(Bonus points for including semiannual and metaphorical in the same sentence.)
On to the topics du jour . . .
• The Golden State Warriors were historically great from 2015 through 2019 – winning three championships and posting the greatest five-year record in NBA history.
This year, they're historically bad.
The combination is (no surprise) historic.
If you're not a sports fan, you only need to know this: the Bay Area's NBA team is doing something that has never been done in the history of major professional American sports.
The Warriors are morphing from the greatest team of their era to the worst team in the league – with no time between the eras. Nobody's done that so quickly.
If you're familiar with the Warriors' season, it's reasonable. They lost one of their greatest players (Kevin Durant) to free agency and then suffered an unbelievable run of injuries to all their top players. By the sixth game of the season, they were reduced to playing whomever was available – a patchwork of rejects, journeymen and rookies. They are terrible, but they're still the Warriors.
This is like if the Beatles didn't break up, but merely lost John Lennon – and then put out an album that included covers of "Billy Don't Be a Hero," "The Night Chicago Died" and "Honey," with studio musicians filling in.
This is unprecedented.
• Mrs. Brad and I have special powers while watching TV shows or movies: I can tell when someone is left-handed and she can tell when someone is lifting something that is empty.
We'll be watching a show and I'll blurt out "lefty!" as someone eats or signs something. She'll say "there's nothing in that box" or "that cup is empty" when an actor lifts something.
If someone were listening in, our discussions would make no sense. Our special powers don't really help the world, but they are gifts nonetheless.
• Speaking of TV, I'm irrationally irritated by the commercial (for Amazon Echo?) where the man is driving to work at a hospital and speaking into a device to get his home ready for his wife.
It shows that he much he cares and how he uses technology to give her a warm welcome. All I see is a guy setting the home thermostat at 71 degrees. Does anyone set their temperature at 71 degrees. Don't we all choose even numbers for temperatures?
Maybe not. Maybe I am obsessive-compulsive about this and have rules that no one else knows exists. All I know is that I've never heard anyone say they want it to be 71 degrees.
• I'm no food snob, but I still can't understand why people have lost their minds about the chicken sandwiches from Popeye's. It's a fast-food chicken sandwich.
If and when we find out the outcry for the sandwiches was just a prank pulled by Popeye's marketing folks, I'll be unsurprised.
The other possibility, of course, is that we are all really dumb.
• My friend Mark makes a good point about the word "extraordinary." Shouldn't it mean that something is extremely ordinary? Should extraordinary be a word you use to explain that something was very bland and everything went as expected? "My day was extraordinary. Nothing surprising happened."
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.
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