Watching USA Curling Win Gold

Telling people that you watched curling from 12:30am past 3am on a late Friday, early Saturday morning makes you sound really lame. But I knew I had to do it. I told Brittany before, this is a once in a lifetime chance, to see USA win curling gold.

It was an incredible game, tied 5-5 in the 7th. And in the 8th, when USA needed to score, they did this:

AND THAT'S HOW IT'S DONE!@TeamShuster doubles their score on one throw in End 8! 😱 https://t.co/crSmtNeRXW pic.twitter.com/D6s4z1cMAl

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 24, 2018

In part due to the ridiculous timing of it, this will be one sporting event I'll never forget.

Road to a Curling Medal for Team USA

Here's the results for the round-robin curling schedule.

Only 4 teams advance to the playoffs. The top three in yellow, plus one of the teams in green after facing off in a tiebreaker match. 

So the USA advanced to the playoff with a 5-4 record. Cool, right? How'd they do that?

After 6 games, Team USA was 2-4.  They'd beaten South Korea and Denmark, but lost to Italy, Sweden, Japan and Norway. 

Their remaining three games: Canada, Switzerland, Great Britain. To make the playoffs, they'd have to win all three games against teams with better records. 

On Monday, USA was 2-4, Canada 4-2. Going into the 9th, it was 5-5 with USA holding the hammer. The final shot of the 9th, was a nice bump that scored two for the USA. 7-5. In the 10th, Canada comes up with their own double and ties it up, 7-7. Free curling! 

Here's where Canada's last yellow stone ends up:

So to win, USA needs to knock out the yellow stone. To do that they have to get by the yellow guard at the top of the screen. Here comes the shot...

Shuster screams for sweeping as soon as he lets it go. The announcer says, "Panic."

It crosses the hog line and is coming really close to the yellow guard. Can it get past it?

Yes! It narrowly passes the guard...

Here it is making contact with the yellow stone...

Perfect shot. Knocks the yellow one out, scores 2, for an overtime 9-7 win. All of that just to get to 3-4 and knock Canada back to 4-3. Both USA and Canada would win their next two games. 

In the semis, USA would face Canada again, and again take them down. 

Re-ordering 311's From Chaos

311 released their 6th album From Chaos in June 2001. It's a pretty good album. There's something that's always bugged me. Over 16 years later, I finally did what I've always thought about. Putting the tracks in proper order.

Here's my re-ordered From Chaos:

For comparison, here's the official track order:

Why did I do this, for the first time in my life, for this specific album? 90% of it is the title track. Simply put, the way this track opens with the drums immediately followed by the vocals, with a classic opening lyric...this is the perfect way to open an album. Within 5 seconds, you're into it. Here's the song I'm talking about, in case you've never heard it: From Chaos.

As I was moving tracks around, trying to figure out how to end it, I discovered a few things. Champagne, Uncalm, and I'll Be Here Awhile all have the same chill vibe that make for a nice  ending. Of the three Uncalm is more of a transition (half-rock, half-chill vibe) so I put that first. I'll Be Here Awhile is a good ending track, but of all the songs, there was nothing that could follow Champagne. Here's the last 40 seconds or so of that song, that is a proper ending for an album: Champagne

Amber also fits into the chill vibe section, but partly because it has so much radio nostalgia and partly because you need something to break up all the rock songs so it's not completely unbalanced, I moved that track up to the #4 spot.

So yeah, take a listen if you want and let me know what you think, if I've improved upon the studio release.

https://open.spotify.com/user/davefymbo/playlist/58CpFnEAkgs8jSdbPzydMH?si=OefbUeWxRwKb22IO15eNeA

The Bullshit They Feed Us

Once again, Paul Ryan and many Republican leaders say "now is not the time to jump to conclusions," that now is not the time to even talk about gun control. Here's a notable example from a conservative commentator:

This comes up a lot so it seems necessary to address it plainly. This is bullshit. For many reasons. 

When something happens, we (in all other cases) address it. When 9/11 happened, the US Government moved quickly to tighten airport security. Then later when someone tried to hide a bomb in their shoe, they added that to the airport safety rules. To this day, we all have to take our shoes off because of one incident. The TSA even introduced newer, better body scanners. 

Imagine if after the Challenger explosion, NASA said that now (and forever) is the time to grieve and not look into the problem and never addressed the faulty O-ring and it kept happening again and again. We'd think they were pretty stupid, right? By the way, I feel pretty comfortable assuming that NASA still grieved. Grief doesn't vanish.   

There is some truth that now is not the best time to talk about gun control. The best time to address it before a shooting. When you're a parent you tell your kids to be careful at the top of the stairs and not to touch a hot stove before they do it. 

So, "now's not the time" because the shooting was Wednesday? How about for the shootings last year, how about Sandy Hook? It's been over five years since that one? Still too soon? It would seem to anyone capable of thought that it's not about "now's not the time" it's that you don't ever want gun control. Somehow you think it sounds better to say it's not the time than the truth. You know it's a bad look to come out after yet another school shooting and say, "I'm never going to even talk about regulating guns because I don't want anything to change." So you peddle your bullshit. You must think we're that stupid to buy the bullshit. 

And it's pretty depressing to look at that tweet and see 46,000 likes. Even if that's inflated by fake accounts, it sure seems like there's a good number of people not just buying the bullshit but peddling it themselves. 

Also, great tactic by Tomi to blame "the Left." My goodness. It's the Left who's the problem in this situation. They want less school shootings, they're the real problem. 

And then we get to the thoughts and prayers. How many actually sit down and think and pray for the victims and how many just tweet that they're sending thoughts and prayers. Because if you actually sat down and sent thoughts and prayers, the next thing most people would think about is how to make sure this doesn't happen to more families. Isn't that just a natural part of the thoughts and prayers, may this never happen again? Wouldn't the best way to honor these families, to do something?

- - -

If it's not "thoughts and prayers" or "now's not the time", the other talking point we get from them is this is about mental illness, not guns. These are not mutually exclusive. I haven't met a single person that is against expanding care for mental illness. 

Here's a problem with that talking point: One of the first actions of the 115th Congress/Trump Administration was to elimination a regulation that was aimed at preventing the mentally ill from buying guns. One of the sponsors of the bill that eliminated the regulation gave us more bullshit. 

Forgive me if I don't believe that the party/administration that spent a bulk of 2017 trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act including Medicaid is actually concerned with improving mental health care. You just don't want to talk about guns, so you think waving the "mental illness" flag will prevent that conversation. 

I'll call your bluff. Let's improve mental health care. Let's help the millions of Americans suffering from mental illness. Let's also not let anyone with documented histories of violence or threats of violence to have guns. We can do both. 

- - -

Everything about this makes me incredibly angry. There will always be crime and suffering in this world. No one expects terrible events to go away completely. We just want less people to die. Less children, less churchgoers, less concertgoers, less mall shoppers to be shot and killed. For a start, I want something, anything to be done. For our leaders to collectively agree that this is a problem. That these killings are not acceptable. Instead, we are fed bullshit talking points and they hope we get distracted by something else before the next election. They'll launch attack ads and talk about abortion or the wall or anything so that they don't have to provide an answer to the most basic question: What are you going to do about the gun violence?

Because the answer is always nothing.

This is from Joe Scarborough in the Washington Post today:

These things are what the American people want. To get them, Americans will need to vote for people that want to do something. Our elected officials stand there and feed us bullshit. And every couple of years, we have a choice about who we want to lead us. There have now been 150,000 Americans who have lived through a school shooting. How large does that number have to be until we vote in the people willing to do something about it?

Want to guess what Fox News viewers think of Black History Month?

The Boston Police Department tweeted a tribute to Red Auerbach in honor of Black History Month. Once they started reading their replies, they deleted it. Fox News reported the story. Here are the comments, representative of the vast majority of the comments.

Thank goodness there's a media company that provides a place for these people to get together in a safe space and make racist comments.