The angstenjoke: Now for the millenials set.

This is my new favorite twitter feed:

This is the best thing that ever happened in Washington

Draymond Green +/- for the Pelican series

Game 1: +23 (1st on team)
Game 2: +24 (1st)
Game 3: +12 (4th)
Game 4: +18 (1st)

Still kicking

Mark Arm has such an awesome side job.  You fly him in, he sings "Kick Out the Jams" for you.  This is a useful skill.
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I still say the following performance is definitive, but Arm was a big piece of that one, too (stick around for the last minute, which achieves Total Eleven-ness):

Ordering this for some friends in Connecticut

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Hard times in Damascus

Syria's former spy chief dies in unclear circumstances: source http://t.co/gzmnZQcitR

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) April 25, 2015

Have I mentioned the shot?

Brian Phillips, Grantland:

On Thursday night, for most of Game 3 against New Orleans, Curry looked flat, almost normal; it was Anthony Davis, the Pelicans’ young power forward, a player so in the mode of the deity-ideal that he might have sprung from the forehead of basketball itself, who dominated, leading New Orleans to a 20-point fourth-quarter lead.  But the Warriors kept inching back. With 11.2 seconds left, Curry pump-faked past a flying Jrue Holiday and drilled a 3 to cut the lead to two. 

With six seconds left and Golden State now trailing by three, Curry missed what he thought was a game-tying shot (in fact his foot was on the line). Marreese Speights got the offensive rebound and kicked the ball out to Curry in the left corner. Four seconds left, tenths vanishing. One of those moments when you can hear your own heartbeat. Two Pelicans, including Davis, converged on him, crashing into him and into each other; a split second before they knocked him to the ground, he got off a shot. 

And you knew. Hindsight can be kind of a bully in sports, and it’s easy to remember certainty when all you really experienced was a kind of limbic panic. But this was Steph Curry in 2015, taking a last-second shot at the end of an astonishing comeback; maybe you didn’t understand what was happening, maybe you couldn’t quite believe it, but while the ball was in the air, you knew. 

The whole piece is really good.

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Well no wonder, you can't give him THAT shot.

Oh. My. God.

Turned off the game last night and went to sleep.  The Warriors had fallen into the classic trap - on the road, under playoff pressure against a budding superstar, they'd wilted under a blizzard of bad calls and hostile fans.  Instead of going up 3-0 and cruising home, they were looking at 2-1, and a long slog ahead.  Oh well, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

And sometimes you shoot the bear but it's not quite dead, and while you're posing for pictures it gets up and gives you an intensely negative experience:

Here is the Pelicans' win probability chart for the game:

This is nuts.  That can't happen.

Anyway, Warriors 3-0, my bad.

I am subscribing to this fellow's newsletter

"Operation Restoring Hope" is the least appropriate name imaginable for a Saudi-led campaign to mess with Yemen. http://t.co/W0xNTnMODm

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 22, 2015

I don't know why they passed over Operation Grim Dire Fuckery

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 22, 2015

Close, it was Iceman

Marvel just announced one of the original X-Men will come out as gay. My money's on Married Republican Senator Christian Man.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 22, 2015

The most valuable man on the Warriors

Not kidding, this guy Green is incredible.  Here is the box score from last night.  The Warriors were plus 24 when he was on the court.  This happens a lot.

Anthony Davis, a 6' 10" 22 year-old who is probably your 2017 MVP, went 0-5 down the stretch with Green (6' 7", or so they say) guarding him.

After the game, Coach Kerr was offered an opportunity to comment on how he manages Green's minutes.  He said:

"I ask Draymond if he's tired, and he says, 'No.' I leave him," Kerr said. "If he says, 'Yes,' I leave him in."

Rock on, P-22

We've seen that in our core study area in the Santa Monica Mountains every young male before P-22 ended up dying when they got dispersed from mom. They either got hit on the freeway or killed by the adult male, so P-22 did find a way out to an area where there is no adult male. There seems to be plenty of prey, plenty of deer for him.

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As long as it is impossible anyway..

Several European Castles Cheaper than San Francisco houses.

Oral history of the greatest movie ever made

I'm not joking.  And stop calling me Shirley.

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Curry's 77

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Grizzlies wondering where it all started to go wrong

Actually, the problem seems to have begun when they took the court:

At one point Thompson scored 23 straight points for the Warriors...[including] 11 points in one 89-second span...

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Who the hell invented buttonfly jeans? "Hey, how 'bout we make pissin' 5 times as hard?" "Good idea, Greg!"
— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) April 17, 2015

To see the world in a grain of sand...

William Blake once penned the line "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" and that line has stood out for me for many years as a challenged to look for singular things that sum up something large and complex.

This year's Blake Moment was that Northrop Grumman ran A Super Bowl ad for a stealth bomber.

I think that one kernel sums up just about everything that's wrong with money, politics, sports, modern entertainment, and the military-industrial complex in America.

Money don't grow on trees

imagine if this was ur job pic.twitter.com/XgCP6GFFlS

— Jessica Roy (@JessicaKRoy) April 10, 2015

The Third Man

If you look closely at the box score you'll notice that one Warriors player actually had a higher +/- than Steph Curry, despite Curry scoring 45 points and going 7-for-7 down the stretch.

Grantland has a long meditation on this man, who beat out an all-star this year to win the starting power forward job, here.

But only two rebounds

Over the final 7 minutes of the game, Curry outscored Portland, 19-17, & didn't miss a shot (7/7 FGAs, 3/3 FTAs) pic.twitter.com/Ps8O9Utztf

— NBA.com/Stats (@nbastats) April 10, 2015

That will be adequate, Mr. Curry

Does it still work if your art sucks? Guess I'm going to find out...

Want to stay sharp in your old age? Make art http://t.co/rUbESn7O1N

— Pacific Standard (@PacificStand) April 8, 2015

Farewell Stan, you genius

Nice approach so far

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Odd but very interesting

This Fresh Air interview (rebroadcast from 2012) of Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is a really odd, but rewarding juxtaposition of Gross' interest in the details of all things violent and sexual, and Mantel's extraordinarily detailed expertise in the violent and sexual court of King Henry VIII.

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