Couch potato

The shot heard 'round the world.

This blog has been neglected over the last few days. I've been attending to some business in real life, but I must confess, I've also been wasting time watching athletics on television.

It's always a bit of a stretch to be witnessing winter sports in mid-June, but the pro basketball and hockey leagues can't resist milking the cow for as long as she'll stand still. And through the convenience of video recording, I can tune in to the action without having to sit through the commercials. I watch until the nice weather and screen fatigue tell me, turn it off. The only trick to my process is avoiding spoilers for a few hours on game days.

The other night, over some excellent leftovers, the Mrs. and I watched the basketball game from Madison Square Garden between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. It was such a remarkable spectacle that I'm still feeling a little buzz from it, a day and a change later. The squad from the Big Apple pulled off the greatest comeback in league finals history, and now have a commanding series lead over the equally lovable but much younger team from Texas. The Spurs coaching staff is not quite championship caliber, not yet anyway, and it really showed. The Knicks, on the other hand, are the most resilient bunch you'll see on the hardwood.

I don't watch much hockey, ever, but this year I've also been drawn into the finals showdown between the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Carolina Hurricanes. No one has any business playing ice hockey in either Las Vegas or Carolina, much less in June, but I'm finding the matchup interesting because the Carolina team is owned by the predatory car loan guy who leads the group that now owns the Trail Blazers. He's not a likeable fellow, and I don't support taxpayer financing of his Portland playpen, but he's put together a heck of a hockey team, and they've climbed out of a 2-1 hole in their series to take a 3-2 lead. The winner of the best-of-seven gets to parade around with the Stanley Cup, and it looks like that will be in Raleigh. (Although I'd wash my hands after touching that thing.)

Meanwhile, the pro tennis game has switched to grass courts, and the matches are wonderful to watch if only for the court surface. Through the miracle of modern television, it seems like you can see each blade of grass individually, and the overall visual effect is soothing. Shortly after the winter sports are finally finished, the granddaddy of all tennis tournaments will begin at Wimbledon, outside of London. I visited those green grounds once in the off-season. It's a holy place.

The World Cup soccer show has also cranked up, and it's here in North America this year. There have been years in which I've gotten engrossed in the World Cup, but this time it feels almost like Hitler's Olympics. Mild indifference has dissolved into mild contempt. I might watch a little of it, but I think my time would be better spent spraying the roses or washing the cars. (Ditto for the sesquisemi-whatever on the Fourth of July. It's no time for flag-waving.)

Speaking of deferred domestic projects, I'm finally plowing through years of unread New Yorker magazines that have piled up here at Blog Central. I save the artistic covers, be sure to find and absorb every Roz Chast cartoon, and then scan the table of contents of each issue to see if any articles look interesting. Anything that does, I tear out and stick in an accordion file. In the old newspapers, we used to call these "tear sheets." The rest of the issue goes straight into the recycling. I'm making a good dent in the piles.

Currently I'm looking through issues from the fall of 2017. It was the first year of Orange Caligula. The political stories were still written as though things might arch back toward normalcy. In that light, thinking about where we have gone since then is more than a little disturbing.