That is pretty much a perfect GIF. Wow.

Independent-minded country music, usually with a little extra boogie to it, a little less radio-friendly sheen, with about a third the crowd of the big radio stars. More often than not, boils down to Austin vs. Nashville, southwest vs. Deep South, but not always. Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses is a good place to…

Basically a 25,000-person big frat party, so the story goes. Lots of a certain type of entitled white person getting butt-faced, and everything that follows from there.

Yeah, man. Songwriter country and (actual) outlaw country that doesn’t get played on the radio are fantastic crowds because those are music fans, not beer-drinking fans. I used to live in Nashville, and the local songwriter country and outlaw country shows were often borderline amazing, but when the CMAs rolled into…

The good people of Cincinnati are never going to move on because that’s not what people do in southwestern Ohio. He was the Glory Days Superhero for a whole lot of people whose lives haven’t gotten a whole hell of a lot better in the intervening decades, and so he’s become the mascot for hardworking Midwestern folk…

I used to work bartending at concerts in Milwaukee, and long-time co-workers said time and again that the absolute worst crowds of any stripe at the outdoor amphitheaters and bigger festivals around Wisconsin (99% white outside of Milwaukee and Madison) are:

I’ve never seen a bottle of booze go faster than a liter of Fireball around a table of fifteen in a hotel lobby lounge following a friend’s rehearsal dinner last year. Think the represented ages were something like 28 to 33, and that fucker was opened and gone in about ten minutes. And it’s not like anyone was trying…

That opening Up montage, man. Holy shit.

There’s the Jewish angle here, from Stein’s particular perspective. I’ve seen it a few other places on the Interwebs since this Lebron/Blatt drama first became a thing late last year, with David Roth being but one Jewish guy who’s also mentioned it. Basically, there’s a certain feeling among some Jewish sportswriters…

No Cleveland starters should’ve taken the floor in the fourth quarter of Game 4, at least in part to help Blatt sort this out:

Two things:

Anyone else catch a whiff of Richie Tennennbaum at Windswept Fields in that final game from Nadal? A certain, “Fuck it, this is over”? I swear there was a moment where you could see the life go out of him. That final double fault was both sad and painful.

But without ever having anything remotely close to Antoine Walker’s peak, yes.

Hey no for real though, Bill Simmons does suck.

Also lost in this telling of what the Hawks are is that they rabidly chased Chris Paul and Dwight Howard, and guys like Milsap and Teague (whose restricted tender with Milwaukee management took all the way down to the final minutes before matching) were cost-effective fall-back options when they couldn’t do any better.

The only answer to the reunion question is “Never go to any reunion.”

Again, seems a matter of scale. When you couldn’t get it east of the Mississippi, it always tasted like liquid mountain sunshine, but part of that had to do with scarcity and smaller production capacity. Now, it just sort of tastes overworked, and there are a million better ambers and red pales that suit the flavor…

Not in Nashville. When it showed up, everyone noticed.

I remember when this shit hit the market where I lived in 2007 (Nashville), it was the bombest thing ever. Along with Fat Tire, it kind of came through at the vanguard of the Craft Beer Revolution. I distinctly remember loving it at first, but I also think that had a lot to do with the other choices at most bars being…

He’ll have a better time than the poor schmuck who had to market Tampa Bay-Calgary a decade ago. Anaheim is basically Los Angeles, after all...