Month: July 2026

When I talk to the electro-curious, the first question is “What happens if you run out of battery?” The answer is, I don’t know. It hasn’t come up. My relatively old Tesla holds 230 miles of charge. That’s a lot. There’s plenty of superchargers on every highway and anywhere enough humans live. We’ve driven to Detroit, St. Louis, Boston without a sweat. After five years of ownership, I’m not worried.

We were on vacation in Gulf Shores Alabama. The car was down to 40 miles. Not a problem. We would go into town and get charged up while doing other things. We didn’t expect any problem since we had already visited a supercharger nearby, at The Wharf.

And so Mr. and Mrs. Muttrox, their 18-year-old daughter and 3 of her friends went into for lunch in a caravan of the Tesla and a ‘normal’ gas car. After lunch we went to get groceries, while the girls went to charge up the Tesla and hang out at The Wharf. 90 minutes later we got the call. “Dad, I’m down to 8 miles left, all the roads are closed I can’t get to the charger! What do I do!?” Yikes. Hoo boy. We’ve had these cars for five years and have never yet had to deal with being out of energy at the side of the road. Time to enter crisis mode. 

1. Girls, immediately pull over to the side of the road. Get out of the car. Turn off your Bluetooth. The Tesla needs to be powered off 100% so it doesn’t lose any more electricity.

We were fortunate to have (1) the extra car that could “scout”, and (2) the Tesla app that lets us track everything, notably location.

2. We drove to them (with the aid of the app). Some lady there had said there might be a charger at the Target down that way. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla in the heat, the rest of us took the Volvo to check it out. There was no charger. Back to the Tesla.
3. The app said the very place we had eaten lunch (Lulus) had a supercharger, and it was the closest one. I had noticed that at lunch but hadn’t seen it in the parking lot. Well, maybe I was an idiot and just missed it. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla again, the rest of us drove back to Lulus. I asked the parking traffic guy and sure enough there were some chargers. They were practically camouflaged and blocked off (I forgave himself for missing them), but they sure existed.
4. Lulus is four miles away from the car. The car now has only four miles of charge. And those miles are an estimate. Brad didn’t think we could get there. We had to try. 

5. Thank goodness for Mr. Rodriguez in 11^th grade AP physics! I knew that wind resistance goes up as the square of speed (because you are hitting more particles and each particle has higher relative velocity), so I had to keep the speed capped at 30 mph even on the highway. I would drive the Tesla with the Volvo behind me with hazard lights on. I couldn’t run the air conditioner (uses energy), I couldn’t have the windows down (adds wind resistance which uses energy). I would just have to bake while driving.
6. I did bake. It was awful. It was over 90 degrees in the direct Florida sun and the car was a sauna. Whenever we got to a red light I lowered the windows to get a small breeze then raised them again when the light turned green. I was stressed about the energy being used by lowering and raising the windows, could that be the difference?
7. But we made it! I backed into the spot with 0% left on the battery. I’d never seen 0% before. The attendant told me I needed to straighten out the car. I told him I couldn’t until I had charged up some more, wasn’t sure I could get back the five feet into the space.  

8. It turned out these weren’t Tesla superchargers, that’s why I missed them before – I was looking for the familiar red and white shapes. These were ordinary level 2 chargers like we have at home. Charging up would take 10 hours. 10 hours is not good enough.  

9. We sent the Volvo off once more to scout “The Wharf”, the only supercharger in the area. Mrs. Muttrox called me and said it was fine, no idea what our daughter was talking about, it’s all fine, come on over. That was 8 miles away. I waited 30 minutes until I was up to 25 miles charge and headed out. I needed that time to cool down. I felt like a boxer, I must have sweated out a few pounds of water while cooking in that car.
10. But I couldn’t get to The Wharf! Everytime I tried to get somewhere, there was a road blocked off. I’d circle to the next area and that would be blocked off also. I was using up my precious miles trying to get to the supercharger, but I was just getting farther away. What the hell is going on!?
11. After a testy phone call with Erinn (I get tunnel vision under stress – I solve the problem but act like a jerk while I’m doing it) I realized what was up. One whole bridge was under construction. The Tesla navigation system didn’t understand that and kept trying different ways to get over the bridge. In the Volvo we used Google Maps, which correctly knew the bridge was under construction and just sent her to the next bridge. (Navigation is the same 98% of the time between the systems, and most of the 2% is irrelevant differences. This was the big exception.)
12. I pulled into the Wharf with 9 miles left. By now, 9 miles felt like 200. We charged up, everything was fine. What an adventure! I got back to the house seven hours after we had left it. The groceries weren’t in great shape.

I discovered that there are services that come out with a battery, the equivalent of calling AAA for a jump start. It’s called Mobile EV Charging, Bee Charged EV seems to be the major player. Or you can get the car towed to a supercharger.   

In the end it all worked out. IMO, five years without ever seriously being close to running out of battery is quite good. Consider what it took to have this problem come up. We had a fairly low charge to start. I didn’t notice the charger at the lunch spot. Major roads were closed for construction. My daughter couldn’t get to the supercharger and didn’t call until we were right at the edge of disaster. The Tesla navigation system didn’t do its job. That’s a lot of things that had to go wrong.

I remain confident that electric cars running out of juice is no more common than ICE cars running out of gas.

Like many Celtics fans, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Jaylen Brown trade. At face value it is about the dumbest trade possible. This is my attempt to justify it. (I’m writing this in the early morning just before a vacation, I haven’t been able to review it much… be kind.)

• Brad Stevens and the rest of the decision makers are still smart.
• The job of Brad Stevens is to maximize the number of championships. Over the long run, not any one particular year.
• We bought a championship in 2024, bringing in hired guns to supplement Tatum and Brown. We went way over the apron to do so. It was a great deal, and now we’ve been paying off that championship debt for a couple years.
• We can’t be a contender if all the apron penalties apply. We need to get back under and reset them. So last year we dumped a historic amount of salary to do so. (The Celtics went from $540 million to something like $185 million.) We need one more year under the apron to reset everything, then we can buy up free agents again and buy another championship or two. The year after this one is the key one.

Is Jaylen Brown Good?

• Jaylen Brown is a fantastic player. NBA finals MVP (deservedly). 6th in NBA MVP voting this year. Record highs in points and the usual stats. In the end, nothing counts more than wins. With him as team leader, the Celtics finished way above expectations, generating and extra 20 wins or so. He seems to get better every year.  He’s also a great person. This was his favorite year for many reasons, but a lot of it was clearly his relationship with young players he took under his wing and supported.
• But Jaylen Brown is not as fantastic as you might think. All the advanced analytics are not kind to him. His net rating clearly shows that the Celtics do better when he isn’t on the floor. Some try to justify this with waving hands, but it can’t be done. It has been a pattern for multiple years, it’s not just about this years bench. It is unique to him, not Tatum or White or other players with high usage around the league. The sample size is vast. It’s real. His increase in statistics this year can be entirely explained by his increase in usage.
• Jaylen Brown is a very expensive player. Remember he was the highest paid player in the league for a short time. His current contract is very expensive, and is 35% of the team cap. (The absolute numbers continue to go up, but the % of cap is stable. Tatum’s percentage is slowly rising.)
• Brown is so expensive that we can’t build out the rest of the team. We would not be able to re-create that title team, he and Tatum would eat up too much salary to get those other free agents (Jru, Porzingis, etc) needed to be a championship contender.
• So. Yes, Jaylen Brown is very good. The analytics are real, but an incomplete picture. It’s just stupid to think he’s actually a negative on any team. But Tatum is better than Brown. He’s top 5, Brown is top 15. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe (and The Celtics likely do) that Jaylen Brown, as good as he is, is not worth the money. He’d be a steal at $30-$40 million. At $50-$65 million he is an anchor. In other words, Jaylen Brown is very good. But not good enough for his contract. 
• The Celtics cannot be a title contender as long as the massive Tatum & Brown contracts eat up so much of the salary cap. We needed to move off Brown and get back the ability to build a title contending team.

Urgency

• Jaylen Brown is due for an extension in two weeks. If he gets it, all the problems set in for a few more years, The Celtics cannot win a championship. If he doesn’t get it, then he becomes disgruntled. This part doesn’t make that much sense to me. So what – if he’s disgruntled, he’s disgruntled. He’ll still play his ass off, like he always does. I think the issue is that the extension makes him untradeable, but we saw in real life that he isn’t very tradeable already. Let’s assume that not giving him the player option creates enough problems to make that a bad option.
• Therefore, we needed to trade Brown before that option deadline.

What did the Celtics want in a trade

• As Brad Stevens said 13 times, they wanted “optionality”. Which for the love of god is a made up word that is longer than the word it replaces, “options”. Just say options. Or flexibility. Anyhow… Optionality means 1) more/better draft picks, and significantly more cap room in the long run, particularly starting the year after this one (when repeater penalties fully reset).

Given the timeline and urgency, did The Celtics act correctly?

• Sorta. More or less. But if this analysis is correct and Brad Stevens is cold-blooded (which is the job), The Celtics should have traded Brown last year and tanked the season while we were at it. We’d be in a much better place now.
• It was correct to see if we could make a Giannis trade work. It was correct to walk away from the price Milwaukee was demanding.
• It was correct to shop Brown around the league and see what we could get. This was Nico’s biggest problem in the Luka trade. It was reasonable to think you couldn’t win a championship with Luka, it was not reasonable to only talk to one team.
• The basic problem is that every other team has some version of this same analysis. No one else thinks that Brown is as good as his contract either. And the more he was shopped around, the more other owners saw the wisdom of crowds (if everyone else thinks Brown isn’t worth it, maybe I shouldn’t pay a high price either.) This meant the Celtics couldn’t get back the kind of returns everyone thought Brown was worth.

What are the results of the actual trade?

• Is Paul George good? If he’s fully healthy, he’s very good – roughly equal with Brown. But he almost certainly won’t be fully healthy.
• Paul George is nearly as expensive as Jaylen Brown.
• But the Jaylen Brown contracts goes for two more years.
• Paul George has a player option after next year, but at that point he is an expiring contract. The Celtics can move off of him, in the same way the 76ers moved off him. It probably costs us a first round pick to do that, but moving an expiring contract is much easier than one that has more years left on it.
• In the 27-28 season The Celtics will have reset all the apron penalties, have significant cap space to build around Tatum, to sign their own young players cheap (Schierman, Hugo, etc.), get free agents, and will even have a premium draft pick or two. That is the basis of championship team.

Endnote: A couple dump media perspectives:

• You might hear media folks like Bill Simmons saying this years team is actually quite good (true), so that justifies the trade (false). You have to compare against the hypothetical of not trading Brown. If we hadn’t traded Brown, we’d also be a very good team.
• Was it because of the money? In the press conference, Stevens and Chisholm both said multiple times this wasn’t a money decision, it was a basketball decision. That has been mocked, but it’s true. It means that we are willing to pay financial penalties to build a good team. It doesn’t mean that money wasn’t involved – because the amount of money in contracts (cap space) drives basketball penalties.

I wish the trade hadn’t happened. I’ve always been a Jaylen Brown fan. He’s done nothing but play hard, improve, and win. He’s a great person. It’s not his fault that he is paired with Tatum. That is a pretty unique set up, having two superstars about the same age and team longevity on the same team, and it drives some weird dynamics. It’s not Browns fault that he was awarded the supermax contract that set him up to fail. I wish he was still a Celtic. But the trade is at the least defensible. Hopefully we will remember him when we raise another couple banners at the end of the 2020s and retire his number.

Stairway to Heaven.

Every guitarist tries to learn it. It was so common that the Wayne’s Worlds reference isn’t even a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCh6guovbt0

It’s such a cliche. It was voted the greatest rock song a million years in a row in my youth. It’s so overwhelmingly popular and so well known. It’s easy to forget that — well — it’s incredibly awesome. Every generations discovers it because it’s one of the best songs ever. What else can you say about it? (You could say it was kinda stolen.)

Led Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2012. To cap off the evening, Heart did a live performance of Stairway to Heaven. It blows my socks off. It blew away Led Zeppelin, you can visibly see them getting more into it and more emotional as it goes.

Turn up the bass, turn up the volume, turn off the lights, and listen to this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cZ_EFAmj08

A few notes:

• John Bonham frequently wore a bowler, thus Jason and much of the supporting team did as well as an homage.
• Apparently they were only able to fully rehearse this once. And it was freezing backstage, Nancy was worried her fingers wouldn’t work for the delicate intro section.
• Some reflections from Robert Plant:

March 26, 2026: At 2:30 in the afternoon, I picked up two sassy fat black ladies from a brunch place (Barneys). They were taking the afternoon off to daydrink. I loved them instantly. They were terribly disappointed by Barneys “weakass brunch”, so they got an Uber (me) to hit up a different brunch. The fare was only $5. A few days later they added on a $35 tip. That’s my biggest tip ever. Especially on such a small base. What a nice treat for me.

 

March 28. Ride 703: I picked up Parkti, a proper young Indian lady at a suburban Marta stop. She quickly asked me to turn the podcast off, she had a headache. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later she asked if she could open a window. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later I heard heavy breathing noises and (you saw it coming didn’t you) she vomited all over herself and the seat. Just as I was pulling onto the highway. I pulled over to the shoulder of the entrance ramp in traffic for her to step out and gather herself at the guardrail.

She couldn’t stop apologizing. We continued onwards, I mentioned I’d have to hit the carwash directly after, heavily implying she owes me for a carwash. I dropper her off. When I drove to the car wash I found she had managed to furiously puke all over herself without getting a single drop on the car itself. That’s amazing. Very impressive skills, Parkti!

She was my second puking passenger. I don’t do much weekend night driving, I generally avoid the drunks. I did have one couple where the guy was so wasted he could barely get in. Two minutes in he asked to open the windows. His girlfriend saw what was about to happen and got me to pull over in time.

After Parkti I now understand the pattern. When they mention windows, look for a safe place to pull over. And I now stock a few rags and wetwipes in the trunk.

I get asked, “What happens if they puke in your car, who pays?” Uber says they will pay for a cleaning, but they ask for a lot of evidence first. Apparently most drivers just give up and pay themselves. I haven’t yet had any actual vomit in my car to test this.

March 2025: A guy with a thick Russian accent hops in with his wife. We are heading 20 miles to the airport. No, just a location very close to the airport. That’s unusual. Passengers often make mistakes. I check with him to make sure, “Ya ya it is airport we’re going, no worry.” I don’t say anything else the rest of the drive.

We arrive at the address. It’s a seedy factory in the middle of nowhere. It looks like where the bad guys torture the sidekick of the hero. As we pull in, he panics and yells “This isn’t airport! What is this!? Get me out of here!” I pause for a second, but he did put in the airport, so it’s his problem. I had even confirmed with him, but he looks very angry and keeps yelling, “This place look like I get killed here, what is this!? Why you do this!!!?” As I start to reply he breaks up, laughing. Son of a bitch was trolling me. This was the correct destination, he was playing the dumb foreigner act for fun. He got me good. One of my favorite passengers ever.