ISSUE #78 - July 26th, 2019

ONE

NOSTALGIA - Baseball is slow. Baseball is regional. Baseball has no crossover stars. Yup, it must be late July, a time of year when coming up with ideas to fix our national past time becomes a national past time. On that note, I have one idea: Let's encourage Barry Bonds to chug steroids and make a comeback.  I'm only 10% kidding. At the time, everyone outside of San Francisco just wanted him gone...but the man was must-watch. He created news. He was a star. Just go back to the early 2000s... Bonds playing the Yankees was an EVENT. And then, with everyone watching he hit this 4,000' home run into the the 3rd deck at the old stadium. Twenty years later and it's still a signature moment in modern baseball.

TWO

 GENIUS - It's not often that I have an idea so brilliant that a major company gets on board to promote it, but when it does happen (this is the first time), I have to share it... It involves vacations and photos and a great way to make your future self happy and one of my favorite apps, Evernote.  Here's the idea: When I'm on vacation I like to take a few pictures every day and send them to my future self at random dates and times weeks and months away. It's goofy, I know... But then one day you'll be at your desk two months later and an awesome photo of a fun memory will pop up and make you smile. I shared this idea and tagged Evernote, since I uses their app to schedule the posts, and then they liked the idea so much that they shared the picture of me and my son here. Just try it. Trust me. Your future self will thank you.

THREE

MOVIES - Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon felt about the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? Or how they got all those amazing shots of Bacon, Hanks and Paxton weightless in Apollo 13? Or what it was like to film the "You Can't Handle the Truth" scene in A Few Good Men?  These are among the maybe 20 awesome stories that Bacon tells as a guest on the Bill Simmons podcast. He goes into that stuff, his time with Belushi in Animal House, what it was like when Footloose became a sensation and so much more... Highly recommend listening to this if you're a movie fan. It's a fascinating interview on 40 years of movies. *The interview starts around the 39-minute mark if you don't care to hear Simmons talk about the NBA or Brooks Koepka.

FOUR

FITNESS - This one's for my fellow meatheads out there (all of you, right?). Ever been curious about how many slams a slam ball can take? I always figured that you'd need vice-grip like hands and jackhammer-like arms and Ford F-150 engine legs to have enough raw horsepower to slam a slam ball hard enough that it rips open...  Now, I'm not saying you don't need those things to slam a slam ball on the ground with such thunder and power that it splits, but i'm not, not saying you don't need those things. All I know is that this week my slam ball was slammed for the last time. There was a split. And sand sprayed. And it was...triumphant. And the crowd went wild... Now it's on to the next one... I did my research and just picked up this 25lb orb of pain.

FIVE

A GREAT QUOTE ABOUT BASEBALL AND LIFE

"You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of a man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it."  -- Roger Kahn