RIP Whitey Herzog

If you grew up in the St. Louis area in the 1980s like I did, then chances are you'll never have a more favorite Major League Baseball team than those St. Louis Cardinals ones from the early to the middle part of the decade. Likewise, you probably don't have a more cherished manager than Whitey Herzog.

"The White Rat" took the "Runnin' Redbirds" to three World Series over a span of six years and while he only one won of them, he was the perfect mix of old-school militant leader - with a perfectly square head and buzzcut - and innovative playcaller of "Whiteyball" who valued offensive speed and defensive craftiness over brute home-run power. 

Whitey Herzog has passed away at age 92. 

His Cardinals won the World Series in 1982 and those were some thrilling games. Even though they weren't champions, the 1985 and 1987 teams may have been my favorite teams. I don't think I ever watched more baseball that I did in 1985 with Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith, Andy Van Slyke, Joaquín Andújar, John Tudor, Bob Forsch, and Todd Worrell. Meanwhile, the 1987 team with many of the same players went back-and-forth until the very end in losing to the Minnesota Twins in seven games.

Whitey always felt like one of Cardinal Nation's own, which may have helped because he grew up near St. Louis in New Athens, Illinois.

Some interesting facts about Herzog:

• His real name was Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog.
• A broadcaster covering his games in the minor leagues nicknamed him "Whitey" because of his light blond hair. 
• He was in the Army Corps of Engineers for two years.
• Herzog was mentored by iconic New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel as a Yankee minor leaguer and said, "Instead of thinking about girls, I would be thinking about what the hell he talked about all day. Casey broke it down into the hundred little things that would make the difference. Once I began coaching and managing, I kept passing them along to my own players. In Casey, I had an Einstein."
• He played eight seasons in the majors, with the Washington Senators, Kansas City Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, and Detroit Tigers.
• He didn't last a full season in his first MLB managerial stint with the Texas Rangers in 1973.
• Before joining the Cards, he was hired to manage the Kansas City Royals and lost to the New York Yankees three years in a row in the AL Championship Series.
• Royals fans are not likely to forget Whitey either. He surpringly called his 1977 team the best he ever coached, and they finished 102-60 in the regular season and featured Darrell Porter, Frank White, Amos Otis, George Brett, and Dennis Leonard.
• Bruce Sutter, the Hall of Fame closer on that 1982 Cardinals team, told The New York Times, "How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?"
• He was the second-oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame behind Willie Mays.

Great Magazine Reads: Adam and the Ants were savage in their pop-punk glory days

Adam Ant was one of the first MTV music stars who I remember melding with my pre-teen worldview of wanting to like popular music combined with something a little weirder, a little more alternative, and a little more of what at the time was called "college rock" because it was mostly only heard on those low-wave types of radio stations.

He and his band were always on music TV with his classic "Goody Two Shoes." The song and video had it all: super catchy, glammy, an upbeat and pulsing horn section, beautiful women in crazy makeup, and swashbuckling Adam in full rock-star gorgeousness.

The March/April 2024 issue of Classic Pop Magazine tells the story, starting with the release of 1980's Kings Of The Wild Frontier: it's "less an album, and more a call to arms. And an extremely compelling one at that. For something so inherently bizarre, it’s shamelessly self-assured, so brimming with confidence and laden with swagger that it’s literally drunk on its own hype." The album "shifted the paradigm from punk to New Romantic."

Some of the most interesting information from the article includes:

• "Early reviews were scathing, and the band suffered much hostility from the music press. To cap it off, their new manager, Malcolm McClaren – who had been brought in to revive their fortunes – delivered the ultimate stab in the back by dumping Ant and poaching his bandmates to form Bow Wow Wow."
• "McClaren’s mutiny proved to be the key turning point. Rather than ceding defeat, Ant quickly assembled a new band [and was] ready to do battle, flanked on either side by his new secret weapons: Marco Pirroni on guitar and producer Chris Hughes on drums. Pirroni introduced a distinctive twangy guitar style, combining 1950s rockabilly with influences from Spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone. What’s more, Pirroni became Adam’s writing partner, a relationship that extended well into Ant’s solo years. Meanwhile, Hughes [brought] the whole chaotic mess together. Hughes’ ear for pop hooks is attested by his later work with Tears For Fears, co-writing their worldwide smash, 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World,' which Roland Orzabal had previously cast aside."
  
• "Their sound totally bucks the commercial trends of the era. The Ants avoid the temptations of synth-pop, with neither synthesizer nor drum machine in sight. While nothing else really sounds anything like them, they form part of a niche that included Siouxsie And The Banshees, and (yes) Bow Wow Wow – blending post-punk with tribal rhythms and layers of complexity. Their two-drummer line-up was integral to the sound."
• "Ant went from obscure punk to Michael Jackson’s fashion advisor. Compared to the fanfare in Britain, Ant didn’t quite conquer America in the way he deserved to."
• "Demonstrating the breadth of influence, there are echoes in phenomena as varied as Disney’s Captain Jack Sparrow through to the rubber-masked nu-metal band, Slipknot (that may sound a stretch, but check out their uniform dress code, gang mentality, parent-baiting and primal dual drumming)."
• "Some today might class Adam’s fixation with Native Americans as cultural appropriation, but arguably he was extremely progressive in his support of indigenous cultures when it wasn’t in fashion, highlighting their plight at the hands of the white man. He ... apparently declared during one live performance: 'They are human beings, and we are the savages.'"
• Oh, and Ant's real name is Stuart Goddard. He is alive and well, living in London at age 69, and still touring.

Adam Ant's discography does not go super deep for me; however, even much of what I would consider inessential is pretty interesting to revist today. Of his essentials, here are my absolute 7 favorites:

7. "Deutscher Girls"

6. "Antmusic"

5. "Stand and Deliver"

4. "Picasso Vista El Planeta De Los Simios"

3. "Wonderful"

2. "Strip"

1. "Goody Two Shoes"

My Night Shift re-read kicks off with vampires at "Jerusalem's Lot"

It's difficult to believe that Stephen King was so refined by the time his first short-story collection arrived. This was 1978 and Night Shift is still among my very favorite of any King releases. Of course, Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Rage (with The Stand appearing later in the year) had already been unleashed, making it clear that "being too raw" was never part of the Stephen King legacy.

Most of the stories in the collection had, in fact, been published much earlier in magazines like Penthouse, Cosmopolitan, Cavalier, and Maine between 1968 and 1977 and may in fact be a bit more raw than his many other releases, but that also gives them a lot of their appeal. "Jerusalem's Lot" follows a foreword about what fear means to King, it's the longest story in Night Shift, it's one of four previously unpublished stories, and it beginning the collection. 

Tied to the story King laid out in Salem's Lot, "Jerusalem's Lot" has a ton going on, presented in letters back and forth that describe a descendant of the Boone family as he discovers his ancestors have left a sickening incestual trail of horror in "Chapelwaite," which is the name of a haunted house where much of the story is set as well as a 2021 one-season TV adaptation (which I haven't seen; it stars Adrien Brody). I probably most love the mystery King presents; nothing is laid out in black-and-white and while he sometimes adds uneccesary details and over-the-top old-timey language, all the pieces are in place to make this yet another one of his must-reads.

Pieces of that puzzle (without spoilers) include:

• The vampires that haunt Jerusalem's Lot, making it a deserted and entirely unsettling setting
• An eerie sense of foreboding throughout, as if King has mastered the stylings of the previously-untouchable Edgar Allen Poe
• The mystery and horror of the Marsten House/Chapelwaite that hangs over the tale
• The completely isolated feel any people have when surrounded by total evil, and
• The religious imagery in the church of the lead vampire makes everything even scarier.

"Jerusalem's Lot" isn't as perfect as the full novel of Salem's Lot (which I recently gave 5 out of 5 stars and proclaimed possibly the best vampire novel ever), but it is an essential addition to that story and is a promising kick off to the rest of Night Shift, which I'm excited to re-read for the first time in more that 30 years.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Road ecology is a relatively new science, but it could shape wildlife and highways

Cliff swallows are a bird species that live all over the United States, but nearly all of them live on bridges. Scientists have found that, over recent years, their wings have grown smaller to adapt to being able to fly in tighter spaces and to be able to maneuver quickly in spaces where human vehicles are speeding along. “They have been shaped, subtlety, by the road,” writes Ben Goldfarb in Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.

His thesis is that about "40 million miles of road encircle the Earth" and that "when alien archaeologists exhume the rubble of human civilization, they may conclude that our raison d’être was building roads." Said another way by writer E.B. White: "Everything in life is somewhere else ... and you get there in a car."

Surprisingly, the study of "road ecology" was not even considered until a Harvard ecology professor wondered, in 1993, why researchers knew so much about Amazon rainforest ecology but nobody had ever thought to study the ecology of the roads running through the Amazon. The professor was initially laughed at but then the study of how roads were affecting plants and wildlife quickly took off and became a popular subject of study. 

Goldfarb notes:

"Constructed bridges for bears, tunnels for turtles, rope webs that allow howler monkeys to swing over highways without descending to the forest floor. On Christmas Island, red crabs clamber over a steel span during their beachward migrations; in Kenya, elephants lumber beneath highways and railroads via passages as tall as two-story houses. And road ecology has yielded more than crossings: we’ve also learned to map and protect the migrations of cryptic animals, to design roadsides that nourish bees and butterflies, and to deconstruct the derelict logging tracks that lace our forests."

One could actually claim that road ecology began back in 1924 when a young married couple of Iowa scientists started a game of counting roadkill as they travelled along the roads in what was likely a Model T. (That still sounds like a fun game with little kids, assuming they can stomach it.) One of their research papers noted: "America’s burgeoning need for speed had become one of the important checks upon the natural increase of many forms of life."

Ironically, many of our first roads were carved by wildlife who had used the pathways for many years. Native American footpaths and later Europeans with their "Good Roads" (for bikes!) activism cntinued the job of preparing for the as-yet-not-envisioned cars. By the 1920s, road building, with the likes of concretes and sealants and asphalt, was becoming serious business. Before then, roads were perceived as part of the natural environment, but now they were shaping the environment and conquering nature.

Daisy Buchanan ran over Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby and that was about par for the course, as there were 23,600 car-related deaths in 1924 - a form of checking out that has always remained more prevalent than we seem to like to know about. But while road deaths for humans have nominally improved with better roads, deaths for animals have become worse with better roads. 

Speed was a major factor in the danger of roads to animals. As early as the 1930s, research pointed out that "below 35 miles per hour, cars seldom struck animals. Accelerate to 45, though, and they kill rapidly. Exceed 60 miles per hour, and you can figure on scoring a kill every 10 miles or less on most of the improved roads."

That early knowledge - almost prehistoric, at least in the sense of road ecology - fell away as those scientists died off, but the topic popped up again in the 1960s when deer populations began to explode in the nation’s suburbs. Now everyone knows how prominent the deer-vehicle collision problem is. We’ve all seen Tommy Boy, Get Out, and the episode of the Simpsons when the family hits a statue of a deer. There are nearly 60,000 people injured and more than 400 killed each year from collisions with deer. But deer were oddly never among the roadkill in those long-ago studies. That’s because suburbs created the perfect "edge" habitats that grew their numbers. The problem was that the suburbs had a very dangerous predator - speeding vehicles. Car interiors were especially dangerous places back then for coming into contact with deer, and after Ralph Nader wrote his book Unsafe at Any Speed, Congress made seat belts mandatory in 1966.

Long before suburbs, deer had formed a mental map and learned exactly which patterns to follow in their migration. That was never considered by engineers who blazed paths right across their territory, creating a situation that will likely never go away. The practice of using GPS collars to better understand the movements of migrating species didn’t begin until after the explosion of suburbia. As deer and other migrating animals began to be tracked better by scientists, it was discovered that only a small portion were becoming roadkill. Most starved because they couldn't get past interstates and barriers alongside them. They couldn’t get to their food sources and they starved en masse. 

Species don’t just rush from point A to point B when they migrate, they "surf the green wave," meaning they seek to find spots along the way where the snow has recently melted and plentiful fresh and colorful salads have sprouted. They will go from one of these zones to the next, often spending weeks in a single location along the way and attempting to migrate to spots where it is eternally early spring-like. 

In 2016, a biology study split animals into four groups: nonresponders like leopard frogs ignore roads and hop across no matter what’s happening on them, pausers like skunks get out onto roads and then hunker down on them, intelligent avoiders like grizzly bears stay away from any roads as much as possible, and speeders like deer evolved to outrun predators and that’s essential what they are doing trying to zip through cars on a roadway. When cars get going into the 70 and 80 mph range, deer finally give up and realize they don’t want to try to run through that, so rural country roads will usually have easily as much death for deer as interstates do. 

Another famous example of habitat destruction by road is Ventura Highway’s dissection of the Santa Monica Mountains - which are essentially the country’s largest urban park. Mountain lions need huge territories to survive and they are trapped there by the freeways. If they don’t get killed trying to cross, they tend to die at the hands of their parents. Young mountain lions leave their parents but the roads often keep them bouncing back in the their journey for independence, often leading to them to unnaturally return home and get killed by their parents. The area’s most famous lion, P-22, was recently hit by a car and succumbed to his injuries, but his celebrity is helping raise private (much of it celebrity) funding for an animal crossing above Ventura Highway. 

We always hear that 40,000 vehicle fatalities happen each year in the U.S., but that fatality number is even more stunningly around 3,600 around the world each day! The interstates, under the guise of helping spur "urban renewal," especially wiped out minority communities: Rondo in St. Paul, Overtown in Miami, Treme in New Orleans, and countless others. But now, cities like Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, and Seattle are tearing down the viaducts that soar over cities and directing some traffic down to ground level or redirected away from cutting through the heart of places filled with people. "Creating a world that’s amenable to feet" is the dual goal of urban advocates and road ecologists. 

When COVID-19 hit, road-ecology scientists captured some startling data. California, Idaho, and Maine are states that have strong roadkill data, and the numbers dropped precipitously, with the researchers estimating a year of reduced travel "would save 27,000 large animals in those states alone." With traffic noise down, sparrows were found to sing more and actually sing better! 

Goldfarb concludes that we need to remake our roads as a massive public-works project. Some good news came along with the November 2021 infrastructure bill that included $350 million for wildlife crossings - the largest such investment of its kind in U.S. history. As the story progresses, this book will remain a valuable and surprisingly entertaining resource.

RIP Hall and Oates (and my favorite 14 H2O albums ranked)

It was 41 years ago - on March 2, 1983 - that I saw my first real rock n' roll concert. My dad and his girlfriend took me and my new junior-high friend Mark to see Daryl Hall and John Oates on the H2O tour at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. Mark and I were in the second row and it was epic.

I was already a huge music lover thanks to my older brothers' Beatles, Stones, Who, Jam, Cars, and many other albums in the house. But they weren't Hall and Oates people. This was all mine. This felt like my area in which I could excel, be an expert in, and mostly just love.

I don't remember what was played that night. There are no setlists online. Surely there was "Kiss on My List," "You Make My Dreams," "Maneater," "Rich Girl," "Sarah Smile," "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)," "Family Man," and the list goes on.

I still love Hall and Oates and it was sad to wake up this morning and realize that something that's been around my whole life if apparently around no more. The writing has been on the wall for many months, as the two have been bickering over business matters, but Oates has now told Rolling Stone that the musical relationship is kaput.

I understand why people come and want to hear the big hits. Those songs are going to live forever. But I wanted to relegate them to the classic file that they’re in. And I wanted them to be heard in the best possible light, the way they were when the spark was on fire in the ’70s and ’80. That’s when those songs really resonated. To keep playing them, for me, was no longer interesting. I just wanted to do something else.

We have a different strategy for our lives, and we have a different strategy for our business lives as well as our personal lives. And that’s that, so be it. We’re old guys. We deserve to be allowed to do whatever we want to do.

I mention Hall and Oates quite a bit here at the Lunch Box, and they remain one of my favorites, but the three times I've seen them since have been far inferior performances. The show at Wolftrap in Virginia in 2009 was really good but the show just a few years ago at the Capitol One Center in Washington D.C. was kind of a stinker (with Tears for Fears opening and being, I thought, the best band of the night, and Squeeze may have been better as an separate opener as well).

One thing I haven't touched on yet: everyone knows about H2O's 1980s content, but should you decide to dig deeper, they had amazing music in the 1970s before their Beatlemania-like MTV era. These are my 14 favorite Hall and Oates albums ranked, all of which I consider valuable parts of my overall record collection:

14. Do It for Love (2003)

13. War Babies (1974)

12. Whole Oats (1972)

11. Along the Red Ledge (1978)

10. Beauty on a Back Street (1977)

09. Sacred Songs (Daryl Hall solo) (1977)

08. X-Static (1979)

07. Bigger Than Both of Us (1976)

06. Daryl Hall and John Oates (1975)

05. Abandoned Luncheonette (1973)

04. Big Bam Boom (1984)

03. Private Eyes (1981)

02. Voices (1980)

01. H2O (1982)

Listen to especially those top 10 albums on the list and try to tell me these two musicians weren't masters of creating perfect power pop.

RIP (sorta) O.J. Simpson

I was just a little too young to watch O.J. Simpson during his prime Buffalo Bills era, although I still have some cards from when he was on that team. But from a very early age - while I might not have seen him running wild in his white, blue, and red uniform - I distinctly recall Simpson in his fancy suits flying through the airport walkways in his Hertz rental-car ads.

I did eventually see plenty of football highlights of "The Juice" and, wow, was he great. He also had an infectious personality later on as an NBC Sports game-time announcer and the detective who flies out of his wheelchair from the upper deck of a stadium in the first of three Naked Gun films in which he appeared.

But those were just the bright-side warmup to O.J.'s approaching dark-side pop-culture legacy. I can still remember being on vacation near the beach in Alabama when my eyes were glued to the TV on June 17, 1994 as that white Ford Bronco led the police on a chase across Los Angeles. It would be the beginning of the entire nation getting more O.J. than they had ever wanted. It took me a long time to finally see him as the cold-blooded murderer of his wife rather than the friendly-eyed TV personality I had grown to love.The drama took us all the way to the innocent verdict date of October 3, 1995 and way beyond. In fact, I can't believe the car chase and the trial took less than a year-and-a-half. It seemed like forever. Of course, Simpson was found liable in civil court in 1997 for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. 

O.J. Simpson has died of prostate cancer at the age of 76.

Some other interesting Simpson nuggets of note:

• He was born in a housing project in San Francisco.
• He blamed a lot of his later troubles on having an absent father after his parents separated when he was 5.
• When he was little, he had rickets and bowed legs that caused other kids to make fun of him.
• He won the Heisman trophy as college football's top player while at USC.
• Simpson was the first NFL player to surpass 2,000 yards rushing, which he did in 1973.
• He met Nicole Brown way back in 1977 at a Beverly Hills nightclub.
• He spent nine years in prison for trying in 2007 to steal O.J. Simpson memorabilia.
• He had clearly started to lose his mind in his last years with his rambling video posts on X but to his credit at least he mostly stuck to football commentary.

What a run he had!

This Fool gets cancelled after a less-perfect Season 2

Just five months ago, I called Hulu’s This Fool "amazingly hilarious," TIME Magazine has called it "one of TV's funniest shows," and The New Yorker called it "summer's best comedy." So then how did The A.V. Club recently have this headline? "Those fools at Hulu cancel This Fool."

Perhaps those fools saw things winding down. Season 2's focus on the gang trying to get a South Central L.A. coffee shop operated by ex-cons up and running was definitely not as funny and endearing as Season 1's setting at an unorthodox rehab center calls Hugs Not Thugs for ex-cons. The cancellation is still a little surprising, as high-water marks continued to sometimes pop up. 

Episode 1 of Season 2 about the neighborhood rooster keeping everyone up at night is a TV classic. The same can be said about Episode 4, in which Julio and Luis convince chef Percy and Minister Payne to join in on the coffee journey. But too many of these episodes didn't really quite hit the mark. There are still lots of humorous moments, but the diversions of the two-episode supermarket robbery, Julio acting as a dad for his girlfriend's daughter, and the episode focused on Julio's mother just don't live up to the perfection of Season 1.

Even when This Fool had a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, there didn't seem to be enough people watching. Almost everyone I've told about the show hasn't even heard of it. Chris Estrada, who plays Julio, is the mastermind, so it will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

3 out of 5 stars

Y: The Last Man is my favorite graphic novel of all time

It's been 10 years since I first read Y: The Last Man and it's such an absolute epic classic (I proclaim it my favorite graphic novel) that I decided to re-read it on my iPad in the library app Hoopla, which incidentally has an impressive graphic-novel collection and all of it can be borrowed in an instant.

The collection is available in five volumes (about 1,500 pages total) and it has it all: a monkey-infused plotline, lots of love triangles, globe hopping, political intrigue, examinations of major social issues, humor, and, of course, the apocalypse.

Or, rather, half an apocalypse? As the title implies, A 22-year-old man named Yorick Brown is the last man on Earth, and much of the books attempt to find out why this wiping out of all mammals with the “Y” chromosome has happened. Actually, Y’s travelling companion, Ampersand, is also a male, albeit of the monkey variety.

Yorick must travel secretly or risk the wrath of the many packs of women who are grappling with the loss of all males and, hence eventually, the end of the entire human race. Needless to say, many of these women are dangerous.

First Yorick leaves New York to get to his mother, a Congresswoman, in Washington D.C. He also meets with the new president, who assigns a beautiful dreadlocked agent, Agent 355, to protect him at all times. She takes him to Boston to meet Dr. Allison Mann, who will attempt to clone the last man. Meanwhile, his mother also tells an Israeli agent named Alter about Yorick, who continuously attempts to take him from 355’s clutches to use as leverage with her nation’s opponents.

Dr. Mann’s lab is destroyed in Boston and the three have to make their way to California to reach the backup lab. Their cross-country struggles take up a major portion of this epic.

The story goes international when a ninja named Toyota steals Ampersand and takes the monkey to Japan. Yorick, Dr. Mann, and 355 go there to retrieve him and stop along the way in Australia to look for Yorick’s beloved fiancée Beth. After many misses, they finally locate Beth in Paris and the two lovers try to get back to where they left off before the plague hit. But things are complicated when Yorick finally realizes he is deeply in love with 355.

The story unfortunately doesn’t end with quite the bang I had hoped for, but Dr. Mann’s experiments have worked, as we see in a flash-forward to 60 years in the future, when many clones of Yorick have been developed by the deceased Dr. Mann and the many clones she had successfully created of herself.

5 out of 5 stars

Because I might just make a tradition of revisiting it each decade, I’m laying out the array of main characters so I have them mapped out and don’t forget who’s who. There are spoilers, but if you've already read the series, you may want to use this as a refresher as well, because there are a healthy amount of important characters.

Yorick - The son of an Ohio politician mom, he’s never amounted to anything except being pretty good at magic tricks and making a lot of funny jokes with political and pop-culture references. 

Ampersand - His monkey. The only other male of any species still alive.

Beth - Y’s girlfriend traveling in Australia. She gets captured by an aborigine tribe. 

Hero - Y’s sister, a paramedic in Boston who cuts off a breast as part of joining in with the Amazons. She signs up to lead the search for the last man, not knowing it’s Yorick.

Dr. Mann - Boston bioengineer who studies asexual reproduction. She much later kills her father, who survived the plague and was also working on cloning, in competition with his daughter.

355 - The U.S president’s agent in Jordan trying to get an amulet necklace as part of her job in the government's secret "culper ring." Her family died in a car wreck when she was 8. She shoots the terrorists who block I-40, which allows food shipments to resume for the country.

Alter - An Israeli military woman, she is also on the trail of the last man and shows up in Boston at Dr. Mann’s lab. It later turns out the person giving her team from Tel Aviv instructions is somehow none other than Yorick’s mom, but Alter doesn’t actually plan to hand Yorick off to his mom, who she considers a terrorist. She wants to take Y back to Israel and have the U.S. start a war with her country otherwise she thinks the two countries will turn on themselves and destroy themselves. She was militarized and hates other nations from when her sister was accidentally killed by an Israeli tank when she was protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes. 

Representative Jennifer Brown - Yorick’s mom. She recruits Israel because she used to work with Alter’s predecessor who always spoke highly of her. Plus the U.S. military is still in disarray and she wanted the best to find her son. She suspects 355 is part of the culper ring, a dirty-tricks pseudo agency of the government and Brown placed a tracking device in Ampersand. Alter enters her office right after she sees the naked newspaper photo of her son and shoots her dead.

Margaret Valentine - Former agriculture secretary named as the new president by the chain of succession. She arrives at the White House to interrupt a militia of Republican congressmen’s wives who are coming in guns ablaze to demand they get their husband’s seats. But the first act of the president (who was herself a Republican) is to arrest them instead. 

Victoria - Evil red-headed leader of the Daughters of the Amazon. She is killed by Hero when Hero decides she is no longer an evil Amazon and that Y is not the enemy.

Sonia - Convicted junkie in Marrisville who falls for Yorick and shares a kiss with him while chopping wood. She kills Victoria with an ax to the head right as Victoria was about to execute Yorick. Then Hero shoots an arrow straight into her heart. 

Natalya - Blonde stowaway on Yorick’s westbound train who has come from Russia to retrieve the one Russian male left, who is on the space station. She also tells the group of a nuclear reactor in Kazakhstan that has killed tons of people and will further spread the plague.

Ciba - A femail astronaut who make it back to Earth. She has been impregnated and she doesn’t know which of the two male astronauts is the father. Both males die upon earth landing. Ciba has a baby boy, Vladimir, right as a Hero is arriving nearby in the Plains to find her brother.

Heather and Heidi Hartle - Run the top-secret government hideout in Kansas that no male politicians ever made it to. Natalya and Dr. Mann will stay with them to monitor astronaut Ciba’s pregnancy.

Cayce, Edie, and Henrietta - Actors in a touring with a theatrical troupe passing through Nebraska who write a play about women who find the last man on earth. Meta.

711 - 355’s culper ring colleague who has retired since her husband died. She lives in a cabin outside Denver and watches Yorick while Dr. Mann and 355 go to the hospital to treat Ampersand. She uses unusual methods to help Y better understand his pseudo death wish.

Leah - A 16-year-old in Arizona who swears to protect her state even if the rest of the U.S. must go down.

P.J. - A bald mechanic and former ska bassist who runs into the gang in the desert and notifies them I-40 has been cut off by a terrorist gang. She is shot while protecting Yorick. Y then shot her killer with the gun 355 let him borrow; but he told 355 and Dr. Mann that P.J. shot her.

Beth - Not Yorick’s fiancée, but another Beth he meets upon arriving in California. She’s at a church and is a former flight attendant who brought the plane she was on down during the moment all the men died. She’s the first woman Y finally sleeps with. Later on she has his baby, a girl. 

Anna Strong - Red-haired leader of the Setauket Ring, a breakaway group from the government Culper Ring. She takes Yorick’s silver and gold engagement ring, which Dr. Mann is starting to suspect has something to do with Y’s magical powers of survival. They are looking for 355’s Amulet of Helene, which they destroy at Candlestick Park the moment 355 hands it over, without exchanging Yorick’s engagement ring. 355 turns the table and breaks Anna’s neck but leaves her alive.

Toyota - Ninja who steals Ampersand and knives 355 badly. She escapes via San Diego to Yokogata, where Dr. Mann’s mother lives. We discover that Amp has been mixed up with another monkey which is why he’s been kidnapped, but he escapes upon docking.

Lieutenant Rose Copen - Mistaken as a pirate on the ship to Japan who informs Dr. Mann that the boat is smuggling tons of heroin and she wants to stop it. Turns out she’s with the Royal Australian Navy. She sleeps with Dr. Mann and they start to fall in love, then Dr. Mann’s mom stabs her. While she’s unconscious she admits she is actually a spy.

Kilina - Captain of the heroin smuggling ship and fools around with Yorick before he realizes the truth about her.

Red headed journalist who falls over a balcony with 355. Both live and then she escapes. 

Sister Lucia Ober - Kidnaps pregnant Beth and Hero. She is the highest ranking woman in the Catholic Church, from Vatican City. She wants the baby to become the Pope so he can declare women can be ordained as the church’s leaders. Turns out the baby is a girl.

The old 355 - Recruited 355 to the Culper Ring after she had killed two racist bullies as a 15-year-old.

You - Former cop and private investigator who created a male robot in Tokyo. Bartered Ampersand for a woman to spend a month with the robot.

Dr. Mann’s mom - Stabs Rose when she arrives with her daughter in Japan. Turns out she had met President Valentine before the plague and become her advisor, having set the whole thing up to get the man and the monkey to her daughter in Boston. Later, we find that Dr. Mann’s dad has also survived and has been making clones of Dr. Mann.

Key Settings

Washington D.C. is the scene of much of the action. The Washington Monument has been turned into a memorial for all the men. Women sing in worship/memory there all the time. Yorick reveals himself to a group of Amazons and 355 has to save him. 

Marrisville, Ohio is where Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann have to leap from a train car. They end up there with an entire town of women who were let out of prison so they wouldn’t starve in their cells.

Kansas government bunker, near where spaceship returns to Earth.

Queensbrook, Arizona is where a group of women are nationalists for their, um, state. The gang was going to go through Utah but the whole state is on fire. And a group of 8 descending from Timothy McVeigh’s ideology have shut down I-40 through Arizona and cut off food and supplies to everyone out west.

San Francisco - The gang makes it here so Dr. Mann can set up her backup lab and work on her cloning project. She discovers Yorick survived the plague because he was with Ampersand and the monkey’s poop somehow shielded him.

Australia is now home to tons of heroin addicts and Japan might be next if the pirate boat shipment arrives there. 

Cooksfield, California - This is where Hero is looking for Yorick’s Beth but instead finds the former flight attendant Beth, very pregnant with Y’s baby. But then the Swiss Guard private army of Vatican City captures and takes Hero and Beth hostage. 

And that's just a little bit of the story ...

Concentration, breathing, and thinking differently about competition are some keys to tennis improvement

I summarized some of the helpful hints from the first half of the classic tennis self-help book, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, by Timothy Gallwey. It begins to repeat itself quite a bit as it enters its second half. There is lots of interesting but repetitive mumbo jumbo about the Self 1 and Self 2 (conscious and unconscious). 

That said, there really might be something to not worrying so much about the “external” score of your tennis matches or how far you make it in the tournament but rather focusing on what’s important to you in your “inner mind.” These may be things like overcoming anxiety or nervousness before a match, achieving a fun time on the court, or any number of other inner accomplishments. Here are some of the more interesting tennis tips I gleaned: 

• Play around with your grip style to see if you are holding the racket the right way for you. I’ve never been able to keep track of the different ways many teachers have instructed me to grip the racket. For many years, the Eastern grip dominated, and it’s still the United States Tennis Association’s approved style. It’s when you basically hold the racket as if you were shaking someone’s hand. But a lot of competitive players are nowadays using the “semi-Western grip,” in which a right-handed player will turn the racket a quarter turn back so that the wrist is bent up in the direction of the elbow a bit. I tried that for a while but I’ve basically gone back to a pretty Eastern grip style, which is not to say I shouldn't still always experiment.
• Go out and videotape yourself in a match. Then analyze the tape to see where your feet, your hips, your shoulders are on good shots and on bad ones. Observe where your backswing is. Where is the ball on your racket at the time of impact, and what is the angle of your racket at the point of impact? Is there any hesitancy in the follow-through? How is weight distributed from the start to the end of the follow-through?
• Counterintuitively, tightening the muscles of the arm and the wrist on the serve reduces power, so it’s important to find the right level of muscle tension. There is no one right way, which is obvious when noting that no pros' serves look the same.
• Whenever you discover you have a bad habit, don’t work to break it but rather try new habits and see how they go. See if you can get in the groove. The thing with tennis is that you don’t need to try to do everything like your favorite pro player because everyone is different and things work differently for different people.

Pretty much every stroke and improvement follows the same process:

Don’t

• Criticize or judge past behavior
• Tell yourself to change, instructing with words
• Try hard and make yourself do it right

Do

• Observe existing behavior non-judgmentally
• Picture desired outcome
• Let it happen
• Continue to observe and learn

For better concentration, try focusing on the seams of the ball. Not just the ball. Not just watching the ball. Really get engrossed in how the ball spins, and watch it this way from the time it bounced off the opponent’s racket. I am suspicious of this hint, but I will try it nonetheless. To help, try saying "bounce" out loud when the ball bounces and "hit" when your racket hits the ball. Likewise, listening to the sound of the ball off your racket can be illuminating, perhaps even more than watching the ball. Once you hit the ball right in the sweet spot of the strings, you might find great satisfaction in often trying to replicate that sound. Flat, slice, and kick serves will each produce different sounds. And there may be no more satisfying sound than that of a volley performed perfectly. 

Relaxed concentration is another tactic Gallwey uses. He will often cheat forward to return a serve soon after its first bounce then attack the net. It not only confuses an opponent but it builds quicker and more accurate reactions over time. “Concentration seems to slow time down.” In order to stay focused between points, “focus on breathing … observing breath going in, going out out, going in, going out in its natural rhythm.” 

Competition is another part of the equation in the book - and Gallwey makes the point that tennis can be both competition and cooperation between the two opponents. For example: 

• Instead of hoping the other player double faults, you can hope it lands in the service court so you can have a better mind state for the return shot. 
• If your opponent has a weak backhand, hitting it to his backhand will be a nice thing to do in helping him improve that shot. 

This book gets a 4.5 out 5 stars. After I try many of the tactics, I'll have a better sense of whether it should be 5 out of 5 or something less.

I've finally found my church: The church of The Righteous Gemstones

Megachurchs are a little bit of a small obsession for me. They seem so weird and culty and foreign. I guess I just wasn't brought up in a way to think that religion could somehow be entertainment and that I would want to go and invest a lot of my time and money into helping one operate. I'm sure they're helpful to a lot of people and provide a strong community where there might not otherwise be one.

Maybe if they didn't have to base everything around one book that, speaking as a former literature major, is such a major snooze. Bible 101 in undergrad at Southern Illinois had a very nice professor but the content was by far the most boring of all my classes. The little made-up story is pretty nonsensiscal and just basically fails at storytelling, characterization, plot, and every other key element of writing.

Bible 101 aside, I just finished season 3 of The Righteous Gemstones (on Max), which is thank-the-Lord coming back for another season soon.

Here's what I wrote about season 1: Led by the masterful patriarch John Goodman, this ensemble cast gives us a look at what life must be like - albeit taking it to ridiculous and hilarious heights - to be megachurch leaders. I especially like the performances of Danny McBride as the oldest and seediest son, Edi Patterson as wacko sister Judy, and Walton Goggins as Baby Billy, a low-budget pastor stereotype. The gang needs to cover up all kinds of misdeeds. 4 out of 5 stars

I liked season 2 even more: A lot of Danny McBride-watching can never be bad. He’s got to be my favorite comedic actor at this point, up with the likes of Bill Burr and Mike Myers (still). The family continues to show its mega-church evil, wackily obliterating anyone who dares to threaten the empire. 4.5 out of 5 stars

I'm not going to jump to giving season 3 5 out of 5 stars, but it is still every bit as great as season 2. 

• Dealing with infidelity by using marriage therapy in a box. 
• Celebratory family gathers while watching each other take turns driving the family monster truck. 
• Baby Billy's Bible Bonkers TV game show is just absolutely bonkers. 

These televangelist and megachurch pastors are a hoot, totally out of control, and quite possibly uncomfortably realistic. The family has dealt with rivals from other local smaller churches, investigative journalists, nonsensical but fun motorcycle assassins, and now needy and estranged family members. Oh the poor lives of megachurch leaders.

Some evangelicals haven't appreciated the show (such as the "media organization" The Gospel Coalition, which wrote, "This show ... feels built on cheap shots and easy caricatures rather than empathy and incisive observation. Created from a mood board that draws inspiration from Falwells, Bakkers, Benny Hinn, T. D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Bieber-looking hypepriests, and PreachersNSneakers, the Gemstones are essentially the Ewings of holy-roller evangelicalism"), but surprisingly there hasn't been much real backlash.

Interesting things about real megachurches (which I'm pretty convinced includes the church of The Righteous Gemstones; heck, I would actually pay good money to see Danny McBride preach every Sunday morning, even if I knew he was doing an 8-ball of coke backstage before each sermon):

• A megachurch is defined as "any Protestant Christian church which at least 2,000 attend in a weekend."
• The first megachurch was established in London in 1861. 
• The first megachurch in the U.S. was the Angelus Temple, founded in 1923 by Aimee Semple McPherson (fascinating story) in Los Angeles.
• By the 2000s, as they had slowly grown in popularity, they eventually started to become more untraditional, with stadium seating, especially in places like the U.S., Africa, Asia, and Australia.
• With more than 1,300 megachurches in the U.S., most are in Florida, Texas, California, and Georgia.
• Many megachurches focus on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage and forego important issue like social justice and the immorality of war. Megachurch pastors, like the Gemstones, frequently appear to encourage their poor flocks to give money to the church that often goes right into their pockets for fancy clothes and vehicles.

Re: monster truck.

Can't wait for season 4. As for season 3, it gets 4.5 out of 5 stars.