Hey Everyone:
We went from summer like temps last Saturday to a small taste of winter earlier this week. There was frost on the car windows when I was heading out to work on Wednesday. It was chilly enough for those who went trick or treating on Tuesday. There weren't as many kids around this time as in previous years, but we still had a fairly good turnout for trick or treating. It's always fun seeing the kids and the costumes. I miss taking Tim around to be honest.
Anyway, the last few weeks it seems like all the news around here hasn't been good. Thankfully we had some good news come out on Thursday. Let's start there...
MUSIC: New Beatles Song!
At 10 AM on Thursday, I put aside what I was doing at work and turned up the clock radio on my desk to Q104.3, where IHeart Radio was debuting what is being called the "very last Beatles song."
As we reported here at WM on June 25, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took an old John Lennon demo they had worked on in 1994 with George Harrison, used AI to separate John's voice from the piano he was playing, and created a new single called Now and Then.
There were leaks all over the internet, but I waited till the official launch on Thursday to hear it for the first time.
I remember when Free as a Bird and Real Love came out around Thanksgiving 1995, I told myself that no matter how good or bad either song was, I was going to proclaim it to be an awesome song. Turns out I convinced myself they were both awesome songs. Were they? Or was I just so excited for my favorite band to put something new out?
To this day I still enjoy both songs. But the quality of John's vocal in those songs wasn't great. I had to put the close captioning on my TV during the Beatles Anthology show so I could write down the lyrics.
That's not the case here.
The AI they used did a great job of making John's vocal loud and clear on this song. If anything, you can't really hear Paul's backing vocal that clear. But it's so much more crisp and clear than the new songs from the 90's were.
Now for the song itself, it's really good, and I'm hoping upon hope that enough people download it and that radio stations play it that the Fab 4 makes another trip to the Billboard Hot 100.
But like one of the critics who wrote about the song remarked, "There's a reason it was a demo." I thought Paul could have added his own lyrics to it because John's lyrics while solid, were for lack of a better term, incomplete.
On Free as a Bird, Paul added just one line, which fit in with the song and made the song feel much more complete. John may have gotten around to adding more but didn't.
I don't mean to be nitpicky, it's still exciting to get new Beatles stuff. And as I said to Ray and Karl and have expressed here before, I'm still not convinced they are totally done either. Free as a Bird and Real Love were supposed to be it too, and so was the Get Back documentary, yet here we are all these years later and stuff is still coming out. We just never know where technology will take us.
GOOD RIDDANCE: The 2023 Baseball Season
The 2023 baseball season ended on Wednesday night in appropriate fashion, the Texas Rangers, a team I'm thinking nobody outside of the Dallas-Ft Worth area cared about, winning the World Series in 5 game excitement free fashion.
Every year that the Mets or Yankees aren't in the Fall Classic, it becomes a challenge to tune in for me.
Back when I was a kid, I couldn't imagine not watching it. The first time I tried was in 1988, my sophomore year of high school. Still hurting over my Mets getting upset by the Dodgers in the NLCS, (and the ABC booth's obvious bias towards LA) I refused to watch the 88 Series, something my pal the late Kevin (Buck) Ludwig bet me I couldn't do. For the most part I was able to avoid it, but I did happen to see Kirk Gibson's famous home run.
From there I watched the earthquake World Series, the Reds win in 1990 and the Twins beating the Braves (before they became baseball's most despicable franchise) in 1991.
By 1992 and 1993, I was out and about during the series, there was no series in 1994 because of the strike and I didn't watch the Braves win in 1995.
The Yanks played in 6 of the next 8 World Series including beating my Mets in 2000. I watched most of those. By 2004, I was working at the Post and also spending more time with Tara. The Mets losing another NLCS they should have won in 2006 followed by their late season collapses in the following two years turned me off of October baseball. In 2009, I fell asleep watching the Yanks-Phillies World Series as Timmy liked to wake up with the roosters.
And really besides the Mets Royals 2015 World Series, I haven't watched too many lately.
But now that I'm getting older, I feel like it's kind of like my duty as an American to at least give the WS a chance. So I did with this one, but I have to tell you it was hard to watch. I tried to work up a head of self-righteous steam knowing that the Rangers had two former Mets who left for greener pastures, but even that wasn't enough to get me into it. Sure I wanted the D'Backs to win, but really all I could muster when it was over was a "bleh" which rhymes with what I really felt.
Meh.
Yes Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer are now going to get rings that neither one of them, especially Jake, really deserve. I guess it's nice that Dallas/Ft. Worth/Arlington now have a World Series trophy to go along with the 5 Super Bowls, one NBA title and (Seriously) one Stanley Cup they already have.
But as a couple of my friends discussed on my FB page, if the World Series continues to be a snooze fest between teams nobody gives a spit about, if teams that win 100 regular season games give way to teams that barely finished over .500, basketball and maybe even the NHL are going to catch it and pass it.
I really believe they need to get it back to 8 teams making the playoffs (3 division winners, one wild card) , and FFS make sure Game 7 doesn't go past Halloween. I realize that goes against every marching order Rob Manfred has gotten from the baseball owners, but baseball wasn't meant to be played in November.
I know I'm pissing into the wind on that one, but it's always worth a shot.
Bobby Knight (1940-2023)
The final straw for Bobby Knight at Indiana took place when he reportedly grabbed a student at Indiana by the arm to yell at him after the freshman yelled out "Hey Knight, what's up?" I'm kind of glad I never met him, because I'm positive I would have (at the top of my lungs nonetheless) done my Dick Vitale impersonation, ROBERT MONTGOMERY KNIGHT BAYYBEEEE!
If "Hey Knight, what's up" got the General that riled up, he would have probably sent me to the emergency room.
All joking aside, the word that bounced around all the obits and tributes I read this week after Knight who was battling dementia and Alzheimer's disease, died Wednesday at the age of 83, was complicated.
If ever the word complicated applied to anyone it was Bobby Knight.
When I posted my tongue in cheek tribute to Knight on my FB page, (toss back a few {chairs} in memory of RMK), I got two reactions from guys I respect tremendously. One praised him as a great coach, the other called him a vile human being.
As much as I have to acknowledge the former, I tend to lean towards the latter.
Yes he was a phenomenal basketball coach, his record speaks for itself. He won three NCAA Championships including the last unbeaten team to win it all in 1976. His graduation rates for his players was remarkably high, instances in which his kids got in trouble were remarkably low.
But as Ted Turner once said, and I've quoted on these pages many times, there is a fine line between being colorful and being an a$$hole. Bobby Knight crossed that line way too many times.
From clocking that cop in Puerto Rico in 1979 (he would have been arrested had he ever stepped foot in PR again) to "telling the ref to have a seat" as Warner Wolf put it when it happened in 1985, to his insensitive comments about rape to Connie Chung, putting his hands on the neck of Neil Reed, and all the countless times he exploded in unwarranted over the top anger, there were just too many of these instances to just ignore. One or two of these things would have finished most people.
And what gets me the most is how he seemed to lash out at the people who were closest to him. I read Ian O'Connor's biography of Mike Krzyzewski a couple of years ago, and to read how that friendship ended was a heartbreak. Something that could have been cleared up over dinner. I've read how he clashed with another former player turned solid head coach Steve Alford. If you read A Season on the Brink, you know how tough Knight was on Alford as a player. A couple of times as a fellow coach, Knight treated him like garbage. Still Alford defended Knight till Knight's dying day this week.
That's how he was able to survive all those years at Indiana and then again at Texas Tech. Somehow he was able to patch things up enough to have all these folks defend him. What that shows me is that he could have been better, he should have been better. He could have taught all these young men about life, won a ton of games, made all the donations to charities and to others in need that he did, and had friends out the wazoo without flying off the handle.
I don't get it, why people feel the need to act out like that. None of us are perfect, we all have bad days, we all lose our cool sometimes. Not like he did, and not nearly as often.
He was complicated. He didn't have to be.
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Not much to say about the Giants, only that I’m heartbroken for Daniel Jones. That’s just awful. Hoping he can come all the way back.
Jets play Monday night against the Chargers. We’ll recap that game next weekend, and it also looks like the Mets got a new manager and it’s not Craig Counsell. Again we’ll break that down next week.
Hope you’re all adjusting to standard time. I really don’t like it pitch black at 5 PM, but I do like the extra hour of sleep for the first few days.
Tuesday is Election Day. Please get out and vote if you haven’t already.
Other than that
Stay Safe
and Have a Great Week
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