Pretty Good Links — March 2023
Everybody loves the sunshine
Fall is my favorite season. But March might be my favorite month.
From a sports perspective, it includes March Madness, the single greatest sporting event on the calendar (diabolical scheduling notwithstanding). Spring Training is also in full swing, the unbridled hopes of every fan base still yet to be dashed by the realities of the regular season. Pro basketball and hockey are ramping up toward the playoffs, and the cycling calendar is off and running with the classics and week-long stage races.
But March also brings more sunlight. Not just the end of winter, but the Daylight Saving Time-prompted bonus hour of evening daylight. Living in the mid-Atlantic, it means doing everything you do outside requires less effort and comes a little easier. The world is warmer, sure, but it’s also brighter in a tangible way.
The end-of-month Pretty Good Links is never going to be all fluff, but it only feels right to have a couple brighter stories in the mix as well.
Recommended Newsletter
As you may know, I was a film major in school and used to host a podcast in which we revisited old movies with fresh eyes. So I’ll always have a place in my heart for film analysis, especially of older releases, which is what the Moviewise newsletter is all about. Check it out if you’re looking for a nice distraction and a trip down memory lane.
Other Links
Here for the brighter stories? Enjoy, for instance, this delightful Smithsonian Magazine story about an Icelandic town on the island of Heimaey, which comes together as one to protect the baby puffins — yes, pufflings — which are endangered.
Fairleigh Dickinson became just the second 16 seed to take down a 1 seed in men’s tournament history, pulling arguably the tournament’s greatest-ever upset. But they only even got to the dance thanks to a messy NCAA rule, one which doesn’t allow programs who transition from Division II up to Division I to play in postseason tournaments for four years. That meant Merrimack, which has won the Northeast Conference twice in their first four years — including this one, the final season of their probation — were left out. It’s grossly unfair to their program…and also the only reason FDU ended up in the position they did, slingshotting Purdue and busting brackets all over America.
Baseball’s finally back, and with it this insane story about how Stephen Vogt saved teammate Wade Miley’s life a few years back. Considering the multiple-times-a-day media exposure that MLB players are subjected to throughout the season, it’s almost inconceivable that nobody learned of this story until now.
On the other end of the business of baseball, while I’ve been warning about the impending collapse of the unsustainable regional sports network model for years, the bill is coming due even more dramatically than I imagined right now. In addition to bankruptcy filings and possible missed payments to teams, the RSNs may even be running afoul of antitrust laws. Cool, cool.
The Guardian provides some interesting historical context on how humanity moved on from the whaling industry as a comparison point for how we might move on from oil. A hopeful climate story, so much as there can be one.
An Irish professor teaching in America decided to explore the Metaverse, so that the rest of us hopefully don’t have to.
If there’s one person in America that more people need to understand, it’s Leonard Leo. I’ll let ProPublica fill you in on why.
Of course, PGL wouldn’t be complete without your monthly warning about the clearly unresolved issues in the AI programs being released into the general public and why I remain extremely skeptical of what they’ll bring.
Finally, I find few ways of resetting my anxieties and worries and concerns about our many problems more effective than reminding myself of how small we really are in the grand scope of the universe. And while that’s usually done conceptually, or through science fiction, nothing really resets the brain quite like a visual of, say, Earth from space. Or as we recently were treated to, sun rays on Mars.
Enjoy that sun, everyone.
My Links
So…a weird thing happened a couple years ago. I wrote a lightly-read blog post about how the early episodes of the second season of Ted Lasso had failed to live up to the first season’s standard of excellence. When I tweeted the post out, it received one particularly notable like.
I had entirely forgotten about that until this article.
If you haven’t watched S3:E2 of the show yet, there is a fairly short, entirely otherwise unconnected analogy made regarding Hallmark Christmas movies.
Which…
Do I think that Jason Sudekis took the time to like my tweet to use as fuel for some retributive creative process, going out of his way to make specific reference to the exact way I negatively described his show? I wouldn’t say it’s likely, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to use similar language. But it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Tell me what you think in the comments and I’ll see you next month.