Legacy can be inescapable, even under quarantine. Browse SyFy or E! or USA Network and you’ll learn about wizarding lineage, possibly through the same film on all three channels. Since it can’t air the Michael Jordan doc 24/7, ESPN might show a replay of an NBA final featuring basketball’s most famous family. Maybe you’ve cut the cord and are filling time with Star Wars on Disney+. That shit is all about legacy.
Read moreTag: 2020 name of the year tournament (page 1 of 1)
Listen to Jan Six I. (Art by Rembrandt and Dennis Clark)
Stare long enough at a disparate set of data points and clusters emerge. If you’re an Ancient Mesopotamian, millions of scattered points of light in the sky become constellations. If you’re a bored, doodling mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam, cardinal numbers arrayed in a spiral reveal grouped patterns in the seemingly random occurrence of primes. Even if you’re a koala—hamstrung by a too-small brain, because you can’t muster the energy to sustain a larger one, because the only thing your body can digest for energy is literally toxic and will kill you if eat too much of it—pattern recognition helps you find your next meal.
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Graphic: Dennis Clark. View full-size bracket here.
Fifty years ago next month, word started leaking that Look magazine would publish two excerpts from Jim Bouton’s diary about the 1969 season, Ball Four. The leaker was the sportswriter who edited the book, Leonard Shecter. In the early ’60s, Bouton was a young, smart, offbeat pitcher with the New York Yankees who stood out in a locker room of jaded, old-school, future Hall of Famers like Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle. Shecter was the beat guy for the New York Post and one of a group of young sportswriters—Robert Lipsyte, George Vecsey, Phil Pepe, Larry Merchant, and others—who cared less about godding up the old stars than writing interesting stories.
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NOTY Fantasy draft board via @PhuHoang2099
According to a survey conducted by the Educational Theatre Association, the most-performed musical production in schools across the United States is The Addams Family. Perhaps you can picture them now: a cocksure senior in Gomez’s striped suit, a white-faced Morticia at his side. Or, if your high school’s theater director is a bit of an oddball, maybe something like Law and Order: Fairy Tale Unit, which also cracked the EdTA ranking.
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Graphics: Dennis Clark. View the full-size bracket here.
As a metaphor for our times, you could do worse than the story of Gimadiah Scrogum. In 2015, the Branson (Mo.) Tri-Lakes News reported, Scrogum was pulled over for driving a white Ford pickup without the headlights on. When the cop approached, Scrogum floored it. According to the police report,
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