The Weekly Tendown February 12-18 2012(Special Halfdown Edition)

Dear Internet:

Sarah Palin ruins everything.  V-J Day.  The Moon landing.  The first showing of the Thriller video. All just a Sarah Palin endorsement away from complete worthlessness.  Sarah Palin comes out in favor of free curly fries every June and we're all suddenly on Atkins..

114 is here. This is 115.

1. The One Non Sports Piece You Have to Read This Week
The Roberts Court vs. America.


The Supreme Court went down a similar road in the Gilded Age and afterward, defending laissez-faire economic principles against minimum wages, 
maximum hours, and other Progressive and New Deal regulation. The new 
cases have different doctrinal logic, and the economy has changed vastly, but 
the bottom lines are eerily alike: giving constitutional protection to unequal 
economic power in the name of personal liberty.


2. The One Sports Piece You Have to Read This Week.
It's SI, about Wes Leonard, the high school basketball player who died after hitting a game winning shot.

Xavier sat there, cubical scoreboard flashing above him, 3,500 fans roaring around him, the sneakers of other boys singing like birds on the polished wood at his feet. The burden of perfection was too great.

The Blackhawks would ride an emotional roller coaster for 11 days. They would beat Lawrence and then Bangor and then Covert, reaching the regional semifinals before losing by 24 points to Schoolcraft, the eventual state champion. Xavier would blame himself for failing in a task he never wanted.

That fall, with Wes gone, Xavier would get his chance to be the finest three-sport athlete in Fennville. He would start at quarterback, go down with a shoulder injury, come back as a receiver, and finally quit with one game left in a dismal season. He would join the basketball team late after threatening to quit. Once in a while he would walk into the gym, the last place he saw Wes, and feel on his skin a mild charge of electricity.

But as he sat on the bench in the second quarter with his team trailing by four points to the Lawrence Tigers, Xavier knew none of that. Nor did he know he was about to play the finest game of the season, with 11 points in the fourth quarter and 18 altogether, or that he'd come back two nights later and pour in 25, or that his playoff scoring average would nearly match the regular-season average of the all-state point guard who at this moment was back in Fennville, in a lonely chapel, surrounded by Trappist-cut walnut, wearing his warmup jacket.

3. Sandwiches Require Two Pieces of Bread


My mother and I have a longstanding debate.  My argument is that sandwiches definitionally require bread.  Hers is that anything could be a sandwich, salt, tomato slices = sandwich.

A Massachusetts court agrees with me. A sandwich is: "two thin pieces of bread, usually buttered, with a thin layer (as of meat, cheese, or savory mixture) spread between them"


If the Roberts court would only engage in more cases dealing with foodstuffs and less water carrying for the plutocracy, all of our lives would improve.  


4. Should I Buy a Droid 4?


I'm askin'.

5. RIP
Bad week.



Freddie Solomon.


Gary Carter.

I'm you're a 41 year old 49er fan, Freddie Solomon was one of your guys.  Hard to see one of your guys dead before he turned 60.

Gary Carter's one of the five greatest catchers who ever lived; one day a little more than ten years ago he turned to a studio audience, nodded at me and said "there's a guy who knows a lot about baseball."

It is probably the nicest thing anyone ever said about me.

That's all for this time.  I'll be back next time.  If there is a next time...

Your pal,

Jim