Jason Kipnis strikes out, plays decent defense in All-Star Game
July 14, 2015Cavaliers, Indians, Buckeyes all up for ESPY awards
July 15, 2015I’ve had enough, Blawg Pound. Of the rain, I mean. What happened to summer? What happened to carefree days under the sun? What happened to picnics and campouts? What happened to spending every waking moment at the ballfield? What’s wrong with weather nowadays? Didn’t we raise it well enough? Didn’t we give it every opportunity to be its best self? WHAT’S GOING ON?
Ahem.
Happy Wednesday, Blawg Pound. Sorry about that just then. All this rain is getting to me a bit, and I suppose I’m a little grumpier without more sporting activities to divert my attention. We’re a good ways into July now, which means that we can look back at how much water we got dumped on us in June (“we” and “us” meaning Clevelanders in this case). It rained on 19 of the month’s last 23 days. It was the third-wettest June in Cleveland history dating back to 1871. An average June brings 3.43 inches of rain. June 2015 brought 8.52 inches.1
I suppose all of this rain is good news for trees and flowers and stuff — assuming they don’t get washed away altogether — but it gets a little frustrating if you enjoy venturing outdoors without a layer of plastic sheeting over your person. Here’s hoping today is a little drier.
I have no significant thoughts on the MLB All-Star Game. I watched for a while, and it was reasonably fun, though much of my enthusiasm was diminished by the time the actual game started. The preshow/introduction was way too long. I didn’t care for Ciara’s national anthem. The announcing was often noteworthy for the wrong reasons. It was a pretty good game despite Jason Kipnis striking out in his only at-bat, but it served primarily as background noise for me.
In lieu of baseball talk, I’ll share a couple pieces of writing I read yesterday. They’re quite different, but both brought the concept of reinvention to mind. Whether it’s by choice, necessity, opportunity, or something else, a great many of us wind up reinventing ourselves. You might be offered an unexpected job or given a chance that’s too good to pass up. You may be forced to fight out of a corner or dig out of a hole.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that stuff happens, and you gotta react. (But doesn’t reinvention sound so much more fun?)
If you don’t know Frédéric Weis by name, odds are better that you know him by image. He’s the 7-foot-2 French guy Vince Carter literally leapt over en route to a dunk in the 2000 Olympics. That’s Frédéric Weis. Carter’s slam became the single play for which Weis was most well-known, at least in the States. Weis was drafted in the first round by the New York Knicks in 1999, but never played a game for them. He played in Europe for over a decade, and did pretty well — he was a four-time all-star in France and was on a handful of championship-winning teams. Still, the dual legacies of NBA bust and infamous dunk victim chased him.
Sam Borden wrote an excellent piece on Weis for the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:
He stopped the car, leaned back in his seat and, at 30 years old, considered all that had happened to him during his career. There were the early years playing in the French league. There was the night in 1999 when the Knicks made him a first-round draft pick. There was the disappointment of feeling as if then-Coach Jeff Van Gundy did not actually want him. There was the vicious dunk from Vince Carter — just Google “le dunk de la mort” (Dunk of Death) if you have somehow missed it — that transformed him into an on-court victim.
And there was, of course, the cold recognition of his personal reality: that the label affixed to him as an NBA bust/cautionary tale — at least if the Weis-themed public reaction to the Knicks’ recent drafting of the Latvian Kristaps Porzingis is any indication — will, almost surely, last forever.
Weis thought about all this for a while. Then he thought about the beach house. Then he thought about his son, Enzo. Then he reached over, took out the box of sleeping pills he had brought with him and swallowed every single one.
If you know James Ransone, odds are you’ve watched The Wire. He’s been in a bunch of other movies and TV shows, but The Wire is the one for which he is best-known. He played Ziggy Sobotka, the ne’er-do-well son of a dockworker union leader. Ziggy was the clown prince of Baltimore, a skinny little pissant who brought a duck to a bar (and made sure it was served), blew $2,000 on a red leather coat, and was tossed onto a shipping container after sucker punching a refrigerator-shaped stevedore.2
Meanwhile, Ransone was living the high life. The Wire work was steady, and close enough to New York for him to catch the train north and party with his friends.3 It was all well and good until he got into pills, and later, heroin. As The Wire became more popular, fans didn’t hesitate to give the man they saw as Ziggy a piece of their mind. Things got bad.
Amos Barshad wrote for Grantland about Ransone cleaning up and reinventing his career.
So he hunkered down, focused on the work. And he got an assist from the chef David Chang, the don of the beloved Momofuku [restaurant] empire, whom he met while both were acting on Treme.
“He explained that when he started Momofuku, all he set out to do was make the best bowl of ramen that he could,” Ransone says. “And that money and fame and the adoration of his peers and the envy of his competitors and sex — it didn’t matter because focusing on those things would just prevent him from making the best bowl of ramen that he could.
“All I can do when I go home at night and lay in bed is think — when I was at work today, was it the best that I could have done? That’s the only experience I’m afforded. Everything else is not in my control.”
It struck me as a simple, inspiring message: focus on the work, and the other stuff will follow. Handle what you can, do it the best you can, and don’t worry about what you can’t change. It also reminded me of a bit of wisdom from the end of Dazed and Confused.
That’s all, gang. Have a good one. Do whatever you do the best you can.
- All of this weather info via NEOMG’s Rich Exner. [↩]
- Here’s an expletive-laden scene that captures much of Ziggy’s essence. [↩]
- “I’d go shoot my scenes and be like, ‘All right, well, I have enough money to drink this week.’ And I’d get back on the train to New York and party with my friends.” [↩]
5 Comments
Yes, it’s been rainy. But maybe no coincidence that we’re about half way between the last Browns OTA and the start of training camp and there’s been been nary a report of an arrest, incidents involving a baby mamas/plate glass windows or even shaky TMZ footage. Joe Haden hasn’t recently lead a Stage IV Protocol teammate onto a Vegas-bound party plane, no closed head injuries inexplicably sustained by a guy “working out on his own.” Just first rounders finishing degrees, guys sitting courtside at the NBA Finals and other milquetoast nonsense.
Rain on. For just 2 more weeks, when all knuckleheads are reincarcerated at Berea.
Has it really been that rainy? Doesn’t feel like it to me but I keep hearing that. The Indians haven’t even had a single rain-out this year.
Any word on the whereabouts of Gordon? Jamaica? Columbia?
Dazed and Confused great flic!
Colorado Kush Farm!