Week: 🍻Bevuary🍸

Feb 03, 2024

The rumors of my demise have been ~~greatly~~ exaggerated.

Look. 2023 was the hardest year of my life. It’s no surprises it’s been 362 days since I last dabbed over here1. I’ve always found it hard to do the living and do the writing at the same time. And those 362 days have definitely been getting it all from me.

Nothing exactly catastrophic, per se. Not directly anyway. But last week marked the first week me and my wife have both worked 5 days in a week and our kid has been on daycare all 5 days in a week since July. A holiday here, a Covid shutdown there. A wedding back in Texas. One of them Deep Vein Thrombosis things. (#hotcompressionsocksummer) A family reunion back in Texas. A Labor Day trip to Florida aborted at the JFK curb due to the 10th toddler vomit. A father in law aging. A work conference. Dragging an aging father in law out of his house and to a facility in Brooklyn. A girls trip. A couple of funerals.

And the next thing you know, you’re out of rhythm. And getting out of rhythm is its own punishment.

Rhythm

Here’s a thing I found down the YouTube rabbit hole this week that I have watched 4 times all the way through and about half the videos in this series. They are wonderful.

Some fucking moron got my 2 year old daughter a drum kit for Christmas. And I am that fucking moron.

Let’s go rapid fire.

Substack and Nazis

I don’t know enough. Other than I don’t like Nazis.

Premier League officiating

Woof.

We’ve actually been watching a lot of the NFL playoffs, after I took about a decade off from American football. Granted the games with the oblong football are more boring. But I’ve also noticed I almost always feel like the NFL refs have the game under control. Like some Tuck Rule shit will come up and they’ll pretty much always call it right at the time. No matter how obscure it is.

I watch A LOT of Premier League football. I ABSOLUTELY NEVER feel like I am about to see a rule applied in the same way I just saw it applied. I’m still dwelling on a City goal against Liverpool from about 3 years ago where City had 4 players offside, but the goal scorer was on the other side of the box, onside, scored and it counted. Now, when I see a goal scored, I feel like there’s a 10 percent chance I will see it waved off because some dumb shit happened like the goalie was offside starting the play at the other end 6 passes ago.

Do I feel like there’s an anti-Liverpool bias. Not exactly. I do think to get goals waved off you have to … you know … score the goal in the first place. Burnley not sitting around bitching about having 15 goals waved off or anything.

But I do think the system definitely needs fixing. Here’s what I would do:

Increase their pay 300 percent.
There’s lots of variance in Google results, but let’s pretend this is a true statement: “Top referees such as Howard Webb and Mark Clattenburg were earning as much as £120,000 per year while refereeing because of their experience and number of matches they officiated.”
That’s about $150,000 today.
ALLEGEDLY, Brad Allen is the highest paid NFL ref at $250,000.
ALLEGEDLY, James Capers is the highest paid NBA ref at $550,000.
ALLEGEDLY, the top MLB ump makes $450,000.
I know picking the highest paid of each league is statistically flawed. It’s also the easiest info I could find.
It’s no wonder it’s fucking amateur hour out there. Many work day jobs. I’m sure they suck at those too.
Switch ‘em up.
I’d take the top 5 leagues in Europe and do a random draw. Ok, this year, England has French refs. Ligue 1 has Italian refs. Bundesliga has English refs. France has Spaniards. Whoever I left off has whoever I left off … Whatever.
I get so sick of the talk of, “oh this guy grew up a Man U fan, so he can’t be fair to us …” Do I believe any of that? Not really. Do I have a good way to fix it? Yeah. I just told it to you.
My guess is something like this has never been tried because it makes too much goddamned sense.