Browsing Feedly this morning I noticed a couple of posts showed up from my own blog. Which I found interesting given that I had not written anything. They were bot-produced spam ads for an internet paper-writing service, hilariously written in some of the most garbled uncanny English one could imagine. Perhaps the most desperate of cheaters, in the waning hours before a course term paper deadline, on their sixth cup of coffee and still staring at a blank Word file, would forgive such trifles, or even be impressed with the occasional (and apparently random) insertion of dollar-plus vocabulary to pad out the ol’ word count. But otherwise, how the hell does spam like this sustain itself?

Fortunately the offenders were not intelligent users, just bots exploiting a dummy test user I’d set up and forgotten about, and probably didn’t bother to give a strong password to. (Pro tip: delete your old unused WordPress users. Luckily I am good about more thorough about this at work where I am compensated for maintaining WordPress sites.) Easily deleted, but I’ll always remember them.

Anyway, while I’m here, I guess I could check in about the pandemic at least once for the historical record. Not that this website will be in the top 100 million sources future scholars will study to understand how society dealt with it in real time. And also, my experience hasn’t been that unusual.

I’m still struck by the speed in which things shifted. When it started to creep into the country in early March, my wife and I were still thinking we’d make a planned trip to the UK at the end of the month. But we’d probably try to keep an eye on the news when we were there, in case anything happened. My boss was planning a trip to Florida to watch spring training baseball. On Monday the 16th he came to work having reluctantly decided he’d have to forgo the trip, prudently assessing that going from stadium to stadium while a virus was spreading was a poor choice. By Friday, they weren’t even playing the games anymore and we were obviously not going to the UK. It wasn’t even a discussion. I think Tuesday evening we were just like, “Oh, we’re not going, are we.” Everything was cancelled and I was working from home indefinitely.

I’m fortunate though. Perfectly healthy. My job translates fine to working from home and it’s stable (in fact a lot busier) for now. We don’t have kids so were not thrust into surprise full-time parenting. I wear a mask when I go anywhere, upped my food bank donations (and made several others) and have been tipping the hell out of my service bills. My quarantine hobby is trying to learn some Spanish (an interesting endeavor and worthy of another post sometime). Me llamo Josh! Estoy estadounideste y hablos un poco de español. ¿Como se llama usted? (I bet I got that wrong somewhere because my app doesn’t make me write anything, just read and speak.) Edit: I did get it wrong somewhere and had to fix it, though I don’t dare consider it right yet.

All for now but maybe I’ll try to do a few more posts soon. Please email me if you want to purchase any essays though!

Since I turned 40 in 2017, I’ve done yearly surveys of pro athlete ages in the primary team sports I follow (baseball & football) to see how many of my fellow 40-somethings were still at it. The owner of a body in its late 30s or beyond begins to understand that competing physically with anyone younger ceases to be any kind of good idea. We may have experience and knowledge, and our hand-eye coordination may hold out for many more years (but even that’s no guarantee), but numerous systems will have started to decay or break down entirely. Recovery time from minor bumps and strains goes from days to weeks or months. Or never! We just start accumulating damage.

So let’s see which old people are left.

Previously:

Baseball

It’s official: There are no more major league players older than me.

But we have an update. Last year Bartolo Colon finished the season as the oldest player left in the majors. He also earned the title of Last Remaining Player Older Than Me. But as a fun gesture to honor their future Hall of Famer, the Mariners added Ichiro Suzuki to the active roster for their two-game series in Japan to begin this season. Ichiro’s last appearance came on March 21. So for two days into the 2019 season (and only those two days) the league continued to have a player older than me, Ichiro Suzuki.

Bartolo didn’t end up pitching this season, which wasn’t surprising given that, despite continuing to find employment, he hadn’t actually been all that good at his job for two solid years. Also worth noting that a couple other older guys who appeared in previous years’ lists are still holding down gigs in foreign leagues: Walter Silva continues to hang around the Mexican Leagues, and Koji Uehara plays in Japan.

The oldest player left in the Majors is Fernando Rodney, at 42 (and around two months younger than me). He’ll be part of the Nationals’ World Series roster. Good for him! (At this point, I figure if enough ex-Tigers win World Series titles, I can retroactively count it for the Tigers.) Fernando is the last 40-something remaining in the league, though there are a handful of 39-year-olds who ought to be playing next year.

Football

Per Pro Football Reference:

Old football players - Adam Vinatieri and Matt Bryant

Two survivors from last year’s list, both kickers. Adam Vinatieri missed a bunch of kicks the first couple of games this season and might’ve been close to losing his gig, but rallied and is doing well now. Matt Bryant has remained steady.

No way to really say how long these guys can keep it up. As noted in past years, since kickers don’t have to tackle or outrun anyone, it really just comes down to how long they can avoid some kind of leg injury or other nagging problem. George Blanda was the oldest player of all time, starting his career as a quarterback but transitioning into a kicker. He last appeared in a game aged 48 years, 3 months, 18 days. Our dudes have to be thinking about trying to surpass that. Adam Vinatieri will turn 48 next year, in December 2020 (the table above is a bit misleading–it’s currently his Age 47 season, but he won’t get there until December 28), but the season will end before he’d make it to 48 years, 3 months. He’d have to still be playing on opening day 2021, when he’d be something like 48 years, 8 months.

Update 29 October: I just read that Matt Bryant got cut from the Atlanta Falcons. He’s had a mediocre season so far and presumably the abysmal Falcons are just taking the opportunity to give a longer-term guy some seasoning. I also learned that Bryant actually hadn’t been in Atlanta’s plans for this year at all. They hadn’t actually re-signed him for this season but brought him back after their intended replacement bombed in the preseason. So for the moment Adam Vinatieri is the only remaining NFL player older than me, but we’ll have to see if Matt gets another temp gig this year.

To close the book on last year’s list… Punter Shane Lechler didn’t end up playing in 2018 and retired in the offseason. (When you don’t have a job, but “retire,” I guess that just means you stop practicing. Or your neighbors kindly ask you to stop punting footballs over the fence.) Phil Dawson did eventually get to try some kicks, and usually was still making them, but fought through a hip injury and the team eventually put him on injured reserve. He also retired, very amusingly signing a one-day contract to do so with the Browns, his original team. He must have enjoyed his time there, because those were some miserable Browns teams.

Three other active players are into their 40s: Tom Brady (turned 42 just before the season started), and Drew Brees and Josh McCown (both 40). Brady is still excellent, and I hate him and the Patriots so much. He has said various things about retiring, but it’s certainly a year-to-year thing. For Bill Belichick, too. They could win another Super Bowl this year and both walk away, or just keep grinding until they die or drive every non-New England football fan away from the sport entirely. I’d imagine Drew Brees is about done. The Saints have had some bad playoff luck the last couple of years. If they break through I’d guess he quits while on top. But really, probably just a season-to-season decision at this point. Josh McCown is a perfectly adequate career backup who just keeps getting jobs. I hope he outlasts everyone.

So. Here I go again, on my own. Going down the only road I’ve ever known. Like a drifter I was born to walk alone…wait. What? No, not like a drifter. Not like that at all. That’s a terrible song. Today I will talk about the opposite of that, I will talk about good songs from the 1980s.

I did this last year for the ’90s, after my wife Kristen and I talked enough about our theoretical lists for so long that we finally got up the momentum to make them happen. Now we’re onto the ’80s. I encourage you to check hers out too. She has good taste and is a much better music writer.

As hard as the ’90s list was to put together, I hypothesized that making such a list for the ’80s might be even more agonizing, and it absolutely was. For me the ’90s are more static. Maybe because I lived them and was the most aware of what was going on than I would ever be again, or I just have a clear handle on the predominant styles, so it’s rare to discover anything new that really grabs me. That’s not to say my ’90s list will never change. In fact, I just swapped out a few things on the playlist since its initial publication last March. But I’ll say I’m 95% confident the list will remain a great representation of my favorite 1990s music until I die.

For the ’80s, I’ll say more like 60-70%. I’m still discovering new-to-me ’80s and earlier stuff all the time. I’d go so far as to say this is possibly now my favorite decade of music. (Edit: Nah, it’s probably the ’70s.) Post punk and new wave have become favorite genres. It was a brilliant time for synth experimentation. Plus it’s the golden age hip-hop and the birth of shoegaze. I like that so many artists mixed electronic and instrumental influences together, but the production generally still has an organic, analog feel.

Similar construction and caveats to the ’90s list. I’m not trying to capture the zeitgeist, this is just some dude’s opinions. I’d expect it will shift and change as I revisit it, and I wouldn’t bicker about precise ordering. It’s just a snapshot of where I’m at on October 14, 2019. It’s a mix of stuff that represents larger genres, and stuff that is the Most 1980s to me, and stuff that I just like for whatever reason. In the end it feels like a painfully short list where I necessarily have to omit hundreds of great songs. Sure, I wanted more Echo and the Bunnymen and Smiths songs. I couldn’t find room for Janet Jackson or EPMD or The Psychedelic Furs. But it’s still a good group.

P.S. It should be 80 for the ’80s aesthetically but I didn’t think it’s fair the ’90s got ten more simply by being later. Think of it as 80 songs and 10 bonus songs if it helps you sleep.

P.S.S. The Michael Jackson Is Controversial caveat: I decided to just not consider him.

All right, here you go:

[Link to playlist]

And the ranked list:

RankArtistSong
90Billy IdolEyes Without a Face
89George ClintonAtomic Dog
88Adam and the AntsStand and Deliver
87LL Cool JRock the Bells
86Prefab SproutAppetite
85The PoliceSpirits in the Material World
84Guns 'n RosesParadise City
83Minimal CompactStatik Dancin'
82The Soft BoysOnly the Stones Remain
81REMRadio Free Europe
80The AssociatesSkipping
79The Teardrop ExplodesWhen I Dream
78The Dead MilkmenPunk Rock Girl
77BauhausSpirit
76The TheThis is the Day
75Eric B. & RakimPaid in Full
74TranslatorEverywhere That I'm Not
73Missing PersonsDestination Unknown
72XTCMayor of Simpleton
71Thomas DolbyShe Blinded Me With Science*
70Huey Lewis and the NewsHeart and Soul
69Faith No MoreWe Care A Lot
68Bruce SpringsteenTunnel of Love
67The Go-BetweensBye Bye Pride
66ABCThe Look of Love
65The ChameleonsUp the Down Escalator
64Green on RedDeath and Angels
63BananaramaCruel Summer
62Spandau BalletTrue
61Thomas LeerWest End
60Big Daddy KaneAin't No Half Steppin'
59KraftwerkComputer World
58Husker DuBooks About UFOs
57The SmithsHow Soon Is Now?
56Big CountryIn a Big Country
55The SpecialsGhost Town
54The SugarcubesDelicious Demon
53Gary NumanRemind Me To Smile
52The FallNew Face in Hell
51Tears for FearsHead Over Heels
50De La SoulMe Myself and I*
49Billy OceanGet Outta My Dreams Get Into My Car
48Simple MindsDon't You Forget About Me
47Public EnemyDon't Believe the Hype
46Faith No MoreFalling to Pieces
45Cutting CrewLife in a Dangerous Time
44Siouxsie and the BansheesCities in Dust
43New OrderBlue Monday
42The BatsRound and Down
41U2Pride (In the Name of Love)
40The B-52'sLegal Tender
39Tears for FearsEverybody Wants to Rule the World
38Romeo VoidNever Say Never
37The CleanAnything Could Happen
36New OrderEverything's Gone Green
35The NamesI Wish I Could Speak Your Language
34Killing JokeLove Like Blood
33Grandmaster FlashThe Message
32Chaz JankelNumber One
31The Ocean BlueBetween Something and Nothing
30PixiesWhere is My Mind?
29UnitsHigh Pressure Days
28Van HalenPanama
27Biz MarkieJust a Friend
26The CureJust Like Heaven
25Bush TetrasYou Can't Be Funky
24Talking HeadsThis Must Be the Place
23Echo and the BunnymenA Promise
22FeltPrimitive Painters
21Public EnemyFight the Power
20Prince1999
19Bow Wow WowDo You Wanna Hold Me?
18Eddy GrantElectric Avenue**
17Sad Lovers & GiantsCloud 9
16The Icicle WorksWhisper to a Scream
15Altered ImagesI Could Be Happy
14Fine Young CannibalsShe Drives Me Crazy
13They Might Be GiantsDon't Let's Start
12SpoonsNova Heart
11New OrderCeremony
10The English BeatSave It For Later
9Joy DivisionIsolation
8PrinceAutomatic
7The Jesus and Mary ChainJust Like Honey
6Talking HeadsOnce in a Lifetime
5They Might Be GiantsShe's An Angel
4My Bloody ValentineThe Things I Miss*
3Gary NumanWe Are Glass
2They Might Be GiantsAna Ng
1Joy DivisionLove Will Tear Us Apart

* These tracks aren’t on Spotify at last check, so the playlist has some bonus tracks inserted after the Billy Idol and George Clinton kickoff (because I just really like the playlist starting with those two).

**Also not on Spotify, but I’ve included a cover version on the playlist.

When I watched TOS I did a final wrap-up to summarize best and worst episodes, time for the same here.

Links to all episodes and ratings can be found in the Trek Index.

Season-By-Season Ratings

My hypothesis is that the series was solid and even from the start, and the ratings will bear that out. Gimme a few minutes to do math, be right back…

…OK, I’m back. Here they are:

SeasonAvg Rating
13.4
23.6
33.8
43.7
53.8
63.6
74.1

Yeah, definitely consistent. Just slightly lower season one, and just slightly higher season seven. Even though I was complaining a bit down the stretch about them getting bored with the characters, they never stopped making good shows. The final arc’s MVP push puts it at the top.

Comparing to my seasonal ratings of TOS, its first season (the best), slots right in the middle of DS9 seasons. Season 2 was about as good as DS9’s least good (not bad) but the cruddy TOS Season 3 lags behind everything.

Worst Episodes

I already had an excuse to cover this in my write-up of “Prodigal Daughter.” When considering the worst, there were two clear choices: “Meridian” and “Profit and Lace.” But on the whole I had very few 1- or zero-star-rated episodes. I may have mentioned elsewhere this show is good.

Best Episodes

I gave out a probably over-generous 5-star ratings to 44 episodes this series. Forty-four! About 25% of the episodes. Well, they were good! So I won’t list them all here since they’re in the Index, but I’ll try to narrow to a top ten:

EpisodeTitleWhat episode was that?
S6E13Far Beyond the StarsThe one where they are all SF writers, and we don't know if they live in our universe or we live in theirs.
S6E18InquisitionMindbender intro to Section 31
S5E25In the CardsBest Jake & Nog farce episode where they are trying to obtain a baseball card for Sisko
S6E2Rocks and ShoalsSisko has a tactical showdown with a group of Jem'Hadar and Kira has to work for Cardassians
S5E22Children of TimeTime-loop one where the DS9ers encounter a society descended from...the DS9ers.
S3E9DefiantDuplicate Riker resurfaces as a Maquis agent
S7E22Tacking Into the WindBest episode of the final arc, Kira dealing with Cardassians and Worf with the Klingons.
S6E7You Are Cordially InvitedLead-up to Worf and Dax's wedding.
S7E10It's Only a Paper MoonNog heals by crashing with Vic Fontaine.
S1E15ProgressSelf-sealing stem bolts & yamok sauce

I’ve leaving a ton of good ones out, obviously. 34 more didn’t make the list. And plenty more 4- and 3-star ones behind that.

Final Thoughts

When I finished TOS I found it an easy call to say TNG was better, and it’s just as easy to say DS9 is better than TNG. All are good in their own ways but DS9 is a complete show in a way its predecessors weren’t. I don’t know why it isn’t part of the cultural canon they way the others are. I guess by the time it came around there had been enough Trek that people knew if they were going to like it or not, and self-sorted appropriately.

Welp, all done. Good use of 176 hours to watch, and mediocre use of however many hours to write them all up. I can’t really believe I bothered with the latter, but I’ve been glad to have done it, if not to be doing it. Thanks to anyone who read any of this for some reason!

Benjamin_Sisko_toasts_the_good_guysS7E23, “Extreme Measures” (David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

I had a theory for a while that Bashir would end up joining Section 31 when the show wrapped. Gave him a good resolution and possible but unlikely spinoff. But that theory has lost momentum as Section 31 has become increasingly shady. It’s clear Julian really hates them, actually, rather than considering them some kind of supercool spy outfit. It doesn’t help that their new thing is creating ultra-rare diseases that are killing one of his friends, and making him waste hours in bureaucratic hell as a way of passively-aggressively denying him any information. So he and O’Brien concoct some trickery, presuming any communications will be intercepted by Section 31. They send a false report that they found the cure, which they think will get Sloan to show up. They have a cunning plan to capture him, then, uh, somehow everything will work out fine.

Pretty much all of “Extreme Measures” is devoted to Bashir and O’Brien lurking around Sloan’s mind thanks to some kind of Romulan mind-probing technology designed to make mind-probing theatrically interesting. Certainly it beats the TOS approach of having sweaty guys yell out scrambled but pertinent information, or carefully arranging a bedsheet around Spock’s skull while McCoy swaps in some new wetware.

I thought this was a nice little SF mind twister, if a little arbitrarily dreamy in the way that any SF taking place in someone’s brain can be. I liked some of the bits, like Sloan’s ability to engage some sort of auto-suicide process, and the mini-twist when Bashir and O’Brien first think they’re out of the woods. It’s satisfying when they get to the end, prying the cure out of Sloan’s mind, even though we know they’re going to get there one way or another. Come on, they’re not killing off Odo, even three episodes from the series end.

This also gives me a chance to bring up the very retro-future idea that as late as 1999, it was thought that storing X units of information would necessitate X PADDs. They just couldn’t quite shake the analogy that PADDs were more like books than like computer disks, even though computer disks (and even rudimentary PDAs) already existed.

Anyway the episode mostly lets us enjoy one more run of the Bashir-O’Brien friendship. I like how the pairing has developed over the course of the series. Suddenly we’re at the end and it’s like, wait, these guys must be tremendous friends by now. Big crushing bear hugs all around, with lots of hearty slaps on the back.

Perfectly good Trek, a bit thinner than other stuff we’ve seen lately, but a solid 3 out of 5.

S7E24, “The Dogs of War” (Peter Allan Fields/René Echevarria & Ronald D. Moore)

A classic DS9 dead-serious A story paired with ludicrous B story frivolity.

Team Damar makes halting progress in their little rebellion game. This just spurs the Dominion to kill a whole lot more Cardassians in retribution. But they overplay their hand, and the streets rally behind Damar, bolstering them for a final push. This thread comes together really well. The cruelty of the Dominion is maybe a little absurd, and we certainly don’t have time in the penultimate episode to build out any stories about it to let it truly feel real, but the point comes across. The Dominion is jerks, is what it is. Feels like the right way for them to go down.

Meanwhile, Zek’s unfathomable oldness has finally prompted him to retire, and he’s on his way to DS9 to name a successor. Fittingly his message gets garbled by some laughably contrived static, of all things, but we’ve rolled with Ferengi nonsense for 171 episodes, what’s one more. Quark thinks he’s going to be Nagus, but of course, it’s Rom, who has embraced his mother’s progressive values, so Zek considers him more fit to take over. Quark doesn’t even want the gig because the Nagus’ reforms to liberate Fenergi society from its backward economic brutality have offended him so much. It’s inarguably better, just not what he’s used to, and he’d rather consider everyone else wrong than accept that it might just be him. So Rom’s ascension is completely agreeable conclusion, I think goes without saying.

Quark was my first favorite character in the series. I wrote something to the effect that he was having fun while everyone else was being a grownup. Naturally I have matured as a DS9 viewer. Well honestly Quark probably lost the Most Favored Character title to Odo as early as Season 2, so as it turned out, my interest in Quark was just a youthful fling. He’s been mostly a scoundrel and hard to really like. As the series ends, he might actually be my least favorite.

A satisfying one where everyone gets what’s coming to them, including Sisko, who gets a new Defiant. 4 out of 5.

S7E25/6, “What You Leave Behind” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

I happen to have hit the end of a bunch of things lately. Finished a Harry Potter re-read, Liu Cixin’s “A Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, a pretty big work project’s end. And now DS9, after two years! I feel comfortable saying that all of those things are great, and this has the best ending of any of them. It also has the best ending of any Trek series I’ve watched. TOS doesn’t really “end” so much as stop being produced. TNG has a very good ending but per my write up (which I’ll have to go on because I certainly don’t remember) it avoided much emotional stuff. DS9’s finale is a similarly fantastic episode but also generated a few genuine sniffles. Fitting, as it’s certainly the best Trek series. All I can really do is gush about its last chapter.

Our ongoing threads all coalesce. The war gets real and Damar/Kira/Garak’s guerilla campaign has both triumphs and setbacks. This could have all been just a lot of both land- and space-based laser battles in lesser hands, but it’s all so well-developed that the victories feel real. Fittingly the Dominion’s downfall comes about when they yet another evil short-term fix over long-term strategy. This has been coming for a while really. Things weren’t looking good, then Dukat got the Cardassians involved in a very shaky alliance. It was getting dicey again, so they brought on the Breen. That de-stabilized things, along with the brutally punitive reaction to the Cardassian rebellion, ultimately turning the Cardassians back against them and costing them the war. Some really good moments, like Martok basking in the piles of bodies and wreckage while Sisko and Ross suddenly aren’t in the mood to party.

The only odd fit to me was the Winn/Dukat thing. They kinda got stuck on the pacing of this, having to portray Dukat and Winn’s trek to the fire caves over approximately the same time frame as the entire war’s conclusion and treaty signings, including Sisko’s turning up at the end to settle things. I also was sorta glad not to have to bother seeing Dukat’s offscreen redemption in the streets, although I wonder how he managed to wander back into Winn’s office with ostensibly no guards or reception staff at all. (Again with Winn’s lousy administration skills!) But whatever, that’s finicky. I appreciated that it wasn’t a boilerplate story of Winn helping Dukat just long enough for him to murder her and run off armed with pah-wraiths. I still don’t get how the pah-wraiths are just in some caves, and the only way to get them out is in a book, and no one thought to just get rid of the bloody thing over the last 700 years. But again, it all serves the story. This was really the best way to finally kill of Dukat, and I liked the ambiguous Sisko victory.

The final sequence of our principals fondly remembering the last seven years of their lives (but somehow not Jadzia) absolutely had potential to get schmaltzy, but to the continued credit of the show, wasn’t that at all. We love all of these dorks and will miss them, too. (Even Jake, whom we discover was still on the show.) They really pressed on the O’Brien-Bashir friendship lately to the point where it seems like the saddest thing, even rivaling Sisko’s ending or Odo and Kira’s.

And oh how I loved the final scene between Odo and Quark. Quark just wants Odo to say he’ll miss him so badly, and Odo just won’t give him the pleasure. It’s so right that he ends it with his smarmy “Ha!” and trundles into the runabout. Nailed it. An easy 5 out of 5.

PS Probably I’ll do a wrap-up post on the show to summarize favorite episodes and compare to other series.