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.

GASSED

Here I am, in my chosen profession, staying up all night in a gas plant in the southeast corner of New Mexico. How did it come to this?

In 2014, I joined up with the manufacturer of the hardware and software that I had spent the last 20+ years getting familiar with as a customer. It was a godsend, really, since I had spent the previous year working for a third-rate outfit that was essentially a cult of personality of the person who founded it, doing crap work with crap people for crap customers who treated us like dogs. I only took that job because my previous previous company was trying to relocate me to Salt Lake City, which is, in the most charitable description I can come up with, a city.

So, anyway, coming to my current employer seemed like a good idea at the time. My first project, which I took over in the middle, was being run into the ground by the project manager and ended up making him something other than a project manager. None of that was my fault. I worked very hard to deliver that project and it came in on time, albeit way over budget because of all the freebies the customer extracted from the no-longer-a-project-manager due to his incompetence. Again, none of that was my fault.

However, I think I somehow got the reputation of not being able to lead a project, because I haven't led one since. I keep being given this flotsam and jetsam of tasks that nobody else wants to do. Most of this detritus involves gas plants. Gas plants are little cookie cutter collections of tanks, columns, compressors and other equipment that some licensing firm designed 50 years ago. They sit in the middle of nowhere (Helllllooooo, Hobbs, New Mexico!) on various natural gas pipelines. Their purpose is to distill natural gas into its component parts, namely ethane, propane and butane, which is then sold either in trucks or sent back into other pipelines for use in other plants.

These plants are dirt simple. And I do mean dirt. Once they are built, they require only a handful of people to run them. Most of the people involved are support people, and since there is little support needed, the people are rotated among anywhere from five to ten gas plants in a 500-mile radius. This fact makes it incredibly frustrating to work with them. They will call us to accomplish some task that they can't quite handle, but for which a person like me needs only a few days if that to complete. The problem is that since the technical people are so scattered and nomadic, their ability to create professional documents is minimal, and the time they can give to support whatever task they want us to do and answer our questions is equally scant. They will usually hand us half-completed or practically illegible piping and instrumentation drawings (P&IDs, which are the lifeblood of any project and need to be complete and correct for a successful job), and then maybe a Word or Excel file that explains (poorly) what needs to be done. We are told to show up at a certain date and time, and when we do, we'll have a quick meeting where they try to explain what they want. Then, in almost every case, the contact person jumps in his truck and drives to another gas plant somewhere, leaving me there to fend for myself. The sites themselves are nasty, with old buildings that haven't been updated in at least 30 years, dirt parking lots (did I mention the dirt?), stray dogs running around, and highly variable weather. They are arduous to travel to and the nearby towns where I stay the night are not exactly tourist havens (Hellllllooooo, Midland, Texas!).

This particular job is a bit different, as this plant has decided to do a proper project and upgrade their control equipment. This is the kind of job that really pays our bills, and our supervisors pay a lot of attention and throw a lot of resources at it to make sure it gets done right. That's where I come in. The lead engineer designed the upgrade and went through the staging and testing at our office and made sure it all worked properly, and then was sent out here to turn it over to the customer. For whatever reason that I can't fathom, she begged off having to stay through the start-up, and the customer asked us to provide another resource. C'est moi.

I showed up last Thursday after getting a call from my boss at 7:30 am to book a flight at 12:40 pm that day (good planning, assholes!), and when I got here, they threw a curveball at me by telling me that the hardware they had tested in the office and tested again here suddenly wasn't working properly and that I might have to completely redesign part of the software as a workaround. Again, why the fucking lead wasn't here doing this, I have no idea. If I was the lead, you can bet your ass I would stay with the job, but nobody asked me to be the lead. In any case, the service guys fixed the hardware problem and I ended up just sitting there watching. Then, the next day, I found out that the lead simply didn't bother to complete a task during staging and I was forced to dig into it and try to figure it out. I fought with it for hours, telling the customer geniuses that have swarmed this job from various gas plants that the damned thing looked like it wasn't hooked up right. Six hours later, they finally decided to go out in the plant and check, and what do you know? The damned thing wasn't hooked up right.

Somewhere in there, the customer decided that they had enough of their people to cover days, and I needed to come in at night. FUCK!!!! I hate working nights. Nothing happens and your sleep schedule gets all fucked up for a week. Which brings me to now. They e-mailed in a panic at about 5 pm saying that their software licensing wasn't working. I was supposed to go in at 7 pm, but I called our company technical support to get their advice and then came in a little early to check out the problem. When I got here, suddenly everything was working fine. I don't exactly know what happened, but I'm sure it was some stupid thing they were doing. I also determined from the service guys that the software license they thought they had on one server was never there and didn't belong there. Geniuses.

Three more hours to go, and then another night of uselessness tomorrow. I need a new job. Again.

THIS IS ASSUMING TRUMP DOESN'T BAN BASEBALL FOR BEING "SAD!"

The Cubs are returning World Champs! And we have the stupidest human on Earth as President! I feel like those two go together in terms of things I never hoped to see in my lifetime. What fresh horrors will 2017 bring? Let's get to it.

NL EAST

The Nationals will be expecting big crowds in DC for a few years from people actively avoiding cable news. The Mets have the Big Five! Wait, the Big Four! Wait, Robert Gsellman? Seth Lugo? A spot start by Gabriel Ynoa, maybe? Oy. In Miami, Giancarlo Stanton of the Marlins will hit a ball to Cuba, which will prompt a "Bay Of Pigs" type nuclear standoff involving Twitter. The rebuilding process - sorry, I mean rebuiliding "thingy" - in Philadelphia will propel the Phillies all the way to a slightly more tenable 4th place. Cobb County's Braves have gone with a youth movement (provided you are a Galapagos Island tortoise) by signing Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey. The new park will not come equipped with a radar gun readout, I would hope.

NL CENTRAL

What can I say about the Cubs that the Murray brothers haven't slurred into various iPhones the last 6 months? The rest of the NL is hoping for some kind of superbug outbreak on the North Side of Chicago. The Cardinals, meanwhile, were last seen at a DNA sequencing lab. They also signed Dexter Fowler away from the Cubbies just in case they can't weaponize avian flu or whatever. In Pittsburgh, Pirates fans are saddened at the sudden ending of the short-lived Joey Terdoslavich era, whose last name sounds like something that goes on a Primanti Brothers sandwich, or is the result of a Primanti Brothers sandwich. The Brewers play baseball professionally, it is rumored. Bronson Arroyo was briefly back for the Reds! That tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the Reds!

NL WEST

The Dodgers have so much money, they are slowly acquiring ex-Phillies in some kind of sick parlor game and still winning. Up the coast, the Giants have picked up Mark Melancon, and will be retiring Sergio Romo to a boutique slider farm up in Napa Valley. Nolan Arenado, DJ LeMahieu, Carlos Gonzalez, and Charlie Blackmon will be learning how to pitch for the Rockies this year because, why the hell not? The Padres GM A.J. Preller has installed software on loan from Wall Street that will execute 1,000 microtrades per second. To what end, I have no idea. In Phoenix, the D'Backs are agitating for a new stadium because, one would guess, the pool in the current one is mostly pee? Fresh water *is* expensive there.

East Champ : Nationals
Central Champ : Cubs
West Champ : Dodgers

Wild cards: Mets, Cardinals

Mets beat Cardinals

Cubs beat Mets
Nationals beat Dodgers

Cubs beat Nationals

AL EAST

Chris Sale changed footwear and will be making his famously violent sartorial critiques for the Red, not the White, Sox this year. Luckily, they haven't changed uniforms in Boston since before Whitey Bulger was wearing a onesie. The Blue Jays re-signed Jose Bautista, hoping he will work on his jab for the rematch with Rougie Odor. Aroldis Chapman is back with the Yankees. Bombers fans count this as their 27th and a half World Championship. The Orioles got 47 homers from Mark Trumbo last year but it didn't help because he was blacklisted. No wait, that was Dalton Trumbo. But the blacklist will be coming back, that much is certain. The Rays traded away Drew Smyly. Now, nothing much at the Trop will be smiley.

AL CENTRAL

The Team in Cleveland whose name should be changed got it together for a Series run, only to be the answer to a trivia question 108 years in the making. They are now the overall droughtmeisters in all of MLB. Theo Epstein is reportedly shopping for homes in Shaker Heights. The Royals big move this off-season was to trade their closer Wade Davis to the Cubs for underachieving outfielder Jorge Soler. I think they are taking the expression "to the victor go the spoils" too literally. Michael Fulmer, former Mets farmhand, won Rookie Of The Year and almost won the Cy Young for the Tigers. If I were the GM in Detroit, I would get a good Tommy John surgeon in my contact list is all I'm saying. Barack Obama returns to being the most famous civilian White Sox fan in America, at least until his extradition to Kenya is complete. The Twins finally went outside the organization for a GM. Unfortunately, he is not named Roger Dorn, who led the Twins to their most recent memorable (albeit fictional) season in 1998's "Major League: Back To The Minors".

AL WEST

Rougie Odor, his brother, Rougie Odor, and the rest of the Rangers will try to make another title run in one of their final years in a perfectly good stadium that will be cashiered for a stadium that had better be the cure for cancer at the price tag it's costing. My hometown Astros have Carlos Beltran back and have removed Tal's Hill, the feature that, along with Adam Wainwright's curveball, were the two worst things to ever happen to Beltran's knees. The Mariners had Mallex Smith for an hour. His greatness will not rub off. Or his lack of greatness will. Your choice. With Mark Davis moving the Raiders to Las Vegas, The Athletics have O.co Coliseum nearly all to themselves again. This includes fans, but not whatever creatures surface when the dugouts flood. The Angels will be signing Emma Stone to a long-term contract after the "La La Land" star won the Best Actress Oscar. I mean, it literally could not hurt.

East Champ : Red Sox
Central Champ : Indians
West Champ : Rangers

Wild cards: Blue Jays, Astros

Astros beat Blue Jays

Indians beat Astros
Rangers beat Red Sox

Rangers beat Indians

World Series: In a four game sweep not attended by a single Murray brother or even Eddie Vedder, the Cubs will repeat by trouncing the Rangers after Donald Trump deports both Rougie Odors after claims surface on Breitbart.com that they faked their birth certficates and that both of them are actually named Barack Hussein Obama.

FACTS HAVE NO LIFE

So, as per my recent post, she didn't make it by a hair's breadth, but lost by less than that. Fuck.

We have seen quite an acceleration of my (Grand?) Unified Theory since Dipshit's election, as almost every major media outlet has decried the end of facts. With a Strongman in power, we will see an end to democracy maybe before 2020. I don't really see any other way. No one can agree on anything, and conspiracy theories are being accepted almost literally as gospel on a daily basis. No government by/for/of the people can possibly exist that way. The basis of such a system is actionable information that connects to reality in some tangible way, and if the National Security Advisor is convinced that Hillary Clinton is running a child pornography ring out of the non-existent basement of a pizza joint in DC, and millions of citizens agree with him, the system is irrevocably broken.

To expand on my theory and to explain it in a different way, I came up with a corollary regarding information as it relates to the act of publishing. To begin, we look at the pre-Gutenberg era of human history. In this era, information was either passed down orally or, later, written down in longhand on papyrus and laboriously copied by monks or other learned folks. The information consisted largely of folklore, origin stories, or religious texts. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese and others also did amazing work in math, science, literature, and philosophy that lasts to this day because of the vast reach of their empires. After Rome and its final ancient worldwide empire fell, there was a period of 1000 years of the Dark Ages where relatively few new published manuscripts appeared and a great deal of information became lost to history (fortunately, some of it survived). The nature of information during this period was such that if it appeared in a text, it was generally thought to be true, even though a lot of it was completely fabricated, and most people didn't have access to the rare scientific or mathematical texts. People did have access to the religious texts like the Torah, Koran and Bible and fervently believed the religious texts and considered them the words of God. For any information not covered by the texts, they believed whatever they experienced in their own lives or were taught by leaders in their community.

In 1439, Gutenberg invented movable type and ushered in the next era of human experience, the Renaissance. With the printing press, anyone could publish information, but there was a significant barrier to publishing. You needed to have money or backing from a group of people to pay for use of a press and there had to be a compelling reason for the information to be published, that being either a profit motive or because the information was deemed too important not to publish. The Renaissance proceeded apace as this torrent of new information came into being and people spent the next few centuries sorting it all out and creating new technology, with each advancement building on the last. During this period, information that was published was generally accepted to be true because of the inherent barriers to publishing. This will probably go down as the "Truth Period" in human history, since this will be the only period when such barriers existed and the technology was sufficient for widespread dissemination of information.

Then, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web bringing us into our current age, which we have deemed, almost ironically at this point, the Information Age. The Web and the greater internet led to the ability for anyone to publish anything that could be accessed by anyone else in the world. The inherent barriers to publishing had been lowered significantly, and became increasingly minuscule over the next 25 years, to the point where anyone with a cell phone could publish in real time. In effect, and to almost everyone's surprise, the internet has now created a new "Dark Age". The old Dark Ages were characterized by a lack of good information due to the limited ability to publish. The new Dark Age is characterized by an overabundance of trivial, maliciously fabricated, or simply wrong information that completely overwhelms good information, and which is caused by the fact that anyone can create information at any time.

So, what next? Unless this new Dark Age is reversed, the world will go back to the old sacred texts, or possibly new superstitions that have arisen since the previous Dark Ages. This is why we are seeing right-wing parties taking over in Europe and the rise of Mr. Disphit in this country. The only things people can rely in in this new environment are religion, folklore and their own experience, which includes outrageous conspiracy theories pushed by bad actors that reinforce their worldview. Just as in the original Dark Ages, xenophobia and isolationism will take root and flourish. The institutions of international trade and cooperation will gradually, or in some cases suddenly, be dismantled. Wars, as we saw in the previous Dark Ages, are almost inevitable, and now that we have nuclear weapons and all manner of powerful conventional weapons at our disposal, they will be infinitely worse than before.

What can be done? One solution could be as simple as creating a new domain name for legitimate journalism, say ".jrn." Just as governments only get .gov, militaries only get .mil, and colleges only get .edu, ICANN could develop a system where only legitimate news-gathering organizations that follow strict fact-checking, correction, and journalistic ethics guidelines are allowed to get a .jrn domain. This domain would signify to all users that certain barriers have been overcome for this information to be published. Obviously, some bad actors would get through, but ICANN could set up a feedback system so that any .jrn organizations who violate the rules will have the domain name stripped. Also, as we've seen, those who are prone to propagating and believing conspiracy theories will simply deem this scheme as part of the conspiracy, but since a vast majority of people aren't prone to this thinking, it will be a way to isolate and minimize the effects of the tiny minority that do. In addition, Google, Facebook, and Twitter could play a huge role by blocking or algorithmically downgrading links from non-.jrn news sources.

It's not the answer but it's a small step in the right direction. After that, I have no idea.

WE ALL HAVE ONE BUT NOT ALL ARE ONE

"Snowflake" appears to be the perjorative of choice that those on the right are calling those on the left in our salons of electronic word hockey these days. Prior to that, we've seen "libtard", "tree-hugger", "hippie", and "commie."

Fortunately, there is only one word that those on the left need to describe those on the right: "asshole." It is a metaphor that stays wonderfully current and never stops being descriptive. It might only lose its power over an evolutionarily long period of time, but of course, they don't believe in that anyway.

G.U.T. CHECK

How did we get here? (You know what I mean.)

I have a grand unified theory, or at least a unified theory.

1. The internet happened. Before the internet, all information was centralized in institutional places like libraries, newspapers, home reference books, three or four over-the-air television networks and one cable news channel. You had a pretty good feeling that the information you read or heard was true, because it had gone through the layers of checking that these institutions provide (sure, there were some urban legends floating around, but nobody put much credence in them and they were repeated mostly for entertainment value). Suddenly, all this previously accumulated information was readily available at a moment's notice from a wire.

2. Quickly, every single person who had internet access began not only reading the information that had previously only been available from institutions, but also creating information for others to read and reading others' created information. Since the information created from individuals or small groups of entrepreneurs or non-profits wasn't being checked by layers of fact-checkers, it wasn't always accurate. In some or even most cases, it was willfully and intentionally misleading or outright false to advance some money-making scheme or political view. The bad information was formatted in such a way as to look exactly like the good information. People had almost no way to tell the difference.

3. Eventually, many of the purveyors of bad information grew and prospered. The Drudge Report was an early example of this, and that site begat so many other outlets. Left-wingers, right-wingers, sports columnists, business people, scientists, and pretty much any niche group saw the power of bad information and took to it readily. It was easy to create, easy to post, and easy to get in front of people, and lucrative to do so. People swallowed it up heartily.

4. The online experience eventually became very easy to curate. You could set up your online day to read only what you wanted to read from the sources you agreed with and/or trusted. Friendster and Myspace started the trend, and then the invention and widespread use of RSS led to a proliferation of feed curation applications. Facebook took over for Myspace and solidified the idea of a daily feed of personally hand-picked news sources. Twitter was another shot of adrenaline that baked in the feeling of instantaneous reaction to news from people who shared your point of view and reinforced it in real time.

5. All throughout this process, information was becoming less and less institutionalized and the bad information was far outpacing the good. After all, 7 billion people could now create bad information while only a relative handful of institutions can create good information. Certain people, many of whom had done well but were getting older and saw problems ahead, or who had lost a good-paying job to globalization, or who were stuck in some remote backwater, or who were simply predisposed to the concept because they were brought up in religious and/or conservative households, started to buy in to the idea far more than others that the old institutions were feeding them lies and that this new age of information, mostly bad information, was the real truth. The bad information, designed and chosen especially for them, felt so good, while the old institutions were always telling them what seemed in contrast to be bad news.

6. The last presidential election where good information was supreme was probably 2000, although we started to see rumblings in the widely reported lie that Al Gore had claimed to invent the internet. Quickly after that election, the horror of 9/11 happened and people rushed to fill in details of the attack with bad information from the internet. The George W. Bush administration was more than happy to supply them with plenty of it as justification to invade Iraq. As Bush's first term was ending, Karl Rove fully harnessed his delivery system of bad information to engineer the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, a diabolically named organization that all but sunk John Kerry. This was the first and most egregious example of a decent, reasonable, and worthy politician being completely undone by lies proliferated by the internet. It set a template for the next decade or so where anybody who actually wanted government to accomplish something or had even the mildest of "progressive" ideas could be undermined by the most tenuous of fabricated bullshit. Of course, the internet also served to upend people like John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer who had it coming. It became very easy to decide that every politician was a traitor, a liar, a bum, or an adulterer because of how easy it was to expose them, whether it was true or not. Faith in government itself began hitting record lows, and a completely avoidable housing crisis and recession accelerated people's anxiety.

7. In 2008, the bad information on Barack Obama was staggering in its scope and depth. The fact that he was African-American split the electorate along racial lines, and those who could not countenance a black President began retreating almost solely into this new avalanche of bad information in addition to the enormous cache that they had been slowly and methodically accumulating for themselves over the years. Obama won only because these folks were in the minority in the large states where the Electoral College votes are most numerous, but their numbers were growing. So was the bad information, day by day, month by month. One of its leaders was Donald Trump, who championed the pernicious idea that Obama was born in Kenya.

8. Prior to the 2010 election, the rise of these bad-information-only voters was given a name: the Tea Party. Using their bad information and the social networking capabilities that went along with it (smart phones became commonplace and you could take your bad information with you everywhere), they were able to organize all across the country. Opportunistic business people who saw the power of the Tea Party, like the Koch Brothers and others, bankrolled and focused the group to take down politicians in local and state elections to give the GOP the majority in the House and in state houses, which enabled the GOP to gerrymander congressional districts after the 2010 census. Their power increasing, and the bad information on which they relied to sway others swelling exponentially, the Tea Party continued to grow and win huge victories like Citizens United that opened the floodgates to corporate political donations. They failed to take down Obama in 2012, mainly because the GOP nominating process favored the "next man up" mentality that had been in place for decades and which resulted in a milquetoast candidate, Mitt Romney. Romney didn't win, but the Tea Party made it closer than 2008 had been.

9. Which leads us to 2016. The Tea Party was not happy with the choice of Romney in 2012 and agitated from the beginning of the process to put a more conservative candidate on the ticket in 2016. Into the breach stepped Trump, long a darling of the bad-information-only crew because of his tireless "birther" movement against Obama. Trump was a perfect fit for the Tea Party, with his bluster, his talk of "draining the swamp", his contempt for women and immigrants, and his almost overt white supremacist leanings. Despite all the major media institutions predicting that Trump could never be nominated, the Tea Party pushed him to the top in state after state, and he ultimately won enough delegates.

10. Here we stand, the day before election day. Hillary Clinton is yet another target of a tsunami of bad information, perhaps at an order of magnitude worse than Obama, from Whitewater to Vince Foster to Benghazi and the endless self-inflicted saga of the e-mail server, plus all the bad information generated against her husband and the Clinton Foundation. The previous institutions, such as the New York Times especially, have done their best to expose Trump as a liar, a serial sexual assaulter, a deadbeat, and a terrible businessman, and they seem to have made some traction. However, the election is certainly much closer than it should be and closer than 2008 or even 2012. Clinton may get through, but only by a hair's breadth. We'll see.

Where do we go from here? Let's say Clinton wins, for my own sanity. The Tea Party will be strengthened by the closeness of the result. Bad information and the methodology to share it will continue to increase. I see no way the bad-information-only Tea Party, now often lumped together with something similar called the "Alt-Right", egged on by the GOP big donors who seek to exploit it, won't eventually take over all three branches of government. They have already cemented the House, and may keep the Senate in 2016 and will definitely improve their advantage there in 2018. In 2020, unless Clinton manages some kind of economic miracle in four years, the forces that are allied against her will have solidified, and if the GOP can find a decent human being to run against her that checks off all the Alt-Right boxes (a big if, to be sure), she will lose handily. Soon after, the Supreme Court will be the final branch to succumb to the Alt-Right. At that point, there will no check or balance against bad information. The entire government will be reliant on it to stay in power, and worse, may actually believe it. The slippery slope to a decade or more of policy dedicated to protect the wealthy at all costs, which has always been the GOP's ultimate goal, will surely ensue. I can't imagine the super-wealthy will allow large clamps on immigration or restriction of trade deals, because they rely on these for their wealth. More likely will be a reduction of taxes on billionaires and the imposition of austerity measures on the poor and middle class, with border control being stepped up and made more visible if not any more effective. Climate Change will continue to be ignored and subsidies will flow to the entrenched energy providers over new renewable players, which could set back that movement for decades. Healthcare will continue to get more and more expensive until good care will only be affordable to a tiny minority, while the rest pay very high premiums and very high deductibles and get sicker, or simply go without and risk destitution for any mishap. Our infrastructure will continue to collapse, with politicians spending on it only when a crisis occurs, and always favoring cars over public transit. We will likely see a reversal of Roe v. Wade, gay marriage and women's and LBGTQ rights in order to mollify the Alt-Right and keep them engaged. We'll put ground troops in Syria and Libya, and once again in Iraq in an effort to stomp out ISIS while trillions in poorly accounted-for cash will go to defense contractors. Essentially, we'll see the policies of the George W. Bush administration on a far more ambitious scale and much more difficult to unseat.

I really fear the complete loss of the previous institutions. Libraries and newspapers are already dying. Television is becoming so fragmented that in ten years, there may be no national over-the-air networks, only niche cable/streaming channels that exist only to tell special interests what they want to hear. With all of that fact-checking gone, all we will have is each other for our news, and the world will become a giant game of telephone. Each retelling of an event will become more and more sensationalized and removed from what actually happened. At some point, truth will be completely fungible, different for each person, each version recorded somewhere in the cloud so that each of us can remember the past however we want to remember it, or if we can't find a memory, we'll have our memories sold to us by the most effective salespeople. This will inevitably lead to the end of democracy because no large bloc of voters will ever be able come to a consensus on what is real. Then the strongmen will swoop in to fill the vacuum and decide what is real for everyone. We're talking some serious Orwellian/Black Mirror shit here.

Of course, I'm posting this on the internet, so it's probably all bullshit, too, and definitely just my opinion. Don't forget to vote!

NO, REALLY, THIS IS THE CUBS' YEAR. I MEAN, BARRING THEM BEING THE CUBS AGAIN...

As we head in to 2016 with Cuba being libre (in baseball terms) for the first time since Minnie Minoso was in his 30s, let's WordPad some predictions to, you know, completely ruin everything.

NL EAST

The Mets came within three blown saves of winning it all last year, and have signed their favorite Cuban for another go round. Yo Cespedes is already leading the league in big sports cars used in Training in the Spring (BISCUITS, to sabermetricians). Meanwhile, Bartolo Colon has eaten all other biscuits in the state of Florida. Bryce Harper and the to-date World Series-less Nats have about as much hope in Washington as Merrick Garland. The Marlins guy might actually show up to Marlins games if Giancarlo Stanton and Jose Fernandez stay healthy. It's the final season in downtown Atlanta for the Braves, and they intend to make the least of it. Despite the recent success of the film "Creed", the Phillies will be low on the baseball Rotten Tomatoes index once again this year.

NL CENTRAL

Ah, the Cubs. Theo Epstein has them stacked, packed and jacked for a pennant run. Of course, Global Warming is now here and they still have to play a bunch of four-hour summer day games. I'm sure they'll be in fine form come October! Their rivals the Cards will be playing the part of the 2004 Yankees, in Cubs' fans minds, anyway. I wouldn't count them out. The Pirates really should be winning something, but they have two very rich and disciplined franchises ahead of them. One of those is not the Brewers. Nor is it the Reds.

NL WEST

The year divides by two, so the Giants will triumph. That sounds like it was written in one of George R.R. Martin's lesser texts at some point, so it must be true. Mad Bum, Cueto The Wild, and Pence The Hunter will rain vengeance! The Dodgers have basically doubled the Cuban economy with their island signings, but those won't reap anything for a while, and they lost Zack Greinke. The D'Backs signed Greinke and look like they've fully recovered from their Kirk Gibson-induced grit overdose and are making some strides. The Padres continue their quest to own the transaction wire to not much effect. "Not mowing the outfield, yeah, that's the answer!" say the Rockies.

Division Champs: Mets, Cubs, Giants

Wild Cards: Cards, Pirates

Cards over Pirates

Cubs over Cards

Mets over Giants

Mets over Cubs

AL EAST

The Blue Jays will be erecting a monument to Jose Bautista's epic bat flip, if they can figure out how to re-create it using steel and robotics without getting fans injured. I mean, it was pretty epic. Manny Machado just threw out a guy at first from the Denny's down the street, which will still not help the Orioles. The Rays played a Spring Training game in Cuba and will have to wait until June to surpass the attendance for that game at the Trop. It's Big Papi's last year in Fenway, and to commemorate it, the Red Sox have agreed to let him swear into an open mic at every visiting team. A-Rod will suit it up again for the Yankees. Also, fans can't use self-printed-out tickets, so in at least two ways it will be just like 2004!

AL CENTRAL

As a Mets fan, I am now a firm believer in whatever the hell it is the Royals are doing, PECOTA be damned. The Indians have Francisco Lindor for a full seaon to go with Corey Kluber, Cody Anderson, and Cody Allen (the Three Amig-Co's - except you've never heard of any of them, so maybe not) and could make a wild card chase. Likewise for the Twins, who signed Korean slugger Byung-Ho Park, the most prominent Asian to appear in Minnesota since Mike Yamagita in the movie version of "Fargo". Things aren't looking good for the Tigers. GM Dave Dombrowski was fired last summer after he realized his team was about as leaden as Flint's water supply. The White Sox committed a PR disaster by banning Adam LaRoche's son Drake from the clubhouse. Their attempts to clear things up by saying they were trying to ban the singer Drake, male ducks, and/or Drake's Cakes probably won't work.

AL WEST

Hack the Astros! It seems to make them play better. Oh, and so does Carlos Correa. The Rangers are so good, apparently, that Joey Gallo, who can hit the ball to Oklahoma, will start in the minors. Jerry DiPoto is in at GM for the Mariners, replacing a guy whose name defies all attempts at spelling (and therefore I won't try). The beat writers are happy anyway. It looks like another year, another fruitless attempt to surround Mike Trout with a decent team for the Angels. The Athletics GM Billy Beane probably got invited to Michael Lewis' Oscar party for "The Big Short", so he has that going for him. I would short his team if it were a stock.

Divison Champs: Blue Jays, Royals, Astros

Wild Cards: Rangers, Indians

Rangers beat Indians

Royals beat Rangers

Astros beat Blue Jays

Astros beat Royals

World Series: The Mets will repeat their 1986 National League pennant victory by taking the Astros in six games. In the Manhattan Canyon of Heroes victory parade, Yo Cespedes will drive a Lamborghini, a Bugatti, a McLaren Spider, a Ferrari, and American Pharoah ALL AT THE SAME TIME, somehow.

BORED ROOM

I'm in Alaska for another few hours. My trip this week was pretty uneventful. I almost had several, oh, hundred rental car accidents, but managed to keep it together for a week.

Right now, I'm sitting in the Alaska Airlines Board Room. I have three more hours until my flight starts boarding, and Tripit Pro offered me $25 to buy a day pass here, so I figured OH HELL YES!. As nice as the Ted Stevens Memorial Boondoggle is, and it's very nice, sitting anywhere near gate B-5 is like volunteering to be an Ebola doctor. Something like half the human race is sitting in there around now, waiting to get the fuck out of this state, and the noise of that influenza-and-worse-ridden rabble combined with the bopping 50's pop tunes playing on the intercom and the constant blather of gate announcements makes any other place on earth more desirable. The Board Room is such a place, and it has beer!

What strikes me immediately with the Board Room is the completely undeserved air of privilege that suffuses the place. At least two or three past-middle-aged douchebags have come at the front desk ladies berating them for committing the unforgivable sin of not letting them in for a) them not having paid to be here and/or b) them not having enough points or whatever to be here. It's pretty simple, folks. I figured it out. You pay $45 (or $20 with a $25 discount in my case) and you can come in. Being a white guy with gray hair and a blazer is not enough. Nice try.

For some reason, they are playing the local NBC feed on the TV. I endured "Undateable" and "Superstore", and now I am hate-ignoring "Dateline". You'd think for $45 you'd get at least basic cable. There are a bunch of chairs pointing at the TV, as though "Making A Murderer" or at least "Jessica Jones" is running and we should all be paying attention. Instead, it's Lester Goddamned Holt.

And, it's Alaska Fucking Airlines! It's not like it's Emirates or Singapore Air. You're not a globe-trotting mystery man on a rakish adventure. You're going to Yakima. Get a grip.

I'll be back here in May for three weeks. It's turnaround time, and I've been told I only need to work five days a week, but we'll see. Turnarounds and I don't mix well. If I do work three straight weeks, I'll get some OT or comp time at least, not that it's worth it.

Well, about two hours left! Beer will help that go away.

ALASKA PROLOGUE: I'M GOING BACK! ALSO, I DIDN'T DIE

Well, the title tells the first part. I have one more week in Kenai, in January.

The second part was slightly more interesting. I did sit slack-jawed in the Kenai airport for two hours,  and after that, my flight still didn't take off because of wind and snow. I rebooked my flight back home for the following night and finally boarded a plane to Anchorage at about 8:00 pm, and reserved a hotel for the night and most of the next day.

My plane was a Dash 8, which I have come to call "the big one," in contrast to the Beechcraft 1900, which is "the small one." Ravn only flies these two types of aircraft, and both are terrifying in their own right. The boarding and takeoff process was about as normal as possible, except for the flight attendant, who was an older native woman named Diane Ross. She was quite a quipster, that Diane. She said that despite her name, she can't sing and so she has to work doing this job. She slipped in some other bon mots during the safety briefing, such as "There shall be no tampering with the lavatory smoke detector, or we will push the eject button and you'll go out with the toilet. No, that's not true. We have no eject button, plus, we like our toilet."

After the customary twenty minutes that the flight is scheduled, I started looking for the lights of Anchorage, but about all I could see was blowing snow and a darkness as black as Donald Trump's soul. It also occurred to me that the gear wasn't down. Usually, the plane starts descending, the gear is deployed about 2 minutes out, and then we land, but none of this was happening and there was no sign that it would. Finally about 30 minutes in, Diane, no longer her convivial self, gravely announced over the PA, "I've been informed that the landing gear will not go down. The pilots say that they will continue to work on it, and we'll keep you updated." Uh, ok. I ran through several scenarios in my head at that point, most of which ended with "I don't want to die, especially not in FUCKING ALASKA!" If they couldn't get the gear down, I figured they would try a belly landing, which would be dicey at best in this weather and with the giant propellers on either side suddenly turning into sausage grinders if the maneuver was not executed perfectly. I checked my phone for a signal to send at least a text back to my wife, but that particular technology was as operable as whatever was keeping the gear stuck. She would have to take it on faith that I loved her. Fun stuff!

Finally, about 10 minutes later and with no warning, the gear deployed. And I'm here writing this a few weeks later. Also, I spent the day lounging in a king size bed at the Anchorage airport Courtyard Marriott, and I went and got some banana cream pie at the nearby Village Inn. I earned that pie, dammit.

More about Alaska later, Ravn willing.

FAREWELL, FORTY-NINE

I write this on the occasion of what may very well be my last few hours in the Large State Of Alaska. It feels like it might be, anyway or at least the last time I come up here on someone else's dime. I've traveled here for the fifth time this year and I am typing this in the cafe of the Kenai Safeway while I wait for my plane to Anchorage. It seems as appropriate a place to part with this land mass as any. I've come in here mostly to get distilled water for my CPAP machine and quarters for laundry, but also groceries, terrible ready-made meals at the deli, and candy bars. This time, I decided to buy an iced latte at the sort-of "Seattle's Best" sort-of coffee bar, and the young sideburned tweaker who took my order made the drink in a paper cup, like an animal. An animal, I tell you!

What have I learned on my many journeys? Alaska is a place for desperate people, living desperate lives, with guns. Alaska is a place for moose, not knowing they are living desperate lives and getting hit by pickup trucks, when not being shot by guns. Alaska is a spectacularly gorgeous place, with oil, and the oil is quickly running out. I read today that the state is grappling with budget cuts and low revenue from the dwindling oil leases, and the populace has taken a particularly self-serving approach to these problems that defies all political labels: we want our Permanent Fund Dividend checks every year, and we don't want to pay higher taxes! So, socialism and conservatism, as it suits them. This is completely understandable. As I mentioned, they are desperate. And they ALL have guns, so they will probably get both of these things, at least until all the oil runs out, and then they certainly won't get one of them.

I've also learned, or rather re-learned, that small cars and snow don't mix. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to get an SUV on this trip, but I didn't. I suppose it was an altruistic attempt to save the French conglomerate I work for a few euros, but frankly, and Frankly, fuck them. The excellent AirBnB I've been staying at has one disadvantage, that being the driveway that sits perched on a precipice off a sloping unpaved road. This is normally negotiable when not covered by feet of snow, but this morning, this was not the case. As I backed out with my Nissan Sentra, a car that should definitely be banned in this state and probably most others, it slid to the left and almost caused me to plummet the six feet off a terrace down to the parking area below. I tried going in reverse but could not due to a) gravity and b) said feet of snow. Forward was a non-starter, although at least the car itself did start. I called Avis to send me a tow truck, and the tower (and his wife, dog, and almost definitely, his gun) extricated me from my arctic predicament. On past trips, I've slid into snow banks with a Toyota Corrolla and Nissan Altima. Next time, if there is one, I shall heed Denis Leary's many warnings and go American.

I have two hours until the plane departs for Anchorage. The local commuter airline has changed names from Era to Ravn (they dropped the 'e' to save money, undoubtedly). The trip to Anchorage is 20 minutes of what it must have felt like shortly after the Wright brothers incorporated. The pilots do everything themselves except load the luggage. I do enjoy seeing them turn for home with the nose pointed down, and you can see the runway lights through the cockpit window. It's one of the only thrilling things left in air travel, an industry that has removed all romanticism from flying and checked it to the final destination of "Never Again".

Well, that shall be it. I need to gas up the rental car and sit slack-jawed in the Kenai airport for a couple more hours. May we meet again under more auspicious circumstances, Land Of The Midnight Sun!