WCS 30: Life springs @ you
When you’re prepping for both 4/20 and Bicycle Day
Before we start sojournin’, a quick reminder that the reader version of my Zoom talk with activist, coach, and former Portland Thorn player Emily Kruger is set to come out tomorrow.
But my mind this week isn’t on the NWSL. It’s been on the fall of 1978. My mom and sister and I had just moved back to Ohio from Ann Arbor, and I had this new friend named Tim.
Tim was the paperboy. He was there the first time I consumed cannabis. We smoked a joint after school, in front of the library in downtown Sandusky. Some of the kids in this circle of open marijuana tokin’ going ’round were as old as 14.
I was 12.
Near the end of our long walks back to the Eastside, Tim would start stopping to sell baggies of weed. Sometimes at a house he only collected payment for The Sandusky Register. I think I remember him doing both, too.
It was a very efficient model.
The show business of education
Spotted hanging near my new home in Echo Park. Is LA Unified the first school district to earn an Oscar?
And this was an exciting time. My ancient joke is that the hardest part of being a 12-year-old stoner is simply finding someone to sell you pot. Nevertheless, in ’78 I did get enough into weed to write a report about it—not business, but social science—for Mrs. Fialka’s seventh-grade English composition class.
Some days I feel like I have never stopped rewriting that report.
So.
Are you as amped as I am for end of pro hoops’ extended preamble and the start of basketball turned up to 11? The NBA Play-In Tournament kicks off our 10 lil narratives.
10 The Warriors, Kings & Lakers in the scrum
The cursed LA Clippers might be the best West Coast team in the NBA. But they’ve got a scorching buzzsaw directly ahead of them in the form of the Dallas Mavericks team, my dark-horse conference contender.
Meanwhile, Sacramento, San Francisco, and LA are undercard performers with varying degrees of dangerousness. This week’s Play-In tournament has plenty of sizzle.
NBA
Northern California’s two teams meet on Tuesday night, in a battle of squads not expected to hang around long. Before injuries, the Kings had a puncher’s chance at making some noise. The iconic Warriors as we have known them, meanwhile, know that their next loss might be the last game ever.
The Lakers are something else. Better than the (decreasingly relevant) regular-season record suggests, LA looks playoff-ready. Yet there’s strange conversation about intentionally losing their opening matchup.
Lil Hit
The Plaid Pantry on 60th and Northeast Columbia Boulevard is getting $100,000 from the Oregon Lottery for selling the eighth biggest jackpot in American history.
Oregon Public Broadcasting
9 Bicycle Day with Dock Ellis
The potential relationship between psychedelics and sport is an interest that never quite leaves the back burner of my mind.
As Friday is Bicycle Day, I offer you a couple of compelling takes on Dock Ellis, who one evening in San Diego became the realm’s accidental pioneer. Choose between a millennial, female take or this one from wise old baseball dudes.
Not Past It/WeedWeek
Not Past It’s take deserves credit for contextualizing Dock’s pre-no-no career where eliding such deets might have been forgiven. The kids didn’t have to!
On the WeedWeek pod, baseball author Dan Epstein and No-No: A Dockumentary producer Chris Cortez offer insights both on the man and the pop symbol.
Lil Hit
Does “California Sobriety” actually work?
The Guardian
8 Mike Trout is OC’s Dan Marino
Caitlin Clark just lost a big game. Does that diminish her greatness? I don’t think so. Same goes for the Anaheim batsman, who’s found himself mired in team mediocrity and overshadowed by Shohei Ohtani.
How we think about Mike Trout must change.
CBS Sports
Lil Hit
The Michigan Plot uses audio surveillance tapes to build a narrative around white, ignorant and egregious cannabis misusers who decide to kidnap the governor. Chameleon
“Everything from [Boeing] management’s point of view was going just swimmingly. They had no idea what was going on on the production line.”
7 Post-COVID, can jock behavior kill you?
People who pick up the syndrome called POTS are young and athletic. Their heart rates jump above normal when going from prone to standing. Have a look at the new disease killing workout fiends.
Washington Post
Discovered more than 150 years ago, the syndrome has picked up mightily since the pandemic.
POTS strikes suddenly, leaving healthy people unable to function and their health care providers wondering why.
Lil Hit
In response to California’s new Journalism Preservation Act, Google has begun removing Golden State news.
Sacramento Bee
6 Finally, money for Gold medalists
In the Olympic Games’ 128-year history the International Olympic Committee has not paid its stars. There’s endorsement money, but nothing from the IOC.
This week World Athletics announced that winners in Paris will get $50,000 for each win.
The Guardian
Between 2017 and 2021, the International Olympic Committee made $7.6 billion through broadcasting and marketing rights, as well as other income streams.
Lil Hit
The political differences that America is experiencing are a lot like Oregon’s urban versus rural experience , only whiter.
NewsHour
5 How do you feel about Cali weed seizure?
Gov. Gav’s weed task force—the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce—grabbed a bunch of illegal weed in the first quarter. Here is where I crack wise about that.
CA Fish & Wildlife
The take has been valued at $53.6 million. I always wonder how law enforcement arrives at these numbers. I like to imagine is there’s a bus tender in the confiscation room who’s placing a dollar amount on each plant. They have a shelf and everything.
“UCETF continues to strengthen its momentum by focusing on priority targets and strategically removing operations having a significant impact on the illegal cannabis supply chain,” said Nathaniel Arnold, Acting Chief of Fire and Wildlife’s Law Enforcement Division. Six years ago, this would have been a timely aim.
Lil Hit
Hillsboro animation studio Laika (Kubo, Coraline) is offering animation scholarships to Portland Community College.
Nerd Reactor
4 Corrupt A’s Sactown meeting
“It was a cold and rainy morning at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento,” is a funny way to begin a behind-the-scenes story about dumping Oakland for that town just outside of Cali’e State Capitol.
The whole enterprise is pretty funky, actually.
ESPN
Detestable A’s owner John Fisher will “bask in the glory of two or three rent-free seasons in Sacramento before he packs up for Las Vegas. It's the never-ending formula, one Fisher plays clumsily but somehow successfully: There's always a city overeager for big league recognition, willing to prostrate itself for the opportunity to stare into the void and believe it's the sun.”
Lil Hit
In a deal that would tie up all of SF's borrowing authority for three years and could cost the taxpayers millions Treasure Island developers seek $115 million SF bailout. 48 Hills
2 Boeing: Crush workers, boost stocks
The international pile-on that is this moment in Boeing watching last week saw a critic describe the company’s current woes as the result of “a ruthless effort to cut costs.”
Other critics continue using the formerly too-big-to-fail company as a punching bag.
“It took almost a catastrophic accident to shake things up,” said Ron Epstein, a financial analyst with Bank of America with a doctorate in aerospace engineering, said that before the panel blew off the Alaska jet, “everything from management’s point of view was going just swimmingly. They had no idea what was going on on the production line.”
Lil Hit
Bel Air has one dispensary license, and they gave it to Xzibit. LA Magazine
1 You should look @ Stormy Daniels’ work
Generally, my business is not to recommend pornography, but as the Manhattan trial starts to take shape, I do suggest you see Stormy Daniels perform. It explains loads about why Trump took the risk. ABC
Give it up for OJ Simpson who stepped away from the scene before he could do interviews throughout the new Trial of the Century.
Lil Hit
I watched Fritz Peterson pitch for the Cleveland Indians without distinction. And what he gained fame for was beyond my immature mind. Peterson died last week at 82, and want to his grave with a career lapsed into lore. He became the face of swinging in sports.
Yahoo Sports/Bleacher ReportHannah Gutierrez-Reed is kind of the worst, and her sentencing judge let her know that.