The amount of praise for an egg seems to be directly proportionate to the softness of the yolk. Runny and “jammy” eggs are in vogue—even “hard-boiled” eggs are expected to have yolks with a little wobble. I am, for the most part, totally fine with this, as I love yolk with movement. But there is a time and a place for…
Donald Trump loves the idea of infrastructure. He brings it up all the time. He wants to make an infrastructure bill a priority in his first 100 days as president. And Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have said they’d love to work with him on this.
"We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals," Trump promised cheering supporters on election night. "We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it."
The catch, though, is that Trump doesn’t really have a plan to do all this. At least not yet. Not in the conventional sense of the word.
What Trump has right now is an idiosyncratic proposal for Congress to offer some $137 billion in tax breaks to private investors who want to finance toll roads, toll bridges, or other projects that generate their own revenue streams. But this private financing scheme, experts across the political spectrum say, wouldn’t address many of America’s most pressing infrastructure needs — like repairing existing roads or replacing leaky water mains in poorer communities like Flint. It’s a narrow, inadequate policy.
For instance: “This is unlikely to do much for road and bridge maintenance,” notes Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. “And [economists] have long believed that the highest returns are for fixing existing infrastructure.”
Trump could, of course, propose to do much more. But that would put him in a political bind. Many Republicans in Congress are hostile toward the idea of spending billions more on public works. Back in September, when asked whether he would help Trump pass a $550 billion infrastructure program, House Speaker Paul Ryan initial response was a loud laugh. Infrastructure may be popular with Trump fans. But it’s not so easy to pull off in Washington.
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(Shutterstock)
If you poke around Trump’s campaign website, you see vague promises to boost investment in “transportation, clean water, a modern and reliable electricity grid, telecommunications, security infrastructure, and other pressing domestic infrastructure needs.” But there aren’t many details on how to do this.
In fact, Trump’s only concrete proposal was this slim, 10-page white paper released October 27. In it, campaign advisers Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro proposed a set of tax breaks for private investors who want to finance infrastructure. These tax breaks, the campaign claims, could help finance $1 trillion worth of projects.
To understand how Trump’s proposal might work, let’s back up for a second and just think about how roads currently get built in America.
Traditionally, state and local governments fund roads directly, using some combination of their own revenues, federal highway aid, and public money borrowed from investors by issuing bonds that are ultimately repaid via taxes or tolls. Public agencies then oversee the design, construction, and maintenance of said roads.
In recent years, though, some states have been experimenting with bringing private investors directly into projects, via “public-private partnerships” (PPPs). The exact set-up varies, but here’s one example: Private firms might bid for a road project, and the winning bidder then raises money from outside investors to design, operate, build, and maintain the road for a set number of years. The firm recoups its costs through tolls or fixed state payments. Because the private company is on the hook for the whole thing, the theory goes, it has an incentive to keep costs low and finish on time.
To date, such set-ups are relatively rare. Over the last quarter-century, the US has only had 36 privately financed road projects, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Of those, 14 are complete, three have declared bankruptcy, and one required a public buyout. The rest are still in construction stage. (These arrangements don’t have to be for new roads or even tolled roads: Pennsylvania set up a PPP to refurbish old bridges.)
So that’s where Trump’s plan comes in. He’s proposing a large tax credit for private investors in such projects — equal to 82 percent of the equity amount in any deal. The hope is that this tax break will lower the cost of financing and spur more investors to pour more money into these projects.
In their white paper, Ross and Navarro argue that you’d need around $137 billion in federal tax breaks to attract $1 trillion in infrastructure finance. And, they claim, the government would recoup this lost money via new tax revenue from new construction jobs and profits. That is, the tax cuts would pay for themselves. (Neither Ross nor Navarro responded to a request for an interview.)
As we’ll see, however, these assumptions are debatable.
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(Shutterstock)
Privatizing infrastructure is a controversial idea, but it’s not crazy. Countries like Australia have lots of success with PPPs. The trouble here, according to outside experts, is that Trump’s proposed tax credits would only likely address a narrow slice of America’s infrastructure needs — if that.
Randal O’Toole is a transportation analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute and broadly in favor of privatizing infrastructure. But he sees a few problems with Trump’s plan. For one, there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s already profitable to invest in, like electrical grids. “He would be giving tax breaks to private owners who would be investing in that infrastructure anyway,” O’Toole notes.
Second, governments also fund lots of infrastructure that isn’t profitable, like rail transit. And here, “no amount of tax breaks would get private investors to spend money on infrastructure that doesn’t pay,” O’Toole says.
Other analysts zeroed in on that second point. If high user fees or tolls are needed to help private investors recoup their investments, then a lot of infrastructure in America may simply never get funded. Think of existing toll-free roads in poor shape, or urban bus systems, or aging water pipes in low-income cities like Flint where people can’t afford a big hike in their water bills. Many of these projects may be worthwhile, but they typically require public funding.
“If [we] only built projects that could cover their costs with user charges, we would have far fewer white elephant projects,” says Harvard’s Glaeser. “However, we would also miss good projects as well. In particular, we would miss projects that mainly serve the less advantaged. Asking buses to pay for themselves would be a mistake.”
“There are many tens of thousands of infrastructure projects out there across sectors that need to get done,” adds Kevin DeGood, the director of Infrastructure Policy at the liberal Center for American Progress. “Fixing 120-year-old water mains that break, interchange widenings, roads that need to be fixed, bridges that are deficient, runways that need to be expanded, levees that need to be repaired, ports that need to be deepened.”
“And this plan does essentially nothing for any of those,” DeGood says. “There are only a very, very small number of projects that would fit the parameters that would make them attractive in theory for tax credits. Because you have to be able to charge really high margin tolls and user fees. So the facility has to be big enough and have high demand that it’s going to generate revenue that you can go out and take on expensive private equity capital.”
Now, it’s possible for states to set up PPPs that don’t rely so heavily on tolls — the state can simply reimburse the private company using tax revenue (whether this saves money is debatable). However, David Levinson, a transportation analyst and professor at the University of Minnesota, brings up a number of other concerns about this plan. PPPs are complicated multi-decade financial arrangements, and not all states and localities are necessarily well-equipped to manage these deals in the public interest.
Meanwhile, these tax credits would do nothing to attract investors without any federal tax liability, such as pension funds, endowments, and international sovereign wealth funds. “That’s potentially important,” Levinson says. “If you look at the major investors in existing quasi-privatized US tolls roads, they tend to be international players and pensions funds.”
Finally, the Trump campaign’s claim that its tax breaks will pay for themselves by creating new tax-paying jobs looks dubious, Levinson notes. Right now, unemployment is extremely low. Anyone who works on these new privately financed infrastructure projects is likely to be employed already — this would just be shifting jobs around, not creating new jobs. (Levinson did add, though, that it might be worth trying out Trump’s tax credit scheme on a small scale — just to see how it worked.)
Ultimately, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks private financing alone can solve America’s pressing infrastructure needs. “There is no replacement for direct federal funding [of infrastructure],” said Richard Fierce, senior vice president at the engineering and construction firm Fluor Corp, at a congressional hearing two years ago. “And the number one priority for Congress should be to ensure there are long-term sustainable funding sources in place.”
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Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Trump, of course, isn’t limited to this tax plan. He could ditch it, or supplement it with a more detailed plan for the federal government to directly fund highway repairs, grid modernization, airport upgrades, school repairs, and the like. The latter is basically what Hillary Clinton proposed on the campaign trail.
Democrats have said they’d be receptive to working with Trump on an idea like this. “We can work together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill,” Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said after the election.
But the Republicans who control Congress seem much more divided on this idea. On the one hand, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said he’d consider it — as long as any new spending did not increase the deficit. “Infrastructure in America is lagging far behind,” he told the Hill. “I think this is going to be a priority, and I think it will be a bipartisan issue.”
The problem is that paying for infrastructure spending has been a sharply divisive idea among Republicans in the House. It took years of squabbling and knock-down fights before Congress finally agreed to a five-year, $305 billion transportation reauthorization bill last December that would fund highways, bridges, roads, and transit. Because no one in Congress wants to raise the federal gas tax, they had to scrape together funding from a variety of oddball sources — like raiding other trust funds or new custom fees.
Many Republicans aren’t eager to go through that process again. As Russell Berman notes at the Atlantic, in the week since Trump’s election, House Speaker Paul Ryan has spoken often about working with Trump on repealing Obamacare and cutting regulations. He’s said nothing on infrastructure.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has shrugged off this infrastructure talk, calling it “not a top priority,” according to NPR. Right now, Republicans control the agenda in Congress. And infrastructure doesn’t seem high on that agenda.
— Here is the Trump campaign’s full explanation of their infrastructure plan.
— Here are additional analyses from Mary Wisniewski, Larry Summers, Tyler Cowen, David Dayen, Nicole Gelinas, and Jim Tankersley and Max Ehrenfreud.
— Here is a story I did a few years back on the push in states to privatize their infrastructure, both by selling off assets outright or pursuing public-private partnerships.
Harrow County is one of our absolute favorite comics of 2015—not just a fascinatingly creepy horror story, but a great story filled with amazing, haunting art. So, good news! The Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook series is going to be getting a lot of love now that it’s heading to Syfy as a live-action series!
The always-quotable Sen. Rand Paul put a funny joke up on the Twitter Machine today! Only question is… (*snrkk!!!*) how would anyone even know the difference?? HAW HAW HAW!
We can hardly wait for the nine paid staffers of Twitchy to condemn Sen. Paul for his very offensive breach of civility.
Speaking of which, dear Terrible Ones, please to remember that while Rand Paul is indeed a rage-inducing asshat, we also want our comments to be funny, not unspeakable. Instead of succumbing to stabby rhetorical excess, let’s remember the immortal advice attributed to one Geoff Miller on alt.peeves, c. 1992:
“Come, let us peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.”
[Twitter]
Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He never thought anyone would take the “This whole blog…” line quite so literally.
[Photographs: Julianne Puckett]
After the towers of sugary holiday cookies and boozy fruitcakes, washed down with bourbony eggnog, I'm done. Please, just give me something light and refreshing. And easy to make.
The answer: The Bul (pronounced "bool"), a simple blend of ginger beer and lime, mixed with your favorite pilsner or pale ale. It's a Cuban favorite that is often reserved for summertime sipping around the barbecue, but it's delightful no matter what the weather, and perfect for sipping alongside game day fare like pulled pork, wings, and 7-layer dip. (Who needs resolutions? We're playing watching football here!)
Making a batch is about as easy as you can imagine: mix a few bottles of beer with a few bottles of ginger beer, add some fresh lime juice and serve over ice. The crispness of the beer pairs perfectly with the tangy, spicy notes of ginger, and the fresh lime makes it all wonderfully refreshing and full of flavor.
Use a good, spicy ginger beer for your Bul: I chose Maine Root, but we also like Fentiman's and Reed's. As for the beer, you'll get more of a bitter, piney punch if you go with pale ale—it's easy to find Sierra Nevada at your grocery store. Bright, easy-drinking pilsner is a good choice too: the best-tasting ones are likely to be the beers brewed fresh locally.
About the author: Julianne Puckett is a writer, designer and the creator of the food blog Yankee Kitchen Ninja. She lives in rural Vermont, where she struggles to reconcile the siren call of her inner farmer with her love of cute shoes and cocktails.
Get the Recipe!If you like sex and brunch, you better put down that mimosa and get yourself a bloody mary. With eleven libido-loving ingredients, this crimson brunch cocktail is your one stop shop for boosting your sex life and making you a better lover.
With its super dose of lycopene, tomatoes are used to prevent various cancers and cardiovascular disease, to enhance circulation and improve blood flow, and even as a natural treatment for prostate disease. All good stuff for you and your sex life. But if that's not direct enough, this lady thinks the mere scent of tomatoes increases penile blood flow by 5%.
Bloody marys should be spicy not just because they taste better that way but because the capsaicin contained in chili peppers actually causes physiological responses in the body that mirror the signs of sexual arousal. Increased breathing, sweating and blood flow are all natural responses to consuming these spicy peppers, and, according to Today, people also "tend to credit their date with evoking those spine-tingling feelings."
The 700 Club seems like the relic from a different time, a time when everyone was awful and racist. A lot of people are still awful and racist, of course, but not as many have TV shows. The hateful The 700 Club, however, has been on the Christian Broadcasting Network since 1966 and shows no signs of being put out of its pitiful misery. Host Pat Robertson isn’t able to spew out his bigotry as much he used to and with as much fervor — it’s more of a slow, drippy leak now — but the 83-year-old has sucked down enough baby fetuses to still be a monster.
Today on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson told co-host Terry Meeuwsen that gay men in cities like San Francisco attempt to spread HIV/AIDS to others by cutting them with a special ring when shaking hands. However, one could not hear Robertson make the remarks on the episode his Christian Broadcasting Network posted online, as the company once again appears to have edited Robertson’s comments after they aired…
“You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” Robertson said. “Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.” (Via)
Someone please cancel his life.
(Via)
In “Newsworthy News That The Newsroom Will Smugly Cover On News Night” news: George Zimmerman, not guilty. We’ll leave the finer points of the controversial trial/verdict to the experts, experts like Olivia Munn and Dumber (or is he Dumb?), but needless to say, people are not happy, including David Simon, who’s usually such a regular Johnny Chuckles. On his blog, The Wire creator shared his well-reasoned opinions on Martin and Zimmerman, all written like the grimmest “white people be like this, black people be like that” joke I’ve ever heard.
You can stand your ground if you’re white, and you can use a gun to do it. But if you stand your ground with your fists and you’re black, you’re dead.
In the state of Florida, the season on African-Americans now runs year round. Come one, come all. And bring a handgun. The legislators are fine with this blood on their hands. The governor, too. One man accosted another and when it became a fist fight, one man — and one man only — had a firearm. The rest is racial rationalization and dishonorable commentary.
If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford. Those that do not, those that hold the pain and betrayal inside and somehow manage to resist violence — these citizens are testament to a stoic tolerance that is more than the rest of us deserve. I confess, their patience and patriotism is well beyond my own.
Behold, the lewd, pornographic embrace of two great American pathologies: Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can’t look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what they must tell their sons about what can happen to them on the streets of their country. Tonight, anyone who truly understands what justice is and what it requires of a society is ashamed to call himself an American.
Should I ever meet Simon, remind me not to ask him, “How many Lee Greenwood songs are on your iPod?”
(via Getty Image) (Via David Simon)
This might he our favorite supercut to ever grace our computer screen. Slackstory has compiled every single coffee and/or pie scene from the great Mark Frost and David Lynch series Twin Peaks. It's all just so wonderful.
    
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The screen is flashing and blinking as brightly colored whozits and whatzits galore stream across the screen, all while dings, beeps, kachings and other exciting noises blare out at you from the casino slot machine. With all that hullabaloo, you must be winning, right? Well, no. Not really.
The sound of winning doesn’t equate into actual riches, say researchers out of Canada (via the Pacific Standard), but you might not realize it until you’ve run out of money and have to wander away dejectedly with your pockets inside out, kicking at invisible clods of dirt like some kind of sad Charlie Brown.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo say those happy sounds ramp up players’ emotional arousal, encouraging them to “significantly overestimate the number of times they won.”
Now that slot machines are mostly computerized, there are many lines to choose from on which to wager. Score on even one of those, no matter the amount, and players will be greeted with an ecstatic whoop, bleep, cash register chime or some other kind of winning sound.
During the study on gambling, researchers found that the group of gamblers playing in silence didn’t have as much fun as those plunged into the world of winning sounds, but they were able to judge better how they were actually doing at the game.
So for example, you could win on one line but overall lose a bunch of money after your bets on all the others fail. Still, the noise will sound for that one little victory, something researchers call “losses disguised as wins.”
The bottom line? Keep an eye on your actual total winnings because no slot machine is going to pull out the tiny violins when you biff yet another bet.
Why You Keep Losing at Slot Machines [Pacific Standard]
There have been plenty of App Store sales before, some of them quite extensive. But Apple's never offered discounts of this magnitude before. Some of the best—and most expensive—games and apps you can find on iOS are free today, presumably in honor of the App Store's five-year anniversary. Here are the ones you need to download first.
All of the following apps are normally at least a few bucks, and some—like Traktor DJ—are as much as $20. We'll keep updating if more apps join the ranks of the free, but for now, happy clicking:
Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery (was $5)
Infinity Blade II (was $7)
Badland (was $4)
Tiny Wings HD (was $3)
Traktor DJ HD (was $20)
How to Cook Everything (was $10)
Barefoot World Atlas (was $5)
Day One (was $5)
Over (was $2)
So dangerous and yet so intriguing. Show these six videos to your dog to inspire them to be brave this holiday weekend.
Source: youtube.com
Source: youtube.com
Source: youtube.com
Source: youtube.com
Get ready to feel really, really smart…then really, really dumb.
WTF is this wizardry how do I do the thing?
Source: cumfacepenisqueen.tumblr.com
Source: freenew.net
Source: gramfeed.com
Soon.
Via: Lisa Morrison / AP
Richard.mcelroyI'm sure Metta would like this.
Forget apple pie and full-calorie beer, y’all — didn’t you know that the quintessential American products are things like popcorn prawns, meatballs Texan style and the pizza hot dog? If you’re brain is doing the “wha wha whaaat?” dance, you’re not alone. You probably only know these items are marketed as American if you happen to live in Denmark.
Our fellow consumer-minded reporter Gitte Laasby at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel calls Denmark her homeland, and writes that she recently took a trip back there. This time around she was tickled by products marketed as American in a local ad for the grocery chain Lidl, which has its roots in Germany.
I’m not sure if there’s some kind of consultancy outfit over there dressed in red, white and blue (wearing pigtails and a midriff-baring shirt while laughing at the inherent hilarity of popcorn, natch), but if these people exist, consider our minds boggled by their choices of “American” foods.
To wit: the “Mcennedy American Way” mailer celebrating “American Week” features a whole slew of weird stuff we doubt has ever made an appearance on the average Joe’s table, along with fairly general things like “wraps” and “onion rings.”
A few fun ones:
• Popcorn prawns
• Pancakes (the “just add water and shake” kind)
• Meatballs Texan style
• Pizza hot dog
• Brownie cake
• ”Big nut cookies” – supposedly “a classic,” writes Laasby.
• Pecans from Alesto (also the German store’s own brand)
• “Western Gold” bourbon whiskey (made by Lidl’s British division)
• “Super size flips” — giant snacks described as corn snacks seasoned with peanut butter
It could just be this one particular Danish ad, but since we’re of the optimistic sort here at Consumerist HQ, we’re going to go ahead and guess that this is a fairly common phenomenon in plenty of cultures. After all, it’s likely just the result of how a certain country or society views Americans, and not necessarily reflective of what we really consume.
If you’ve got any other interesting examples of perception of America + [Insert country/culture here] = new reality, please feel free to send them to us at tips@consumerist.com with the subject line FAUXMERICA.
“American” products in Denmark are all about marketing [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
Animals make our lives so much better.
Via: Tore Johnson/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Source: Meg Williams/Flickr Creative Commons / via: flickr.com
Via: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Via: Merlyn Severn/Picture Post/Getty Images
Love or hate haunted houses, it's hard to deny the fact that their ability to turn otherwise rational adults into whimpering shells of their former selves is, to say the least, fairly impressive. And now, thanks to the new Haunted Mansion Backstage tumblr, you can see exactly how they turn all that dated robotic tech into some of our worst nightmares.
More specifically, the tumblr focuses on Disney's famed Haunted Mansion and collects photos from all over the internet of the ride's carefully guarded inner workings.
While these photos will certainly take some of the mystery out of the experience if you've never been before (in other words, spoilers lie ahead), it really is pretty amazing to get this rare view into the backend of a truly amazing show. Especially when the control room itself is creepier than the show for, uh, slightly different reasons:
Head over to the tumblr to see the rest of the photographs, and keep checking back—there will surely be more to come. [Haunted Mansion Backstage via BoingBoing]
None of us will ever be this happy.
Richard.mcelroyWe should get rid of Joan
Remember how your cat was waging a long-con, biological war on you? And then — with suspicious abruptness — it wasn’t waging war on you anymore and you were like, “But I could have sworn...” uneasily returning to your household chores with a creeping feeling that your cat hadn’t abandoned its murderous plans? Well, it turns out you were right to be uneasy — you’re cat is still trying to kill you, only this time not with parasites. This time, it’s tuberculosis.
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Ray Bradbury left his personal book collection, and some other personal effects, to the Waukegan Public Library, which is planning a permanent Ray Bradbury exhibit. Road trip?
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Programmer John Graham-Cumming tells a fascinating story about what coding like was back in 1985. Unlike today's programmers who wear hoodies, down energy drinks and use a paper thin computer, programmers in 1985 had to code by hand... with actual paper.
The story behind the handwritten code is fascinating. Graham-Cumming was tasked with making the software for a machine that put labels on bottles without any fancy futuristic tools. He had to write code for the software by hand because there wasn't an assembler and the KIM-1 singleboard computer he was using to prototype computer control only had a hex keypad and a small display. It was a time consuming process, to say the least.
John Graham-Cumming writes:
Of course, writing code like this is a pain. You first had to write the code (the blue), then turn it into machine code (the red) and work out memory locations for each instruction and relative jumps. At the time I didn't own a calculator capable of doing hex so I did most of the calculations needed (such as for relative jumps in my head).
In our world that's become littered with gadgets, it's always mind blowing to see how far we've come in the past 30 years. It's like creating technology with nothing! [John Graham-Cumming]
Kristin Cavallari tweeted this picture of Jay Cutler with ’80s rocker hair and get-up, along with his meme-appropriate cigarette at a 30th birthday celebration for everyone’s favorite chain-smoking feline quarterback. It’s hilarious on its own and another in a series of instances where Cutler has subtly acknowledged how the Internet makes fun of him.
Cutler might still be someone who would be unpleasant to meet in person (even by his own admission) or to work with, but from a certain remove, he actually becomes likeable. It’s hard to explain. Eventually his over-the-top dickishness combined with a willingness to give no f*cks grows on you. Perhaps it’s that, on some level, we crave an athlete to willingly personify the smug, dismissive jock persona that’s been a totem in pop culture for generations. It also helps that he doesn’t seem to take himself as seriously as he has in the past. Cutty’s behavior may not always be defensible, more often than not it isn’t, but it can still be charming in spite of itself.
[h/t Deadspin]
The post It’s Time To Admit We Like Jay Cutler appeared first on Kissing Suzy Kolber.
Spending the rest of your life with a fan of Arrested Development, New Girl, Mad Men, Lost, 30 Rock, Adventure Time, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, someone who also recognizes the Gracie Films “shhhh” logo, is about as good as it’s going to get, you lucky SOB. To live out your days with a wife/husband who not only loves all those shows, but also recreates their opening credits for your birthday, well, that IS good as it gets. Also, sex.
The video below, put together by Leigh for her lucky husband Oren, has just raised the bar for birthday gifts. It’s so good, we’ll even conveniently overlook the inclusion of 2 Broke Girls.
The post Awesome Wife Recreates Various TV Show Openings For Her Lucky Husband appeared first on UPROXX.
Excellent news! The BBC's television adaptation of Susanna Clarke's 2004 novelJonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, about magic during the Napoelonic Wars, is going ahead. And it's set to air in 2014!
It sure is getting dusty in here.
Source: youtube.com
After winning the 2000 National Championship, Michigan State's Mateen Cleaves cries as "One Shining Moment" plays in the arena.
Via: s3.amazonaws.com
David Barrett claims to have a fuzzy memory, but the night 27 years ago that a stunning waitress sat next to him in an East Lansing bar and forever changed his life? That he remembers quite well.
Barrett was just 31 and could have been most generously described as a sometimes-guitar player, sometimes-composer, and sometimes-songwriter. None of these career paths had held much traction, but after playing a gig at the Varsity Inn, Barrett pulled up a stool, ordered a beer, and turned his head. What had taken his attention away from Larry Bird and the Celtics was, as he remembers her, the most beautiful waitress he'd ever seen. "She could've been a Victoria's Secret model," he says. "She was so gorgeous, unless you were Robert Redford, you wouldn't even bother talking to her."
To his surprise, she started talking to him, so Barrett stammered to try and explain the allure of basketball and, on some deeper level, the captivating nature of watching elite athletes perform elite skills. When he swiveled toward the TV during a Bird-led fast break and turned back, she was gone.
The self-effacing Barrett wasn't so surprised by that turn of events, but he was struck by the conversation and what he'd tried to convey. "I had played a lot of basketball growing up, and I realized I'd gotten an insight like, 'Hey, I know a lot about this and I'm going to write a song about it.'" There wasn't much semblance of verse structure or even a strong melodic direction — not like John Tesh calling his own answering machine in 1990 to hum out the burst of inspiration that became NBC's theme for its NBA telecasts — but there was a phrase that lingered. He wrote it down on a cocktail napkin: "One shining moment."
The next morning, Barrett had plans for brunch. His friend ran a few minutes late and Barrett couldn't shake the feeling he was onto something with this half-baked sports song. "I'm just waiting there, so I grab another napkin and I literally wrote all the lyrics on the napkin," he says. "God knows how that happened, but it just did. I went home and, in 20 minutes, put the lyrics down and wrote the music. The whole thing was seemingly undeniable." Had Barrett's friend shown up on time, life might've turned out quite different.
Barely one year later, Barrett would become one of the most sought-after TV composers in the industry. And the song, "One Shining Moment," will air Monday night for the 27th straight year as the music bed for an array of highlights honoring the memorable stories, comebacks, and heartbreak of the men's basketball tournament. Moreover, the song has also provided a nice living for Barrett, who has always owned the rights to its usage, and his wife and two daughters.
And while "One Shining Moment" was meant to be a cathartic afterthought to the trials of March Madness, a palette cleanser to wrap up a near-month of competition, it's also maintained its familiar mid-'80s schmaltz, the same sense of comfort that personifies so many sports movies clichés.
But in an age of pop culture where everything old is new again, "One Shining Moment" serves as a reminder that for every skin-crawling collegiate scandal that pops up, there's one constant immune to tarnish. Every year, the script plays out the same — great teams lose, small schools stand up, and only one is left at the end — and then it's time to cue up "One Shining Moment." Weeks of behind-the-scenes work by CBS Sports engineers go into three minutes and five seconds of montage, but no challenge is too great when you're dealing with what Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has deemed "the national anthem of college basketball."
There's a sense, not altogether false, that if you've seen one year's "One Shining Moment," you've seen them all. To watch a few individual installments is to verify this claim, as there's an obvious method to the montage. Barrett's lyrics provide a roadmap through the song, giving at-home viewers something that is not so much formulaic as it is subliminal. The opening stanza practically comes storyboarded:
The ball is tipped
And there you are
You're running for your life
You're a shooting star ...
What are you going to see? Well, there'll be an opening tip-off, clearly, perhaps followed by someone chasing after a loose ball going out of bounds, possibly ending with a slo-mo jump shot or under-the-rim dunk. That's followed by another set of lyrical instructions:
And all the years
no one knows
just how hard you worked
but now it shows …
Anything showing raw emotion — a coach yelling in protest or perhaps someone staring at the arena roof in contemplation — will suffice.
In the blinking of an eye
ah, that moment's gone ...
Now you get someone (you guessed it) blinking wild-eyed followed by a losing team's player in tears or his head cradled in someone's hands.
And when it's done
win or lose
you always did your best ...
This is always some amalgam of buzzer-beaters, "No. 1" fingers pointed high in victory, and somber elbows resting on heavy knees after a loss. But then the second run of the chorus strikes up:
One shining moment,
you reached deep inside.
One shining moment,
you knew you were alive …
And this is where we start to get heavy voiceovers from important games theretofore, perhaps a top seed getting upset or the completion of an improbable comeback.
From there, the focus will typically segue to fresh footage of the Final Four, taken 48 hours prior, and the national championship game, which has only just concluded minutes ago. And just as each verse spells out the tournament, so does the cryogenically frozen melody. From the snare drum and piano that opens the segment to a few seconds later, when that familiar 11-note synth-trumpet kicks in, the interplay between words and harmony never veer from Barrett's original architecture. In fact, despite all the iterations through the years, many of the same musical elements remain from that fall day in 1986, when a handful of men came together in an Ann Arbor studio to record the first song for the first time.
Oakland Press, March 1972
Image by David Barrett
Though they played basketball against each other for rival high schools in Michigan, David Barrett and Armen Keteyian eventually became close through a mutual friend. When Keteyian moved to New York in 1982 to write for Sports Illustrated, Barrett would often crash at his place when he was swinging through town for a gig or near-begging others for work. ("Most likely the latter," Barrett admits.)
Keteyian, meanwhile, grew through the ranks as an investigative reporter and made connections across the Manhattan sports media scene. It was during a chance meeting with Bob Tassie, who was involved with marketing at CBS, that Keteyian learned the network was looking for a song to play during the closing moments of the national championship game.
A couple of months after he wrote the song — and just a few days after Keteyian's meeting with Tassie — Barrett found himself in New York on his friend's couch as Larry Bird was again on the TV, this time in the NBA Finals. Barrett figured he'd bring up his idea: "Armen, you know, I wrote this song about basketball and I think it's pretty good."
Keteyian turned. "Well, if you ever record it, send it to me." He made a demo, eventually, but not without reservations. "I was going through a pretty rough patch and that song was too optimistic for me. I was only going to record songs that art professors would like — and then I'd go broke."
In September 1986, Barrett hired some local musicians to professionally record "One Shining Moment" — Barrett himself providing piano and main vocals. He sent that cassette off to New York, where Keteyian listened to the tape ("It gave me chills") before personally dropping it off at CBS headquarters.
The next day, Keteyian's phone rang. It was Tassie. "You're not going to believe this," he said. Tassie had popped the tape into his own cassette player, and as the song wafted through the halls of CBS, people started flocking to his office in awe. "I think we're going to do this," he said.
The tape eventually made its way to Doug Towey, the longtime creative director of CBS Sports. He had loved Barrett's composition and wanted to use the song on one of their telecasts, so Towey called him up in Michigan. Barrett was incredulous.
"It took him 10 minutes just to convince me that he was Doug Towey from CBS and that they wanted to use my song," Barrett remembers. "I have a bunch of knuckleheads for friends, and it wouldn't be above them to do something like that." After those 10 minutes, though, the two became close friends, right up until Towey's death in 2009.
From the get-go, Towey was determined to get "One Shining Moment" on the air at the earliest possible moment. It might require a slight lyrical tweak here or there, but Towey already had one date in mind: January 25, 1987. Barrett's song would premiere after the Super Bowl.
The final image of "One Shining Moment" 2012.
Image by David J. Phillip / AP
It was a beautiful song but it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.
— "The Entertainer," Billy Joel
At some point in the wee hours of today, Shawn Robbins will have boarded a red-eye flight from New York to Atlanta. He'll have been clutching a book-sized container in his hands, one that never leaves his sight. He's been told he can run it through the TSA's mammoth scanner machine, but that's when the paranoia usually sets in. As he says, "You don't want to get down there and the tape is blank."
The tape happens to be the two minutes and 30 seconds or so of "One Shining Moment" that has taken him and editor Shelley Goldmark, who's worked on OSM for some 20 years, more than three weeks to cobble together. Robbins always spends these hours in the air staring at the plane's overhead compartment, making sure no one makes off with this master reel. If he has to go to the bathroom, he might even take it with him.
For him, the national championship game is a culmination of sleepless nights, bleary eyes, and nonstop basketball. As the producer of "One Shining Moment," Robbins gets constant emails, texts, and voicemails from CBS cameramen to producers and everyone in between, full of helpful suggestions for what might be deemed OSM-worthy. This starts from the opening moments of the first games in mid-March, and it's up to him and Goldmark to sift through not only those moments that seem obvious — a buzzer-beater here or an alley-oop there — but also the hours of B-roll game footage that never make it to air.
It's hard to adequately convey the chaos that pervades any TV production truck or control room doing a live sporting event. It's a testament to any successful broadcast that we, the at-home viewers, rarely witness any stray artifacts from this organized madness. What we do see, if everyone is on their game, is, in this case, basketball with informative graphics, timely replays, and seamless transitions. Robbins's job is all of that — only magnified. He must go back through all those endless reels of tape and piece together two- and three-second clips until he forms a narratively cohesive story. It's E pluribus unum in action. Out of many, one.
"Literally watching the games is one way," Robbins says. "But then there are things that never make it to air. Let's say there are eight cameras at each game. All those cameras are feeding into a tape machine and there are all sorts of things the people at home never see. So if the game is two hours, that's 16 hours of footage on each game. We literally go through every frame looking for stuff."
Robbins knows how it sounds, like there's not enough hours in a day for him and Goldmark to accomplish such a feat — the first four days alone consist of 48 games. "I know this tournament very well in fast-forward," he says. The struggle pays off, though, when a process that can feel downright Sisyphean yields a special moment that never made it to air.
That's actually something that CBS is hoping to accentuate this time around, according to Harold Bryant, an executive producer and VP of production at CBS Sports. "This year, we have not just game cameras, but now we've added in 'specialty cameras' that will look for those dramatic moments: a hug, a high-five, a kid on the bench looking like he's in pain or sorrow," he says. "The fun of the tournament is what we're trying to capture: the color, the cheerleaders, the bands, the painted faces, and so on."
For Robbins, that means keeping eyes on as many cameras as possible. For the championship on Monday night, it'll be him, an editor, and two assistants that have access to the main CBS video router, allowing them to pull in any feed they like. They'll go into the game with about two minutes and 35 seconds already done. That leaves just 30 seconds left to fill and every image is a contender, right up until the final buzzer and postgame celebration.
"It's mayhem for us in the best way, because there are all these great celebration shots and everyone is chiming in," Robbins says. "And it's like, 'Oh my God, punch up 32! Punch up X! Punch up Z!' And we're looking at all these great shots but we need to figure out, OK, what's getting in at this point?"
The most frequent complaint Robbins hears is that some school, of the now-68 that get selected every year, is not depicted in some way. It's an unfortunate reality of his job, he says, and a wholly unrealistic ideal at that. With barely more than three minutes of airtime, there's just no way that every school will make it. This year, he says there'll be just over 40 schools, give or take, that make it to the final cut, but that'll mean more than two dozen unhappy alumni groups. And there are tournament moments, such as the harrowing leg injury suffered by Louisville's Kevin Ware, that pop up without warning but always deserve their due tribute. "What we've done really works," Robbins says of how they treated the grisly incident. "That's part of the journey of the tournament. It is touched on, and that postgame shot of Rick Pitino being hugged by his players is so unbelievable."
And if is seems odd how little "One Shining Moment" has actually changed over the years, that the themes and representations embedded in Barrett's composition seem to need no revision, that, according to Robbins, is all by design.
"The segment has to stand the test of time," he says. "We always look at the piece, and we say, in five years or 10 years time from now, is this going to be representative of this tournament? Did we do a good job?"
Indiana guard Keith Smart rises for a shot during the 1987 National Championship.
On the night of January 25, 1987, David Barrett picked up the phone and his heart sank. It was Doug Towey on the line from Pasadena, explaining that "One Shining Moment" would not be airing after all. Super Bowl XXI had run long, thanks to the New York Giants' 39-20 romp over the Denver Broncos. The closing montage, at the last minute, was scrapped. Barrett didn't take the development well.
"I was a beat poet for about two weeks after that. It was me and Jack Kerouac," he says. "It was terribly disappointing." Towey, though, was undeterred. He had championed the composition's use for football, since its lyrics and musical stylings were generic enough to work for almost marquee sporting event. (According to CBS Sports VP Harold Bryant, "I think you would've heard 'the ball is kicked' rather than 'the ball is tipped.'") Regardless, the song had originally been written for basketball, and so it was decided that the 1987 NCAA Tournament would see its unveiling. That was a more controlled event for which CBS could plan more precisely. Towey assuaged Barrett's concerns, telling him, "Now we're going to put it where it should be."
The debut of "One Shining Moment" on March 30, 1987, after the National Championship Game, could not have played out more perfectly. In the waning seconds, Keith Smart's jumper from the left baseline gave coach Bobby Knight's Indiana team a 74-73 win over Jim Boeheim's Syracuse Orangemen, delivering, in essence, a shining moment for the entire montage to stand upon. In now-typical OSM fashion, clips from the tournament's previous games played on while Barrett's voice and piano work provided the soundtrack for a memorable tourney. A phenomenon had been born.
Source: youtube.com
But to go back and watch the original OSM segment is to peer into the closest thing resembling a time machine that can blend the spirit of '80s basketball and the sensibilities of popular culture at the time. Lost to the years is the piano prelude that Barrett also composed and performed, called "Golden Street," and this did play during the CBS credit roll that prefaced "One Shining Moment." Barrett actually wrote this particular piece of music when he was 19, but its somber, singular nature provides a welcome contrast to the underlying Rocky IV, '80s-synth vibes that come to bear in what follows, a now-hilarious time capsule filled with legendary coaches, younger than we can possibly remember them. (Most striking is seeing a bespectacled, emotional Boeheim, who returned to the Final Four this year with Syracuse. The only real difference between now and then is a hairline in full retreat.) But the highlights, even from that first year, do wonderfully synch up with Barrett's voice and instrumentation.
From that day forth, the segment has become a staple of every tournament, a comfortable coda that officially closes the college basketball season. That sort of longevity stems from how "the imagery of the song cuts across generations," Keteyian says. "Everyone has struggled, and the whole of idea of winners and losers, you're running for your life, you're a shooting star … Those are timeless lyrics, even though they're simple. And in a world that's increasingly commercialized and complex, the beautiful simplicity of the song holds together." The Wall Street Journal has even called it "arguably the most famous song in sports," and no compelling evidence has yet countered that charge.
Barrett's career almost immediately took off. He ended up writing lasting themes for golf's PGA Championship and tennis's US Open, as well as some compositions for the Olympic Games. His rendition of "One Shining Moment" played after the conclusion of the NCAA Championship Game until 1994, when he was bumped in favor of soul singer Teddy Pendergrass. However, Barrett owns the rights to the song, which means he not only gets a nice check from CBS and the NCAA every year but also stays close to its production and evolution. ("I'm the guy who knows where all the stuff is buried in those tracks," as he says.)
Though the boon to Barrett's career would've been undeniable had the song aired after Super Bowl XXI, Keteyian, for one, likes that the song has remained indelibly connected to one event. "I think it's great it's never been used outside basketball," he says. "David would never say this, but he's turned down opportunities to cash in on that song. He owns the masters. He owns everything with that song, and he's protective of the history of the song and the message that it sends."
Barrett's original version was remixed and "enhanced" when it was brought back for the 2000 tournament. An organ, some strings, new background vocals, and a horn section were added, though it was still Barrett himself "playing the piano like a chimpanzee." That version played for two more years before R&B legend Luther Vandross was signed to be the new voice of "One Shining Moment" in 2003. It was, famously, the last song Vandross ever recorded before a massive stroke ended his singing career.
It's the Luther Vandross version that has remained since, save for 2010, when Jennifer Hudson recorded a new, more contemporary version. Controversy ensued, and the public clamoring for the Vandross version led to its reinstatement the following year. In truth, Hudson's vocals are superior to the three prior vocalists, but the more egregious affront was to intersperse clips of Hudson in the studio into the actual "One Shining Moment" montage, something that had never been done.
To this day, no one close to CBS Sports seems particularly keen on rehashing the short-lived debacle, and at least one YouTube user has even removed Hudson's vocal, cut out her scenes, and dubbed in Pendergrass instead. "Hope you all appreciate this," the video's description says, "because I hated the new 'One Shining Moment.'"
Barrett in 2010, with producer Harvey Mason Jr. and singer Jennifer Hudson
This is Shawn Robbins's third year at the helm of the montage, and he'd like to think this is when he finds a happy middle ground. His first year, which followed the Jennifer Hudson debacle, the University of Connecticut blew out Butler University and Robbins scrambled to fill precious seconds in those manic final minutes. Last year, an expected Kentucky victory provided for a fortuitous final shot, of the Wildcat players mussing John Calipari's perma-styled 'do.
This year, Robbins is prepared for anything. "Now I always have extra shots ready to insert, like, in case of emergency, break glass," he says with a laugh. There won't be much time for laughter as the tournament concludes Monday night inside Atlanta's Georgia Dome, but he's more confident than ever in his ability to continue the legacy of what Doug Towey envisioned 26 years ago. "You always want more time, but you never have it," he says. "I'm proud of the fact that I get to do it, it's definitely an honor, and we all treat it that way. We really do."
And while he and his CBS Sports peers are busy holed up in their production trucks just outside the stadium, Barrett will be sitting inside the dome, cheering on (as any good Ann Arborite would) the Michigan Wolverines, along with his family. They'll fly home the next morning, and then he has to drive one of his daughters back to college. He's got two small films he's scoring now and has never truly been out of work long since his first shining moment in 1987. Barrett says he never tires of discussing the song, mostly because of the sheer happenstance from which it was created. He never saw this coming and has learned not to question it too much. Like the star basketball player he was in high school, Barrett threw up his best shot with "One Shining Moment," and the ball just happened to swish through. "You have this dreamer idea that you're going to write songs and people are going to like you and pay you and you're going to make a decent living," he says, "but it was a real blessing."
Does Barrett still watch every year? "Oh, gosh, yeah," he says. "It's a perfect marriage between song and video. Even last year, I got moved just looking at it, thinking, man, these guys who cut this up are good."
