Just heard about Garrison Keillor’s recent retirement from A Prairie Home Companion. He actually did so as well back in 1987, but over the next several years he gave in, bit by bit, to his audience’s demands until the show returned in its full reincarnation in 1994. Now that he is 72 years old, however, …
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Much as the Golden State Warriors’ loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA finals has been described as a collapse, Game 7 was anything but. It was biting, scratching and kicking warfare for a full 48 minutes. Such games always come down to someone making a big play at the end, and when Kyrie …
Johnny Cueto, whom the San Francisco Giants acquired last winter, is the hands-down best free-agent signing thus far in 2016. Yesterday, he won his tenth game and reduced his season ERA to 2.10, which would actually be about half that total if you subtracted the five-run innings he suffered on two occasions in April and …
Today’s NPR Fresh Air show features a review of a debut album by Margaret Glaspy, who grew up in Red Bluff, CA. I once was treated to a private concert with some friends at her mother’s house, where she sang country tunes and Great American Songbook standards, with a banjo accompanist who did a respectable …
As one would expect, Muhammad Ali’s passing on Friday has generated a flood of tributes and commentary over the weekend, far greater than the usual obituaries that stand at the ready at the Times and elsewhere for such occasions. To this, I would add the following comments. First, Ali strikes me as one of the …
I may live in a blue state, but the politics of my immediate neighborhood tinge red. Obama doesn’t come here to raise money, but a lot of right-of-center political celebrities stop by, including Sarah Palin when she did her Going Rogue book tour in 2010. It made sense, then, that Donald Trump and his plane …
Regardless of who takes home the Larry O’Brien NBA Championship trophy, the Golden State Warriors’ 2015/16 season will be remembered mostly for their 73-9 regular season record, much as the 1995/96 Chicago Bulls are remembered for their 72-10 mark. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the Warriors did more to validate themselves as champions in …
The Golden State Warriors ended their playoff series last night with a 125-121 victory over the Portland Trail Blazers. Though the Blazers won only one of the five games, the widespread consensus is that they gave the Warriors all they could handle. Game 5 was no different than most of the other games, with the …
The news that Stephen Curry would play in last night’s Game 4 between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Golden State Warriors seemed a significant but not earth-shaking development, and when I checked the first-half score and saw the Blazers up by ten, I figured the game was over and that Curry would need at …
In Game 3 of the NBA West Semifinals last night between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Golden State Warriors, the Blazers did to the Warriors what the Warriors have done to the NBA for two years. Every time the Warriors made a run at the Blazers in the second half, even closing the lead …
The Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, is about an hour off the beaten interstate track, but it’s well worth the trip. It is the home not only of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, but also a remarkable collection of vintage airplanes and spacecraft, including V2 and Gemini Titan rockets. The Spruce Goose, in …
The Columbia Sky Observatory in Seattle, WA offers the tallest view available to the public west of the Mississippi. It can be a little frustrating to negotiate the surrounding one-way streets to get there, but the panorama is well worth the effort and the $14 fee. The Columbia Observatory may not be as well-known as …
The first thing you notice about Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers and their new coach, Chip Kelly, is how far it is from the city itself—about an hour’s drive south to Santa Clara in a neighborhood dominated by corporate office buildings. With its exposed white framework, the stadium has a slight resemblance …
For the first three quarters of Game 2 of the NBA Western Semi-Finals, the Portland Trail Blazers did everything they could to defy conventional wisdom. They crashed the boards, made big shots and on defense forced the Golden State Warriors to work for their points, and at the beginning of the fourth quarter the Blazers …
One should never judge a series by its first game, but with their 118-106 victory, the Dubs took care of business with a 20-point lead in the first quarter, never allowing the score to get close after that. Lillard and McCollum shot a combined 30% from the floor—they and the Blazers may have been a …
When I saw the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Los Angeles Clippers back in November, I wrote at the time that the Blazers looked better than expected, while the Clippers seemed to have more than their share of issues. I would have never predicted, though, that the Blazers would not only make the NBA playoffs …
I once heard a fan at AT&T Park say that he liked pitching duels when watching baseball on television, but when he was at the park, he wanted to see runs scored. I understood his perspective; hits and baserunners are a lot more interesting from the upper deck than a continual succession of pitches going …
Just saw that Garry Shandling passed away suddenly. I liked him. He made meta funny and accessible at once. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/24/471773637/actor-and-comedian-garry-shandling-dies-at-66 His appearance on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee wasn’t that long ago: http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/garry-shandling-its-great-that-garry-shandling-is-still-alive Note the title of the segment. Replayed the episode. A lot of discussion of death, almost eerily so. At one point Shandling …
One person much on people’s minds at last Saturday’s San Francisco Giants Fan Fest wasn’t even in the house. For the first time since 2008, the Giants are beginning their season without one of the most iconic players in their history: Tim Lincecum. Questions on his status came up in several of the interview sessions, …
When the NFL comes to town for the Super Bowl, it is not just a visit: it is an occupation. In addition to the game itself, the NFL has taken possession of the Moscone Convention Center for the week for its NFL Experience, a theme park and autograph show that one can attend for the …
This article is an interesting update on the Blazers/Cavs game last December, suggesting that the LeBron and company may have scaled down their level of play on purpose, possibly to persuade ownership to ship Coach Blatt out the door. http://www.blazersedge.com/2016/1/22/10818480/david-blatt-cleveland-cavalaiers-lebron-james-portland-trail-blazers No one will likely confess to the deed, but it would not be the first …
This is a recent conversation between two unquestioned experts on Sinatra, Pete Hamill, author of Why Sinatra Matters, and Jonathan Schwartz, the writer and radio host who coined the phrase “Chairman of the Board” in regard to Frank. A pleasant remembrance. http://92yondemand.org/pete-hamill-with-jonathan-schwartz – Chuck Strom
If anyone hasn’t heard by now about the fantastically good year Stephen Curry has had so far, this video will satisfy all curiosity. The sequence is very instructive, if only to show how many shots Curry makes in traffic, sometimes while being knocked to the floor. If there was ever a reason to unload your …
In September 1998, shortly after Frank Sinatra’s passing, the jazz critic Francis Davis described Sinatra’s career in The Atlantic as a two-decade procession of taking songs off the market, meaning that once Frank had recorded them, his interpretations were immediately accepted as definitive and thereby discouraged other singers from recording them afterward. I thought of …
In our NFL-focused society, it can be easy to forget that the NBA season actually starts in November. For those who haven’t paid attention, there already have been some interesting developments, including a fired coach (Kevin McHale of the Houston Rockets) and a Golden State Warriors team that has somehow convinced itself that it has …
When ESPN shut down Grantland on October 30, I was surprised at its abruptness, but not that it happened; after Bill Simmons’s acrimonious departure from ESPN, it was realistically only a matter of time. Grantland was Simmons’s creation, and without him, ESPN had no institutional incentive to maintain it. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in …
During last night’s World Series Game 5 broadcast, there was some criticism of Mets manager Terry Collins’s decision to leave Matt Harvey in the game to pitch not only to the first batter of the ninth inning but the next one as well. Second guessing is part of the fun of baseball, but I remember …
One of the charms of major league baseball is that on rare occasions, people can not only play but thrive in the league despite a non-athletic body if they have the right skills. We were reminded of this when Bartolo Colon came in to pitch for the Mets last night in the 12th inning of …
Today former Mets and Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra claims to have blackmailed umpires during his career for favorable calls on balls and strikes at the plate. Seems rather outrageous, but anyone interested in Dykstra’s playing career should pick up Keith Hernandez’s Pure Baseball, which featured Dykstra prominently in his pitch-by-pitch analysis of two MLB games …
Nice interview with Bill Murray on ESPN at Wrigley. Still funny as ever. http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=13934932 No need to give up on the Cubs yet. Lots of parallels to the 2004 Red Sox: 1. Theo Epstein 2. Down 3-0 at home against a New York team 3. A prospective World Series opponent from Missouri Everything is all …