Chris Hurst Daily

Someone is entitled to my opinion

[chrishurstdaily]

March 15, 2016

Beware yourself.

Who’s actually adding to the civil discourse/garbage fire that is the comments section of news sites (the sites that still keep open a place for such reader contributions, at least)?  The few, the proud, those without a life...

During a performance, ushers equipped with laser pointers are stationed above, or on the perimeter of, the audience. When they spot a lighted mobile phone, instead of dashing over to the offender, they pounce with a pointer (usually red or green), aiming it at the glowing screen until the user desists. Now if we could only extend that to the comments.. just kidding, everyone should have their say. That’s the beauty of this internet thing. No should have a laser pointer directed at them for being a jackass.  

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February 25, 2016

If the NHL season ended today, exactly zero of the league’s seven Canadian franchises would qualify for the playoffs (something that has happened only once before, in 1969-70). And although that fate isn’t a lock — Hockey-Reference.com’s simulations say there’s still a 26 percent chance that at least one Canadian team will manage to claw its way into the postseason  I’m a baseball fan. I can’t skate. If no Canadian team qualifies for the endless procession of boredom that is the NHL playoffs, oh well.

On Tuesday, we published a story about a competition called Last Man, a challenge to see who can be the “last” American to still not know who won the Super Bowl. More than two weeks after the football game, 29 of the initial 199 Last Man players remained, and the competition had largely gone stagnant.  This is a thing? Seriously? For the record I do know who won the last Super Bowl, the last World Series and the last NBA Championship. I don’t know who won the last Stanley Cup, though, except I know the team wasn’t Canadian.

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February 19, 2016

Don’t ask James Parker to draw a line:  I draw it up the side of the Boston Public Library. I draw it through the middle of Stephen King’s wallet. I draw it right between the frontal lobes of every writer who ever lived. I draw it — well, that’s enough of that. 

Don’t sit near David Denby:  At times like this, reading “Lit Up” can feel like sitting in a movie theater behind someone who obscures part of the big screen.  So is this snark at his previous gig, because you know he had stuff to say about snark.

[chrishurstdaily]

February 12, 2016

Someone introduce him to negative numbers: When asked by host Andy Cohen to rate Green Lantern on a scale from 1 to 10, [Ryan Reynolds] went with 3 or 4, but then he thought about it for a few more seconds and gave it a 1 instead.

Death goes in and out of fashion.  Au contraire, death is an evergreen. Would you rather talk about taxes... don’t answer that.

[chrishurstdaily]

February 9, 2016

Sam Lipsyte remembers his father and Earth, Wind and Fire’s Maurice White:  In 1975, when I was eight, a film called That’s the Way of the World was released in America.... The screenplay was written by my father, the sports journalist and fiction writer Robert Lipsyte, and the soundtrack was by Earth, Wind and Fire, who also appear in the movie as the Group...  (‘The record went platinum and the movie went lead,’ my father announced)

Stephen Akey’s on Malcolm McLaren’s Fans:  My initiation into the sublime and absurd world of grand opera came not with my attendance at a legendary performance or under the tutelage of an impassioned connoisseur but through a chance encounter with a bizarre musical experiment conceived by Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols and craven self-promoter. For what it’s worth, McLaren was a disagreeable man in many ways, but I’m quite fond of Fans. But listen to Earth, Wind & Fire first.

[chrishurstdaily]

February 7, 2016

As I read “Infinite Jest” in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them. Yes, “Infinite Jest” is 20 years old. I remember when “The Broom of the System” was the novel you were most likely to find in a Penguin remainder sale. That’s how old I am. I’ve red some short stories and some essays, but “Infinite Jest”... that’s 1000 pages. 

Amon Düül is dying proof that no one should listen to a band with more than one umlaut.  Not trüe. Hüsker Dü, my friend, Hüsker Dü. 

I’ll try to be more regular visitor.

[chrishurstdaily]

January 24, 2016

You may have heard that there are six new X-Files episodes. Or you may be living under a rock. Whatever. Here’s a guide to the previous nine seasons of episodes. I don’t agree with many of the assessments, but tastes differ etc.

You may have heard about these Academy Award things. Or you may be living under a rock. In this case, the rock may be more comfortable. In any case, 538 has a guide to predicting the main categories. Anyone know a comfortable rock I can borrow until the season is over...

[chrishurstdaily]

January 12, 2016

The annual Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll is out. I won’t tell you who won the best album because everyone’s known that since May. I won’t tell you who finished second, because everyone’s know that since May as well. Good choices, just they were long ordained. 

The State of the Union Address as a Wes Anderson film. You mean it isn’t...

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January 7, 2016

“The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals,” a Confucian commentary 22 centuries old, insisted that correct language was a matter of life and death.  And you wonder why I haven’t posted in a while.

168:01 is a system of exchange, connecting viewers like yourselves directly with the College of Fine Arts to generate a transnational grassroots effort. Your participation in this Kickstarter will fund educational texts from a wish list compiled by faculty at the College of Fine Arts.  So help them, please.

[chrishurstdaily]

December 21, 2015

Yes, the “Drake Effect” is real, but it’s time we start talking about the Nicki Effect.  How about silence... silence is good.

My favorite metaphor this year about advanced old age comes from Sally Mann’s memoir, “Hold Still.” Ms. Mann’s friend the artist Cy Twombly tells her that he is “closing down the bodega for real.” The happy implication is that he has lived well enough to have a mental bodega in the first place.  I’ll just be stepping out of the bodega until 2016. See you then.

[chrishurstdaily]

December 17, 2015

Tomorrow is the big day:  You could call Mr. Abrams a love child of Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg, born to the blockbuster world they helped make. I wonder what it’s like to direct a movie that will be a bomb if it only makes $400 million domestic...

Welcome to the wonderful world on analytics, basketball:  One small problem: Nobody seems to agree about what exactly usage rate is, or should be, or how it is calculated.

[chrishurstdaily]

December 13, 2005

Just a little hobby:  The only way to get good at crosswords is to do lots of crosswords. And Dan Feyer has done lots of crosswords. By his back-of-the-envelope calculations, he’s spent “just” 4,000 hours of his life solving. I wonder if he does cryptics, which are the only kind of crossword worth doing... kidding, sort of.

George Saunders Explains How to Tell a Good Story - except I don’t think much of George Saunders storytelling ability. He’s good with imagery, though.  

[chrishurstdaily]

December 11, 2015

Charles McGrath and I agree:  “H Is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald, is a captivating book that’s part bereavement memoir, part an experiment in literary criticism, but mostly an account of taming a goshawk — a bird notoriously difficult to train. Macdonald is a little hawklike herself: she’s a superb noticer of things, and her sentences glide and then pounce.

If literary fiction is Brooklyn, the historical novel is Queens. So what’s Manhattan...

[chrishurstdaily]

December 8, 2015

Books don’t fill a store:  “I’ll be honest, I am really surprised by how many books you need to fill a space,” Hicklin said. “I have about a thousand in here, but you’d never know it. I’ve got to fill these damn shelves!”

By now there’s a whole cottage industry dedicated to handicapping the Warriors. It’s a living.  

[chrishurstdaily]

December 4, 2015

Best use of a metaphor in sports writing today:  After his team trailed all night against the Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw a 61-yard game-ending Hail Mary pass for a touchdown with no time on the clock... It was the worst thing to happen to the city of Detroit since globalization and systemic mismanagement. Let me salute Walt Hickey who has made the Significant Digits column at 538 a must read and outdid himself today.

We hate it when our friends become successful:  The singer and former Smiths frontman Morrissey won Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award at a ceremony here for his debut novel, “List of the Lost.”

[chrishurstdaily]

December 3, 2015

Gay Talese has a cold:  But Talese wouldn’t have missed the night for the world. “That’s one thing about journalism: you have to show up.”

Throwing, scmowing:  On Wednesday night, the Houston Astros traded backup catcher Hank Conger to the Tampa Bay Rays for cash considerations, just minutes before the midnight deadline to tender 2016 contracts to arbitration-eligible players...  And that’s curious, considering that Conger’s 2015 season made him, by one measure, the most incompetent catcher of all time 

[chrishurstdaily]

November 30, 2015

Clive James is condemned to life:  When my leukaemia came out of remission earlier this year, it might have spelled curtains, but a new chemo drug, which I might as well call Pill X – its real name sounds like the result of falling accidentally on the keyboard of an ancient Greek typewriter – was ready for use. Months later, it’s holding back the lurgy, leaving me stuck with the embarrassment of still being alive.

Are the Carolina Panthers this good?  It’s hard to go 11-0; the other teams to pull it off have been historically great. But despite the unblemished start, there remain statistical reasons to wonder if these Panthers are quite as great as their 11-0 forebears — and, perhaps, reasons to wonder if the stats are missing something about their style of play.