This gin is mighty tasty.

In Memoriam: Adam Yauch

As you all know by now, surely, Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA of the Beastie Boys passed away earlier today at 47.  He had been battling throat cancer the last couple years.

And, you all surely know that I love the Beastie Boys.  I love them because they thumbed their nose at 80s rock, at preconceived notions of Jewish boys from New York making hip hop records, at everything and everyone they considered to be “The Man.” I love them ironically, unironically, I wear Beastie Boys shirts, I listen to their music way too loud and rap along when I’m driving alone.

MCA had the gruffest voice in the group, and was probably the best wordsmith.  There’s no shortage of great MCA lines, but then again, there’s no shortage of great Beastie Boy lines.  

The first Beastie Boys song I distinctly remember hearing was “Girls.” I remember it because my mom found it misogynistic and horrible, and changed the radio channel as soon as it got to “to do the laundry, and in the bedroom.”  The song was witty, catchy, and above all told a heck of a story.  This was the Beastie Boys.  Funky Monkey was a stupid song about getting shit-hammered on horrible-tasting liquor, but they played it at our middle school dances because it made people just go NUTS.

I still go nuts when I hear the Beastie Boys.  Judging by the amount of words and the heartfelt sentiments that have been dedicated to MCA today, lots of other people do too. RIP Adam Yauch.  You’ll be greatly missed.

Hot Sports Takes

Hey gang, it’s been quiet.  I know my blog has “sports” in the title, but it seems like it’s been mostly a food and drink blog, with funny videos posted every once in a while. I’m totally OK with that, and I don’t have any particular “direction” I want to take this thing. It’s just a stupid tumblr, after all.  But I have some thoughts on SPROTS and I will thusly share them with you.

• Baseball season is starting! Giants predictions: Freddy Sanchez is forced to retire because of his shoulder injury…MadBum is a top 3 vote-getter for the Cy Young…Buster Posey? Still ain’t havin’ it. 
• March Madness, while indubitably exciting, is very dumb, and I’m a dumb person for filling out a bracket every year. HOWEVER, somehow Stephen is worse than me at filling out brackets, and has been for the past couple years. Stephen’s being bad at bracketeering (thank you for the awful words you make up, ESPN assholes) equals free beer for me, so I will continue to make brackets even when we both regress back to the mean and I start owing him beers.  Oh well.
• That said, Anthony Davis’ unibrow is UNSTOPPABLE. He’s like Sam the Eagle but even more intimidating.  UK for the championship, which will be surely be vacated due to recruiting violations in, oh, five years when Calipari leaves for the NBA.
• Tanking is bad.  It’s a huge flaw in sports, especially basketball, that teams would be rewarded simply for lacking not just talent but, often, effort.  That said, I hope the Warriors lose every game for the rest of season and keep their first round pick.  I can’t wait for them to pick another shoot-first no-defense point guard, and probably pick them right before a future All-Star wing/big man.  Warriors basketball! Still terrible!
• Slowly starting to get excited for the Euros this summer.  Spain will surely be the favorite, but as long as Holland’s studs (RvP, Sneijder, Robben) can stay healthy, they’ll be a hell of a dangerous team.  It feels good to not have to always root for the USMNT and have an real soccer team that I can call my own.
• Hey, at least this year we probably won’t have to worry about the Sharks getting knocked out in the conference finals again…*bangs head on desk repeatedly*

If you dig sports, at all, I can’t recommend the SBNation blog network enough, specifically mccoveychronicles.com, everydayshouldbesaturday.com, the SBNation YouTube channel, and anything written by Jon Bois, Bomani Jones, Tom Ziller, Spencer Hall and the countless other great writers featured there.  Also, check out The Classical (with its own great stable of writers) for essays and long reads about some less mainstream sports topics. 

Thanks for reading all this dumb sports stuff.  Here’s a GIF of Christiano Ronaldo amazed by his teammate’s penis.

A few quick thoughts.

1. #Linsanity.  

2. I’m starting to come around…As of right now, Bourbon > Scotch.  And rye whiskey is creeping damn close to the top.

3. The way Nabokov describes young girls—I can’t help but think that he is either a HUGE pervert, or one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century.  Probably both.

4. Next time I grill, I’m using a rub of nothing but brown sugar, ground coffee, and cinnamon. Maybe even a little cocoa powder.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.