Golf — Basketball — Coronavirus — Books About Crime — 5/6/25

Welcome back to another edition of G,B,C,BaC, a blog series that has spanned two different blogs over half a decade. Mostly written by Nate, he drops some knowledge about four different subjects, including... well, you know.

GOLF

Realistically, a person only needs six golf clubs: A putter, some kind of 56-degree-or-higher wedge for sand and chipping, a longer wedge what for when you're inside 140, an 8-iron, a 5-iron, and a rescue wood or a hybrid. If you're good with your woods or particularly versatile with your wedges, you could get away with five. This is a different story if you're a pro golfer, one supposes, but for hackers like you and me, just save your money and get six clubs. It'll be easier to walk, and you'll find yourself with fewer decisions to make. Incidentally, if anyone wants to borrow some clubs, I'll make you a six-set and we can walk Durand Eastman this Friday after work. Let me know. 

BASKETBALL

God, the fucking Clippers cannot overcome their nature. If ever there was a franchise born under a false sign, it's them, less of a twin to the Lakers than an unexpected half-form sliding out with the placenta. The signs were all over the court that this was not a team to be feared, and lo, they were not: a momentarily-brilliant-yet-visibly-hobbled Kawhi Leonard, the grim spectre of James Harden slowly turning into a corn cob with each passing game, withered husk of Ben Simmons, who has forgotten both how to shoot and how to experience shame. Affable billionaire Steve Balmer flew a bunch of fans into Denver to watch his team lose by 50, and one hopes they at least got into some legal weed or went to Red Rocks while they were there. It says more about the limits of Denver and its oafish savant Nikola Jokic that this series went to seven games. The Clippers never stood a chance because they are the Clippers. See you bums in hell! 

CORONAVIRUS

It’s looking more likely every day that the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will not be anything productive or useful (respect for medical professionals, grace for one another, a focus on supportive mental health practices, the restorative and centering powers of recreational golf), but will instead be "everyone went online too much and it turned them into sociopathic monsters." 

This is not specifically what The Black Pill by Elle Reeve is about—it's much more about how nihilistic online communities of incels, men's right activists, nazis, and white nationalists found each other online for the worse of all of us, borne out in the violence of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017—but its coverage of the January 6 insurrection helps paint the picture of where we are now and how that moment was a flashpoint from which we are struggling to recover. 

In short, the theory is this: As people become increasingly more online and more distrustful of the government's response to the pandemic, a new class of older-in-age but younger-to-internet users found their way to QAnon and to each other. In this digital setting where the lines between "irony" and "sincerty" were blurred to the point they ceased to exist, that already-primed group never stood a chance to understand what was real and what was just edgelord shit. It also allowed a normalization of concepts and language that were seen as fringe, dangerous, and the currency of degenerates to become national lexicon, which is how we have people on cable news talking about replacement theory in 2024 and how we have RFK Jr., who is at best Measles-curious, heading up the country's health initiatives. A bunch of people isolated themselves into thinking it was time to overthrow the government, shut the door behind them, and now it's everyone's problem.

COVID's lasting impact will be letting the grossest parts of the American psyche refract, expand, and reach a disgusting tentacle through all the screens people use every day. Touch grass indeed.

BOOKS ABOUT CRIME

Woodworm by Layla Martinez is a slim, spooky novel about a grandmother and a granddaughter living together in a falling-apart manor somewhere in the Spanish countryside. Both women have a contentious relationship to the local rich family and have been stewing in their shadow for all of their lives. Both women take their revenge on that family and suffer the consequences. One of them sees the saints, who appear as giant mantises and whisper secrets and recriminations. One of them sees their mother enter the house over and over again, only to be swallowed alive by the wardrobe time and again. The house is haunted and neither of them can leave. Their lives are haunted and neither of them can leave. 


INDIE ROCK