The body shot knockout

But more than anything else, a punch like that puts a terrible picture in your head: You can see this black, spreading stain just under your skin, all of your body's essentials bleeding out and filling spaces where they don't have any business. A punch to the head can make you feel dizzy or woozy or sleepy, but it doesn't hurt, exactly. A punch like that one, like the one Hopkins slipped into De La Hoya, makes you feel as though you're about to die.

Chris Jones in Grantland on the art of the body shot knockout.

Gilligan

In TV writing it's called a "Gilligan" when a character is like, "There's no way I would ever do [X] thing," and then it cuts to a shot of them doing it.

Molly Lambert and Chuck Klosterman discuss the upcoming and final season of Entourage. My favorite paragraph, from Klosterman, delves into the fundamental appeal of TV:

I think people are constantly trying to understand their own life and constantly trying to find meaning within that reality; this is an extremely difficult process, mostly because we're all shackled by a fixed perspective. We can only experience life through our own eyes and our own memory. But TV is not like this. When we watch TV, we are watching (a depiction of) life from a detached, outside perspective, and we're able to understand multiple experiences simultaneously: We can see Turtle's life as Turtle sees it, but we can also see how people view Turtle and how accurate Turtle's personal worldview is, and everything else that's happening in Turtle's world that Turtle is oblivious to. We are also watching something that was written with a definite beginning, an action-heavy middle, and a definite end (so a clear metaphorical meaning can always be deduced). It's almost like watching escapist TV is a way to unconsciously simulate our own hopeless attempts at understanding ourselves, except with all the answers outlined at the back of the textbook. The static predictability of Entourage suggests that it's somehow possible to understand actual life, and this feels good to people.

Miracle berry

Earlier this year, Homaro Cantu of Moto fame paired with Thomas Bowman to create a restaurant called iNG which offered a special miracle berry tasting menu at its kitchen table. The miracle berry or miracle fruit tricks human taste buds into thinking sour tastes are sweet, among other effects, and many people throw miracle berry parties to tour its flavor warping effects.

Cantu and Bowman now think the miracle berry can take on a more useful role: combatting obesity. If the miracle berry can trick people into tasting sugarless items as sweet, perhaps it can reduce sugar intake period.

“Famine is not only a distribution issue, but what we think of as food,” said Mr. Cantu, 34, who was homeless for three years as a child in Portland, Ore. Last year, as co-host of the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green TV series “Future Food,” he survived for a week eating only miracle berries and weeds, leaves and grass that he scavenged from his backyard.

Much nutritious, wild vegetation is mowed under or tossed into the garbage because humans do not find it palatable, Mr. Cantu said.

Miracle berries could be a way to get around that barrier, he said. “We have to redefine what is edible to include what is edible with the miracle berry,” he said.

Cantu has a miracle berry diet cookbook in the works. I just ordered a pack of miracle berries online. I have to try this out.

Breaking Bad

[Breaking Bad] is designed to take a guy from his beginning point to his end point and transform him from a good guy into a bad guy.

That's from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in a revealing interview in Grantland. I wish he hadn't come out so definitively with this thesis with the show still on air, but the quote does leave little doubt as to the course Gilligan is steering the show, and it's better than feeling like you're watching a show that's open-ended simply to maximize revenue from additional seasons (I won't name names, but everyone knows a few). It's a unique premise for an American television show, where even the darkest of protagonists in the past were intended to be sympathetic (Tony Soprano, Don Draper). Walter White's soul grows darker by the episode, making the show simultaneously more unique and yet harder to watch.

[possible minor spoiler ahead as I offer a general prediction for how the series will end]

Take the premise above and fuse it with Gilligan's statement that his personal belief system centers around karma, and it's not hard to imagine that Walter White and Jesse will meet with a tragic reckoning by series end (not that they haven't already suffered a huge toll already).

"I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell." - Vince Gilligan

A natural question for Gilligan is whether a good man turned bad was the premise from the very beginning, and he offers not only an answer to that but names the moment he thinks White passed the point of no return, and it's not the one most would expect.

I think Walt reached the point of no return was actually before that, as early as Season 1, and it might have been the moment in which he was offered financial salvation. He was offered some sort of deus ex machina salvation in the form of his former partner coming to him and saying, "Listen, Walt, I've heard about your situation, and I'd love to give you a job, and I'd love to pay your bills, and I'd love to give you a free hand here." And Walt, out of pride, would rather cook crystal meth than take the help.

I was about as proud of that moment as I was of any we've had since, and I'll tell you why: My first inclination for this show was that this was a good man — fundamentally good — who was doing a really stupid thing, cooking crystal meth, and was ignorant of how terrible this world was and would quickly be in over his head, and quickly forces beyond his control would make him continue cooking. Perhaps he'd be held in some sort of bondage by some kingpin and made to cook meth. It occurred to us early on, "You know what? We don't want to see that. No one wants to see that.” They want to see this guy, right or wrong, have the will to go forward in this thing. That's a much more interesting character than a character who is forced simply by dire straits.

Last season, the show's third, Breaking Bad was the best show on television, with at least two of the most memorable episodes of TV, and if people argue it's the best show on TV, or the GOAT, I don't blink.