In 2022, at about this time of year, I read Rethinking Fandom, a book that proposes that we don’t owe our sports teams our undying loyalty and attention. It struck a nerve with me, as I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the shitty way almost all professional sports teams (I’m counting the NCAA here too) are run. So I tried an experiment that year. I became a casual fan.

By casual fan, I mean I did not sign up for MLB.tv to obsessively follow the Red Sox. I did subscribe to the radio feeds because I like falling asleep to a west coast baseball audio feed during baseball season. And it’s nice sometimes to sit on the porch with a beer in the dark, listening to baseball. Between Apple TV Friday night games, and ESPN+ broadcasts, plus Sunday baseball on Peacock, there is generally a baseball game on TV just about every evening. As a casual fan, I no longer felt compelled to try to watch the Red Sox regularly. If I was in the mood to watch baseball, I watched whatever game was on.

It worked better than expected. I greatly enjoyed watching teams I normally would not watch, and I enjoyed not obsessively following the Red Sox ups and downs (well, mostly downs) daily. I did watch the World Series, probably closer than I had since the last time the Red Sox were in it. In past years, the Red Sox not being a part of the Series made it seem less worth watching. Now, though, watching the two “best” teams play for the trophy was more interesting without the Red Sox mental baggage. I continued that same model for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. I am officially a casual baseball fan.

Likewise, I followed through with college football and basketball. We canceled Hulu Live, so we did not have access to the Big 10 Network to obsessively watch Purdue. And it was fine. The occasional game that was promoted to the network made those games more special. Another thing we did was refuse to plan around Purdue sports. So if they were on Fox on a Saturday afternoon, we might watch if we were home, but we didn’t plan around the game like we used to. I think I saw one football game on TV and one in person in 2022, and maybe parts of one football game in 2023 and 2024. It helped that Purdue football was historically bad the last couple of years.

Basketball was a little different, as Purdue basketball was historically good in 2023 and 2024, going all the way to the National Championship game in 2024. So even though we still did not have the B1G Network, there were plenty of opportunities to watch basketball, including every game of the Big Dance. We still don't plan around regular season games, though. If we are home and the game is on, maybe we watch. Earlier this week, we chose our ongoing re-watch of Buffy over Purdue at Michigan State.

Also, I’m old enough to have become a baseball fan when my options were Monday Night Baseball, the Game of the Week on Saturday on NBC, and the Cubs because we lived in Northern Indiana at the time and I could pick up WGN with the rabbit ears. Being a baseball fan in the late 70s meant using the box scores and the AP write-ups in the newspaper as your primary source of information. It made a Red Sox appearance on TV a special event.

However, I've decided to pay more attention to the MLB in 2025. Primarily because I need the distraction from the decline and fall of the American Empire. So I've upgraded to the MLB Network, which will get me up to 15 games a week on TV, plus the radio feed for every game of the season by all teams. I don't really expect much from the Red Sox, though. They have upgraded the team, but the AL East is loaded, and they still feel like the 4th best team in the division to me. I had Spring Training games on in the background while working on Thursday and Friday this week, and I realized just how much I've missed baseball in the 13 years that have passed since the World Series ended in 2024.

What? Are you going to argue it doesn't feel like 13 years since late October 2024?

Anyway, play ball!

Note: I apparently wrote a first draft of this in 2022 and never published it. I stumbled into it this morning and decided to update it and put it online.

I was a fairly typical NFL fan for most of my life. A few years ago I burnt out on it, in part because my team, the New England Patriots, had become the bad guys.

That sums up my feelings about being an American right now. We are the bad guys. We are not Reagan's shining beacon on a hill (ignore for now that Reagan's beacon only shined on white people), we are Mordor. We are ruled by an unelected South African Nazi with a chip on his shoulder about losing official white supremacy in his home county. So now he has bought the President and is instituting it here.

It would only take 4 Republicans to stop all of this, but unfortunately the number of honest Republicans in Congress is zero. I'm not sure if there are 4 honest Republicans in the country. It is much quicker to break the law than enforce it. The Courts are slowly ruling against Musk and Trump, but they are just ignoring the ruling and doing whatever the fuck they want, confident that the Congressional Republicans are happy to cede the power of the purse to Trump if it means he doesn't fund the opposition in their next primary.

So we can't count on Congress or the Courts. We probably shouldn't wish for a military coup. What does that leave us?

It leaves us. Us. We the people.

This article is hopeful. It argues that no government has ever withstood the active opposition of 3.5% of the population. So we need, on average, 3.5 out of every 100 people actively protesting. You find a friend on week one, and them both of you add a different friend on week two, and you are at 5 out of 100 for your social circle. Rinse and repeat, and the dictator is toppled.

Easy, right?

Of course, it won't be easy. But 3.5% is not an insurmountable number. We can do that. We must do that.

It's the middle of February, and the national nightmare that is Elon Musk running the country as a Dictator shows no sign of abating. Everything he is doing is illegal, but I'm losing faith that any institution has the willingness to step up and stop him. You know shit is bad when you are rooting for a military coup.

Anyway, this was Valentine's weekend. We skipped the circus of overcrowded restaurants on Friday night and stayed home to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead. We went out last night, for dinner at a neighborhood Italian place, then a concert by RVA's premier Yacht Rock tribute band. We had a lot of fun, the club was crowded, the band sounded great, and everybody there just seemed to be in a good mood having fun. The band started a little after 8 PM, so it wasn't even a particularly late night, which is increasingly important to us. My days of club shows ending at 2 AM are way, way in the past.

We started Saturday by heading out in to the cold at 9 AM to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count with the RVA chapter of the Feminist Bird Club. It was an unremarkable morning of birding, but the people were really nice, and we will definitely be hanging out with them more. Also, they do more beginner outreach than Audubon does. When out with the Audubon Society, I'm usually among the least experienced birders. I was among the more experienced yesterday, which was fun.

In other news, I ordered a 1 TB external SSD drive so that I can move my backups off of AWS. I'm also in the process of moving my photos and music file sync from Gdrive to pCloud. I also deleted every post I've made to Facebook. I'm not deleting the account, yet, but I am no longer contributing to the app. I'm mostly in read-only mode there now.

It's a 3-day weekend for me, as tomorrow is President's Day. My wife has to work, though, so I'll probably do a lot of nothing tomorrow.

On to the links.

For those of you in the US looking for ways to #resist, this is a list of ideas that aren't protest or vote.

The hippies were right.

Archive 95 is an independent archive of early web content.

This is a rather long list of text only and very lightweight websites.

This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.

The LA Maybe- Damn Dirty Tricks

The LA Maybe came out of North Carolina with a record in 2021 that can be best described as the result of three-way between AC/DC. Guns N Roses, and The Black Crowes.

I'll give you a minute to get that vision out of our head. . . .

The album is fabulous. The lead singer actually tried out to replace Brian Johnson in AC/DC, when he had health problems and his future ability to sing was in question. They take the blues vibe of AC/DC, gritty it up a bit a la GnR, and them bring it down south with some Black Crowes vibes. It works fabulously well.

Unfortunately, this album is all we will get from them. The lead singer left the band, and they took a hard turn towards country. Or maybe they went country and the singer left, I'm not sure of the order. Anyway, this record is a hell of a throwback to real rock and roll.

Mr. Danger

When I'm Gone

We started a re-watch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer this week. Initially, I thought it was a reaction to the news that there might be a reboot of the show coming. But after six episodes of far too much 90s grunge music, I think there might be more to it.

Seriously, I did not remember just how much music was in the show. Maybe they tone it done after season 1?

Last week we watched the six episode series American Primeval. Set in 1857, it is a brutally violent and profane drama that is thematically, historically accurate. The Mormons were homicidal maniacs, the US Military not much better, and the Indigenous Tribes in Utah were screwed. Almost everybody dies. That's how life in the west was back then. But the one hopeful character arc couldn't make up for just how miserable the US Government was, and just how horrible the Mormons were. Add in that I've been reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is a retelling of the US conquest of the West from the Native American point-of-view, and layer in the actual day-to-day hell that is life in the US right now, and well, it is all too much.

I'm conflicted between my desire to do what I can to improve things, the reality that my ability to affect change is pretty damn limited, and my other desire to pull the covers over my head and sleep through this nightmare, metaphorically speaking. Also, I need to acknowledge the obvious truth that I've got it much better than many in the US. I'm a CIS, heterosexual white dude with a pretty decent income. The government isn't trying to erase me from existence — yet.

Which brings us back to Buffy. The Buffyverse is pretty damn black and white. Vampires are bad (ignore Angel for now). They must be vanquished. Direct action by a high school girl can save the world. Yes, the world is more complicated than that, and the show dives into that struggle. But on the surface, vampire bad, must be turned to dust. It's comforting to lose myself in that world for a couple of hours every night. It's a world I can deal with. I didn't watch Buffy when it was originally broadcast. We watched it over 2010-2011, after which I wrote,

More seriously, the message of the show, from my point of view, is that growing up is hard. High school makes that hard thing an absolute living hell. (Literally, in the case of Sunnydale High) That isn't so far from the truth."

When faced with what to do about your government taking a hard turn to the right towards Nazism, the problems of high school seem quaint by comparison. Even if those problems do involve vampires.

• 3/4 ounce rye whiskey
• 3/4 ounce cognac
• 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth
• 1/2 ounce Bénédictine liqueur
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• 2 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
• Cherry or lemon twist, garnish

Combine all the ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, stir to chill, and strain into a glass. I prefer serving it over a large ice rock with a Luxardo cherry garnish. For the whiskey component, I used Pikesville Rye — its 110-proof strength adds a nice spice balance to the bitter and sweet elements.

The balance of sweet, spice, and citrus made for a refreshing drink. We enjoyed ours with a simple spread of cheese, crackers, and mixed nuts. 

After finishing our drinks, I decided to head out to the deck for a quick cigar before sunset. The Black Label Trading Company Bishops Blend cigars in my humidor had been calling my name, especially since I still have samples dating back to 2020. I grabbed one of the 2024 sticks to enjoy.

The 5 x 48 Robusto features an Ecuadorian Maduro wrapper, an Ecuador Habano binder, and a blend of Nicaraguan, Connecticut Broadleaf, and Pennsylvania Broadleaf filler tobaccos. It delivers rich flavors of coffee, cocoa, and dark fruit, with a hint of black pepper adding depth to the profile.

The weather was pleasant, though I turned on the heater for a bit of extra warmth. I kept things simple, pairing the cigar with just a glass of water while acoustic blues played softly on the radio. After about an hour of peaceful relaxation, I headed back inside, where Colleen was preparing a delicious "Seven Layer Mexican Hot Skillet Dip." We feasted on that while half-watching the football game — muting the halftime “performance.”

It was a great way to start what promises to be another cold, wet, and snowy week. Hopefully, we’re nearing the end of this long season.

Cheers!

This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.

The Knees - Sexual Radio

Yet another Aime Street find, from 2008 if the dates in the MP3 metadata can be trusted.

I think this was an all-woman band. The music is very much in the pop-punk vein. They basically don't exist online. Another band started using the same name in 2020 and even Last.fm has the two bands confused. I found the album uploaded to YouTube, but beyond that there is no Facebook page, no website, no reviews of the album, no trace of the band at all.

The album is okay. The music is catchy, but after the first couple of songs they start to all sound the same to me. Which, to be fair, is not a unusual issue with debut records. Songwriting, like everything else, typically improves with practice. The two songs I shared below are bangers, though.

If you know anything about this band, please share.

Sick of Being Stoned

Can't Stop Now