My Favorite Things This Week #85
The Friday High 5: Fantasy games, a favorite new podcast, and lifelong fascinations
Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻Last weekend was the 20th anniversary of the fantasy football league my brother started. We draft in person, using a paper draft board and color-coded stickers. The draft is the best part of the season, so we try to make it last as long as possible. We have thus erected a weekend of optional activities around the draft, by which I mean we golf.
At this point, it’s as much about the draft as it its retelling the drafts of old.
Early drafts were done at a golf course, in a well-appointed room with leather armchairs. It was all very Bruce Wayne chic. The golf pro hooked us up with free pitchers of beer one year, enormous nacho platters the next. We ended our association with the course after the third draft, in which we were stuffed into a narrow, windowless room, forever after known as the fart closet.
There was the pink towel incident, in which one of my brother’s bathroom towels was generously stained by a mysterious pink substance. To this day, we don’t know who did it or what the pink stuff was.
The year all 12 of us ended up on the same hole, watching in disbelief as 4 Japanese golfers took turns laying on their bellies to line up putts they subsequently missed. This went on for at least 20 minutes.
The year we got caught in a monsoon and raced back to the clubhouse through literal walls of water.
The year a storm kept us sequestered to the clubhouse and we debated if the familiar-looking guy at the next table was Detroit Red Wings goalie Chris Osgood (I maintain it was him).
The year I locked my keys in the trunk and we tried to break into my car.
The draft picks so unbelievably bad we’re still talking about them over a decade later.
At this point, the draft is as much a reunion as anything else. And like all reunions, there’s a lot of looking back. I suppose that’s inevitable. We have shared history and common ground around this one thing, if nothing else. And, too, I think we’re all subconsciously trying to recapture those times in our lives, even fleetingly. When we were younger and life seemed simpler. Before we’d reckoned with the full weight of adulthood.
I look forward to the draft every year. It’s legitimately fun picking players for my imaginary team; less so once the season starts and it becomes obvious I’m not the NFL General Manager I cosplay as. But the league is about more than the game at this point. Though I’d obviously like to win this year.
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Playing Dungeons & Dragons (In Person)
And now for an entirely different kind of pretend, though I once heard fantasy football described as D&D for jocks. That’s not entirely accurate, but it gets the idea across.
It’d been roughly a month since our last in-person session. Long enough that we were a bit hazy on exactly what happened last time. The thing we 100% knew going in: The previous session had ended with an enormous dragon angrily bursting from a subterranean pool and landing basically on top of us.
As Captain Tarpals says in The Phantom Menace when faced with the weight of the droid army, it was “ouch time.” The specter of the dreaded TPK (total party kill) hovered over the table. A possibility anticipated by the DM, as he’d somewhat maliciously brought a paper shredder to the game and had it ready to consume the sheet of any fallen character.
And then a wonderful thing happened, the sort of magic that can only occur in games like D&D.
We had one thing going in our favor. Our sorcerer had donned the appearance of the dragon’s henchman/butler/gopher just before the dragon appeared. Like, literally seconds before. So he did what any self-respecting player would do when staring down the muzzle of a carnivorous atomic weapon.
He bluffed his ass off.
That it worked—convincingly enough that we subsequently laid a devious trap for the dragon—is only part of the story. Our sorcerer did such a convincing job of channeling the dragon’s henchman that he’s finding himself a bit unable to drop the act. This isn’t a curse or some kind of game mechanic at work—it’s pure roleplay.
It reminds of the R.E.M. song “Man in the Moon,” specifically how comedian Andy Kaufman would get locked into a character. I never understood how that could possibly happen, but now I get it.
Never Seen It: Field of Dreams
My friend
is a brilliant writer, comedian, and photographer. Her newsletter Stay Curious is a blend of all her talents and one of my favorite weekly reads. She sprinkles in pop culture references liberally, which is probably why we get along so well. Game recognize game. But my favorite is when she goes full monty with it.She recently started a series called Never Seen It! in which she shares her first experience with a classic movie, the type that make people question your sanity when you admit you’ve never seen it. The inaugural post covered Chinatown, which I’ve also never seen, and now want to based on her piece.
At the end we’re left as wrung out and shocked as the previously unflappable Jake Gittes, unsure of how to feel about basic fundamentals like truth and the “arc of the moral universe,” which is not a curve but a horizon line constantly receding. And that’s Chinatown.
I’m still reeling from this. What a line.
This week, Sheila released an audio version of her experience with the next new-to-her film, Field of Dreams. It’s such a great listen! Funny and illuminating and also heartwarming. Highly recommend!
You can hear more Sheila on my podcast; she came on recently to talk about Hacks.
The Wire: Season 2
Spoilers…
I resumed season 2 this week and only have one episode to go. I gotta admit though that I’m more than a little disappointed with this season. The show is well-made and I love the characters (except Ziggy—screw that guy). But something is missing.
Season 2 is basically about a one-sided beef that Polish-American Police Major Valchek has with Polish-American dockworker Frank Sobotka, because Sobotka donated an expensive stained glass window to a Polish-American church before Valcheck could do the same. The major suspects Sobotka used illegal funds—because he’s a dockworker—and uses the full resources of the Baltimore Police Department to exact revenge.
There are other things going on—Bunk fishing on a boat; Bunk and Freamon as the new super detective pairing; Stringer Bell making moves—but of all things, it’s this stained glass window drama that gets the gang back together.
I’m glad this season expanded the cast and included the Greek organized crime angle. But I also feel like the great stuff from season 1 has been watered down. I need more Stringer Bell in my life. The season’s best scene is hands down Omar’s court appearance but it’s basically Omar’s only season 2 appearance. And why aren’t we getting more prison scenes? I could’ve used an entire season of the prison book club breaking down classic novels.
Maybe I’m just sore that D’Angelo was determined to stick to the straight and narrow, and ended up dead anyway. That’s true to life in a way, but it’s also disappointing.
Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made
I have been reading this book for like 5 months now.
I started it because I’ve been on a Michael Jordan kick—to be honest, I’ve never not been on a Jordan kick—with the idea that I might one day write about my ongoing fascination with him.
David Halberstam is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who also covered sports, and he’s written a number of popular books about basketball. This is my first Halberstam and I’ll just say one thing for the man: He’s very thorough.
What I thought was a book about Jordan and his impact on the game has sprawled in all directions. We get a long Dean Smith chapter, because Jordan played college at North Carolina. There’s a chapter about Phil Jackson—his career as a player for the New York Knicks, his upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian home, his time coaching in Puerto Rico—because Jackson coached Jordan’s six NBA Championship teams. Basically anyone who played a role in Jordan’s career gets a lot of print.
On one hand, I can appreciate this book for its detail. But it’s also a bit of a slog.
The one ancillary storyline I was interested in—the 1980s Detroit Pistons, and their role in Jordan’s story—merited a mere 10 pages. That’d be a sizable amount in any other book, but compared to the exhaustive background on Phil Jackson, it felt like an afterthought.
That’s it for this edition of the High 5. What are you digging at the moment? Drop a comment and let me know!
The true morale of Field of Dreams is you can swindle boomers out of their money using nostalgia.
Just had my FF draft 2 nights ago. This is the 18th season I've been the commish. Unfortunately we've never been able to do an in-person draft. Everyone is too spread out around the country. Which is too bad. As I always say in my pre-draft email to the league, "for many of you, the draft will be the highlight of your season."
WHAT???!!!! A High Five-FIVE!! JOHNNY-FIVE ALIVE!! (I will simply stomp that into the ground until it is molecular). I am so, so, SO honored to be included here. Seriousface. It's kind of wow. Thank you. Really honored. And can you please write more about your FFB draft adventures? I was laughing at these tiny anecdotes alone!!