Robots, Football, Penguin Skulls, Sand, Wonderwall
That's what's on my mind. I think I better go lie down.
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Of course Tom Brady is a Person
Right? Yes, he’s 44 years old and still playing football. And that means he’s been getting plowed into by big strong guys for literally decades but he’s still fine and that’s the kind of thing that would happen to a very well-maintained robot but Tom Brady is a person. He’s not a robot. He’s a person.
And because he’s definitely a person, we should take what he’s said about mental health and Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka at face value.
“It’s interesting,” Brady told USA TODAY Sports in August. “I think there are so many young people in sports. Obviously, Naomi’s really young. Simone’s really young. I’m 44. When I was 24, I certainly didn’t have all the answers to all the different pressures and the adversities that you face. I don’t know if we have expectations for people that we should have all the answers, have all things figured out at young ages.
“It’s very difficult to deal with a lot of things that are thrust upon you when you have a degree of success. Things in your family dynamics change. You’re still learning and growing. You’re going through a lot at 21, 22, 23, 24, just as a human being. And now you’re dealing with it on the world stage. So, there’s absolutely challenges to be dealt with and adversities to overcome at that age. Even at 44, you’re dealing with different things and adversities. And now you have kids, wives and off-field stuff like we all do in our careers. So, life has its challenges for all of us. You just hope that people can manage them and get through them in as healthy way of a way as possible and that you can learn from them and that they make you into a more self-aware person. And that’s obviously what I hope for Simone and Naomi.”
“As a human being,” he says. Which a robot wouldn’t say. So he can’t be a robot. Or as a Norwegian person I know once said, “row boat.”
Now, the important thing here is that Brady wasn’t really going out on a limb. As is often the case with cautious and carefully managed humans, he said something kind of safe. Had Brady, a human, said that Biles and Osaka were a couple of cowardly quitters, it would blow up and hurt his image as a human celebrity.
And so the tide has shifted and that’s what matters. Athletes choosing their mental health is on its way to not being a big deal. And it hasn’t been as big a deal in the past when white men did it. And I think racism and sexism was at work in the attacks on Biles and Osaka. And I am starting too many sentences with the word And.
As to the new default, normal position being that yeah, duh, mental health matters: yay.
Oh That’s Why I Mentioned That
The NFL season begins tonight and that’s why I went looking for stories about the NFL and mental health and that led me to the statement by the mortal human Tom Brady.
At the invitation of my friend Joe, I joined a fantasy football league this year. As always, I was disappointed that fantasy football doesn’t let you draft Gandalf or have your receivers ride pegasuses.
But here are my actual fantasies:
- That none of the players sustains permanent brain injuries over the course of the season.
- That football somehow just vanishes from existence in such a way that we never even remember it existed.
- That the Seahawks overcome their continuous dysfunction and lack of an offensive line to win the Super Bowl.
I hate myself for watching football because it’s a systemic maiming of people. I will watch it though. And that’s where they get you.
Oh Hell Let’s Make the Self-Loathing Football Fan the Theme Here
Because isn’t beating yourself up the easiest thing to do? Because that way the person you are punching is always, always within punching range?
I’m a huge fan of Drew Magary’s annual Why Your Team Sucks series, now housed in at Defector. It’s Magary and the fans of every team running through what’s intrinsically terrible about each NFL squad. They’re all worth a read. The Detroit Lions entry tends to be one of the sadder and funnier ones each year.
To me, you can’t really be a fan of a team if you don’t hate them at a 45-55% hate-love ratio or higher. If you love your team in an uncomplicated pure way, you’re a baby or a fool. So I always read the update on the Seahawks. This year, there was more penguin skulls in it than I was expecting. He quotes from an article in the Seattle P-I about Jody Allen, sister of the late Paul Allen, and now owner of the team:
In August 2011, inspectors destroyed 72 pounds of giraffe bones belonging to Vulcan, according to a USDA report.
What the fuck, 72 FUCKING POUNDS? What were they doing, making stock?!
OK, OK. Settle down, everyone. I’m sure there’s a totally non-sinister reason for repeatedly smuggling bulk quantities of animal bones into the United States. Let’s see what else was included in the booty:
In a memo, a security officer noted that they were able to make sure “the penguin bones that JA picked up in Antarctica were boxed and put on the plane without being scanned at customs.”
Jody Allen was also accused of forcing her bodyguards to dress up in tight swimsuits and do a little fashion show for her, presumably as they each held sacks of penguin skulls. Because when you’re that rich, you have to be this fucked in the head.
Jody Allen emailed her nanny looking for a penguin skull that went missing during the return from Antarctica; a friend apparently wanted to make jewelry from it.
Are you ready for some PENGUIN SKULLS!
Here’s something I didn’t know existed: Werner Herzog on the insanity of penguins:
Here maybe this will help calm your nerves a bit
I’ll Be Honest
This whole edition of the newsletter kind of spun out on me. You start with robot Tom Brady and then it’s on to lots of football, depressed baby penguins, and sand art.
Anyway. Here’s Wonderwall.