Ahead on Differential

This is the Ahead on Differential Daily Dispatch, issue #1.

I.

I’ve never been to Asia; the furthest east I’ve been from home is Czechia, and that was just for a layover in Prague. Tangent: I might be the only person to ever listen to the Denis Leary stand-up comedy album No Cure for Cancer in the skies between Prague and Paris. I have no excuse for my choice of in-flight entertainment other than I was 15 and deep into stand-up at the time. I bring up Asia because Josh, my Scrabble tutor, is back home from commentating the 2026 Causeway Challenge in Bangkok, and I told him before our session today that I should get into the broadcast producer’s ear about helping out at the next event in Kuala Lumpur in 2028. I’m not good enough to play in the tourney proper, but surely I’m good enough to run network cables and print scoresheets.

II.

There’s been a microtrend of “perfect season” games cropping up, where you pick players from a random decade of a random franchise’s existence in the hopes of assembling a team that has a perfect season. The catch is you can only fill out one position at a time, so if you roll the 80s Edmonton Oilers but already have a center, tough shit, no Wayne Gretzky for you (thankfully, if this is the case, you’ll have a great consolation prize like Jari Kurri or Grant Fuhr assuming those slots are open). There’s one for basketball, hockey, football, another one for football, but favourite one is for pro wrestling, and this other one for pro wrestling. My best card, and only S+ “show of the year”-tier card I got on the first game I tried involves not one, but two Hangman Adam Page matches, and one of them is a tag match. This game also just makes me want to queue up these classic matches on YouTube.

III.

when I see a steel albatross full of jet fuel and upholstery streak cross the skyline and miraculously not collide with anything in the foreground, double in size while descending, land without disaster or collateral damage, and roll to a standstill like a golf cart I can only point like a guileless child and say “holy shit, man, that’s crazy”

I guess I have transportation on the brain.

IV.

A good chunk of the new music I encounter in the wild is through the various subreddits I follow. This is how I got hip to A Taste of Cherry, the debut album by the Creem, the new project from Nick Thorburn, best know for his work with Islands and the Unicorns, and Mike Stroud, late of Ratatat. I was a budding music snob in 2003, reading Pitchfork and alienating my friends, so this particular team-up is a big deal for me. I was jamming “I Was Born (A Unicorn)” and “Seventeen Years” then, and I’m still jamming them now. It took me a second to figure out what all this reminded me of, what with the late 60s/early 70s touches and Stroud’s needly, hyper-processed guitar tone. Then it hit me: 10cc. This feels like a 10cc album, especially in the back half. The title track feels like it’s trying to emulate “Rubber Bullets.” Good job, fellas.

#dd