The NBA's crybaby problem

The Golden State Warriors are a great basketball team, but they---and the league---have a crybaby problem that makes watching their games increasingly a mixed pleasure. 

Almost every NBA player is used to being a star in high school and college before the NBA, which means that the league is full of prima donnas. (You called a foul on me?) Seems like every foul call gets an outraged reaction from the player who commits the foul, which is almost always verified by instant replay.

Coach Steve Kerr has recognized the problem ("It's absolutely too much") and even admitted last week that a team meeting on the issue would be "a good idea." Did he hold that meeting?

How do you tell a bunch of highly-paid prima donnas---the average NBA salary is over six million dollars!---to quit whining at the referees after every fucking call? I suspect he didn't really try.

By the way, kissing your boss's ass is a bad look for Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant, e.g. Vice President Pence.

Turning out napkin rings

Amazon

After all that family fun and awful Christmas music, it's time for some bracing negative thinking from Gustave Flaubert, thanks, if that's the mot juste, to Julian Barnes:

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

What an awful thing life is, isn't it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.

I still carry on turning out my sentences, like a bourgeois turning out napkin rings on a lathe in his attic. It gives me something to do, and it affords me some private pleasure.

Paul Bagley

Thanks to Politico.