Daily Digest |  |
| Posted: 01 May 2022 07:22 AM PDT (John Hinderaker) Last night 19,000 fight fans packed Madison Square Garden for a title bout. Dave Portnoy said the pre-fight atmosphere “may be the most electric environment I have ever been in.” Here is his brief video shot shortly before the action began:
Except that the boxers were women: Katie Taylor, who entered the bout undefeated at 20-0, and Amanda Serrano, who came in at 42-1-1. The fight was at 135 pounds and five belts were at stake. The fighters put on a great show. Women fight two-minute instead of three-minute rounds, and a title match is 10 rather than 12 rounds. The result is non-stop action. The Garden crowd last night was on its feet throughout, roaring its appreciation for the fighters. Lots of pro boxers watched the fight and tweeted about it. Caleb Truax, for one, tweeted: “Guys…That’s the F****** FIGHT OF THE YEAR!” The action was furious, with Serrano mostly the aggressor throughout. The early rounds were anyone’s call. In the fifth Serrano staggered Taylor and it looked like she might take her out, but Taylor managed to survive. Taylor was still wobbly in the sixth, but came back strongly in the later rounds. The result was a split decision, 2-1 for Katie Taylor. I thought Serrano probably won the fight, although that was just impression and I didn’t make a serious attempt to score it. Dave Portnoy agreed:
There no doubt will be a rematch, as both fighters agreed immediately afterward. Sportsmanship is generally at a high level in boxing, and that was especially true last night. Serrano and Taylor embraced when the final bell rang, and in their comments afterward saw themselves as partners in the development of women’s boxing. I have not been a fan of women’s boxing, mostly on principle because I don’t like the idea of women getting hit as a form of entertainment. But it is impossible not to appreciate the athletic skill and courage of fighters like Taylor and Serrano. There is no question that last night’s fight was a great sporting event. This video from DAZN, which broadcast the fight, is 15 minutes of highlights. In truth, the whole fight was a highlight. I will post the complete bout if a video becomes available. Meanwhile, here it is. Buckle your seat belt:
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| Talkin’ ’bout their (money) generation Posted: 01 May 2022 06:39 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Last week John posted the email chain between Hunter Biden and his attorney about the Biden blues. Hunter’s lawyer was at the Faegre Baker Daniels firm where John worked for 42 years. I overlapped there with John when it was still Faegre and Benson but somehow missed the email chain when the New York Post first unearthed it from the infamous laptop. I am reposting it at the bottom of this post in case you missed it. As a first-year lawyer at Faegre and Benson, a family friend with serious legal issues and the resources to pay for representation to resolve them asked me to represent him. A senior partner at the firm advised me not to take the case because he had dealt with my prospective client as an adverse party and thought him less than credible. The senior partner is now deceased, but I wonder what he would have had to say about the firm’s representation of Hunter Biden. I somehow doubt that he would have passed muster. They used to care, but (in the words of the Dylan song) “things have changed.” John took up the Faegre connection in “My old firm is in the news.” He noted that the Faegre lawyer appears to be a friend of Biden and something of a jack of all trades, working on Biden’s divorce obligations as well as other legal and personal issues. Biden owed the firm over $130,000 for work including the restructuring of BHR — Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company. As John explained, BHR is “one of the Chinese entities in which Hunter (and perhaps Joe) had an interest.” John posted the documents below.
The New York Post is of course the key player in the revelation of the Biden family business, with Peter Schweizer making his own contributions along the way. The Post takes up recent Biden family business revelations (“including bills related to [Hunter Biden’s] overseas businesses”) in the editorial “Joe Biden sure looks like he's lying about Hunter's biz.” The text of the editorial (“[Biden] has been outright lying”) is more blunt than the headline and it is clearly correct. Moreover, as the editorial observes, “The incuriosity of most media institutions on all this remains appalling.” The term “all this” is something of a euphemism. For “all this,” read “the CCP connection” and “the Biden family business” or “the Biden family corruption.”  |
| Posted: 01 May 2022 04:16 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) We went to see Robbie Fulks perform with his bluegrassy quartet at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis this past Thursday evening. We sat at table 150, right in front of Fulks. I snapped the photo from our table while he was bathed in blue lights (sorry about that). We loved the show. You may well ask, however, who is Robbie Fulks? He is a brilliant songwriter and entertaining performer. His wry sense of humor is a prominent feature of his songwriting and virtually everything he said during the show was funny as well. I found him to be hilarious, even in his unscripted engagement with the audience, many of whose members had previously attended his shows in less deluxe venues and helped him recall the names of the Twin Cities bars he had played as he ticked them off. He observed that the dirtiest part of the Dakota was cleaner than the cleanest part of the (late) 400 Bar. I give him especially high marks for being funny in rhyme put to music — there is a high degree of difficulty attached — but he isn’t only funny. He is drenched in the tradition of country music to which he applies his own offbeat alt-country spin. He is also bright enough to have made it to Columbia University as an undergraduate. However, he heard Greenwich Village calling his name. He dropped out after two years to pursue his career in music. Looking around the room during the show, I stupidly thought to myself that only fans of Fulks’s work must be in attendance and wondered how they had heard of him. On the way out, however, as we swung by the merchandise table, I laughed when I heard a member of the audience telling Fulks how much he enjoyed the show even though he’d never heard of him before. It occurred to me that a few readers who have never heard of him before might appreciate a brief introduction to his work. His Allmusic profile by Steve Huey provides the essential background. Huey introduces Fulks this way: “Singer/songwriter Robbie Fulks is one of the more heralded talents in the alternative country movement, displaying an offbeat, sometimes dark sense of humor in many of his best moments. While Fulks’ best-known songs are often bitingly funny, he also has a gift for writing incisive, evocative material in the country and pop traditions.” Huey’s profile gives a good sense of the range of his career to date. I can’t touch all the corners of his career here, but I thought I would compile one track from each of the studio recordings released under his name just for fun. Picking only one track has been the hardest part. In the event that any one of these strikes your fancy, please check out the disc in its entirety. You are sure to find more to your liking where it came from. If I hadn’t heard “The Buck Starts Here” on Minneapolis’s mini public radio station KFAI back in the ’90’s, I would never have heard of Fulks. He may be an acquired taste, but from the first time I heard it I loved the song, both drenched in the country tradition and paying tribute to it at the same time. I found the disc in stock at Electric Fetus and was not disappointed. That’s Buck Owens who “starts here, with Hank sure to follow.” The song is from Fulks’s first disc, Country Love Songs. The KFAI host had a discerning ear. Fulks played “Tears Only Run One Way” from the disc during his show Thursday evening. South Mouth is full of highlights. “Forgotten But Not Gone” is one of them. Let’s Kill Saturday Night both raised and lowered the curtain on Fulks’s appearance on a major label (Geffen Records). The Allmusic reviewer assesses the title cut to be a charging rocker that is turned into “a cut-rate Bruce Springsteen parody.” I think that is a bit unfair, to say the least. It’s a song out of a rock genre. I value the anger coursing through it at full price and think it’s a helluva track. The Dakota audience was deeply into it on Thursday night. The title of the Very Best of Robbie Fulks is a joke, like Phil Ochs’s Greatest Hits. The disc compiles some of Fulks’s previously uncollected work. You can hear him working the tradition in “I Just Want to Meet the Man.” It’s goes over the top, but the pedal steel kills. He followed up with the highly regarded Couples In Trouble. Let’s go with “Mad At a Girl.” On 13 Hillbilly Giants Fulks’s respect for the tradition manifested itself in a project reclaiming lesser known country songs of the ’50’s and 60’s. “Bury the Bottle With Me” was written by Hank Cochran. Fulks then produced the fantastic various artists’ compilation Touch My Heart — A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck (Sugar Hill Records). See what I mean about respect for the tradition? He recruited an outstanding cast of artists including Neko Case, George Jones, Buck Owens, Bobby Bare, Mavis Staples, Hank Williams III and pedal steel legend Lloyd Green for the project. He paired himself with Gail Davies on “Shakin’ the Blues.” They do not shake the humor. Georgia Hard is full of good tracks. “It’s Always Raining Somewhere” works the vein of anger again along with the humor. Excuse me for repeating myself, but it’s a helluva track. Shouldn’t this have been a hit for someone? Now we come to a surprising turn in the road. Fulks released Happy: Robbie Fulks Plays the Music of Michael Jackson on his own label (Boondoggle). The name of his label reflects his sense of humor, but there’s nothing funny about his cover of “Billie Jean” or the disc itself. I won’t repeat myself, but I will confess that I’m thinking it. Fulks said of the project: "The record is not so much about Michael Jackson but having an open spirit about music." That “open spirit about music” is the keynote. Fulks’s most recent discs show him at the top of his form. “When You Get To the Bottom” is from Gone Away Backward. As Chicago’s Bloodshot label puts it: “The album is rooted deeply in the interplay between Fulks and a brilliant cast of Appalachian-style slingers: Robbie Gjersoe, Jenny Scheinman, Mike Bub, and Ron Spears, collectively playing banjo, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, and adding airtight and warm vocal harmonies.” Fulks mentioned his roots in North Carolina in connection with his performance of “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals” Thursday night. This is from Upland Stories. Fulks recorded Wild! Wild! Wild! with Linda Gail Lewis, the younger sister of Jerry Lee Lewis. “I Just Lived a Country Song” is below. The writing, the humor, the singing, the respect for the tradition….not Wild! Perfect! He played it with feeling on Thursday night. Sunday morning thought: “Excuse me if I’m late for heaven…” Back near the beginning of his career Fulks was a member of the Chicago bluegrass group Special Consensus. He mentioned that he has finished recording a bluegrass disc with a large cast of guest artists including Alison Brown that is to be released early next year. I’m looking forward to the release and hope to see him if he passes through town again to promote it. In the meantime, he has posted his upcoming tour dates here.  |
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