The Friday Five

Where I’m Eating This Week: I’ve told you before that we ride or die with Xiandu Thai, but we decided to broaden our horizons this past week with JJ Thai on 20th and Chestnut. It was a damn good call. Delicious dumplings, rockin’ red curry, and poppin’ Pad Thai. Yeah “poppin” was a bit of a stretch to make the alliteraion work. I KNOW. But seriously, these guys are great. Highly recommend.

What I’m Watching This Week: The Challenger exploding was, for people my age, the end of our innocence. It was a horrifying episode where our worlds turned upside down. Challenger: The Final Flight gives us the backstory of that ill-fated voyage. How NASA had recently gotten much more diverse, how they added a teacher because they needed to improve their PR, and most consequently, how a late night phone call sealed the shuttle’s fate. It’s a heartbreaking look at an American tragedy the impact of which can only be compared, in my mind, to 9/11. Well worth a watch.

What I’m Listening To: I really can’t get enough of Griselda these days. The Buffalo group of Bennie the Butcher, Conway the Machine, and Westside Gunn brings a 1990s Wu-Tang griminess to hip-hop that’s been missing. Conway recently did an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. The second song has a few bars about George Floyd that are particularly poignant:

I just saw a video on the news I couldn’t believe

Another racist cop kill a n***a and get to leave

He’s screaming “I can’t breath!” cop ignoring all his pleas

Hands in his pocket leaning on his neck with his knees

Cracker invent the laws that’s why the system is flawed

Cops kill black people on camera and don’t get charged

We ain’t taking no more and we ain’t just pressing record

Can’t watch you kill my brother, you gonna have to kill us all

What I’m Reading This Week: Did you realize that two members of ZZ Topp more or less started as members of a fake Zombies band? In other words, promoters acted as if the band was the Zombies, a British prog rock band. In fact it was a bogus band, a few kids from Texas that learned to play Zombies songs and then pretended they were British. Quizzo player Tiffany alerted me to this one. It’s a bizarre story.

What Interesting Person I Met This Week: This week I had the opportunity to chat with author Yaron Weitzman, who recently wrote a book about the Sixers “Process” called Tanking to the Top. Really fun to talk about the Process, because as we’re living through it there’s all these crazy things happening, but it’s really not until now that I think we can look back and say, “Holy shit! That was INSANE!” From Hinkie to Markelle Fultz to Burnergate, Yaron got the inside scoop on all of it, and Reef and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him about it. Oh, and remember: shop Shibe, and take 15% off with checkout code “quizzo”.

Alright if you’ve got any suggestions for what I should eat, drink, listen to, or watch, shoot me a line on twitter (you can also see where I’ve been retweeting the funniest tweets like crazy after Trump got COVID). And be sure to join the JGT Quizzo page on Facebook as well. See ya soon!