You have been told to follow your dreams. But what if it’s a stupid dream?
Games described as forgotten typically earn that classification because they deserve to disappear; traditionally, it’s a modifier historians use to marginalize or dismiss a given event. But this game is “forgotten” in an actual sense: There’s almost no record of its existence. Fewer than 500 people watched it happen. It was not televised and there’s no videotape. It wasn’t broadcast on the radio. Only a couple of small-circulation newspapers made mention of what transpired, and — because it happened before the Internet — Googling the contest’s details is like searching for a glossy photograph of Genghis Khan. The game has disappeared from the world’s consciousness, buried by time and devoid of nostalgia. And this, of course, is not abnormal. Junior college basketball games from 1988 are not historic landmarks. We are conditioned to forget who won (or lost) the opening round of the North Dakota state juco tournament because those are moments society does not need to remember. They don’t even qualify as trivia.
But something crazy happened in this particular game.
Chuck Klosterman | Three-Man Weave
The Bill Simmons grantland.com project launched today, and Chuck Klosterman proved with his first column he’s the (not-so) secret weapon.
Source: steinbergsports
I believe in and advocate monogamy. Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary politeness. I don’t like to be made much of. Such things please only persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine, such as it is, at the age of 12.
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.
Well, first of all, you don’t smoke peyote.
Phil Jackson | responding to Dallas Maverick’s coach Rick Carlisle’s press conference comment:
My belief is that he’ll retire for a while, but I don’t know how long you can go to Montana and meditate and … smoke peyote or whatever he does there. He’s gonna get bored, and I mean that in an endearing way.
via Swann Galleries
ENCOURAGEMENT FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT SALINGER, J.D. Typed Letter Signed, to Elizabeth Cordova, declining to speak at her high school graduation, explaining that this is because he must attend his son’s eighth-grade graduation, stating that talking writers are a scourge, and offering a two-sentence graduation speech intended for her alone. 1 page, 4to, folds. With the original envelope. Windsor, 14 May 1974
He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend … If you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more loveable — funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies — than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.
Jonathan Franzen | On David Foster Wallace | Farther Away, The New Yorker, April 18, 2011
via Vulture
Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.
Source: thingsdeadpeoplesaid
In the bungling and bellicosity that constitute the back and forth of history, worsened by natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty, humble citizens pay the highest price. To be a traveler in such circumstances can be inconvenient at best, fatal at worst. But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report: “I was there. I saw it all.” The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience — shocking though it may seem at the time — is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
They give you a round bat and they throw you a round ball and they tell you to hit it square.
Willie Stargell
Baseball season has arrived and that brings to my mind springtime and youthful nostalgia. And the late great Willie Stargell, who I believe remains the only man to ever hit a a ball into the parking lot of Dodger Stadium.
Although growing up in L.A. and a Dodgers fan, I couldn’t help but love the great “We Are Family” Pirates team. How could you not like a team with Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Bill Madlock, Omar Moreno, Mike Easler, Lee Lacy, Dock Ellis, Kent Tekulve and Rennie Stennett? I mean, even their names were cool.
When I was about five, in 1980, I think, the season after they’d won the World Series, my family stayed at the same Chicago hotel as the Pirates, who were visiting for a series with the Cubs. As they boarded the team bus, I hounded them for autographs, even shook Dave Parker’s hand. There are two things I remember most about the encounter. 1) Nearly every guy on the team wore a leather jacket and carried a massive ghetto blaster, and 2) Dave Parker’s cobra belt buckle was bigger than my head.
I wonder what ever became of those autographs.
Source: thingsdeadpeoplesaid
