Yup, it’s time for a “Wow, look at all the open tabs, let’s clear some of those out!” posts.
:: What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture.
Interesting article about the proliferation of numerical analysis for just about everything these days:
Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels. In the century and a half of MLB history covered by the database Baseball Reference, the 10 years with the most strikeouts per game are the past 10.
On another note, I should write a post sometime about the movie Moneyball, which is a fascinating sports movie from the standpoint of the front office, a good piece of evidence for my belief that Aaron Sorkin is at his best when he’s paired with another writer to neuter his more annoying quirks, and also an interesting case study in how to not manage.
:: A post about the title song from the movie That Thing You Do!, the wonderful 90s flick about what happened when a bunch of teenagers from Erie put together a garage rock band and ended up being a national one-hit wonder. The film was directed by Tom Hanks, and he directed it very well, which is why I’m often surprised to think how he never really pursued directing much at all after this one. Maybe he just didn’t want to. That’s fine!
As for the song, though, I did not know that it was written by Adam Schlesinger, the brilliant songwriter who was behind a lot of the amazing satirical songs that formed the backbone of Rachel Bloom’s masterpiece series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Schlesinger, sadly, died at the too-early-age of 51 in the first wave of COVID-19.
Oh, here’s the song, if you don’t remember it. It got quite a bit of airplay in the 90s when the movie was a thing:
:: Black conductors, long excluded, are now on the podium. But will it last?
When Jeri Lynne Johnson made it to the finals of an orchestra tryout in California and didn’t get the job, she didn’t think much of it.
“It happens. It’s like dating — you kind of work or you don’t,” says Johnson of the chemistry that gets tested when a conductor stands before an orchestra for the first time.
But when Philadelphia-based Johnson asked the head of the selection committee what she could have done differently, “He said, ‘We just didn’t know how to market you. You don’t look like what our audience expects a maestro to look like.’”
Orchestra conducting has been the almost entirely-exclusive bastion of white men for just about the entire two century period that the job has even existed. Woman conductors have only started breaking through into the mainstream in the last couple of decades. Black conductors? Imagine that quote above: “We didn’t know how to market you.” Why not…as a thrilling and exciting musician? The same way you market every new conductor who takes a music director position with an orchestra?
My God, we have so damned far to go.
(Classical music’s racism is often obvious, but it’s also worth noting the crustacean-like resistance to change at all in the genre and in people who follow it. I remember attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert some years ago where the first half of the program was a modern work, and the second half was a Beethoven piano concerto. At intermission I heard the old ladies behind me saying things like “At last, now we get to the good stuff.” I can hear them now, exiting the concert hall after a Black conductor has led a performance of, oh, Brahms’s Third: “Well, I like Brahms, but I suppose he’s woke now.” Ugh!)
:: Who doesn’t love a ranked list? Here is The Best Crime-Solving Writers In Fiction, Ranked!
If that sounds confusing–and it did to me at first, too–it’s referring to fictional writers who also end up being detectives, like Richard Castle of my once-beloved show, Castle. (Who is on the list, by the way. He’s not Number One. If you’re wondering who Number One is, I won’t give it away, but it’s really kind of obvious, especially considering recent events.)
:: For my money, the essential reading following the passing of Jerry Lee Lewis is everything Sheila O’Malley has written about him.
:: Finally, here’s an excellent Twitter thread about what a gigantic mess everyone’s favorite WonderGenius, Elon Musk, is making of Twitter.
I've seen a few people claiming that Musk, despite his seemingly chaotic approach to overhauling Twitter, is actually playing 3D chess and actually totally "gets" the site.
Baloney.
Let's talk about why. 1/nhttps://t.co/TYYT9UZuYC
— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) November 4, 2022
I, myself, have never been much for the notion that people are to be automatically afforded massive amounts of deference and respect because they have simply managed to amass some large amount of wealth. But in this country, I am in a distinct minority in this viewpoint, I think.
That’s all for now. Time to start letting the tabs pile up again!
They don’t make coliseums like they used to….
If the attitudes in Ancient Rome had anticipated attitudes on 21st century America, I suppose they would have razed the Coliseum after just a few decades because the rich and powerful–Brutus and Cassius, say–could have made more money on a newer venue farther out from the city core. But no, the Romans built a sports venue that would last them for centuries and whose stone guts would still be standing over 1500 years following the fall of their Empire.
Meanwhile, in the US we have absurd situations like the Atlanta Braves and Falcons, both of whom are playing in spiffy new stadiums built in the last couple of years, replacing aging venues built…in the 1990s. At least Chicago still has Wrigley and Boston still has Fenway…but here at home, in my neck of the woods, the Buffalo Bills are gearing up to start construction on their new stadium. (And this is literally my neck of the woods: we live less than two miles from Highmark Stadium, current home of the Bills, and the new facility is set to be built across the street from the current stadium, basically taking the stadium and the parking lots and flip-flopping them.)
Renderings for the New Bills Stadium (which I’m sure will sell naming rights to some local company so it’ll end up being a boring corporate-sounding name) were released the other day, all over news media and social media in the 716:
My reaction? Meh, whatever.
Look, it’s fine. It’s nice. Stadiums (stadia?) nowadays all tend to have this futuristic-shiny thing going on (exceptions exist–I do like the way Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium ended up), and architectural diagrams always make new buildings look shinier than they do in real life; that outside rendering up top looks less like a building and more like a Ralph McQuarrie concept-art painting for a 21st century remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The field rendering? It’s fine. It’s a stadium. Inside, they all kind of look the same, because there’s really not a whole lot new you can do with a football field and 60-70,000 seats around it. It’s interesting that according to the scoreboard the Bills are beating the Jets 24-3, and according to the Gigantic Teevee Screen, the Bills are playing a home game in their white uniforms. Other than that, my basic reaction is “Yup, that’s a stadium.”
Do the Bills need a new stadium? Not exactly, in the sense that the current one is still perfectly capable of hosting games (they’re having one tomorrow night!), it’s not crumbling, et cetera. But in the sense of “Can the NFL, the Bills’ owners, and some others make a shit-ton more money than they already are if they rebuild?”, then the answer is, “HOLY SHIT YES, AND THEY CANNA BUILD IT FAST ENOUGH!!!” Which just happens to be what the answer always is, here in our era of Late-Stage Capitalism.
The worst part is the price tag that will be assessed not on the team’s owners, who are worth over 5 billion dollars, but on the public. This new stadium is supposed to cost well over 1 billion dollars, and it’s yet another example of the rich not being asked to pay entirely for the thing they want. So in a state and community with out-dated schools and infrastructure and loads of impoverished citizens, we’re spending over a billion dollars on a building that will help people who are already rich beyond comprehension get even richer.
I could rant about this, but at my vantage point of 51 years, I’ve given up on this sort of thing. If there is a point at which Americans become so sick of being fleeced by the rich that they start setting up the guillotines in the city squares, I’ve no idea what that point is. It’s tough shit, ’cause that’s just who we are as a country. We’ve equated “freedom” with “thank you sir, may I have another”, when it comes to the rich being showered with advantages they hardly need.
A while back the big debate around here wasn’t whether to build a new stadium, but where. Many people wanted it in downtown Buffalo, or as close to downtown as possible. The most frequently-mentioned site was a spot just off I-190, the main highway that accesses downtown Buffalo, where a bunch of mostly-abandoned buildings once used for public housing now stand. The arguments were that the stadium in that spot would benefit from downtown’s hotel availability and transit systems. Now, hotels I can maybe see, as there are a lot of new hotels in the downtown Buffalo area. (So much new hotel space that I often wonder why we have so much of it, given our city’s old, dilapidated, and entirely-too-small convention center that is in desperate need of replacing but probably won’t be for at least a decade now.) Transit, I’m not at all sure about. Yes, there are more bus lines in the city than all the way out to the suburbs, but that’s all there is, unless Buffalo’s Metro Rail system was somehow extended to the new stadium. (Our Metro Rail, built in the late 1980s, is literally a straight line. It was intended to be the start of a good regional light rail system, but nothing has ever been done to add to the original line.)
Building way out in Orchard Park isn’t awesome, but it makes sense on some other grounds. First, the site is shovel-ready; no demolition of existing property is needed at all. The new stadium is literally going onto the parking lot of the old one. There are lots of hotels kinda-nearby, but the area surrounding the stadium itself is not exactly a hotbed of lodging activity; just about any hotel is probably ten to fifteen minutes away. Public transit isn’t fantastic out here, either, with just a few stops that are meant more for commuters than for consistent access to and from the city. And sadly, neither of those is likely to change as long as the population of The 716 remains in its current neighborhood. Increased transit and lodging density aren’t going to happen unless this region starts growing its population in a major way again. (Which might happen longterm! Especially as climate change really starts digging it its heels. But it won’t happen fast enough to benefit the stadium.)
So, the new stadium will still be a place almost entirely accessible by car or bus or RV or whatever. It will still be a big building on a bigger piece of land with another big piece of land next door to house all the vehicles and such. In Buffalo, tailgating is a major part of the Bills’ fan experience; a downtown stadium would almost certainly have made tailgating mostly a thing of the past, at least as we know it now. Tailgating will survive now, so…yay. (This is the fanbase that drunkenly jumps through folding tables, so I won’t say that I was much swayed by nostalgic appeals to tailgating.)
The other big debate about the stadium was whether or not it should have a dome. As you can see by the renderings, the current design is not domed, which you might think a surprise given how the weather around here can be. Now, as always, it’s worth the eternal Buffalo-rejoinder about our weather: “On average it really isn’t that bad in winter here, you just hear about the few times it does get really bad, and anyway, it’s spring that’s massively unpleasant here, winter’s fine.” And yes, all of that is true. And while more teams play in enclosed stadiums now than ever before, there are still hold-outs that play in the open air in northern climes: the Packers, Steelers, Browns, Giants-Jets, and Patriots all play in open-air stadiums. It’ll be fine here, especially if, as built, it’s got a bit more cover than Highmark Stadium, which somehow manages to surround you with concrete and make you feel more exposed to the elements.
And with the “What, no dome?!” reactions come the real pie-in-the-sky dreamers, the ones who say (and yes, they really do say this), “But if it’s not a dome, then Buffalo can’t host a Super Bowl!”
Oy.
Look, folks. Buffalo could build the single-greatest domed stadium in the history of such venues. They could build it right downtown, and give it a Metro Rail spur with a station right there in the building. They could build it within walking distance of all those nice new downtown hotels…and Buffalo would still be unable to host a Super Bowl.
Like it or not, Buffalo for all its charms and all the work it’s doing to try to reverse its sixty-years of bad economic and demographic fortune is simply too small to host an event as big as a Super Bowl. One person actually said to me on Twitter, “How is Buffalo too small? Stadiums can only set 70000 people. It’s not like the stadium doubles its capacity for the game.” It’s almost like it comes as news to these folks that the Super Bowl brings quite a few times as many people to the host cities as can attend the game. I found an article indicating that when Atlanta hosted Super Bowl LIII in February 2019, more than half a million people flooded the city.
Buffalo, at this time, simply does not have the hotel stock or transportation infrastructure for a week-long influx of that many people. The most recent illustrative example is Jacksonville, FL, which hosted Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Jacksonville is often cited as the worst host city of the last couple decades; most famously, that city’s lack of hotel stock at the time was addressed by docking cruise ships in the city’s harbor to act as temporary hotels. And Jacksonville is a city that’s three times the size of Buffalo, in terms of population. (I think it’s obvious that docking cruise ships in Buffalo’s harbor in February is simply not gonna happen.)
So, summing up, my reaction to all this stadium talk is basically, “Sure, OK, looks fine, I’m sure it’ll be a lovely place to see a game if you can afford it, we shouldn’t have to pay for it but we will, and can we please knock off the Super Bowl-hosting talk? Anyway, Go Bills.”
Go Bills, indeed.