Golf — Basketball — Coronavirus — Books About Crime — 5/24/25

by Nate

Nate told a friend—partially in jest at the time but as he reflects on it there’s a lot more truth to it than he first thought—that these four topics are the only things he reads about online. This friend told him that, surely, there must be a website that speaks to these niche issues at the same time. WELL THERE IS NOW, BABY.

GOLF

Here's a great song to listen to while golfing. 

The Charles Schwab Challenge is going on at time of writing. It's very early, too much so to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions, but the current top five on the leaderboard are five people that I, the most perverted golf observer this foul blog has ever seen, am not completely are real people. Patrick Rodgers? This is not a real person, this is a create-a-player. Golf, please be more serious.

Patches, I'm depending on you son! To pull the family through! Man, I love that song when I'm hooking a driver over some trees and into the loading dock of a Walmart. 

BASKETBALL

The extremely large Oklahoma City Thunder thrashed the Wolves (and may have thrashed them again by the time your read this), and the extremely Indiana Indiana Pacers outlasted the Knicks in a game resonant with history. The Pacers game was better than the Thunder game, in the sense that the Pacers game as a real slugfest back-and-forth that ended with one of the Pacers' main guys doing this. This made for more dramatic competition compared to what the Thunder did, which is what the Thunder do every game: decide at some point in the second quarter to steal the ball and dunk, and then keep doing that until the game is over. 

If one had to bet the farm, they should be it on Thunder over Pacers in six games and be comfortable with their agricultural future, but ask me again on Monday when more games have occurred and my mind has been changed. Also, cards on the table: I've been crushing a lot of Andor Season 2 this week, so my basketball observance has not been as diligent and loyal as it would be normally. Once I figure out what's going on with these Star Wars spies, I will lock back in and watch the fuck out of some sports. 

CORONAVIRUS

Gotta be honest, I did not think there was going to be so much shit to say about COVID when I picked this old-ass column format up off the trash-heap for... reasons still not yet known, actually. I assumed I'd talk about mental derangement via Too Much Online, maybe get into some measles negativity, maybe just relisten to a bunch of memory-holed albums from the pandemic era. 

And still! The 'Vid is as with us now as it ever was! Moderna was going to put forth a dual Flu/COVID vaccine booster, but that's off the table now because the general state of American politics! Fuck! That would have been so sick! So responsible! I'm getting red-assed over here!

I'll say this: respect to Moderna for not giving the game away in their statement, and for staying under the radar of the administration by leaning on the excuse of "needing more information about the flu," and not going with what Reuters calls "increased regulatory scrutiny of the vaccine approval process," which is one of those things that is technically true but emotionally disingenuous. Fuck and shit again!

BOOKS ABOUT CRIME

You know what's good? And Then There Were None. Agatha wrote one book 100 times, and they were all good.

INDIE ROCK

The Spotify algorithm is bad and has been made worse when they, uh, fired the people who made it a decent discovery engine back in the olden days of eighteen months ago. But sometimes you get lucky. For example, maybe you were looking at a newsletter from Ed Zitron in which he recommends listening to El-P, and you think "huh, I haven't listened to El-P in a while, that could be cool," so you call it up on the machine only to find that he's, uh, doing a guest verse on a hard rock song. Sometimes things can be good if you adjust your expectations for what "good" should mean.