This year has had some days. And the wild thing is, we’re all stressing so much about whatever tragedy was just plopped in our laps on a recent weekday afternoon that we never consider letting our imagination run wild at what fresh hell might about to be detonated.

So while we were all bracing for Amy Comey-Barrett’s nomination to a lifetime on the Supreme Court to become official—with the Democrats playing their expected role of a decades-old rounded-down speed bump with plenty of space to the side—news came down that ACB’s colleagues-to-be handed down a decision that would make it harder to vote in Wisconsin.

Continue Reading Let them find out – pack the court

If you ever hear that an athlete doesn’t read what people write about them, don’t believe it. They read it. At the very least, their dad or their brother or their wife reads it—and they pass it along. Blog post, newspaper, even the occasional tweet. It gets in front of them.

That’s why Colts QB Philip Rivers’s colorful and candid comments yesterday made the rounds.

Continue Reading If you want to get to know someone, read what they write

The crowd present for the first Saturday at a just-opened public park in Seattle was about what you’d expect. For one, bike parking was in high demand as my fiancée and I rolled our Radwagon ebikes up to Fritz Hedges Waterway Park on Seattle’s Portage Bay. Ours were third and fourth Radwagons—a Subaru Outback in bicycle form—inside about a 25-foot radius.

“This is really nice,” an older man in flannel shirt said to his significant other as they strode out the metal dock overhanging the water.

“We need more of these,” she responded.

Continue Reading New parks are awesome, obviously

Being into golf isn’t original. It’s been around forever. Old people love it. A lot of young people, too. In American culture, it borders on being ubiquitous—particularly given certain demographics.

So as I spent a chunk of this year getting back into a sport I played a lot when I was younger—a bunch of rounds with my brothers, a nice new driver, even an official GHIN handicap—I couldn’t really do the natural fallback people do these days when they’re newly passionate about something, trying to share it with others and saying stuff like “Have you tried this thing called golf? It’s amazing!”

About everyone’s tried it. Not everyone loves it.

Continue Reading In praise of ‘No Laying Up,’ a digital media empire done right

This week, I’d been looking for an easy subject for a blog post to get back in the swing of things. That’s like half of blogging, trying to get back in the swing of things when you’re not. Anyway, I was watching the Packers game at my sister’s place and her fiancé suggested we play a random mobile game I hadn’t heard of.

It was ‘Among Us‘, which Wikipedia describes as “an online multiplayer social deduction game.” If you have no idea what that is, hey, right there with you because we didn’t actually all end up playing it.

Continue Reading ‘Among Us’, Proud Boys and the (sometimes dangerous) power of exposure

Two nights into the 2020 Democratic National Convention, more Republicans have given speeches than Democratic Socialists. Given the party’s clear strategy—even in its more opaque moments—it isn’t surprising the firebrand wing of the party is all but banished from the big stage.

But it still feels pretty gross.

And listen, I get it. Winning come November takes precedent over all else. Gotta have it. If 45 takes this one, it’s all over—if it isn’t already.

Isn’t there more to it, though? Like, isn’t the object to govern in a way that fits a certain set of ideals? To help the greatest number of people? To put a dent in American history, if not the universe?

Continue Reading Progressives should look back for a path forward

The evening after everything settled, as the dust and debris finished falling on the crater that was the 2020 college football season, I saw a reporter tweet that it was a good night for a drink.

Who would disagree?

Fans chimed in expressing a similar sentiment, some sharing pictures of their own beverage of choice. They’d lost their beloved college football Saturdays, the weekly tradition that carried many from late-summer afternoons all the way through winter.

Continue Reading For many, it’s so much bigger than losing college football Saturdays

This is a question I’m seeing a lot. It’s one people gravitate towards. I don’t like property destruction being the focus—or even a large part—of the conversation around this, but it is. It comes up a lot, even in my family’s own group text thread, a source of much political discord.

How would you feel? What would you do?

What would you think if it was your business getting trashed in the middle of an economy-crushing pandemic?

Well, I’d have a lot of questions.

Continue Reading What would you think if it was your small business being destroyed?

I am an excitable person. Getting me going on a particular subject can be a regrettable experience for whoever made such a mistake. I’ve come to acknowledge this. The subject could be Mariners prospects, my favorite neighborhood brewery, progressive politics or Williams’ 1995 classic pinball adaptation of Dirty Harry.

Or it could be my bike, as happened the other day. Picking up beer at my favorite neighborhood brewery. But that’s another post.

This is that excitable rant about a bike. Continue Reading Ebikes are an urbanist’s dream—and my dog’s, too