The Tapes: May 17

Typing this on Ma and Pa Fury’s iPad. Please excuse any errors.

* Fans of the BBC’s Sherlock — and you should be watching — will enjoy this New York Magazine story on Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, fans of the new Star Trek will also like it.

And I’ve stopped using the iPad because I can’t figure out how to highlight some text.

* Alan Sepinwall offers up an appreciation of The Office. And the famed TV critic reviews the series finale.

* Nick Saban does not enjoy being compared to Satan.

* Grantland’s Jonathan Abrams talks to some old-school NBA players about what travel was like in the past.

* For soccer fans! Like Terry. Brian Phillips on Alex Ferguson, famous coach over in England who is hanging it up.

* With a new Trade Center opening, the New York Times looks at how security around the new building will cut it off.

* The mayor of Toronto was probably caught on camera smoking crack. Oh, Canada.

* Are newspapers making a comeback? Maybe. Maybe.

* The glorious return of Arrested Development is a week away. Like TV, Will Leitch liked the show the first time around – before it was cool.

Tips from a 1921 Good Housekeeping

It’s 1921. You’re a parent. You have a boy or a girl. School doesn’t offer the challenges your child needs, or maybe it doesn’t provide the discipline that will be required when the kid goes on to their next step in life. Fortunately, if you subscribed to Good Housekeeping, you can look at 13 pages of advertisements for various military academies, boys’ schools, girls’ schools, Bishop’s schools, art schools, home economic schools, powder point schools and much, much, — no, really, much — more.

When we arrived at my parents’ house in Minnesota on Tuesday afternoon I quickly noticed a stack of very old magazines sitting on their very new dining room table. Old Life magazines. Look magazines from 1964. A Ladies Home Journal from 1961.

And a Good Housekeeping from June 1921. How could I not spend an hour digging through these?

Tracking the changing NBA, through the boxscores

Go to any YouTube video of an NBA game from the 1980s and count the dramatic ways the game is so different from today. The shorts, sure. No one needs to see that much of Bill Laimbeer. But there’s so much more. The players are skinnier. There are more fastbreaks, more scoring but the defense is much worse, much less intense. You could score four points in those games. Big guys play down low and when they try to handle the ball you can tell they’re having flashbacks to the time in 7th grade when the coach screamed at them that anyone who’s the tallest player on the court should never try to dribble. In today’s game 6-11 guys handled it like 6-1 guys did in the past.

It’s all there on the video. But if you don’t have the patience for viewing, simply read the old boxscores.

The Tapes: May 10

* Mount Union’s Larry Kehres is retiring after going 332-24-3 with 11 national titles. Not too bad. His son Vince, the longtime defensive coordinator for the team, will take over. This also means that the career victories record for John Gagliardi will almost certainly never be broken. Gagliardi won 489 but Kehres was winning 15 games a year so could have had a shot if he had stuck around.

* The Columbia football team is in the news, but not for good reasons. A defensive player is accused of a hate crime and several other players had their racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/asinine tweets revealed. That Ivy education really paying off. The CU Lions Blog has more information.

* The Great Gatsby is opening to less-than-stellar reviews. Here’s Wesley Morris’ for Grantland. No matter how bad the reviews I’m looking forward to seeing it. Team Leo.

* Not everyone loves The Great Gatsby the book. In fact, New York Magazine’s Kathryn Schulz absolutely despises it. Is she just being contrarian or are there some good points? Or both?

* Why don’t superheroes work on television?

* Oh-oh. According to The Wrap, American Idol might dump all of its judges for next season.

* Sad newspaper news. The Daily News got rid of numerous employees this week and some of the big names in sports include Tim Smith and Sean Brennan. But the biggest name was the legendary college hoops writer Dick Weiss, whose nickname is actually Hoops.

* Short first names mean bigger paychecks. Plan accordingly.

* The horrific case of former Minnesota State Mankato football coach Todd Hoffner took another turn this week when he left the school, though it’s not known if he was fired or left on his own. Hoffner was arrested and charged with possession of child porn last year before being totally exonerated. He was innocent. No technicalities, nothing like that. Wrongfully arrested. Unfortunately he lost his coaching job and now his reassigned position at the university.

* Rolling Stone has a profile on popular rapper Macklemore and his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction. It feels unusual to read about an artist trying to avoid chemical excess at the height of his powers rather than embracing it.

* From the department of nonsense, Late, Late Show host Craig Ferguson recently declared TV’s town – Sioux Falls, S.D. – as the booty shaking capital of the world. Um … what?

A Minnesota sports dad talks sports

Guest post
Author: An Anonymous Minnesota Sports Dad who’s seen it all
Age: 50-75
Occupation: Insurance salesman/farmer/grocery store owner/bar owner/factory worker/high school teacher/bank manager/mechanic
Writing influences: Larry King

You can’t tell me the Vikings wouldn’t have won a Super Bowl under Burnsie, if only he hadn’t been so god damn loyal to Bob Schnelker. Ya gotta get Steve Jordan more involved in the offense, especially at the goal line.

Columbia’s baseball championship

Columbia University’s sports teams are probably still best known for two things: Lou Gehrig played baseball there and the football team couldn’t win a game in the early 1980s. Today the football team remains a work in progress thought it’s always tough to see if there’s actually much progress being made. The Lions’ basketball team pulls off an occasional big victory — last season the Lions defeated Villanova — but never challenges for an Ivy title and an NCAA berth.

But the baseball team is another story, a different kind of story at Columbia. A winning story. On Saturday the Lions hosted Dartmouth in a best-of-three showdown for the Ivy League title, the winner earning the spot in the NCAA tournament, which won’t begin until the end of May.

The Tapes: May 3

I’m going to Minnesota in two weeks. If there is snow on the ground I’m going to be upset. But Shawn, you’re saying, what about the poor Minnesotans who have had to live with this horrific winter? They get my sympathies. But they live there, it’s part of the deal. They’re used to it. I’m going there on vacation! Anyone feel bad for me? Anyone?

Okay, on to the links.

* Grantland’s Michael Weinreb looks back at the game of the century — one of them anyway — when Notre Dame and Michigan played to a tie in 1966. And take a look at Dan Jenkins’ original story in Sports Illustrated on that famous game.

* Courtesy of David Grann’s invaluable Twitter feed, “World’s Biggest Rubber Duck Debuts in Hong Kong.”

* There were cannibals in Jamestown. Please note: This Jamestown is not Terry’s lovely hometown in North Dakota (although maybe there were cannibals there too). It’s the Jamestown you grew up reading about in elementary school.

* From Aaron Gleeman, what’s the deal (Seinfeld voice) with Twins pitcher Kevin Correia?

* A League of Their Own is one of my favorite baseball movies. But what would it look like as a musical? You never wondered? Huh. New York Magazine puts together what such a show would look like. “Is That General Omar Bradley? (Marla’s Song)” — Comedic pas de deux between cloddish baseball scout Ernie and mooselike prodigy Marla.”

* First clip from the new Arrested Development episodes has been released.

* I put this link in my Q&A with Peter Richmond, but it just appeared online this week so want to highlight it here. Deadspin’s The Stacks section has put Richmond’s famous story on Tommy Lasorda and his late son online.

* From The Onion: After checking your bank account, remember to log out, close the web browser, and throw your computer into the ocean.

* Tech News Daily looks at how everyone from Gawker and Fox News to Buzzfeed would cover Tony Stark — Iron Man — if he was real.

* Crazy story about some athletic department members who came to the aid of a reporter who was having a stroke during a phone interview.

* The Portland Timbers of the MLS did one of the all-time good deeds in staging a miniature game (replete with crowd) for an 8-year-old fan with cancer. It’s a must-see video.

* In other soccer news, a couple of players did the Jason Collins thing long before Jason Collins. Their story is here.

* In other Jason Collins news, Bill Simmons captures podcast of the week honors for his sit down with the NBA free agent shortly after the world found out that he’s gay. Honestly, this might have been the first time I’d ever heard Collins interviewed in his college or pro career.

Netflix peers into my soul

Netflix made big news again. You know it’s big because the suffix -ageddon has been attached to it, which is to overhyped non-apocalyptic events what -gate is to overblown political scandals.

It’s called Streamageddon — Streamgate, if you will — because about 1,800 movies are no longer going to be available on the website’s streaming service. It could cause some more PR headaches for Netflix, which endured a near-catastrophe two years ago after announcing a price raise and a bizarre plan to separate the company’s DVD service from the streaming. Netflix backtracked on the separate company plan but the price fiasco — Priceageddon? — severely hurt the company for a time. I never understood the outrage back then. We pay 25 bucks for unlimited streaming and three DVDs at a time. To me that’s an amazing deal, which is affirmed each time we spend 28 bucks for two movie tickets and then raid my 401k to buy popcorn, chicken fingers and — for now anyway — gigantic sodas.

Death of a copy desk

I had three hometown newspapers when I was growing up. The Janesville Argus was the most literal representation, its small offices located on Main Street one block from our house. The quality of the Argus was totally dependent on the quality of the paper’s publisher. As a kid the paper was blessed with great publishers and editors, making the weekly Argus a great read. That quality declined over the years until the main question about the Argus wasn’t “What’s in it this week?”  but “Is it still alive?”

The Waseca County News was a bit bigger, but still a weekly. Twice-a-week when I was a kid and was a paperboy raking in the big quarters while lugging my heavy bag around Janesville, avoiding angry dogs and grouchy widows.

The Tapes: April 26

Welcome to spring upper Midwesterners. And welcome to this week’s links.

* Grantland’s Brian Phillips went to the Iditarod and the result is this epic piece that is well-written but also notable for the design.

* Don Van Natta Jr. takes a look at one of the most famous SI pieces ever, William Nack’s Pure Heart.

* Speaking of SI, Jack McCallum has a great story in the new issue on Gregg Popovich. It’s not online yet but McCallum wrote about just what it took to get an interview with the famously private coach.

* Charlie Pierce’s writings are always must-read but they were particularly so during the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings. Here’s Pierce the day after the city was locked down.

* Deadspin wonders why the San Diego Chargers’ team doctor — a drunk quack in their words — is still allowed to work with the team.

* Here’s one of those dumb surveys that determines dumb things. This one looks at worst jobs in the country. The verdict? Reporter. Last year it was a lumberjack. Ok.

* Not safe for work but here’s Michael Shannon reading the insane sorority email from last week.

* Gwyneth Paltrow is the most beautiful woman in the world, and the most hated celebrity.

* Johnette Howard on what Kobe might have tweeted if he had been forced to watch Game 2.

* This week’s podcast of the week is pretty highbrow by comparison. On the Media, a production of New York Public Radio, tackles the subject of how the media handled the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt from several different angles.

* Bonus multimedia link: This week, an animated Web short called “Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse.” Apparently, it’s been in the works for a long time and may or may not have been held up by some legal issues. It’s … insane. And probably true. Probably.