Author: Greg Habeeb

Categories
Football

Growing Gains

Last year around this time, I wrote about Tom Brady and the internal conflict of rooting for someone who meant so much to me for two decades, even though that person no longer played for the team I care about. It was the first post in this blog’s history (a history that also includes a breakdown of Harry Potter’s Quidditch career and a dissertation of how Real Housewives of New York reflects the decline of American society for those interested), and a lot of words to basically say “I wish Tom Brady was still on the Patriots, and I wish him the best in Tampa, but I’m still like 30% salty about this whole thing”. I probably could have saved a lot of time and energy by just posting Doug and Jem’s fight from The Town and calling it a day:

Behold, the most Bostonian pronunciation of Florida (Affleck’s “Flahridahr”) ever filmed.
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Categories
Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2021

I spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time listening to music this year. According to the data from Apple Music (yes, I’m one of those people), I listened for 1,023 hours in 2021, and that’s just from that streaming service. Naturally, absorbing that much music is going to lead to likes, dislikes, and opinions ranging from “pretty agreeable” to “this is an insane person”. With the year coming to a close, I figured it’d be a worthwhile exercise to give my top ten albums, plus a few honorable mentions, for this past year. Please note: this is a totally arbitrary list, meaning I’m not entirely sure if it’s the ten best albums I listened to over the last 365-ish days, or my ten favorite, or just the ten I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Either way, here’s my year-end list for 2021. Hopefully you, my dear reader, will find something new that you might have missed, or be reminded of a great album from earlier this year that’s worth revisiting. On to the good stuff!

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Categories
Album Review

Review: Red (Taylor’s Version)

There’s something special about an album that, upon listening, recalls an extraordinarily specific time and place. The first few seconds of the first track blare over your headphones, speakers, or whatever listening apparatus is handy, and suddenly you’re instantly transported from wherever you are right now to wherever you were when you initially heard that collection of songs.

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Categories
Baseball

Disappointed But Not Surprised

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 18: J.D. Martinez #28 of the Boston Red Sox is unable to catch a single off the bat of Gary Sanchez #24 of the New York Yankees in the second inning at Yankee Stadium on August 18, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

Baseball, more than any other sport, is truly Shakespearean. Everything happens so gradually, so deliberately, it’s almost impossible to actually be surprised. Even the best plot twists have been foreshadowed ad nauseam, and are less twists than the culmination of an entire play’s worth of intentional choices and actions. We’re not supposed to be shocked by Hamlet’s death, nor Romeo and Juliet’s death, or the end of Richard III’s reign. We’re supposed to reflect on all of the little moments that led to that grand, tragic finale. Baseball is no different. A 162 game season, containing three-and-half-hour marathons with hundreds of pitches and no game clock, leads to end results that may not have been expected in April, but by the time October rolls around are logical conclusions deduced from dozens of key moments over the course of a long campaign.

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Categories
Album Review

Cosmic Heroes and Average Joes: Teens of Denial, Five Years Later

Last spring, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, I binged Watchmen, both the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the HBO miniseries sequel from Damon Lindelof. For the uninitiated, the stories take place in an alternate history in which masked vigilantes are real and the norm. It’s a rich world with incredibly complex characters, and isn’t afraid to tackle huge moral, philosophical, and psychological questions.

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Categories
movies + tv

Amazon Prime’s Invincible and the Rise of the Anti-Superhero

There’s a case to be made that “College”, the fifth episode of The Sopranos‘ first season, is the most important television episode of the last 25 years. For those who need a refresher, it’s the episode where Tony takes Meadow on a few college tours in Maine, while Carmela stays home and has an almost-dalliance with Father Phil during a thunderstorm. While in Maine, Tony spots a former rat of his mob Family at a gas station, and, because this is what the mafia does, the trip turns from a fun father-daughter bonding weekend into a vengeance mission that ultimately concludes with Tony strangling the rat (named Febby Petrulio) in Petrulio’s own witness-protection-gifted backyard.

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Categories
Football

Julian Edelman, Dustin Pedroia, and the Glory Days of Grit

Julian Edelman’s retirement earlier this week was far from a surprise. If anything the writing was on the wall last week, when Patriots beat writer Karen Guregian reported that Edelman was unlikely to be able to play the entirety of the upcoming 2021 season due to the “chronic” knee issues that plagued him last year. So, on Monday when news broke that the Patriots were terminating their star wideout’s contract, I didn’t bat an eye (okay fine, maybe it was a half wink situation). I knew what was coming next.

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Categories
Basketball

Wildest Dreams

Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

How awesome is it having March Madness back?

That’s obviously a rhetorical question, for two reasons. First, the ol’ blog post format doesn’t exactly allow for much back and forth discourse. More importantly, though, there’s no need to give a real answer here because the only response should be self-evident:

It’s truly, deeply, intrinsically, exceptionally, fucking awesome.

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Categories
Basketball

Back From The Brink

via MATTHEW J LEE / BOSTON GLOBE STAFF

At 8:10 p.m. on Wednesday, February 24th, I was convinced the Boston Celtics would never win another basketball game again. I’m not talking about this winter, or this season. I was thinking about the rest of eternity, and that the C’s were on the cusp of ceasing to exist, like the Kentucky Colonels or an unsuspecting large Dunkin’ iced around Ben Affleck. These are the thoughts one has when Danilo Gallinari turns into a human three-point tsunami in the midst of a blowout loss to the Hawks.

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Categories
movies + tv

Seeking The Truth

The best 90s Gryffindor Quidditch player, and Harry Potter.

It was the autumn of 1991. George H.W. Bush was president of the United States, The Jerry Springer Show had just made its television debut, and Nirvana’s Nevermind was setting the music world on fire. And, in an undisclosed location in the highlands of Scotland, The Boy Who Lived began attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

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