monday tidbits

- So Mensch called Spector and I "fuckers" for not posting about Fran Dunphy leaving Penn; apparently we are the only connection to Philly sports that dear Matthew has. I've decided to rectify the situation forthwith.

Daily Pennsylvanian: Dunphy announced as next Temple coach

There you go, your majesty!

Seriously, I wish Dunph all the best; you can't really fault him for wanting to do this. I can only hope that whoever is next to lead men's basketball 1) doesn't pull a Joe Scott, and 2) regards coaching the Penn Quakers the same way one would regard managing the Yankees or coaching Notre Dame football. We may live in an ESPN world that has long since left Ivy League sports behind, but that doesn't mean it isn't amazingly special to pace the hardwood at the Palestra.

- I don't know who Ray Glier is, but after writing his commentary on the upcoming Mets-Braves series, it seems clear he can go back to his home on Whore Island. Seriously. Part of me wonders if he was wearing a Braves hat in the Turner Field clubhouse/dugout when he got quotes for this thing. It reminds me of the dueling columns in the DP and the Daily Princetonian on the eve of Penn-Princeton basketball, only it's completely sincere and written by a grown man and a professional journalist.

Bluster like this is one of the many reasons the Braves deserve to fall, and fall hard (though I don't know if it's better or worse than the type of intellectually dishonest homerism that frames the rivalry as the poor wittle Braves versus the big bad Mets), but as Clint Eastwood once growled, deserve's got nothin' to do with it. So we shall see.

I've come down from the euphoria of last week, as Carlos Beltran is apparently hurt again (oh, come on!) and the Mets looked lucky to take two of three from the Brew Crew. I'm getting that "Lucy's going to pull the football away just before the Mets try to kick it" feeling in the pit of my stomach - again - but I really really really really hope this year is different. I know these three games against the Braves won't tell us either way if this year is indeed The Year, but I really hope they slap those bitches down and put them back seven games before April 20th (I'd take five).

I've been calling David Wright "The Chosen One" for about two weeks now; normally that would invite a meteroite to explosively sluice through the skull of whichever Met had been called that (by anybody anywhere), but Wright just has that certain "it" factor that makes me unafraid to anoint him as such. I'm hoping that tonight he begins to fulfill the prophecy and bring balance to the force (i.e., finally finally lead the Mets to first place - and beyond).

- Some musical moments of zen: I heard Hall and Oates' "Your Kiss is On My List" not once, not twice but three different times this weekend: once while Kris and I were walking through Ann Taylor on our way out of Franklin Mills on Saturday, once in Kris' car on our way back from Franklin Mills, and a third time at Lowe's yesterday.

The odds against that have to be astronomical; I'm guessing either that or winning Powerball was going to happen once in my life, and now it has, and it wasn't the Powerball one.

The other musical moment of zen occurred this morning on the NJ Turnpike; I stopped at a service area to get some coffee at Starbucks - just regular old coffee, nothing too fancy. When I got back in the car, Mike Doughty's "Busting up a Starbucks" was playing on XPN.

Now it's true that railing against the corporate, bourgeois ubiquity of Starbucks is very 1999, but as I drove along sipping my Tall Freshly Brewed, I was like "yeah, Starbucks sucks, man!" I don't know what that says about me.