Two Teams to Root for..
The Worst Intersection of Sports and Politics, the Death of Deadspin and Chili!
It’s 11:30 am on Halloween at the time of starting this and the Washington Nationals are our 2019 World Champs. I live in Texas, I was born outside of Houston (but split to the Midwest almost instantly ) and thought it might be cool to see Houston take another title for the second time in three years. It also would have made my joke on Twitter dumping on D.C. a little bit better…
Baseball is mostly consumed locally and while casual sport fans will sometimes find a reason to adopt a team at the end of October, this year there were some particular rooting interests that both really sucked and were predictably lame.
You saw or at least heard that our President got booed to hell by the majority of a crowded stadium. This angle really shows how quickly the crowd goes from cheering on some vets to sheer contempt for Donald J. Trump. As a historically unpopular president, in a liberal city, fans booed and honestly that’s okay. That’s what fans do in stadiums - boo and hoot like a bunch of hogs since it’s the only way you can communicate your feelings about what’s unfolding in front of you. It’s as old as Roman times. Booing is also kind of soothing - feels nice coming out, doesn’t it?
Anyways, watching Twitter react and finishing the game as the Astros went on to win, I started to notice each teams grabbing some more fans on their bandwagon:
And suddenly, it wasn’t even about baseball anymore but the same back and forth shit that is among the most boring between the divide from our political landscape. There’s plenty of already-hilarious fighting (and infighting) between politicians and all the vampires in political media to make politics entertaining enough…when fandom starts getting involved from the bleachers, that’s when things take a predictably boring turn.
Just like putting on a jersey and watching the game doesn’t make you part of the team, neither does simply stepping into a voting booth once a year or once every four.
And like athletes, politicians also go home at the end of the night to their money and families, and spend 0 time thinking about you.
It’s all reminiscent of the ‘Owning the Libs’ phenomenon that both sides (myself included!) indulge in but something about bringing sports into the equation feels hollow and lame. At least with politics, you can do the most drop-in-a-bucket type of gestures (canvassing, donating) to support your candidate of choice. With sports, all you can do short of some Tonya-Harding shit is just sit there with your beer, maybe make some noise and hope for your team wins.
I watched San Francisco play Arizona on Thursday Night Football which ended up being a great game but couldn’t help think that if this trend continues, are liberals automatically cheering on the 49ers and conservatives are going for the Cardinals?
Anyways to put a bow in this, this is definitely not a call for civility. If you want to tell @MAGAJim69 or @LindaRESISTS to eat shit, go for it! If you are going to chastise and attempt to own the other side, be somewhat creative about it. Find better reasons.
Just don’t be so corny.
Sticking to Sports
Another story that took up a lot of my feed and attention this week was the unfortunate death of Deadspin. The story isn’t complicated and unfortunately is one happening across more and more media companies…bigwigs acquire said media company, bigwigs want more money to fund their second vacation home and said bigwigs hatch cheap, shitty plan to squeeze a few extra dollars to the dismay of employees and the readers, before they alienate them and lose their clicks.
Deadspin was the perfect intersection of sports + culture + politics and more - to see it get stripped of everything outside of sports and to be turned into a vehicle for cheap click-bait that is already a dime a dozen was not only disheartening to their huge and loyal fanbase but for the staff themselves and in solidarity, they all fucking quit!
It isn’t just hilarious to see the greedy G/O Media group ruin their own acquisition that didn’t need fixing in the first place, but how they went about it.
Farmers Insurance has pulled out of a seven-figure ad buy with G/O Media. The move comes after several G/O sites published posts criticizing the ad experience and noting reader complaints about the ads is one hell of a headline but as I pointed out, that doesn’t even scrape the surface of dysfunction and hilarity.
Owned lmao. Anyways, Deadspin is dead and here are a couple thoughts aside from my own that I thought encapsulated it perfectly.
OK Boomer
‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
I don’t want to sound like a hipster here, BUT I’ve had plenty of disdain for boomers before it was cool.
I hope this wasn’t staged but…
This is fucking awesome. If you don’t know, go fire up some Dead Kennedys and get it in your Q zone.
Things Worth Getting in the Kitchen For
Cooking is a pain in the ass but nothing is more of a pain in the ass than trying to learn or look up a recipe only to see somebody’s boring life story. I won’t be doing that! Instead, I will be telling you *concisely* what I’ve been cooking and point you in the right direction.
You guessed it: another seasonal recipe. This time, it’s CHILI!
Before meal prepping became en vogue, I thought I was such a genius my junior year of college (when I really started to learn how to cook) when I made a pot of chili and had dinner for the week. The best part is you can go in a lot of directions that suits your diet - veggie chili is great, lean turkey chili is great and fatty, beef + sausage chili is great.
I went with turkey and used this NY Times recipe.
I also had a nice white bean chicken chili. As always, it tasted better than it looked.
Now time for a QUICK food rant. As I mentioned at the top, I live in and am from Texas and I guess I am a “Texan.” We have plenty of cool shit that makes us unique but we also have a bunch of HURRR DURRR I’M A COWBOY bullshit that makes a lot of people (rightfully) roll their eyes at us. One of those things is REAL TEXANS don’t put beans in their chili - probably stemming from some urban legend that beans give you estrogen or something, we stupidly pride ourselves on our version of meat-soup. Fuck that. I came across a chili recipe from Texas Monthly and I would like to roast it:
Oh sorry, that Paprika you have in the spice rack won’t do, I need HUNGARIAN paprika. Have fun toasting coriander seeds you dork. Do you keep lard handy? Unless you make tortillas (which is actually an awesome move) good luck finding a recipe published after 1970 that calls for lard. I also can’t think of a single grocery that has all of these picky ingredients under one roof. If I am going to stop at multiple grocery stores and turn this into a scavenger hunt, it better be for some better shit than this!