Muttroxia

Like many Celtics fans, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Jaylen Brown trade. At face value it is about the dumbest trade possible. This is my attempt to justify it. (I’m writing this in the early morning just before a vacation, I haven’t been able to review it much… be kind.)

• Brad Stevens and the rest of the decision makers are still smart.
• The job of Brad Stevens is to maximize the number of championships. Over the long run, not any one particular year.
• We bought a championship in 2024, bringing in hired guns to supplement Tatum and Brown. We went way over the apron to do so. It was a great deal, and now we’ve been paying off that championship debt for a couple years.
• We can’t be a contender if all the apron penalties apply. We need to get back under and reset them. So last year we dumped a historic amount of salary to do so. (The Celtics went from $540 million to something like $185 million.) We need one more year under the apron to reset everything, then we can buy up free agents again and buy another championship or two. The year after this one is the key one.

Is Jaylen Brown Good?

• Jaylen Brown is a fantastic player. NBA finals MVP (deservedly). 6th in NBA MVP voting this year. Record highs in points and the usual stats. In the end, nothing counts more than wins. With him as team leader, the Celtics finished way above expectations, generating and extra 20 wins or so. He seems to get better every year.  He’s also a great person. This was his favorite year for many reasons, but a lot of it was clearly his relationship with young players he took under his wing and supported.
• But Jaylen Brown is not as fantastic as you might think. All the advanced analytics are not kind to him. His net rating clearly shows that the Celtics do better when he isn’t on the floor. Some try to justify this with waving hands, but it can’t be done. It has been a pattern for multiple years, it’s not just about this years bench. It is unique to him, not Tatum or White or other players with high usage around the league. The sample size is vast. It’s real. His increase in statistics this year can be entirely explained by his increase in usage.
• Jaylen Brown is a very expensive player. Remember he was the highest paid player in the league for a short time. His current contract is very expensive, and is 35% of the team cap. (The absolute numbers continue to go up, but the % of cap is stable. Tatum’s percentage is slowly rising.)
• Brown is so expensive that we can’t build out the rest of the team. We would not be able to re-create that title team, he and Tatum would eat up too much salary to get those other free agents (Jru, Porzingis, etc) needed to be a championship contender.
• So. Yes, Jaylen Brown is very good. The analytics are real, but an incomplete picture. It’s just stupid to think he’s actually a negative on any team. But Tatum is better than Brown. He’s top 5, Brown is top 15. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe (and The Celtics likely do) that Jaylen Brown, as good as he is, is not worth the money. He’d be a steal at $30-$40 million. At $50-$65 million he is an anchor. In other words, Jaylen Brown is very good. But not good enough for his contract. 
• The Celtics cannot be a title contender as long as the massive Tatum & Brown contracts eat up so much of the salary cap. We needed to move off Brown and get back the ability to build a title contending team.

Urgency

• Jaylen Brown is due for an extension in two weeks. If he gets it, all the problems set in for a few more years, The Celtics cannot win a championship. If he doesn’t get it, then he becomes disgruntled. This part doesn’t make that much sense to me. So what – if he’s disgruntled, he’s disgruntled. He’ll still play his ass off, like he always does. I think the issue is that the extension makes him untradeable, but we saw in real life that he isn’t very tradeable already. Let’s assume that not giving him the player option creates enough problems to make that a bad option.
• Therefore, we needed to trade Brown before that option deadline.

What did the Celtics want in a trade

• As Brad Stevens said 13 times, they wanted “optionality”. Which for the love of god is a made up word that is longer than the word it replaces, “options”. Just say options. Or flexibility. Anyhow… Optionality means 1) more/better draft picks, and significantly more cap room in the long run, particularly starting the year after this one (when repeater penalties fully reset).

Given the timeline and urgency, did The Celtics act correctly?

• Sorta. More or less. But if this analysis is correct and Brad Stevens is cold-blooded (which is the job), The Celtics should have traded Brown last year and tanked the season while we were at it. We’d be in a much better place now.
• It was correct to see if we could make a Giannis trade work. It was correct to walk away from the price Milwaukee was demanding.
• It was correct to shop Brown around the league and see what we could get. This was Nico’s biggest problem in the Luka trade. It was reasonable to think you couldn’t win a championship with Luka, it was not reasonable to only talk to one team.
• The basic problem is that every other team has some version of this same analysis. No one else thinks that Brown is as good as his contract either. And the more he was shopped around, the more other owners saw the wisdom of crowds (if everyone else thinks Brown isn’t worth it, maybe I shouldn’t pay a high price either.) This meant the Celtics couldn’t get back the kind of returns everyone thought Brown was worth.

What are the results of the actual trade?

• Is Paul George good? If he’s fully healthy, he’s very good – roughly equal with Brown. But he almost certainly won’t be fully healthy.
• Paul George is nearly as expensive as Jaylen Brown.
• But the Jaylen Brown contracts goes for two more years.
• Paul George has a player option after next year, but at that point he is an expiring contract. The Celtics can move off of him, in the same way the 76ers moved off him. It probably costs us a first round pick to do that, but moving an expiring contract is much easier than one that has more years left on it.
• In the 27-28 season The Celtics will have reset all the apron penalties, have significant cap space to build around Tatum, to sign their own young players cheap (Schierman, Hugo, etc.), get free agents, and will even have a premium draft pick or two. That is the basis of championship team.

Endnote: A couple dump media perspectives:

• You might hear media folks like Bill Simmons saying this years team is actually quite good (true), so that justifies the trade (false). You have to compare against the hypothetical of not trading Brown. If we hadn’t traded Brown, we’d also be a very good team.
• Was it because of the money? In the press conference, Stevens and Chisholm both said multiple times this wasn’t a money decision, it was a basketball decision. That has been mocked, but it’s true. It means that we are willing to pay financial penalties to build a good team. It doesn’t mean that money wasn’t involved – because the amount of money in contracts (cap space) drives basketball penalties.

I wish the trade hadn’t happened. I’ve always been a Jaylen Brown fan. He’s done nothing but play hard, improve, and win. He’s a great person. It’s not his fault that he is paired with Tatum. That is a pretty unique set up, having two superstars about the same age and team longevity on the same team, and it drives some weird dynamics. It’s not Browns fault that he was awarded the supermax contract that set him up to fail. I wish he was still a Celtic. But the trade is at the least defensible. Hopefully we will remember him when we raise another couple banners at the end of the 2020s and retire his number.

Stairway to Heaven.

Every guitarist tries to learn it. It was so common that the Wayne’s Worlds reference isn’t even a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCh6guovbt0

It’s such a cliche. It was voted the greatest rock song a million years in a row in my youth. It’s so overwhelmingly popular and so well known. It’s easy to forget that — well — it’s incredibly awesome. Every generations discovers it because it’s one of the best songs ever. What else can you say about it? (You could say it was kinda stolen.)

Led Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2012. To cap off the evening, Heart did a live performance of Stairway to Heaven. It blows my socks off. It blew away Led Zeppelin, you can visibly see them getting more into it and more emotional as it goes.

Turn up the bass, turn up the volume, turn off the lights, and listen to this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cZ_EFAmj08

A few notes:

• John Bonham frequently wore a bowler, thus Jason and much of the supporting team did as well as an homage.
• Apparently they were only able to fully rehearse this once. And it was freezing backstage, Nancy was worried her fingers wouldn’t work for the delicate intro section.
• Some reflections from Robert Plant:

March 26, 2026: At 2:30 in the afternoon, I picked up two sassy fat black ladies from a brunch place (Barneys). They were taking the afternoon off to daydrink. I loved them instantly. They were terribly disappointed by Barneys “weakass brunch”, so they got an Uber (me) to hit up a different brunch. The fare was only $5. A few days later they added on a $35 tip. That’s my biggest tip ever. Especially on such a small base. What a nice treat for me.

 

March 28. Ride 703: I picked up Parkti, a proper young Indian lady at a suburban Marta stop. She quickly asked me to turn the podcast off, she had a headache. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later she asked if she could open a window. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later I heard heavy breathing noises and (you saw it coming didn’t you) she vomited all over herself and the seat. Just as I was pulling onto the highway. I pulled over to the shoulder of the entrance ramp in traffic for her to step out and gather herself at the guardrail.

She couldn’t stop apologizing. We continued onwards, I mentioned I’d have to hit the carwash directly after, heavily implying she owes me for a carwash. I dropper her off. When I drove to the car wash I found she had managed to furiously puke all over herself without getting a single drop on the car itself. That’s amazing. Very impressive skills, Parkti!

She was my second puking passenger. I don’t do much weekend night driving, I generally avoid the drunks. I did have one couple where the guy was so wasted he could barely get in. Two minutes in he asked to open the windows. His girlfriend saw what was about to happen and got me to pull over in time.

After Parkti I now understand the pattern. When they mention windows, look for a safe place to pull over. And I now stock a few rags and wetwipes in the trunk.

I get asked, “What happens if they puke in your car, who pays?” Uber says they will pay for a cleaning, but they ask for a lot of evidence first. Apparently most drivers just give up and pay themselves. I haven’t yet had any actual vomit in my car to test this.

March 2025: A guy with a thick Russian accent hops in with his wife. We are heading 20 miles to the airport. No, just a location very close to the airport. That’s unusual. Passengers often make mistakes. I check with him to make sure, “Ya ya it is airport we’re going, no worry.” I don’t say anything else the rest of the drive.

We arrive at the address. It’s a seedy factory in the middle of nowhere. It looks like where the bad guys torture the sidekick of the hero. As we pull in, he panics and yells “This isn’t airport! What is this!? Get me out of here!” I pause for a second, but he did put in the airport, so it’s his problem. I had even confirmed with him, but he looks very angry and keeps yelling, “This place look like I get killed here, what is this!? Why you do this!!!?” As I start to reply he breaks up, laughing. Son of a bitch was trolling me. This was the correct destination, he was playing the dumb foreigner act for fun. He got me good. One of my favorite passengers ever.

An old high school friend and I turned out to both have had the same experience. We both got the album “Listen Without Prejudice” by George Michael. We both listened without prejudice. And both of us love it. The album is best known for Freedom, but They Won’t Go When I Go is wonderful, far better than the Stevie Wonder original (and Muttrox loves him some Stevie Wonder).

Other standout tracks are Praying for Time and Waiting For That Day. All of these have stayed within my regular rotation for well over thirty years now. I’m glad that I followed directions and listened without prejudice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oata-ksmxjg

It got me thinking about other album titles that also direct the listener. (I left out singles, which would make this very long.) There are a lot of them. I filtered out impossible ones (“Ride the Lightning”). Here are some notable ones (thank you AI).

• Steal This Album! (System of a Down)
• Kill ’em All (Metallica) – Difficult, but possible.
• Please, Please Me and Help! (Beatles)
• Check Your Head (Beastie Boys)
• Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads)
• Let’s Dance (David Bowie)
• Eat a Peach (Allman Brothers)
• Look Sharp! (Joe Jackson)
• Speak Now (Taylor Swift)
• Imagine (John Lennon)
• Smile (Katy Perry)
• Cut the Crap (Clash)
• Turn Back (Toto)
• Keep the Faith (Bon Jovi)
• Break Every Rule (Tina Turner)
• Believe (Cher)
• Listen Like Thieves (INXS)
• Stand! (Sly and the Family Stone)
• Buy This (Stone Temple Pilots, compilation)
• Get a Grip! (Aerosmith)
• Watch Out! (Pat Benatar)
• Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player (Elton John)
• Play it Loud (Slade)

In the last couple weeks I’ve been hearing over and over about what a crossroads the Celtics are at, specifically around Jaylen Brown. The Celtics built a package to get Giannis that featured Brown. That didn’t work out. Now Brown is disgruntled. By looking at trades with him, they’ve poisoned the waters. They’ve been forced to actively look at other trades with him because of this. Odds are good he won’t be back next year. What a horrible situation.

In my opinion, it’s all greatly exaggerated.

Did Brad Stevens do anything wrong? No. It is his job to build teams that win championships. He doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have any loyalty to particular players. That’s not his job. His job is to be cold blooded. No one is untouchable. Jayson Tatum is not untouchable. If San Antonio offers Wemby and two firsts for Tatum, that’s a deal. No one else on the team is untouchable, I’m sure there is constant noise about White, Pritchard, Hugo, and every other player. Any good GM is constantly taking calls and making calls to see if they can improve the team. Danny Ainge was right, the soft-heartedness towards the Big Three cost Boston championships. Danny Ainge learned from that. He made hard trades. Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett were beloved in Boston. Pierce particularly “deserved” to finish his career in Boston. Ainge traded them anyhow. Among the haul for them was two draft picks that turned into Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, and a Celtics championship. He was right to pull the trigger on that trade (and trade Isiaih Thomas for Kyrie Irving as well).

That is Brad Stevens job. It’s what we celebrated in Moneyball, how to maximize championship chances with limited resources.

Did Jaylen Brown do anything wrong? No. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a bigger role. There’s nothing wrong with having some ego. He earned it fair and square! It’s hard to say exactly what he did that is getting everyone so worked up. He said it was his favorite year. He said, or didn’t say, a few things on his Twitch channel. So what? This is just a bunch of commentators finding content, this isn’t real disgruntlement.

Has he demanded a trade? No. Has he said he won’t play for this team. No. Jaylen Brown has been living with trade talks almost his whole career. If he was the kind of person who caused troubles because of it, we would know. He is visibly annoyed by it. But he still works hard in the of-season, he works hard in the on-season, he has good relationships with all his teammates, including Jayson Tatum. Jaylen Brown is a professional. Part of being a professional is knowing you could be traded at any time. This is the job. He’s never been anything but an incredible player and teammate. There is zero reason to think Brown needs to be traded because the relationship is poisoned. It’s all nonsense.

It’s unfortunate that the makeup of The Celtics and their financials always leads to Jaylen Brown being talked about in trades. But that’s part of the job.

Billy: I’m a player and you got to cut me from the roster. Do it. Part of the job, man.

Peter: I think this is stupid. I’m not going to fire anybody, and this is dumb.

Billy: They’re professional ballplayers. Just be straight with them. No fluff, just facts. “Pete, I got to let you go. Jack’s office will handle the details.” That’s it.

Peter: Really?

Billy: Would you rather get a bullet to the head or five to the chest and bleed to death?

In 2022, we were looking at a Jaylen Brown for Kevin Durant trade. It didn’t happen, we had these same dumb conversations. Two years later he was the finals MVP as The Celtics raised the championship trophy.

On his last couple podcasts, Bill Simmons wonders why home court advantage doesn’t matter anymore. He listed several possible reasons, which were mostly moronic. Bill, if something impacts both the home and visiting team equally, it has no explanatory power. Obviously. Let’s look at this a bit more rigorously than he did.

Is it true?
First, is the assumption true? Is the home court advantage diminishing?

In the regular season, the home court team has gone from winning ~60%+ up to the 1990s to ~55% today. Vegas bakes in 2.5-3 points for the home team, it used to be 3-4.5. 

What about the playoffs? This is harder to figure because home court is given to the better team. But here again we’ve gone from ~65% to ~58%, and Vegas bakes in 2.5-3 points, though it varies heavily on context.

Conclusion: Yes, the assumption is true.

Do we know why?

Since the phenomena is true, the next step is to see if we already know why it happened. The answer is yes. It’s been studied and known for decades that the home court advantage comes primarily from unconscious referee bias. They don’t mean to, they don’t want to, but referees are human and react to the fans yelling. One of the ways we can see this is how home court advantage completely disappeared in the bubble.

If home court advantage comes from referee bias, has it changed? Yes it has, and that is the answer. Refereeing has become increasingly professionalized. Modern refereeing is heavily scrutinized, graded by micro-cameras, subjected to centralized NBA replay center, play-by-play reports of the last two minutes, increasing social attention, etc. The days of cowboy referees are long over. For all the jokes about Scott Foster, individual referees just don’t impact a game like they used to.

There you go, that’s the answer.

Other factors:

Three-point shooting: The rise of three point shooting increases scores for both teams, but more importantly increases the variance in the outcomes. Increased variance eats away at the home court advantage. Think of an exaggerated case – let’s say at the end of each game, each team takes one shot. If the shot goes in, they get 100 points. In this imagined scenario, the variance would be enormous, swamping everything else that goes on in the game. (It’s analogous to Quidditch, where the optimum strategy is to ignore everything except getting the Snitch. Everyone on the team should be a seeker.) Note that in the last five years of playoffs the Boston Celtics (who shoot 3-pointers aggressively) have a win-loss percentage 10 points higher when playing on the road than at home.

Easier travel: Every team has chartered flights, most have team planes built especially for their comfort. They stay in nicer hotels. The NBA has reduced the number of back to back games. All of this means that the visitors are in much better shape than they used to be. This also applies to the bubble year control case, so there’s some conflating variables there.

Several of the people I follow are worked up about Trump attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden tonight. Because he is attending, they changed the security systems at the game and you can’t bring any bags at all in. Traffic will be shut down all over. MSG is right over Penn Station, so that will be completely disrupted as well. Isn’t that Trump just the worst, ruining everybody’s day like that!?

C’mon. He’s the President of the United States of America. Sometimes the POTUS goes to big sports events, sometimes those big sports events are in big cities, it’s the way of the world. If it was Obama you wouldn’t be complaining, you’d be celebrating. There have been three assassination attempts on the POTUS in the last couple years, it’s appropriate to have a lot of security.

I will enjoy watching Trump get booed for the entirety of the game. I expect and hope it will be non-stop, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he leaves the game early. That’s all fair. But criticizing Trump for doing something all presidents do ain’t fair. Relax. Enjoy the game.

March 8: A large black woman gets in my car while yelling into her phone, “I’m telling you I need you to be cool when the cops show up! They can’t know you’re drunk, you cannot get a DUI and go to jail again! Stay cool!” She repeats this a few times. “Chew some gum. Drink a lot of water. Take some deep breaths… Yes, I know your car is in bad shape, but you’ll make it worse if you’re in jail!” That’s good advice!

My passenger had been out drinking and celebrating with her best friend at their birthday outing. A lot of alcohol was involved. For whatever reason my passenger took an uneventful Uber ride home while her friend drove her own car. On the way home her friend got hit by another car. The other car called the police. Then the other car fled the scene. Now the police are on the way. The best friend is still very drunk, she is at the scene of the accident, and she is loud enough that I hear everything from the phone in the back seat. My passenger is trying to keep her friend from getting arrested for drunk driving, but it’s not getting through. Her friend is still too drunk to understand. It didn’t look like it would end well for the friend.

The capstone: At one point the drunk best friend yelled back, “I can’t go to jail! I’m too small! My brothers are already in jail for that murder!” Yikes.

March 9: You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t put on a seatbelt. And how many of them want to argue about it. You might believe the demographic profile of these folks. It happens a lot. If the trip is under ten minutes I might let it go, but it usually goes like this: I tell the passenger to put their seatbelt on. They are surprised that I would ask and instantly accede. Or I ask and they try to ignore me, or argue with me. Sometime they try to tell me the law. I tell them seatbelts are the law in my car. They can cancel the ride or put it on. They grudgingly put it on. There will be no tip on this ride.

Today, halfway through the trip, he ever so quietly slips the seatbelt off. Really? This is a Tesla. It has sensors for everything. It knows when my eyes are looking at the road. It probably knows my blood pressure and bank balance. You think I don’t know your seatbelt is off!? You can hear the binging noise as well as I can. “Put it back on.” He pretended he didn’t hear me. Enough is enough. I yelled at him. He put it back on. Then he had the balls to take it off a second time near the end of the trip.

An older one: I went to a housing complex near the airport. I couldn’t find the passenger in the complex. I guessed I had driven past the pin… no, wait. There’s the pin, the pin is in a complex on the other side of the highway. It’s two miles to get turned around to the other side of the highway and get there, but I do it. When I get there, the pin has somehow moved back to the first location. What is going on? Here’s what was going on. The passenger wasn’t in either housing complex. He was that guy I had seen walking on the edge of the actual highway. Nope. I’m not driving another two miles to pick up some sketchy dude on the side of a highway. No thank you. No thank you sir!

If ever a post will get me in trouble, this is the one.

I’ve had arguments with MAGA friends about the assassination attempts on Trump. Do they reflect what liberals want? Do ordinary Democrats support it? How much does your average Trump hater actually want him dead? How much do they support his assassination? It was time to look in the mirror and examine my own beliefs.

I hate Trump. I really do. I hate him as a human being, I hate him as President. The country, the planet, the species, are all far worse off because of his existence. But what does that imply? Do I actually want him to be murdered? Is the cure worse than the disease?

Here are my rankings, from most to least desirable, of how the Trump presidency ends.

Trump Exits Early:

1. Trump willingly leaves office now. He decides to run a media empire or something. Being President sucks. He abdicates and leaves the last couple years to JD Vance. (He dies on a bed made of hundred dollar bills surrounded by pretty blond women telling him how great he is. His last words are “I won.”)
2. Trump willingly ends his term now due to mental or physical incapacitation. He abdicates via Section 3 of the 25^th Amendment. JD Vance takes over.
3. Trump dies of natural causes now. JD Vance takes over.
4. Trump unwillingly leaves office now. He is impeached and convicted or is removed by others via Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment. Either way, he leaves office early unwillingly. JD Vance takes over.

Trump Finishes Term:

5. Trump finishes out his term. Nothing special. He leaves at end of his term.
6. Trump finishes out his term. But along the way he gets something horrible and visibly disfiguring. A physical injury, a medical issue, whatever. He is not really in charge but continues as a figurehead. Similar to Woodrow Wilson’s stroke or Reagan’s early dementia. But it must be visible. The humiliation and loss of physical normalcy matters. This is the spiteful one. After his non-stop cruelty to everyone with less than him, he deserves to be pathetic and mocked.

The Exception:

7. Trump ends his term early due to assassination. JD Vance takes over. Although assassination is part of “leaving office early”, assassination is very bad. I moved it down. The societal and moral cost of political violence overrides the benefit of an early exit. But I still prefer assassination to the last category, Trump keeps going.

Trump Keeps Going:

8. Trump somehow pulls a constitutional fast one, serves a 3^rd term (or more).
9. Trump leads another insurrection. He serves a 3^rd term, but relies on overt physical violence rather than pseudo-legal maneuvering.
10. Trump effectively becomes king, doesn’t leave until his death.
11. Trump actually declares himself king, doesn’t leave until his death. He passes the crown to his handpicked heirs, Donald Trump Jr or Jared Kushner.

Who you vote for is private. But the choice of which primary you vote in is not private. As a poll worker, I see in real time who is voting in the Republican, Democratic, or Nonpartisan primary races. Of course this inevitably leads to making guesses. I wonder which party this guy is in? My fellow pollworker and I started developing guidelines.

Disclaimer in advance: This is all ludicrous. It’s blatant stereotyping. Although some people were blindingly obvious, we probably only guessed 60% right. Georgia has open primaries (you can vote in any primary, so people sometimes cross parties to mess with the other team) which undercuts this whole thing. And this is just one random location in a highly Democratic suburb (base rate was roughly two thirds Democrat, one third Republican).

Still, stereotypes usually arise from some core truth. And it’s some fun in a long draining day. Here we go! (Images from AI.)

How to spot a Democrat:

• Handmade jewelry. Made individually by humans. Bonus if it’s in the style of Native Americans or South Americans. Bonus points for colored stones.
• Flowing dresses
• Flaming gay men (youngish, in shape, tight shirts, dyed hair)
• African (not African American, Africans from Africa)
• Generally less put together – don’t care as much how they look

How to spot a Republican:

• Women with blond-dyed hair, dyed fairly recently
• Boating clothes (the right kinds of shorts or shirts)
• Structural dresses
• Kitty heels. I don’t know what these are, but my partner assures me it’s dead on.
• Clothes with African animal patterns: Leopard, Zebra, Cheetah
• Generally more put together – more care put into personal appearance

Non-predictors: In some ways, this was the most interesting list. What stereotypes didn’t stand up to testing?

• Golfing wear was not a predictor.
• T-shirts were not a predictor.
• Initially it seemed like the jerks who barely look at you were Republican, but then there was a string of obnoxious Democrats. Maybe they were DEI jerks.

This list will evolve in the Georgia runoff next month.

Yesterday I worked the Georgia General Primary Election. It’s a long day. You report for duty at 5:30 am and go home around 8:00 pm. I’m not so young anymore, by hour fifteen I was struggling to stay locked in to the job.

• I worked with this same group last year, and will work with them next month for the runoffs. Every person involved with the process is a true professional. I’m pretty sure every worker in my district is solidly Democratic. I guarantee not one voter could tell, everyone was treated the exact same.
• No one can cheat. There are a ridiculous number of systems and checks. The easiest way to think of it is that every step has both a physical and electronic ‘copy’. If you could figger how to jigger one then the other one wouldn’t match. There are a lot of cross checks. I don’t see how it could be done. It would make an interesting Oceans movie.

• There are so many checks, actually too many to be optimally effective. There are far more opportunities for honest mistakes when the many numbers and serial IDs and counts and inventory checklists and zero tapes and check this box in the presence of another sworn official and you can’t believe how much there is and many numbers are copied by hand from point A to B even though there is a perfectly good computer than could do it all. Because of the threat of lawsuits, more and more steps have been added, often making the overall process worse. Additionally, the documentation of procedures are never exactly correct. And elections are of course very intermittent – it’s hard to be perfect with skills that you only use once a year or so.
• If there is a way to cheat, it would have to be in the software, and at “headquarters” (not individual machines). The cheating couldn’t stand up to a recount because all the printed ballots are saved. But it is pathetic that we are using 3^rd party voting machines with proprietary software. The core problems of how to code election software were solved long ago. All states should mandate that all election software be open source. (Here are some of the many software tools already out there). It’s reasonable for anyone (not just Republicans) to be suspicious of fraud when they can’t see how it works and have to “trust the software”.
• You would think being a poll worker (checking you in and getting your voting card ready) is simple. It is simple for 98% of the voters. But every edge case better be handled exactly right. What do you do with the guy who starts voting, then changes his mind which primary to vote in but the system isn’t cancelling his votes correctly so his vote is in limbo. The person who arrives at 6:55 pm in the wrong district but doesn’t have time to get to the right place. The guy with a shirt saying “Women can vote” – is that partisan political speech (banned) or generic support for voting? The drivers license with a picture that doesn’t quite look like this person but doesn’t quite not look like them. The person who sneaks out an iphone while voting (banned) for a few seconds, does their ballot need to be struck?  The woman who asks are these ballots going to end up in Trumps hands like the Fulton County ones, how to respond? And many more.
• Fortunately, we are a quiet district. There’s a couple well known assholes who like to yell at everybody and cause trouble but they are expected and handled. Our manager is incredible at working with people nicely, getting them to follow the law without raising anyone’s temper. She was a librarian for many years – we could all learn from her.
• Many voters say “Thanks for volunteering”, “You folks are saving the country”, and other nice things. It is nice, but it gets weird quick. Is this what it’s like to be a soldier, constantly being thanked for your service? We say, “Thank you for voting!”  And we are paid. Not very much, but we are not volunteers.
• If you know me (Muttrox) personally, you might be wondering why I am just a clerk. Does it seem a bit beneath me? I sure thought so! C’mon, I have a rich varied background in IT and data analytics, I’m comfortable with technology, I’m an expert at building and using systems to gather data to come to a conclusion. You might think I’d be running the show. That was the plan! After serving as an recount observer in 2024, I my personal contribution to democracy was to be an election worker. I signed up for a manager role. The county asked me to start as a poll worker. They were right. There is a lot to learn. Next month will be my third cycle as a poll worker. Then I plan to move up to assistant manager. It’ll be the November midterms — the big time!

Everyone has correctly touted this as one of the best games of the year, maybe of the decade. They’re right, it was! I had to watch it two days after it happened (I was working the election, more on that soon). I already knew who won, who was transcendental, and so on. Normally I’d move on to the next game, but I tuned in for a few minutes and then watched the whole thing. It was still a great watch. Everything professional basketball should be.

Why?

• It featured the top players of the league. Not your Jalen Brunson, Jaylen Brown, Donovan Mitchell, Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Maxey, etc. The top three players in the NBA are obviously Wemby, SGA, and Jokic, whatever order you put them in. We had two of the top three players going at it.
• Wemby is just ridiculously entertaining to watch. One of my good friends who has steadily soured on the NBA is coming back just for Wemby. It’s not just his physical talents, as incredible as they are. It’s the sense that on any play you might see something that no other human being has ever done. Literally. It’s seeing every other player, star or not, completely rethink their strategy based on him. And his attitude. He is driven. In a good way. He gives a shit when others don’t. His attitude singl-handedly saved the All Star game. He is arrogant, but appropriately so. He doesn’t mind showing emotion. He isn’t fake humble. He thinks he’s the best and goes out to prove it every game. He doesn’t bitch and moan to refs, he doesn’t do cheap shots, he doesn’t flop – he just plays basketball every night. He’s ferocious.
• OKC is also  very entertaining. I’m on record as not liking SGAs game, but damn, even when he’s bad he’s good. Where other players jab step or change speed in one step, SGA does it within the same step. I don’t know how he leans so much without taking a step, how do you guard it? I love Chet, I love Caruso, and watching the whole team play defense is a joy. Just running hard and going all out goes a long way.
• Both teams play different than other teams. It wasn’t an endless series of drive/kick/3-point attempts.
• Both teams trying all out.
• The game was close the whole way. You didn’t have to wait until the fourth quarter to see what was going to happen.
• Overtime! And overtime again!
• The home crowd was great. It was a sea of blue. OKC didn’t have to ask their fans to buy tickets. They yelled and supported the whole game.
• The in-arena noise was kept down. You could hear the fans cheering because they weren’t blaring all the stupid noises every other team does. This is an enormous pet peeve of mine, I give this feedback to the Hawks every year. When your team is good, you don’t need to cater to the 10-year olds. It was such a pleasure to watch basketball.

I dunno. What can you say. An epic game. I can’t wait for Game 2 tonight.