NowLoop

Dan’s mom here. While I hope to thank everyone more formally, for so many of you it won’t be possible; I don’t know how to reach you. So I thought I’d reach you the way my Dan did—through the online written word. To the Defector staff and readers, former Daily Pennsylvanian staff and UPenn community,…

Excuse me while I go Dave McKenna mode: I watched Jose Alvarado as a high school star in Queens nearly a decade ago. His team at Christ the King Regional High School took on Bishop Loughlin, another local powerhouse, in the Brooklyn-Queens Catholic High School Athletic Association semifinal back in February 2017. I paid $5 to get into a very loud gym, and distinctly recall thinking to myself that it was the best basketball game I'd ever attended in New York City, at any level. Aptly for the city, it was a battle between two slight, speedy, hard-nosed point guards: the 5-foot-11 Alvarado and the 5-foot-7 Markquis Nowell. But Alvarado fouled out at the end of regulation, and Loughlin pulled away in double overtime, 98-90. I knew then that Alvarado was headed for Georgia Tech; I had no idea he'd eventually carve out a role in the NBA as a point-of-attack dog. Watching him break out for the New Orleans Pelicans in the 2021-22 season was a delight. I often thought back to that raucous gym in Queens as Alvarado thrived in his pro career, needling opposing ball-handlers, talking prolific shit, answering real-time questions about his shooting ability, and even establishing his own signature steal—creeping around in the backcourt to ambush the inbounds pass. That whole Pelicans season was a rush. Head coach Willie Green came aboard and led a Zion Williamson-less squad through the play-in and into the postseason, where Alvarado got to torment Chris Paul on the national stage. He was one of many cool new faces on the team, alongside Herb Jones and Trey Murphy. The undersized scrappy guard had found his niche in the league, finessing his two-way deal into $6.5 million guaranteed. This year's Pelicans were headed nowhere in particular, so Alvarado was rumored as a New York Knicks trade target for much of this season. Just a few hours before the Thursday deadline, this Queens kid was sent back home, in exchange for Dalen Terry, two second-round picks, and cash. Alvarado should bring an edge to a Knicks team that often coasts on a vague reputation of toughness, without consistently embodying it on the floor. The timing also could not be better, as guard Miles McBride has just been sidelined for a core muscle surgery that will likely keep him out until the playoffs. Alvarado will have some time to slide into McBride's minutes and give head coach Mike Brown an energetic demon in the backcourt. Judging by Alvarado's wholesome postgame interview after his Madison Square Garden debut in 2022, he'll be pretty keen on suiting up there as the home team.

Well well well. Well WELL well! My sources tell me it's a big weekend for the Bay Area, in the sense that luminaries such as Bad Bunny, Tom Brady, and Kalyn Kahler have descended upon San Francisco to be within an hour's drive of the Super Bowl, which will be held in Santa Clara next to an electrical substation so big, it got a kooky guy to write a blog post about how its electromagnetism was weakening the load-bearing tissues of various 49ers players; the theory espoused in said blog post is now influential enough that it's been covered by The Athletic (former employer of Kalyn Kahler), ESPN (current employer of Kalyn Kahler), and NBC News (no known affiliation with Kalyn Kahler, but I wouldn't rule it out). I didn't know electricity could do stuff like that, but as a lifelong PG&E customer, I also wouldn't rule out some volto-thaumaturgy on their part. Perhaps you have some questions. What? would be a good one, Why? another, though as experienced readers of this semi-proud, always annual, often-strained column know, we are concerned with a different interrogative: When? The Super Bowl's geographic fixity is far above our pay grade, but its temporal situation less so. As always, the start of the game is less important to us than the start of the real game, which is the brutal scrabble among the decreasing number of search traffic–focused websites to inform their readers what time the game starts. If you google any form of that question, you will see a big box right below the search bar telling you exactly what time it starts (that is, unless you see the Gemini logo immediately preceding Google's proprietary AI cheerily telling you Super Bowl 60 is scheduled to take place on April 6, 1841). Yet the game persists. Several websites, most notably CBS Sports, will refresh the timestamps of a handful of identical posts, making it difficult to track with great precision. What follows is as faithful an attempt as I can make. All times Eastern; time stamps are as accurate as I could find from the source code.

When Emerson Jaquish’s mother decided 10 years ago to get a Saluki, the contract for the dog said that the canine needed to be “shown.” In other words, if they were to buy the dog, they would be contractually obligated to enter it at dog shows. So at the age of 9, Emerson entered into the ring for the first time, showing her family dog. She began to learn show-dog handling from renowned dog trainer Jody Davidson, who trained many of the junior-level handlers in Arizona. From there, she excelled, eventually qualifying for the Westminster Dog Show several times in the Junior Showmanship category. Ten years on, Emerson is still in the ring, although she typically shows dachshunds now. Dog shows have become her life. She works as an assistant handler under Erin Karst, a professional handler. She attends online college, which gives her the flexibility to work full-time for Karst. “I try to get all my schoolwork done on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, so that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I can focus on the dog shows,” Emerson tells me. I ask her to estimate how much time she spends getting ready for attending dog shows each week. She laughs. “All of it? It’s one big, continuous loop, pretty much.” At the average show, she and Karst manage around a dozen dogs.

On Sept. 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore fired two bullets at then-President Gerald Ford. They were in San Francisco, outside a hotel. Moore missed her first shot, but seeing an opportunity, took another. She missed that one, too. An ex-Marine named Oliver Sipple, who was behind her in the crowd, tackled Moore before she could try for a third. “I said, the bitch has got a gun,” he later recounted.  Forty years later, after serving 32 years of her life sentence in federal prison and being released on parole, a CNN journalist asked Moore, “What drove you to try to assassinate President Ford?” The same question is at the heart of Robinson Devor’s documentary Suburban Fury, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2024 and is slated for a wider theatrical release this year. Over the course of several interviews with Moore, the film aims to illuminate the particular set of conditions—state of mind, political belief, personal history, sense of purpose—that drove Moore, who died last year at the age of 95, to pick up a gun and fire it at the president. Suburban Fury opens with a title card informing us that Moore agreed to participate on the condition that no other interviews were conducted. From the first, we are trapped in her claustrophobic perspective, on which Devor leans to evoke the atmosphere of paranoia that accompanies Moore’s narration. He shoots her through panes of glass, alone in the backseat of a car, in an empty living room. Revisiting important landmarks of the assassination attempt, such as the hotel ballroom where Moore was interrogated after being caught, Devor explicitly borrows from the master of the American paranoid political thriller, Alan J. Pakula: Moore’s diminished figure, a speck against austere right angles, is reminiscent of Woodward and Bernstein clambering up the steps to the Library of Congress in All the President’s Men (1976). These framings contrast with Moore’s labyrinthine, even incoherent, description of her journey from every-woman to would-be assassin. The film announces, basically, that any semblance of order is just that. 

If you are anything like I once was, you moved through life feeling pretty sure you were not going to get scammed. You had an eye for the desperation of a fake Craigslist posting. You were attuned to the strange formatting of a phishing email. You had not even written a book intriguing enough to attract the attention of the mysterious book thief. But then hubris got my ass, as it is wont to do, and somehow I ended up inputting my debit card information into a fake USPS website and losing around $600 in many installments of $19.99 to a man named Maurice in Georgia. (Hey, at least I didn't get scammed by a cat.) No species is above a scam, or above getting scammed. Two recently published papers bring news of particularly creative scams that, as a bystander, made me chuckle. And now I will share them with you! I recognize my privilege here. Perhaps I would not find these scams so charming if I were the bird or bee in question. As such, the pages of Defector remain open to any victims of said scams who would like to share their stories. Please direct all pitches to berry@defector.com.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. Max B has been home from jail for a little less than six months now. It's been a pleasure to watch him gallivant around the city, making up for all the lost time. https://youtu.be/xfn-eba0spM?si=YDgM9GyD5si9vgBd

The death of Dilbert creator Scott Adams in January at age 68 was followed by obituaries with a predictably wide range in tone. While some were charitable to the late cartoonist, most were less forgiving. Adams’s long leap into infamy on the back of countless racist, sexist, transphobic, and antisemitic statements, and his close association with right-wing politics, cost him dearly while he was still alive, including the eventual cancelation of his comic strip from most of the country’s remaining newspapers. The last decade of Adams’s life was a public and often bizarre downward spiral, culminating in feuds with some of the alt-health quacks who gave him medically unsound advice after his prostate cancer diagnosis. Most of the obits were dedicated to rehashing these late-career follies, only occasionally straying to examinations of his artistic legacy.  I find myself interested in Adams damaging and/or capitalizing upon his artistic legacy in a different era: at the height of the strip’s popularity. In the late 1990s, Adams undertook tireless efforts to commercialize the Dilbert brand. From the highly successful Office Depot ad campaign to a million coffee mugs to lunchboxes to rubber masks to the ill-fated Dilberito—available in “Mexican” and “Indian” flavors!—Adams was a relentless promoter. Among the franchise detritus, one particularly intriguing tidbit has caught the attention of obscure media aficionados: a supposedly lost, live-action Dilbert sitcom pilot, which Adams wrote and directed for the Fox network. Numerous articles have identified the pilot as lost media, but are light on details. A ghastly Dogbert animatronic puppet is the only artifact from the pilot that has made it into public view; it was featured on a segment of a local PBS station’s B-movie happy hour, having somehow landed in the collection of a movie prop museum in Florida. 

NEW YORK — In the days before the Westminster Dog Show, I could not stop saying the phrase "33 Pomeranians." There’s a pleasing rhythm to the phrase—better spelled out as thirty-three Pomeranians—that lends itself to any multitude of cadences. Excitedly: thirty-three Pomeranians! As matter-of-fact as one might say 101 Dalmatians: thirty-three Pomeranians. Baffled and/or aghast: thirty-three Pomeranians? This was, of course, because there were 33 Pomeranians in attendance at the Westminster Dog Show, though the Pomeranian participation metrics still did not quite match up to the delegations of Retrievers, Golden (52), or French Bulldogs (48!), or Chihuahuas, of both Long Coat (23) and Short Coat varieties (18). Which is a way of saying that there’s no getting over the absurdity of, as the official press release says, 3,000 CHAMPION DOGS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD TO COMPETE AT THE HISTORIC 150th WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW. Champion, in this case, means a dog that has obtained at least 15 points in competition, with two major wins under different judges. The Westminster Dog Show is a competition of champions—to participate is to already be a winner, though of course there are always bigger horizons.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Late afternoon football is the best football. The NFL regular season can make you forget this evergreen fact, because the 4 p.m. slot is custom-made for viewers to steal a nap while one shitty AFC West team battles another. But then the playoffs arrive, and you and I are reminded of what makes twilight football—outdoors and on grass—special. You start off in broad daylight as both teams fuck around for a quarter or two. Then the sun slowly begins to bleed away, taking all distractions along with it as it sinks below the horizon. Now we’re in primetime, when everyone is watching. Now every player on the field is in the spotlight, and you, the viewer at home, are dialed in. Our long afternoon’s journey into night is over, and shit is starting to get intense. Shit is starting to matter. Also, it’s cocktail hour.