Flashfact: 100 years later, Sunshine Sketches still resonates

This is kind of a two-fold thing for me: it was a chance to finally get around to reading Sunshine Sketches, a book that defines Orillia: from the Leacock retirement home to the Mariposa Market where I eat breakfast once or twice a week. And the book was good, better than I thought it'd be.

The other thing is for me: this is kind of a warmup piece for something in the future, which doesn't have a home yet. While waiting for that to come up, please give this essay a read:

There was a billboard here in town with his face, a quote about how the harder he worked, the luckier he got. Stephen Leacock occupies this town, his legacy a major influence.

When he wrote what would become his most endearing book, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, he said it wasn’t any one town, but any small town, on either coast. And while his characters are everyone, in a town that could be anywhere in Ontario, Orillia has taken it as it’s own; businesses use names like Ossawippi and Mariposa and there’s even a museum dedicated to his works.

I’ve lived here for most of my life but until recently, I’d never bothered to read his book. I expected some similarities between Orillia and Mariposa but I didn’t expect to enjoy the book so much.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Toronto Review of Books: A Look into Baseball's Golden Age

The Toronto Review of Books published a short essay of mine on one a very good baseball book: Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, a oral history of baseball in the first half of the 20th century.

In 26 chapters, each adapted from extensive interviews, Ritter’s book covers the first half of the last century, the golden age of baseball. Moving fom Tommy Leach, who started in the 19th century, to Hank Greenberg, who played until 1947, each chapter is like an informal conversation with an athlete looking back on their career. It’s a telling record of the growth of a major sport.

I didn't have room for it in the essay, but one thing I found interesting in this book was the players talking about life after baseball. These were people who spent their youth playing pro sports in a age where you didn't get a lot of money or respect for doing so. Some of them got mundane day jobs, others hung on the outer fringes of teams as scouts or the like. One guy went blind, another went to Japan to help introduce baseball. It's fascinating stuff.

Anyway, click here to read the whole thing.

The Good Point: Sonics - There and back again

My latest for The Good Point is about a team that doesn't exist anymore.

Okay, that's a little misleading. This is also about the Sacramento Kings, haunted by arena issues and the ghost of the Sonics. But Seattle is very much in the forefront here, too: from arena talk of this own, an owner willing to spend vast sums of his own money and the green and gold, showing up in the background of games everywhere in the NBA.

It seemed oddly fitting when the Sacramento Kings hosted Oklahoma City on Feb. 9. The former Sonics were playing a team whose owners are looking for a new arena and blogs asking – maybe even telling fans to chant and bring flyers that read “HERE-WE-STAY,” hoping TNT’s national audience would hear it on their only national TV appearance.

The game sold out and enough people wore dark colors that Kevin Harlan called it a blackout. When the Kings roared to an 11-2 lead, the crowd erupted in a frenzy.  It was hard not to think back to the 2002 playoffs. It would be a real shame if the Kings left town. Unfortunately, that’s a real possibility.

Click here to read the whole thing.

When losing isn't a bad thing: A postcard from Toronto

How long was Rasual Butler holding the ball for? Was it for a a full five seconds? Less? More? There’s a report he asked the referee to count out loud, which probably wasn’t enough. And for what it’s worth, he shouldered the blame, but that’s not what people will remember: they’ll remember him standing there, getting the ball for the first time all game, for what the NBA would later rule was 5.8 seconds, failing to get the ball in bounds.

That’s not fair to Butler, and it's the wrong thing to take from Sunday's game; which was, even after 48 minutes, exactly the best kind of game the Raptors could have played this season.

Flashfact: Lana Del Ray, marked for death

Ripping off one of my favorite Lester Bangs headlines only felt appropriate for this, and not only because it also riffed on the name of Del Rey's album. 


In at least a few ways the cycle around Del Rey's debut, which hasn't been out very long but feels like it's happened for months, is emblematic of music criticism right now as a whole: people rush to judge someone who's almost designed to be quickly judged. A question like  "Is Lana Del Rey constructed by people to sell records?" isn't what people should be asking. The question should be if it's worth listening to, context removed. 


The short answer: it's not bad, but it's not great either:

Google her name for a novel about postmodern hype and public relations. Listen to her album to be lulled to sleep. Watch her videos on YouTube to look into a cold display counter at a seafood market. She is a lot of things, all of them so concurrent to now: perhaps manufactured and coldly indifferent on stage but oddly compelling and worth looking at, even if only to grasp what lessons there are here.

For the long answer, and some thoughts on why it doesn't matter if she's constructed to sell records,  click here to read the full post at Flashfact.org

The Good Point: Is Andrea Bargnani the NBA's most improved player?

There aren't many storylines - which aren't even a thing, really - around the Toronto Raptors, but there's one that I couldn't get out of my mind: what's happened to Andrea Bargnani this year. Over at The Good Point, I explain how he's changed from a black hole and why it matters:

In a year marked by some bad teams, the Toronto Raptors are one of the worst. This is not a new thing. They’ve been bad for years, with a defense more porous than Havarti cheese. Last year, they regularly allowed 120 per game, sometimes as much as 140. You don’t have to know basketball to know that’s bad. 

The stats bear that out: the 2011 Raptors allowed the fifth most points per game, the fourth-lowest SRS and lost the third-most games in the league. And Andrea Bargnani, their much-maligned star, finished the season with just 2.6 Win Shares and a 16.4 PER, despite playing the second-most minutes on the team. 

Things aren’t much better for the Raptors this season. They dropped eight in a row in January, are 8-16 and have the league’s second-lowest points scored per game (86.8). And that’s mostly because of Bargnani. I mean it in a good way.

Continue reading at The Good Point