Archive for November 1st, 2022

Net loss.

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022

And the latest on the firings front: Steve Nash out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

94-67 over roughly two years.

But wait, it gets even better! Though this is technically not part of the firings watch: Ime Udoka is rumored to be next up as Nets coach.

That’s Ime Udoka, who was suspended for a year by the Boston Celtics for having an inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate.

Personally, I’m thinking: this is not a good look.

Obit watch: November 1, 2022.

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022

Gael Greene, noted restaurant reviewer for New York magazine.

After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”

In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” she wrote in one review. “Here the spleen is infinitely more memorable than the sweetbreads.”

Julie Powell, of the “Julie/Julia Project” and later Julie and Julia: My Years of Cooking Dangerously (affiliate link). She was 49.

In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.

Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.
Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”

Firings watch.

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022

Bryan Harsin out as Auburn football coach.

Harsin’s tenure on the Plains lasted just more than 22 months, and he finishes with a 9-12 record at Auburn that included a 4-11 mark against Power 5 opponents. He’s the first Auburn coach to finish his tenure with a losing record since Earl Brown’s three-year stint wrapped with a 3-22-4 record between 1948-50.

He was two years into a six year contract. He was also the subject of an inquiry by the university back in February:

Former players spoke out publicly about their experience with Harsin last season, while current players rallied around the embattled coach. After an eight-day investigation and uncertainty about whether Harsin would see a Year 2, Auburn announced its decision to retain the coach, with Gogue releasing a statement on the matter, explaining that it “would have been an abdication of the university’s responsibilities” to not investigate concerns raised about the football program. Gogue added that the university was committed to Harsin and providing him the support necessary to achieve his goals as head coach.

Ultimately, though, it was the on-field product:

After starting 6-2 in Year 1, Auburn spiraled to close out the 2021 season, ending the year on a five-game losing streak. That skid included blown double-digit leads against Mississippi State, South Carolina and Alabama, ultimately losing the Iron Bowl in a quadruple-overtime classic at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The year was capped with a loss to Houston in the Birmingham Bowl, which solidified the program’s first losing season since 2012 and its first five-game losing streak to end a season since 1950.

Two uneven performances against opponents from the FCS and Group of 5 to open the [2022 – DB] season, followed by a humiliating loss to Penn State that marked the program’s worst at home in a decade. Auburn escaped its SEC opener against Missouri in overtime before losing each of its next three. The death knell came in the form of Saturday’s double-digit loss to the Razorbacks, which dropped the Tigers to 3-10 in the last calendar year and brought an end to a coaching tenure that was uncomfortable, unfounded and ultimately didn’t work.