Phthursday Musings: Socks, Halls, Gyms

At Christmas time, people give each other gifts. That means that I give you something, you give me something, because that’s how it all goes.

Unfortunately for people around me, I am the kind of gift recipient who produces grave consternation. There are many reasons for this, and I won’t take a super deep dive into that, but my being difficult to buy for has been a theme for many, many years now.

Well, this year, I just went full-on Dad, and have encouraged my exasperated wife to buy me socks. I even went to a website and filled out the forms to help us figure out precisely which kinds of socks would be best.

Guys - and look, it’s almost always guys - I encourage you to do the same. We all wear socks, and therefore, we can all use socks, and socks are the sort of thing where we just blithely go get socks when we think we need them. This is different from ties, which frankly nobody needs. Good socks are worth so much more than crap socks. They provide warmth and comfort. These are way down the list on Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s worth the extra money to be comfortable.

Socks are in a realm along with some other things where people have a tendency to go cheap, but where we really should get good things. Another example: Pillows. We use a pillow every single day of our lives. If the difference between a crap pillow and a great pillow is $70, well, that $70 is spread out across every day of our lives, and why wouldn’t we pay a penny or two a day to get a better night’s sleep?

We just don’t think about things incrementally like this. We’re far more likely to get the next level up in a drink that’s gone in 20 minutes, or a leaf blower that’s used twice a year, than we are with something we use and would benefit from every day.

So ask for socks this holiday season. Be particular about what you like. If you need the bigger size, make that known. If you want added cushion, make that known. It’s worth it. You’re worth it.

Dick Allen passed away on Monday. He should have been in the Hall of Fame. He’s likely to get inducted, much like his one-time teammate Ron Santo: posthumously, and unnecessarily so.

Over the years I’ve more or less closely read the sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who a couple months ago was angrily complaining about the Hall of Fame putting off announcements of inductions for a year, arguing that a number of the people with a real chance of making it just might not make it another year. Pos gets worked up about a lot of things, but he doesn’t seem to get angry about a lot. And on this one, he was sadly proven correct.

Here’s the thing. Two years ago, if you’d mentioned Dick Allen to me, I’d have had only the most fleeting knowledge of the man, who was AL MVP for the White Sox in 1972, whose best (and in other ways worst) years were in Philadelphia, who was never a star on a glory team, and who was therefore just another name. But over the last couple of years I’ve reengaged with baseball, and with baseball history, and the Sox announcers Jason Benetti and Steve Stone love to talk baseball history. And Stoney especially loves to talk about Dick Allen. Between his moving descriptions of his former teammate, and where all else I’ve seen his name pop up the last couple of years, I’ve been easily convinced that Dick Allen was one of the most overlooked superstars of just-before-my-time - and definitely one of the most fascinating characters:

Like Pos, I’m an advocate of a big Hall. And thanks to Pos, I like him am an advocate of what I will call a Common Fucking Sense Approach to the Hall. If there’s ample reason to vote for a guy, and the guy is very close to getting in, stop splitting hairs, and put him in before he dies. It should have been one of the greatest of days in Chicago when Ron Santo was elected, but those fools put him in a year after he died. It should have been one of the greatest days in Chicago when Minnie Miñoso was elected, but those fools still haven’t gotten around to it - but just you watch him get inducted in 2021.

Joe Posnanski, incidentally, is counting down the 100 people not currently in the Hall who he would put into the Hall, in the order by which he would put them in. It’s in The Athletic so it’s behind a paywall, but try to sneak a glimpse somehow. I’ve learned so much from paying closer attention to Pos the last couple of years, especially about the Negro Leagues. I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming week. Stay tuned for The PosCult.

This week we - mostly me, but also D - achieved Level 40 in Pokémon GO. A month ago, this would have meant reaching the highest level. But they’ve now added 10 levels, and by my calculations, it’ll take approximately 317 years to get to Level 50. So it goes.

One of the aspects of the game, borrowed from the show, is the gym badge. To oversimplify, when you’re out in the world, a lot of spots on the map are Pokémon gyms. Common ones are statues, churches, parks, well-known buildings, and other highly visible landmarks. The same day we got to Level 40 we also got our 500th gym badge.

In the game, you can battle a gym, or you can leave one of your Pokémon behind to defend the gym. The very first time you visit a gym and interact with it at all, you get a badge. Over time that badge can go bronze, then silver, then gold. To get a gold badge for a gym, you might have to visit the same gym dozens of times. The same day we got to Level 40 and got our 500th gym badge, we also got our 22nd gold gym badge.

I find the gold gym badge to be the most interesting objective in the game. It’s like you’ve staked a given location as yours - and it’s not a virtual location, it’s an actual physical place, one you perhaps walk or drive past nearly every day. It’s a weird virtual manifestation of your very real existence going from place to place on the planet Earth.

I suspect that this lines up with how much I deeply love travel, but how I don’t actually go to a lot of typical tourist destinations. Over the course of the last ten years, I’ve been to California three times, but I’ve been to South Dakota five times. And I am always fascinated by wherever I go, whether it’s Laguna Beach or Clinton, Iowa. Pokémon GO has this strange quality of effectively treating every place like it matters pretty much the same relative to its population, which we can’t say about things like culture, media, or democracy…

Anyway, as relative latecomers, D and I haven’t really played the game with other people very much, and so it’s not something we’ve talked about a lot with people either. So I don’t know if my take on the gold gym badge is similar to others, or if it’s all just in my head. Perhaps one of you good people will weigh in on this.

For what it’s worth, I’ve found Pokémon GO to be very helpful in keeping myself from losing my mind the last few months. I’ve used it a means to force myself out on walks at times when I wasn’t getting much physical activity any other way. It might be silly to think in such terms, and it’s probably not the best thing for someone with OCD tendencies like me, but hey, whatever. It’s 2020, we all get by however we get by.

Pro tip:

Do not call your wife Home Lady.

She will not appreciate it.

I got an email this week from Matador Records. They’re reissuing Bailter Space’s 1995 album Wammo on orange vinyl. (If you get it from Flying Nun Records in New Zealand, you can get it on limited edition green vinyl.)

I am not sure how this will sell more than 19 copies, but I am very curious to meet the buyers. I won’t be one, as I don’t own a turntable, and see no point in buying the vinyl version of something I already have on CD. But surely someone will buy this. Someone will even buy both the orange vinyl and the green vinyl.

A couple of us had the distinct pleasure of seeing Bailter Space live in Champaign in 1997. Before the show, we interviewed the band, and even got a station ID out of them. It was not a particularly useful interview or ID, as Alister Parker was blasted on some unknown substance, but it was definitely a good time.

I’ve been on and off obsessed with all things Kiwi for almost 25 years now. That my entry into such an obsession was a fuzzed out shoegaze / space-rock band from Christchurch is probably not too terribly common, but who knows. Maybe one day I’ll actually make it there and see New Zealand for myself.

Anyway, here’s the video for “Splat”. It’s bloody good stuff: