Heavy, Heavy Fuel : Tuesday Open Thread

My life makes perfect sense
Lust and food and violence

Dire Straits, Heavy Fuel

I was born during a snowstorm. I grew up walking through canyons of ice so deep I could not see over, left behind when our neighbor would carve a trench down the sidewalk of our block with his snowblower and the sides would freeze. I learned the signs of frostbite before I learned to swim.

Since recording started in 1870, it has never hit 100 degrees in Buffalo, New York.

My parents are from the Northeast, and my ancestry traces to northern England on one side and into the winter wastelands that spat out Napoleon and Hitler on the other.

All this is to say that I am not built for hot weather, neither by nature or nuture.

And yet here I labor, along with much of the US population, under The Heat Dome.

Crotch-pot cooking indeed, Roosevelt. I am waiting for the carpet of drying cicada corpses in my backyard to spontaneously combust and bring this miserable season to it’s deserving fiery climax.

I bring this up for two reasons:

1. I enjoy bitching about things to strangers on the internet, and

2. Due to a confluence of Heat Dome, draconian Return to Work policies and a broke-dick cooling system, I am currently sweating my tits off with six hundred of my closest friends and enemies as I try not to tell opposing counsel precisely how far (and in what manner) he can stick his proposed “minor revisions” up his ass.

Needless to say, even my famously even temperament is being Tested.

Speaking of being tested, good luck tonight to the Edmonton Oilers in trying to avoid the Gentleman’s Sweep in /spit Broward County. The Mavericks fell flat on their asses last night after their Dead Cat Bounce in Game 4; angry as I am at the theft of Connor McDavid, Hot Weather Hockey should never prosper.

NEWS

-And someday our grandchildren and great grandchildren will ask “Pop-Pop, what was it like? Where were you when the Birmingham Stallions won the inaugural United Football League Championship over the San Antonios Brahmas?” And we will say unto them “Shut the hell up and get me my psychotron headset. It’s almost time for Wheel of Fortune.”

Seriously though- cheers to the league for making it through a full season. It wasn’t good football, but it was football.

-Speaking of Not Good Football, the Niners continue confounding expectations by pissing on the feet of key contributor Brandon Aiyuk.

Aiyuk is set to make $14 million in the last year of his rookie contract. Not chump change, by any account, but roughly half his likely market value. They have been unwilling to trade Aiyuk so far, and it sounds like they are not close to giving him what he wants for a long-term deal. According to Aiyuk, who held out of minicamp, the Niners “said they don’t want me back.”

The Niners plainly do want him back. The general interpretation of Aiyuk’s statement has been that the Niners don’t want to do what it would take to get him back (i.e. pony up AJ Brown/ Amon-Ra money).

Which is fucking stupid. Yes, they have him cheap this year and can probably retain him next year for $22-25 million on a franchise tag. But you have the cap space. The market isn’t going to get cheaper, he’s 26, and he’s an essential part of the supporting cast that makes Brock Purdy work. No offense to Purdy, but not one of us is going to be surprised if he regresses to average-or-worse without the collection of talent he has to work with right now. So don’t take that chance. Pay the man his goddamned money.

WHAT’S ON TONIGHT:

Imma watch something cooling, like Volcano (starring Tommy Lee Jones)