. It seemed like Conway had rolled out of bounds, but the officials said he was touched or rolled backward and kept the clock winding.

Flutie had no choice but to spike the ball. The offense scurried to the line of scrimmage, Flutie got under center, and as I'm sure he had practiced hundreds of times, he called for the ball and attempted to spike it. But...the ball slipped out of his hands! The officials all had their whistles in their mouths ready to call the play dead after the spike, and in the split second Flutie had the ball, they instinctively exhaled. Meanwhile, the ball rolled on the ground, and Bryan Cox of the Pats jumped on it. Bill Belichick started screaming at the head linesman immediately, and after Wade Richey had already started lining up for a field goal, the refs finally figured out they needed to review the play.

Head Referee Terry McAulay went under the hood, and emerged saying that Flutie fumbled the snap, but since all the refs had blown their whistles, per the rule at the time the play was dead there at the Pats 41. Richey now had to back up two yards and recalibrate. The Chargers lined up for the field goal, Richey kicked it as hard as he could straight at the uprights, and it was...short. By about two yards.

If Doug Flutie does something he had practiced over and over again throughout several seasons after the spike-the-clock rule was instituted and which is one of the simplest things a QB can do, Wade Richey probably makes the field goal and the Pats dynasty might never had happened.

There's no doubt in my mind Flutie remembers that game. The Chargers were never the same after that and he ended up losing his job to Drew Brees in Week 8. I'm also certain he thinks about how it led to the Patriots getting the bye, the Super Bowl win, and then more Super Bowl wins. He may not think he helped the Pats that much, but I certainly do.

Hail Flutie, indeed!

IT'S A MARATHON, NOT A TESORO

I'm going back to Alaska next month! A lot has changed. Not Alaska itself, which I'm sure is pretty much the same old collection of folks who think salmon at every meal is viable. The refinery has changed quite a bit, though. Now it's run by Marathon, who bought the whole company a few months ago. The new guy I'll be working with up there seems like a gruff veteran of many a vendor skirmish. I'm sure he'll be glad to see my backside when I leave after two weeks of him being less than satisfied no matter what I do. I miss the old days of Steve and Ten to Two Ted and having dinner at Louie's and not really caring what happens at the refinery.

I'm looking forward to many things, though. That Ravn flight to and from Anchorage is always thrilling, if not death-defying. I have a sweet newly renovated AirBnB awaiting in the heart of Soldotna, steps from the high school where I can walk around the track that encircles the football field while freezing my ass off. Jersey Subs is a 2 minute drive away, as is Fred Meyer, the Target of Walmarts. I might drop in on Moose Is Loose Bakery for an apple fritter, Saint Elias for a pizza, and one of the many hot-babe-run drive-through espresso places or Kaladi Brothers for some coffee. Since I'll have a weekend to kill, a trip to Homer might be in order, depending on the weather.

I guess what I'll enjoy most is the waves of nostalgia. Alaska has always been a fun place for me. It's where I spent some of the best times of my life. Even Hawaii always seemed too good for me. I hate to say too foreign, because it wasn't, but there was something off there. I didn't feel welcome, nor should I have considering its history. Alaska is completely different. The people, the cold, the isolation, the scenery and everything about it felt comforting and like home. I only hope it's not really the last time this time.

SIXTH SENSE

Well, they did it. The embroidered patch for my banner is on the way.

There is a lot of Patriots hatred about. I completely understand it. It's the same feeling I have for the Yankees and Cardinals, for Duke, and for Notre Dame.

In the Patriots case, it's two main factors. One is the cheating or perception of cheating. That's probably 75% of it. Bill Belichick will always say about WalkThroughGate and SpyGate that "it wasn't against the rules" or "every team does it." He flatly denies Deflategate, and it seems implausible on its face, but Brady destroyed his cell phone and ultimately accepted a suspension, so the consensus is that something happened.

These are good reasons to hate a team, and I empathize. If the Yankees were caught doing this sort of thing, I would never stop tweeting about it.

The other and more mundane reason for Patriots hate is that Belichick takes no joy in winning. This is as equally true as the cheating/perception of cheating argument. This seems to me to bother fewer people but much more intensely. Cheating is a time-honored tradition in American sports, and probably in every sport (ask Diego Maradona). Not showing joy and gratitude at winning, though, is a cardinal sin that can never be forgiven. There is a protocol when you win something as difficult and arduous as the Super Bowl. Everyone involved must celebrate and take part in the festivities and show real, unbridled emotion. Belichick is simply incapable of that.

From his perspective, he did what he was hired to do, expected to do, and no more. He understands better than any human alive what is required to win NFL football games, and he simply applied his knowledge, earned at his father's knee and in the countless hours studying film for other head coaches, to the Patriots when he was finally given full rein to run a team as he saw fit.

You could almost see, after he handed the Lombardi Trophy to Brady, the machinations in his brain. "Ok, this is over. How am I going to replace Flores and Gronk and the McCourty twins? What about the draft?  Are we ready for OTAs? Who should we get in Free Agency? Can we get Brady to take less money again? On to Week 1 of 2019."

The idea of anyone playing football for entertainment is anathema to Belichick. You play to win, and you only have to win by one point. It could be 3-2 if that's the game plan. Grace, acrobatics, outlandish speed without strength, panache, style...none of these things help you win games. And after you win every game there is to win in this season, there is next season to prepare for.

Thus, Belichick keeps winning, and keeps looking forward to winning, like a relentless Terminator, and everybody loathes him and his team.

I really don't care. I prefer winning to losing. Go Pats!

PATRIOTS FRAY

Hello, my name is Tim, and I'm a Patriots fan.

"Hi, Tim! Fuck you and every one of your ancestors dating back to the Neanderthal!"

This little scene never happened but would if there was some kind of Patriots Fan Anonymous group where the 12 steps included inoculating yourself from the abuse you get from the rest of America and anywhere else people watch the NFL. I'm not sure why that would be a thing, but I thought it was funny to think about.

I came by my Patriots fandom relatively honestly. I was not born in the New England area, but many of my previously mentioned post-Neanderthal ancestors were. I did not really follow the NFL closely until I was nine. Previous to that, I was a die-hard Mets fans during the summer, and I sometimes watched Jets games in the fall and winter with my dad and brother Mike, but neither of them were strong partisans. We all liked Joe Namath, who was constantly on the back page of the New York Daily News my dad would bring home when he arrived from work every evening (with the entries from Aqueduct and Belmont heavily annotated, but that's another story). Namath's knees gave out and he became washed up when I was eight, and was traded to the San Francisco 49ers, who might as well have been on the moon as far as I was concerned.

Then, the most catastrophic thing that ever happened to me happened in August of my 10th year. Mike was killed when a fire started in his room after he came home from a night of carousing at the county fair. Two of my sisters and I were in the room across the hall and witnessed the whole thing. Of course, it was devastating and brutal and horrible and my family descended into a pit of despair and grief that touches us to this day. We were uprooted, first to a motel and then to a drafty rental house a few miles away with not much but our sorrow and whatever toys and trinkets our homeowners insurance would pay for. We were all grieving, bewildered, missing our brother and son, and looking for any solace. Mine was the New England Patriots.

The other kids in my class were starting to adopt NFL teams about that time, and I wanted as much as ever to fit in, especially after what had happened. Many picked the multiple Super Bowl champion Steelers, or their hated rivals the Cowboys, or the Raiders or Dolphins, perennial winners all. Nobody, and I mean nobody, and this is to their credit really, picked the Jets, Giants or Bills. These were three beyond moribund franchises who had done absolutely nothing to earn anyone's loyalty for years and just because we lived in their TV market was no excuse for anyone to root for them.

I fancied myself as clever, and I wanted to set myself apart but still root for a good team that I had at least some passing connection with and could watch on TV at least occasionally. The Patriots were the perfect match. I knew that my dad's side of the family was from Massachusetts going back hundreds of years, and my older brother Joe had just moved to Cape Cod to take an air-traffic controller job. I also knew that my Catholic school's sports nickname was "Patriots," and that the Patriots played the Jets and Bills twice each year, and we would get those games on our local TV channels. I liked the fact that the team was named after a whole region and not just one city. It appealed to the geography nerd in me. I liked that they played in a small town, about the size of the town I lived in, in a stadium nestled among ancient deciduous trees whose leaves were turning color during the season. I liked the logo of the minuteman snapping a football and the red, white and blue color scheme. Finally, I saw Steve Grogan play and that sealed it. Grogan had just been named the full-time starter that September after the fire, replacing the traded Heisman Trophy winner Jim Plunkett. His ability to make something out of nothing with his legs and his strong arm, the way he flung the ball around with abandon, his toughness and his fiery on-field demeanor and competitiveness made me completely forget Broadway Joe. I begged my mom to help me order his poster from the back of Sports Illustrated, and since I was getting away with everything at that point, she relented. The poster went on the wall, and it was official. I was a Pats fan.

It started out as great as I could have ever imagined. The Patriots dominated that year. Their roster was considered the best in football. Grogan, Sam "Bam" Cunningham, Darryl Stingley, "All-World" tight end Russ Francis (no less than Howard Cosell himself called him that), John "Hog" Hannah, Leon Gray, Mike Haynes, Tim Fox, and Steve Nelson were all considered to be top players at their positions. Haynes, Francis, and Gray made the Pro Bowl. Grogan had terrible numbers, but the team was a winner and he was the unquestioned leader. At 11-3, they barely missed winning the AFC East on tie-breakers with the Baltimore Colts, but got into the post-season as a Wild Card, playing at Oakland in the first round. This was the John Madden Raiders at the height of their success. They only lost one game that season, to the Patriots in Foxboro, 48-17. I knew it would be a tough game, with the Raiders and their dirty players ready for revenge for their only loss. The Pats had the lead with a few minutes left in the game, and on a third and long, Kenny Stabler threw an incompletion down the sidelines, making it desperation time for the Raiders. Then, I was first introduced to what being a Pats fan at that particular moment in history was really all about.

Let's back up. My 9-year-old brain did not have access to Wikipedia, Google or anything but newspapers and magazines and books, and I failed to do my due diligence when choosing the Patriots because it was too much work. The franchise came into existence in 1960 as the Boston Patriots when the AFL was formed. Billy Sullivan bought the team with all the money he had in the world and scraped together a franchise on a day-to-day basis for years. They played in many different stadia with few fans and little press coverage and barely had enough cash to stay in business. When the NFL-AFL merger happened in 1966, Sullivan reaped a windfall, but still managed to keep his team in the bottom of the league through all kinds of bad decisions and worse luck. Kicked out of the city of Boston, the team settled in a small stadium in a tiny village called Foxboro and changed their name to the New England Patriots in 1970. More bad decisions followed until in 1973, they hired Chuck Fairbanks as the head coach. Fairbanks had just left his job with Oklahoma, where he had great success, leading the Sooners to three Big Eight titles. Fairbanks immediately drafted Cunningham, Stingley, Hannah, and Ray "Sugar Bear" Hamilton in the first year, and Grogan in 1975, after a couple of bumpy years because of various labor disputes and more Sullivan meddling, the team was ready to contend. I came in at that point, and to my naive sensibilities, all was going swimmingly.

Back to the Raiders playoff game. Just as Stabler was releasing the pass, Sugar Bear, playing defensive end, struck the arm, shoulder and yes, the helmet, of the Raider QB. Referee Ben Dreith inexplicably called roughing the passer, even though the rule at the time did not address a blow to the helmet and only covered hitting the QB late after the pass had been thrown, which Sugar Bear most definitely did not do. First and ten Raiders. They went on to score the winning touchdown with seconds remaining and won the game. They would then go on to beat the Vikings in Super Bowl XI for Madden's only title.

It was my second sports disappointment, after the Mets losing the World Series in 1973 to another Oakland team, the A's. This one hurt worse, because I was still mourning my late brother, and because the Pats had been robbed by the refs. Looking back, I should have known that the Patriots were never going to get the benefit of any doubt based on their checkered history and their perennial doormat status up to that point. In subsequent years, the backstory and the bad karma began to fill itself in. 1978 was another brutal year. The Pats won the AFC East for the first time since the merger, and hosted a playoff game in Foxboro for the first time ever. Unfortunately, Fairbanks had had it with Billy and his even more cheapskate son Chuck Sullivan and news leaked late in the season that he had signed to coach the University of Colorado Buffaloes the next fall. The Sullivans were livid and suspended Fairbanks for the final regular season game, which was co-head-coached by Ron Erhardt and Hank Bullough. Fairbanks was allowed to coach the playoff game, but after all the turmoil, the team collapsed and lost to Houston 31-14. There would not be another playoff game in Foxboro until 1996.

The rest of the 70's and early 80's were a blur. The most memorable part of that time for me was when Howard Cosell announced the murder of John Lennon during a Dolphins-Patriots Monday Night Football game in 1980. The Pats made the expanded playoffs in the 1982 strike year, losing in the first round. Those were the infamous Ron Meyer years, when everyone on the team hated the head coach and the head coach pretty much hated all his players. Meyer was canned and replaced by Colts legend Raymond Berry, another great hire by the Sullivans that almost worked. Berry led the team to their first Super Bowl appearance. Unfortunately, it seemed as though the Pats really just drew the short straw because no one else wanted to face the terrifying Chicago Bears. I remember getting excited when the Pats took an early 3-0 lead, and then watched the Bears score 46 straight points. This kind of thing was now becoming routine in my Pats experience.

Berry had a couple of decent years after that but the team declined under his leadership and he was fired and another rebuilding cycle started. The early 90's were the absolute nadir. The Sullivans finally found a buyer for the team in Remington shaver CEO Victor Kiam in 1989, and he brought in Rod Rust, who was in over his head, for the miserable 1990 season. Grogan led the team to his last win as a Patriot and the team's only win that year. The franchise hit rock-bottom off the field that year as well when Lisa Olson, a Boston reporter, was sexually harassed by numerous players and called a "classic bitch" by Kiam. I was out of college and living in Illinois at the time, and this was before NFL Sunday Ticket. I rarely watched any Patriots games, and if I did, it was just to peek in on the train wreck. Unlike the Mets, though, who I abandoned during this time because it's really hard to root for a baseball team you can't watch or listen to every day, I stuck with the Pats, mostly because of the good will engendered by Grogan.

Kiam, looking to sell after the disaster of the Lisa Olson incident, hired former rah-rah Syracuse head coach Dick MacPherson, who led the club to two increasingly embarrassing seasons. In 1993, Kiam offloaded the team to James Orthwein, an heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune from St. Louis. The franchise was in complete tumult at this point. They were lousy on the field and the ownership was unstable. It looked like Orthwein might move the team to St. Louis, which had been abandoned by Bill Bidwell and the Cardinals. "Oh, well," I thought, "I'll have to get a new team." I think I might have considered the Houston Oilers for a brief second, since I was now living near Houston. It boggles the mind.

I didn't live in Boston, so I really had no clue what was going on around this time behind the scenes. A Patriots season ticket holder and business owner from Foxboro by the name of Bob Kraft had quietly bought up the land around Sullivan Stadium (as it was then called), and then he bought the stadium itself and the lease to the team though 2001. When Orthwein came in and bought the team, he didn't quite realize what he was getting. He finally discovered that Kiam didn't own the stadium or the lease, and when he couldn't convince Kraft to break the stadium lease, his only option was to sell the team to Kraft. Kraft didn't really have that kind of money, but he somehow made it happen.You know the rest of it.

It started slowly after Kraft came in, but built steadily. Drew Bledsoe, a classic pocket passer from Washington State, had been drafted by the previous regime but became the starter under new Head Coach Bill Parcells during Orthwein's only full year as owner. Parcells was a Super Bowl winner with the Giants and had some history as a Patriots assistant. The 1993 season was another rebuilding year, but starting in 1994, the Patriots were mostly good again. They endured another close playoff loss that year to Parcells' former defensive coordinator, a guy named Bill Belichick, and the Cleveland Browns. A down year in 1995 was followed the most successful season in the history of the franchise to that point in 1996. You could feel a complete turnaround in the team by this time. It was exciting to look forward to the season to see what Parcells and Bledsoe could do. I got DirecTV that year and bought NFL Sunday Ticket for the first time. I was at a conference in Boston in August of 1996, and the Patriots were having a pre-season team dinner in the hotel. I thought about hanging around and getting autographs but I decided against it. The 1996 season was electric, capped off by the Divisional playoffs and AFC Championship Game, both in Foxboro, where the Pats stomped on the hated Steelers and the second-year Jacksonville Jaguars to go to the Super Bowl. I really felt like this was finally it, the culmination of all of the misery. Bledsoe was the team savior, and Curtis Martin was his right-hand man, and Parcells had all the answers. It reminded me of the '86 Mets. They just wouldn't lose.

I watched Super Bowl XXXI at my boss's house with a bunch of co-workers. The accountant at the plant where I worked "borrowed" a projector from a conference room and we projected the game on the wall. The game was back-and-forth, with Brett Favre definitely having the upper hand and Bledsoe struggling but still making plays. The Pats were down 13 in the 3rd quarter but got to within 6 on a pretty Curtis Martin TD run. Ok, one stop, get the ball back, and let's get the lead. But then, Desmond Howard happened and they turned into the same old Pats again. Howard returned the kickoff for a 99 yard TD and the Pats pretty much folded the tent. Man.

Parcells quit after the game, blaming Kraft for not letting him "buy the groceries," especially with regard to 1996 draft pick Terry Glenn, whom Parcells referred to as "she," and the Pete Carroll era began. Again, as I look back, this should have worked. Kraft took a lot of time to choose Carroll, and Carroll is clearly a good coach. I'm not sure why he thrived in Seattle but not in New England. But he definitely did not thrive. The team declined each of the three years he was there. In year three, 1999, I attended a depressing Pats loss at Veterans Stadium against the Eagles and yelled at him as he left the field, "Hey, Pete, the Big Dig is hiring!" 

Then came the day that changed everything. January 4, 2000. My 33rd birthday, of all days. The earth shook, the heaven parted, angels sang. No, none of that happened, but you have to gild the lily. Parcells decided to retire as the Jets head coach after a mostly successful run and hand the reins to his assistant, Belichick. Belichick had been secretly in talks with Kraft but was contracted to stay with the Jets. Kraft was unhappy with Carroll and wanted to fire him, but not without a plan. The season ended on January 2nd, and Parcells retired on January 3rd. The following day, Belichick called a surprise press conference. Nobody in the New York media knew what was about to hit them. Holding a napkin that he had written on for the purpose, Belichick stepped to the podium and said, "Due to the various uncertainties surrounding my position as it relates to the team's new ownership, I've decided to resign as the head coach of the New York Jets." 29 words that doomed one franchise to hopelessness and raised another to unforeseen heights of greatness. It was stunning. The Jets didn't accept the resignation and held Belichick to his contract. He sued for anti-trust violations, and finally, Kraft and Parcells worked out a deal to send Belichick to the Patriots for draft picks.

I was completely bewildered. At first, it wasn't clear that Belichick was going to end up with the Patriots, but that was the rampant speculation as soon as the press conference was over. I was skeptical that this was a good move. Belichick was not successful in Cleveland as a Head Coach and it seemed his best role was defensive coordinator. The first year under BB was a continuation of the decline that started under Carroll. The Pats seemed rudderless again. I was growing more and more hopeless. I honestly didn't think I'd ever see a Patriots Super Bowl win in my lifetime. It seemed millions of light years away.

The 2001 season started with Bledsoe resorting to his old habits of patting the ball a few too many times and taking sacks, and the team not moving the ball and making too many mistakes in losses to Cincinnati and the Jets. The Jets game was not broadcast locally in the Philly area where I was now living, and I saw the hit Bledsoe took from Mo Lewis in replays. It really didn't look that bad, but they were saying he might have ruptured his spleen. They carted him off the field, and inserted a QB I had never heard of, Tom Brady. It was hard to follow the Pats at that point because our house in the Philly suburbs had a huge tree right in line with the DirecTV satellite and I had to give up Sunday Ticket. I really wasn't keeping up on all the draft choices and the depth chart. I heard that Brady came in, didn't do much, and they lost. I figured they would go find a QB off the waiver wire until Bledsoe was healthy. I was pretty despondent. I went on the Patriots.com web site and logged into the chat board. I wrote something to the effect that maybe it was time to give up on "Bellyache" and find a young coach like Andy Reid. I think I got several positive replies.

The very next week, Brady led the team to a 44-13 blowout of a Colts team led by Peyton Manning. I was shocked. The game was a regional game in our area and I was able to watch, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I knew about Manning and figured he'd destroy this other kid nobody ever heard of. Neither Manning nor Brady played that well, and the Pats defense did most of the work, returning two interceptions for TDs. You could see, though, that something special was happening. Where Bledsoe was tentative, Brady was calm and decisive. Where Bledsoe would pat and pat and pat the ball and take a hit, Brady had that Dan Marino-like quick release and could get rid of the ball before he got hit.

The next game was against the Dolphins in Miami, and Brady struggled, as he always seems to in that stadium. I was used to the Patriots taking this week to party on South Beach, so I wasn't too worried, and the Dolphins were the division favorites. I think it was the next week, at home vs. San Diego, that we saw what Brady could be. Down 7 with 2:10 on the clock and one timeout, Brady went 5 for 8 and hit Jermaine Wiggins from three yards out to tie it with 40 seconds left. The Chargers missed a 59 yard FG attempt at the gun, which could have been a crippling blow to that season had it gone through. After losing the toss, the Pats defense held and Brady put Adam Vinatieri in position for a game-winning FG. The record was 2-3.

Another beating of the Colts was followed by a loss in Denver, wins over Atlanta and Buffalo, and a loss to the Rams. The record sat at 5-5, and people were arguing that Brady was not the answer and that Bledsoe should get his job back. I may have been one of them. I am an idiot. They didn't lose another game until September 2002.

My wife saved the Philadelphia Inquirer and cut out the front of the sports page with the photo of Vinatieri jumping for joy on it. She bought a frame and mounted it and I have it hung in my man cave. I'm looking at it right now. I can't believe that happened. My only memories of the Super Bowl run are the Tuck Rule game, which I watched with my fingers covering my face for most of, Drew Bledsoe coming off the bench in the Championship Game in Heinz Field to throw a TD pass, and John Madden saying that 1:21 wasn't enough time to win the game. For Tom Brady. Yeah, sure.

Thus, the misery ended, over 25 years after it had begun. I graduated Catholic school, graduated high school, watched the Mets win the World Series, graduated college, got a job and moved to Illinois, moved to Houston, got married, and moved to Pennsylvania all in that time. In retrospect, 25 years isn't that long to wait, when I think of Jets fans, Dolphins fans, and Bills fans (4 straight Super Bowl losses and still no wins!), and that's just in the AFC East. Arizona Cardinals fans have seen their team move from Chicago to St. Louis to Phoenix all without a title since 1947. Even on that frigid day in 2002, I was lucky. And, thanks to Thomas Edward Patrick Brady and William Stephen Belichick, I've been lucky to this moment.

I have no memory of the 2002 season. I was still in shock. I know they missed the playoffs, but I can't recall a turning point or one particular game where I realized they wouldn't be going back to the Super Bowl. I just didn't care at that point. I still didn't have DirecTV so I must have not watched many of the games. I remember two things about the 2003 regular season. The Pats lost 31-0 in Buffalo after Belichick had cut Lawyer Milloy right after the last preseason game. Molloy was pissed and took out his anger on Brady and the Pats receivers that afternoon. I was pretty furious at Belichick for letting a player like Molloy go to a rival right before they were supposed to play them. Of course, the Pats righted the ship and went on a glorious run after that, winning 14 and losing only one other game. The final game occurred while I was at Epcot with my family. I had to break away and duck into the ESPNZone to check out the final score. Pats 31, Bills 0.  A perfect book-end to the season. I remember the Super Bowl being a crazy shootout between Brady and Jake Delhomme of the Panthers, with Vinatieri once again splitting the uprights to seal it. Two rings! A dynasty! Huh? This team? The PATRIOTS?

It got even better the next year. The Pats went 14-2 again, losing a heartbreaker to the Dolphins in Miami (as usual) to lose the #1 seed to Pittsburgh. That only made it sweeter when, after a 20-3 blowout of Peyton Manning and the Colts in the Divisional Round, they trounced Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers 41-27 at Heinz Field to go to their third Super Bowl in four years. I watched this Super Bowl at the home of the head of the organization my wife and I volunteered for. They were all Eagles fans and I was the only Pats fan. I wore an Eagles sweatshirt under my Brady jersey, just in case. Thanks to Andy Reid's poor clock management and Donovan McNabb's stomach, the Pats hung on 24-21 and it wasn't needed. Three. One fewer than the Steelers in the 70's, but still a legitimate claim on all-time greatness.

The dynasty seemed to end the following year. I've already posted my experience sitting in my wife's Subaru and listening to the playoff loss to the Broncos because the power was out in my neighborhood. They made it back to the playoffs in 2006, and took a 21-6 halftime lead over the Colts while I was en route to Hawaii with my wife for a business trip, then lost after we landed. Belichick was being criticized heavily during this period for being a terrible GM and not getting the right complementary pieces around Brady. Well, in 2007, he acquired Randy Moss.

I got to watch the Steelers game that year in person. The company we were doing a project with, and for whom I now work, was conveniently based in Foxboro, and they let us occupy the company box at Gillette. The fact that I was a longtime customer of this company was a happy accident that started back before Kraft bought the team, and the fact that I work for them now is probably no accident at all. I'm a pretty committed fan, right down to my livelihood. In any case, that game has to be the highlight of this whole run personally. The box had an attendant who would fill up your glass as soon as it was empty, and there was unlimited food. It was amazing. They treated us like kings. On the field, Brady baffled the Steelers secondary all game long, capped off by a stunning flea flicker to Jabar Gaffney that made even the fancy seats shake. The final was 34-13 and it wasn't that close. It was great fun hearing the Patriots fans serenade the few Steelers fans who showed up as we got into our van back to the hotel. That win put the record at 13-0. I was back in Foxboro in January and bought an upper deck ticket to the Divisional win over the Jaguars. 16-0. They just might do it!

I was in Hawaii again when David Tyree happened. I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing. To go 18-0 and then lose the Super Bowl to yet another Manning brother was simply inconceivable (if Archie and Olivia Manning had stopped after Cooper, Brady might be going for his 11th Super Bowl win). I did get to console myself by going to the Pro Bowl in person the next week. Brady, of course, begged off as he usually does.

I booked a pair of tickets to the final game of a Rangers/Red Sox series in Arlington for the first Sunday in September, 2008. My wife and I wanted to spend a long weekend in Dallas and see some tourist sights. I wasn't really paying attention that the NFL season was starting that day, and it didn't look like much of a challenge. The Chiefs were coming off a 4-12 season (and were headed to a 2-14 season) and the Pats were at home, so I figured I wouldn't miss much. I think it was in the 6th or 7th inning or so when they played the NFL highlights on the Jumbotron. "Tom Brady was carted off the field in the first quarter against the Chiefs with what appears to be a serious knee injury and is out for the game." Oh, crap.

The rest of 2008 was very weird. The Pats without Brady. I kept writing off the season, and Matt Cassell kept dragging me in. Finally, it ended when the Dolphins beat the Jets in Week 17 even though the Pats ended the season with four straight wins. This was probably the best 11-5 team with a backup quarterback that never made the playoffs, which is a small comfort.

I'll compress the next few years. 2009: Ray Rice goes the distance on the opening play of the Wild Card playoffs, one and done. 2010: Mark Sanchez (!) ends the Pats season in the AFC Championship game. 2011: A really weak Pats team sneaks into the Super Bowl by beating the Ravens on a last-second pass defense by Sterling Moore and a missed field goal by Billy Cundiff. Eli beats them again in the Super Bowl, this time because "My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time" Gisele Bundchen famously says. 2012: The Ravens get revenge, beating the Pats at home after the Pats had a 4th Quarter lead for the first time ever at Gillette. 2013: Peyton re-takes over the Manning dominance over Brady, this time in the AFC Championship, as the Broncos win 26-16. 2014: The Malcolm Butler game. Should have handed it to Marshawn, Pete! 2015: Peyton again, this time a little closer, 20-18. 2016: 28-3! 2017: Philly, special. That brings us to today.

This season started out with Julian Edelman suspended, Gronk hobbling, no real identity on defense after last year's debacle in the Super Bowl, and Sony Michel, a rookie, as the featured back. They snuck by the Texans in Week 1, and then lost two, one a humbling loss to Detroit, before bouncing back to win six straight including a 43-40 win over the Chiefs on a late Gostkowski field goal. I was thinking this season could be special, but then they dropped another clunker, this time to the mediocre Titans. After a couple of grinding wins over the Jets and Vikings, the record was 9-3, two games back of the Chiefs. The Pats usually don't win the Super Bowl or even get in if they don't get the #1 seed, so I was not very optimistic at this stage. Then came the dreadful Miami Miracle. After decades of not even showing up for the game in Miami, they finally played really well and had a 6-point lead with under 30 seconds left. For some reason, they put Gronk, who could barely run at this point, on the field for what they thought would be a Hail Mary. The Dolphins were way too far back for that, though, and ran a Stanford Band play, which only worked because Gronk was the last line of meager defense. Touchdown, and 9-4. No shot now. The next game was at Pittsburgh, and Brady could never get going, throwing a terrible interception in the Red Zone en route to another loss. 9-5. It's over. Done. Maybe a Wild Card win at best. They won the final two at home vs. the horrible Bills and Jets, and because of the Antonio Brown-fueled collapse of the Steelers and the win in Week 1 against the Texans, they got the bye and the #2 seed. Lucky.

I became slightly more enthused as I watched the Wild Card weekend and saw that they were going to draw the Chargers instead of the Ravens. They've always owned Philip Rivers, and every game against the Ravens was a struggle, and forcing LA to travel across the country twice in two weeks was a bit much. Sure enough, Rivers had a terrible game and the Pats won easily. On to Kansas City to face the Chiefs in Arrowhead. I did not like their chances. The 43-40 game was in Gillette and another shootout would be less likely in a playoff game against what seemed to be a stouter Chiefs defense than earlier in the season. The Pats took a 14-0 lead at halftime on a beautiful catch by Philip Dorsett, of all people, and I still thought it was only a slight problem for Pat Mahomes. I was right of course. KC made up the 14 points quickly and even took the lead with 2:03 to go, forcing Brady to score a TD. I thought they had lost the game at least three times, especially when Dee Ford was called for lining up in the neutral zone, nullifying a game-ending interception. Finally, Rex Burkhead plunged in with the go-ahead TD, but there was 40 seconds left, way too much time for the NFL MVP. The Chiefs had a shot at a winning TD, but opted for the tying FG instead, one of many odd calls by Andy Reid in the game. Matthew Slater called heads in the overtime coin toss, as he always does, and heads it was. Brady did the rest, converting three 3rd-and-10s before handing it to Burkhead again for the winner and Super Bowl number nine for Brady and Belichick.

I can't fathom that. NINE Super Bowl appearances. I think of me sitting pathetically in Herkimer or Potsdam, NY, trying to watch any Patriots game I could and usually watching them lose in some depressingly bleak manner. I'd then have to face the jeers of my high school or college friends, all of whom were rooting for the Steelers, Cowboys, Redskins, Raiders, or some other team that had actually won something. There were decades of watching the playoffs and the Super Bowl with no rooting interest and wondering what it would be like for the Pats to have a real shot at the title. And then a grumpy journeyman coach resigns on a napkin and this gangly kid from California and Michigan shows up, and all the tragi-comedy turns to magic, all the losing to winning.

Whatever happens Sunday, I'm ready. I have a spot for a sixth Super Bowl patch on my Patriots banner in my man cave. That spot may never be filled in within my lifetime, or it might be filled in next week. It really doesn't matter. The Patriots have won enough for several lifetimes already.

Go Pats!

MAKE AMERICA GET (OFF TWITTER) AGAIN

Hey, I'm posting! What do you know? Still breathing.

The reason I am posting is that I would like to inform the billions of people who aggressively don't read this that: TWO AND EVEN MORE THINGS CAN BE TRUE AT THE SAME TIME.

You've seen it if you waste your life on Twitter like me. Some truly awful humans from a Catholic (only capitalizing to differentiate it from the much nicer non-capitalized word and definitely not out of respect) high school in Covington, KY went to DC to participate in the March For Life (same parenthetical as above). Somehow, and I'm thinking the MAGA hats they were wearing realllly helped, they got involved in a confrontation with Black Hebrew Israelites, which I confess I had never heard of before yesterday, and a Native American group. Everything was filmed from different angles on various cellphone cameras because progress? and the episode was posted to Twitter. Then the carnage began (no violence of any kind occurred during the incident).

At first, from the editing of the initial video, it seemed that the Covington kids were very much instigators. All you saw was a Native American man drumming, with a MAGA kid staring at him and smiling with a creepier grin than anything Eli Roth has ever imagined in his worst nightmares. There was a tomahawk chop chant going on in the background, and various other non-specific things being yelled. Twitterers immediately said that "Build The Wall" was one of the things they heard, and a short video of the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, in tears, was later posted where he said that "Build The Wall" had been chanted, but I did not hear that. Some more short videos from other angles were posted that showed the same scene.

The response from Twitter was truly mind-boggling. Every celebrity you've ever heard of and many you've never heard of and people who are not famous except on Twitter and people who are not famous at all joined in the condemnation of the Covington kids. I posted that the Covington diocese had settled for one of the largest amounts to that point in the clergy abuse scandal back in 2005, demonstrating that the moral high ground was not exactly at Mt. Mitchell levels in that particular corner of Appalachia, but that's all I posted, trying to await the backlash to the backlash to the backlash before going any further.

It took a little while, but the backlash sure did come. The most convincing was a post that stitched together about 30 minutes to an hour of video from the Black Hebrew Israelites and others. The BHI were not pleased with the MAGA hats at all, and hurled abuse at them for several minutes. The Covington kids didn't do much in return, gathering in a group, and then doing some school chants. Then, the Native American group led by Phillips appeared, with Phillips beating his drum. He definitely moved toward the Covington kids, not the other way around. They were still chanting, including the execrable Tomahawk Chop, while Phillips drummed. Then he approached the kid with the nightmare smile and drummed directly at him with both making eye contact with each other the entire uncomfortable 2 or 3 minutes. Then it was over.

Phillips later released a statement saying that he was trying to defuse the confrontation between BHI and the Covington kids, and he characterized the BHI as "prey" and the Covington kids as "predators." An anonymous Covington student released a statement saying that they did nothing wrong and were just waiting for their buses when all this transpired around them and to them. The backlash to the backlash then followed, with many saying the Covington student was lying, citing various snippets of video that I was too exhausted to go and check. That's all still going on right now, and I haven't become any less exhausted.

Here's what I wanted to say: it is true that the Covington kids and the adults who arranged this trip are terrible (they wore MAGA hats to a pro-life rally and chanted the Tomahawk Chop, and that grin...I mean it will haunt me for months) and it is also true that as terrible as they are, they did not incite violence or make racist remarks on top of the inherent racism of the Tomahawk Chop chant, which by the way, Kansas City Chiefs fans also did throughout the AFC Championship game on Sunday. It is also true that Nathan Phillips approached the students and not the other way around. It is also true the BHI were hurling insults at the students. It is also true that none of the adults with the Covington group seemed to step up and do anything. It is also true that the Catholic Church is a moral cesspool and that Native Americans are the victims of genocide and that whatever the BHI is, it consists of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved for hundreds of years by the ancestors of at least a few of the Covington kids.

All of these things are true. What are we going to do about it? I don't know, but tweeting is not enough.

THE LAST (TIME I EVER POST ABOUT THE LAST) JEDI

SPOILER ALERT! Oh, hell, no one ever reads this. Luke dies. Fuck you all.

I went and saw The Last Jedi because I am genetically required to, having been a child when Star Wars came out in 1977. I didn't like it, and I will enumerate the reasons why without calling everyone who liked it an asshole on Twitter. I don't care what you think.

1. Kylo Ren is a terrible character, horribly miscast and badly written. Speaking of Twitter, the hilarious Twitter feed Emo Kylo Ren perfectly captures how risible this role is, and every time poor Adam Driver came on the screen, I thought of this feed. Driver is quite simply in the wrong movie. I like him as an actor and in contemporary roles, especially, he is excellent. He's a perfect Brooklyn hipster in "Girls," for example. He doesn't belong in a sci-fi space opera, nor does this stupid character. Kylo Ren should not be a callow, tempestuous 20-something idiot. To really fill Vader's shoes, he needs to be more ominous and ruthless and played by someone who can convey that sort of dread.

2. I do not care what happens to Poe and Finn. They mean nothing to me. They are one-dimensional, have no charisma, no motivation, and I don't know why they are in this movie or the last one. Again, Oscar Isaac and John Boyega are very good actors, but they have nothing to work with here. The characters are beyond under-written. They are ciphers.

3. Re: number 2, who the hell are Rose and Paige Tico? Why are random nobodies being inserted as love interests and crucial plot points? This is a saga, and it's in episode 8. This is not the time for this sort of thing. Also, Rose's line "I want to put my fist through this lousy, beautiful town" is perhaps the dumbest thing ever said by anyone ever.

4. It's too long. Get over yourself, Rian Johnson. Bring it in under two hours, already.

5. The story here is about Rey, who is excellently cast and written, and her relationship to Luke and the Jedi and Kylo. Mark Hamill was born to play the role of Luke and he is fantastic in it, and Daisy Ridley is a revelation, even more than she was in The Force Awakens. Why couldn't we have gotten a few more scenes with their dynamic and infinitely less with the characters that mean nothing to anyone?

6. I'm tired of the Force and all the dumb things it can and can't do, and nothing about the mechanics of space flight or space weaponry or space in general make any fucking sense at all in this film. It's exhausting. They are just making shit up as they go along, which is their prerogative, I guess, but I don't have to like it.

7. We need more Chewie, C-3PO and R2D2 to connect us to the earlier films. Being droids and an alien of indeterminate lifespan, these are essentially timeless characters you can insert into any scenario, and they should have been central to the plot instead of mere adjuncts. Plus, everybody loves them! Why are you keeping them in the background?

8. Who is Snoke? The main villain just appears from nowhere and we should be afraid of him because he looks mean and is powerful? That is just shit plot construction. And then they cut him in half out of nowhere. Completely fucked up, and also, a near shot for shot copy of what happened to Palpatine in Return Of The Jedi, except for the actual method of death. Lazy.

I liked Laura Dern, and of course, Carrie Fisher was great. Benicio Del Toro should get his own spinoff. Now go back to writing your Rose/Finn/Rey threesome fanfic.