Distraction 1: Watched about 10 minutes of the movie "Holiday" on TNT. First opportunity to veg out watching television in a long time, as I have not lived in a house with TV since August of 2012. I watched about five minutes of SportsCenter and then flipped around and landed on this movie in which I gathered that a bunch of romantic "relationships" would be established and then would be changed around. I highly suspect that, although lots of momentary heartbreak and loss would be created, all would be well in the end. Bla bla bla, behold my arch wit in critiquing the movie. Anyway, there were two scenes that I actually took in. The first was of Kate Winslet doing voice-over to the visual of her walking around her office's Christmas party, sort of stalking a dude, and the script was full of self-pity--"The worst kind of love is the unrequited variety, and that is the one to which I am beholden." The second scene featured Cameron Diaz breaking up with her boyfriend, said boyfriend being played by one of those guys from the Brothers McCullough movie. Good looking guy. Parts of their arguing break-up scene feel very contrived and stilted, but I like the part at the end of the scene where she punches him in the face. What leads up to it is ... she's come to believe he's cheating on her, and, and I guess this is the contrived part--He makes mention of the fact that he can't remember the last time they've had sex. And she says, "Well, nobody really has time for sex." I would posit that nobody really says that. But moments later, when that stilted dialogue plays out, she manages to return them to the question--did he sleep with this woman? She's speaking to him from a second floor balcony as he looks up at her from the front lawn, and as he considers how to answer this question, the gardener nearby shakes his head wisely. But the guy, like an idiot, says 'Yeah, I did.' And so, the punch in the face.
2. Bill Simmons' Friday column gave his "picks" for the Sunday NFL slate, and I didn't read it until this afternoon, by which time all the games had been played. Totally inexplicable, the allure of a Bill Simmons column. I mean, once it's over, I have no real sense of what I have just been reading about. This was done using "mailbag" format, which is a trick in itself, and what makes Simmons good at it is the fact that he gets funny e-mails from readers. Maybe he makes them up himself, I don't know. But they're funny. Let's see if I can find the funniest one from this week: ... Damn ... Not really, and in my search to do so, I came upon distractor #4 ... An article about how the St. Louis Rams have a chance at improving next year if they make the smart move and release their starting quarterback, as doing so will free up much-needed salary cap space. So weird that I would spend time reading that!
3. Joe Posnanski's counting down the 100 best baseball players of all time, according to him, and No. 74 is Hank Greenburg. (No. 75 is Tony Gwynn, which I briefly considered reading but ... I prioritized.). I wanted to read about Hank Greenbrrg because I know he's like the greatest, or one of the greatest, Jewish athletes of all time. I learned that Hank was a rookie in 1933 and that there was a lot of excitement in his first big season (1934, in which he was an MVP candidate or the MVP, I forget which) because he was playing so well and then he engaged in this very public decision about whether to play on Rosh Hashana. And he did play, and hit game-tying and then game-winning homers in the Tigers' 2-1 win. But then he did sit on Yom Kippur a couple weeks later. Four years after all that, in 1938, he made a serious run at Babe Ruth's record of 60 homers--he hit 58. And he went homerless in his last five games ... he had a very good chance at breaking that record. But anyway, his career was cut short by his being drafted into the service. He missed five years, and when he returned to baseball at age 35, he had a falling out with the Tigers' owner and got traded to Pittsburgh.
So those were my three distractions today. Tomorrow I'll probably report to you from Colin Cowherd's twitter feed or from ... I don't know what.
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