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Cryptocurrency and the non-fungible artwork purchased with it has been the talk of the Internet in 2021. Though crypto had been around for years, its rising and falling slipped into the mainstream conversation thanks to Elon Musk and others going viral and bringing new evangelicals into the fold.

There have been a lot of tie-ins with crypto and other entities as the space continues to grow, starting with the explosion of NFTs. But now we’re also seeing specific coins minted with pop culture references in mind. So perhaps it’s not surprising that The Office is now among those shows.

Leslie David Baker teamed up with Rocket Bunny to make Stanley’s Nickels, a reference to his character on The Office. If you’d like to hear Baker describe the coin and try to figure it out for yourself, you can hear him read a script explaining the coin, how it works, and some potential benefits from owning nickels for yourself.

The announcement seemed to slip under the radar, which is reasonable because there’s simply a lot of noise in the crypto space and plenty of new coins simply go nowhere until they are all at once a big deal. And even then, some just crash and burn right as they become popular. But at the very least, this one is certainly going to a good cause. If you can manage to parse all the complexities of the digital version of Stanley’s Nickels, that is.

In a Medium post announcing the coin, Baker explained that the coin’s proceeds will go to The Actor’s Fund, which has been crucial to helping out of work entertainers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’ve ever watched The Office, you already know who Stanley Hudson is. Well, Leslie David Baker (Stanley Hudson) and Sardar Khan (Stanley’s nephew, Lucky, in the upcoming show Uncle Stan) have decided to release a real live version of the “Stanley Nickel”! That’s right, the official Stanley Nickel is coming to the blockchain. To make matters even more exciting, it will initially be available exclusively on our Rocket Drop staking platform.

In other words, the coin is more charitable with some fun benefits than a get rich quick scheme. But The Office tie-in is clear here.

British rapper Little Simz has a blistering new song out today called “I Love You, I Hate You,” which is the latest offering from her forthcoming album Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert, her first full-length release since 2019’s critically acclaimed Grey Area. Unrolling pointed verses over swells of horns and strings, with a sung chorus of “I love you, I hate you,” Simz addresses her father on the Inflo-produced track.

She says in a statement, “Flo asked me, ‘What do you love and what do you hate?’ I knew the answer immediately, but I was adamant I didn’t want to talk about it.” The song’s lyrics echo her inner-conflict, as Simz asks, “Is you a sperm donor or a dad to me?” Later, she gets even more blunt: “You made a promise to God to be there for your kids […] You made a promise to give them a life you didn’t live / My ego won’t fully allow me to say that I miss you / A woman who hasn’t confronted all her daddy issues.”

Prior to this, Little Simz released the singles “Rollin Stone,” “Woman,” and “Introvert.”

Listen to the poignant “I Love You, I Hate You” above.

Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert is out 9/3 via Age 101. Pre-order it here.

The Tampa Bay Lightning established themselves as a modern hockey dynasty of sorts this week by winning their second straight Stanley Cup Final over the Montreal Canadians. The club did this on home ice in Florida, and very soon, their fans will be able to drink that ice if they’re willing to give it a try.

Shortly after Bolts captain Steven Stamkos lifted the Cup for the second year in a row on Wednesday night, Coors Light announced that’s been taking some of that ice surface at Amalie Arena and will turn that into a celebratory beer for people in the Tampa area to drink at select bars.

Coors Light has been quietly scraping and collecting the actual ice from the rink and transporting it to its hometown brewery in Golden, Colorado to craft the game-winning Champions Ice brew. Coors Light will be filtering the ice during the brewing process, ensuring a refreshing, fully purified drinking experience.

It’s certainly a unique promotion, laid out on a website that listed 15 bars in Florida where the beer will be available. Starting on July 12, fans can get cans or a limited supply of 32 oz crowlers of the Coors Light made with rink water, which the company stressed will be filtered and made potable. Beers have certainly been made with weirder ingredients, as craft beer has made everything from glitter to oysters to even Rocky Mountain oysters part of the industry.

But filtering aside, hockey water is really gross: it’s skated on, spit on, snotted on, and remade again and again when it’s scraped, melted down and sprayed on the top surface to make it smoother. When it’s melted, it’s basically floor water. So this is fairly bewildering, to say the least.

It’s absolutely the first beer made with “championship ice” because, well, that water isn’t really reused for anything much. It’s not like a football or baseball playing surface that ends up mounted in a plaque or sold in a vial at a Major League team store. But perhaps this beer is meant more as a collector’s item than something actually worth drinking. If you’re in the Tampa area, well, you’ll be the first to find out.

As a seven-time NBA champion, Robert Horry doesn’t need to come across bigger than he already is. But in an NBA House event this week in Brazil, Horry showed up (remotely, as you might imagine) to answer questions from fans on a screen that cast his face about three stories high.

NBA House, traditionally an in-person, interactive experience for fans that showcases players past and present as well as live entertainment, started in London in 2012 and has since held eight large-scale events in five countries. Horry, who says he’s been an extended part of the NBA family “since I stepped off the hardwood” has taken part in many NBA events abroad. This most recent iteration in Sao Paulo, to showcase the NBA Finals, was exciting for him because, initially, it meant he could get back to Brazil, a place he’d traveled to with the NBA in the past and enjoyed. And Brazil enjoys Horry, and basketball, too — the country, which has hosted three out of eight NBA House events, is second among all international markets for NBA League Pass subscriptions.

On a call with Dime, Horry was quick to laugh and spoke candidly about the Finals, his thoughts on the NBA’s growth globally, the changes to the game he and other league alumni talk about when they get together, team building, dynasties, who he loves to watch and what inspires him about the next generation of players, fashion included.

The NBA House Brazil event ended up feeling intimate even though it was remote for you and for the fans. Maybe because you were answering questions directly to the people who asked, and who were watching from their homes. We’ve obviously lost a lot of opportunities for in-person interaction with the pandemic, but we’ve gained some, too. How do you think the rise of virtual events and online community has helped to grown the NBA’s market in Brazil, and globally?

I think has been tremendous because there’s so many times that there are individuals within the NBA organization, past players, that don’t like to travel. So this is the opportunity for them still to tell their story, be a part of the ongoing mission of the NBA to expand abroad and be a part of it. I know I’ve played with a couple of guys who don’t like to travel abroad because they don’t like to fly anymore. You fly so much during your career as a player, you don’t want to fly when you’re out, and it’s quicker. Think about it. You can be in seven countries in one day and never leave your couch, your dining room table or your office. So it’s great for the NBA. And it’s great for the fans because it’s really and truly opened up a whole new marketability for the players, and for the ex players to talk to people like them, get to know them, so they can really get the inside scoop. So to say, own these guys and own these players and not just players, but GMs owners, anybody who’s involved with NBA.

You’ve done a lot of these NBA House events, do you notice if questions change country-to-country? If questions are really wildly different or if all fans share this same, almost global experience, with what they want to know and what they want to ask you?

You have a lot of questions that are the same. For me, there’s always a question about the Hall of Famers that I played with — you know, Clyde, Dream, Kobe, Shaq, Tim, Manu, it’s always those questions. And it always falls back on my mindset, what am I thinking about when I make all those big shots and things of that nature. So it’s usually those questions and they always want to ask, you know, what do I do on my downtime.

The questions are pretty much similar, but every now and then you get a question that makes you think. Because a lot of these questions are asked so many times that you kind of program, and you know what to say, and you’re always appreciative of those that you don’t have to always answer. Like if someone came over and said, “What was your favorite moment in high school?” Then, well, wow, you know, they know the NBA but they want to go deep, dig deep into your past and how you became who you are and your journey to the NBA. So those are the questions that I find really heartwarming and touching, because they put some thought into it.

Well I hope I can touch on something like that.

[Laughs] No pressure, no pressure!

In the media, and I’m sure you’re familiar with this, we talk a lot about the NBA’s evolution — shifts in how the game is played, or the rise of super teams. And something I’ve always been curious about is how alumni like yourself, who have played through several distinct eras, see these shifts. What do you view as an actual change, and what’s more cyclical, kind of like how fashion trends always come back. Since you left the game, what do you view to be real and significant changes, and what do you view as things that look a little familiar, or have made a comeback?

The game is always changing. And I think for the most part, the game has sped up. The game has really sped up compared to when I played. And I think they’re taking maybe 70 to 80 shots a game, where we took like maybe 50 to 60 shots a game. And in that sense it’s a totally, totally, totally different type of game. But overall it’s still the same. The guys are big, tall, athletic. They shoot more threes now. It’s really that each generation, almost every decade, learns from the previous decade and they add something to it. And that’s the thing about the game, it’s always evolving. It’s always reinventing itself. I mean, I should say the players are always reinventing themselves and learning from their mistakes and expanding on their greatness.

That’s what I like best about what’s going on in the NBA, and to be honest with you, there’s nothing that’s harmful in the NBA. The only thing that did come out of the pandemic, that I think should help the NBA and I wish they would go do it, is more of a baseball schedule. Where you go into a city and you play a team twice before you head out, that way you can take some of the stress off of flying with guys. I know fans might not want to see a team back to back, but it’s easier on the players. So who wants to see, you know, a Damian Lillard, two nights in a row because that’s the night you have free. So that’s the great part that I think that came out of the pandemic, and I hope the NBA continues to do that.

I’m curious, in your conversations with other league alumni, what are you guys noticing and what conversations are you having about the league these playoffs?

We just talk about the speed of the game and how we wish we could, or were allowed to do, some of the things they’re allowed to do with the basketball. That’s about it. Because there’s so many things that go into the handling of the rock that we’re like, man, I wish we could have done that [laughs]. The gather step, some people are like, “The gather step? What’s a gather step?” You know, you get an extra step. So it’s the little things that we old heads sit around, like, man, if I could have done that, I could have averaged 10 more points. We always sit around telling a bunch of lies because we probably wouldn’t have been able to average ten more points in our careers anyway, but it’s fun to talk about. Because when the older heads get together, we talk about how we’ve been able to deal with the social media aspect of it. Because you think about it, these guys, from their phones, they can make a million dollars and not even leave their couch. They have such a huge power. We didn’t have that.

And to go back to what you said about fashion. You take guys like Westbrook, just doing what he wants to do. And if we did that back in our day, you’d get joked out of the room. But now, these guys are so headstrong they’re like, you know what? I’m going to make something fashion just because I am an icon.

Are there any looks that you’ve seen on guys that you wish you could steal?

Nah. I couldn’t. I couldn’t rock the shorts like these guys, my legs were too skinny. I couldn’t rock the loud colors because I just didn’t feel comfortable doing it. I’ve been very basic, like I was when I played, you know, just a suit and maybe a tie and keep it moving.

Keep it classic.

Just a classic man [laughs].

Nothing wrong with that. So, you were obviously a crucial part of some fordable dynasties, and you experienced Jordan’s era with the Bulls as a competitor. I’m curious where you stand on dynasties — do you think they’re good for the league, or is league parity better for competition and growth?

There’s nothing wrong with teams that build a dynasty, like the Lakers with Showtime, like the Boston Celtics, like what the Bulls did. But when these guys, you know, say oh we’re friends, let’s play together. And when guys say I want to go play with this team, trade me there. And then all of a sudden, you become a dynasty? I don’t really count that. Cause you gotta get trades, and all this kind of stuff. I don’t think there’s really ever going to be another dynasty, you know, because there’s so much player movement. Think about it. If everybody would have put— if they had a chance to bet a million bucks — bet a million bucks on the New Jersey Nets, I should say the Brooklyn Nets, winning this year but because of injuries, fell apart.

Only a Suns fan and a Bucks fan would have those two playing in the Finals right now. It’s hard for dynasties to step up this day and age, because of the injuries and the player movement, and the things of that nature. I don’t think there will ever be another dynasty because guys want to get paid, guys wanna play close to home, guys want to play with friends. So it’d be hard for that to ever happen. There’s only really been two dynasties in my eyes, that’s the Lakers and the Celtics, the Bulls pulling in a close third.

A lot of stock is put into the NBA Draft as a change-maker for teams, but we’ve seen where things don’t always work out, or where a team decides to draft for fit and uses development like the G League. There’s also trades, which you touched on with players now moving around quite a bit. What are your thoughts on team building?

It’s hard. It’s so hard. Just look at last year, who won, the Lakers won it and then the next thing you know, they got a whole new team the next year. It’s hard to keep players, it’s just extremely difficult. And then you go through the Draft. And for me, I don’t ever say anything bad about the NBA, because everything’s good, but I think the one bad thing about the NBA is that they allow kids to come straight out of high school and go to the G League. I think kids need to spend at least two years in college so they can develop mentally and physically. I know a lot of these guys don’t get to college until they’re 18 and 19, so they’re just a couple of years away from being physically ready.

Because there’s a lot going on, and it’s not just about the physical aspect, but about the mental aspect. There’s so much that goes on with being a professional athlete. I think they need to at least learn a couple of skillsets that you get in college: getting up, going to class, going to practice, having a schedule, a regimen like that. Because once you get in the NBA, you only have one thing to do, let’s go to practice. And then you’re free the rest of the day. You can do whatever you want. If I was the commish — and I don’t care what anybody says, this is my opinion — and I know a lot people will say you’re taking food out of the mouths of kids, but now, with the new rule in college where kids can make money off their name, if you’re that good, you’ll make money off your name in college. Stay two years.

More personally, who do you love to watch?

I’m a big DeMar DeRozan fan. Because this game has become a three ball game so much that guys jack up threes, and to me, that’s street ball. But you watch DeMar DeRozan, and he shoots threes now because everybody has been on him to do it, and I’m like, dude, you average almost 30 points just doing it your way. Who’s to say they’re right? You’re right. Do what you do. I just like the way he plays. He just has a skillset like no other.

And I’m falling in love little by little with [Mikal] Bridges from the Suns. I think because I gravitate towards people who remind me of myself and I watch him play, he can guard anybody on the court, he can shoot some threes, they run no plays for him, he’s just out there balling and doing whatever the team needs him to do. Him and Cam Johnson are the two guys, since I get to actually see them play now, I’m like, wow, I really like these young heads because they remind me of me. They just go out and play. They get no love and no glory from the media, but they just go out and play the game. They always make a difference somehow in some way on the court.

In case there were any doubts that Donald Trump’s rage knows no bounds, the former president is reportedly angry with Junior’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. The former Fox News host has been working as the national chair for Eric Greitens’ U.S. Senate campaign, which shouldn’t seem like a problem, but there’s just one small detail: Trump hasn’t endorsed him and doesn’t like him. That’s enough for the former president to be “short” with Guilfoyle and repeatedly express his anger with her. Via Politico Playbook:

Aides told Playbook that Trump has been openly griping that Guilfoyle joined ERIC GREITENS’ campaign for Senate in Missouri as national campaign chair, and he’s becoming increasingly short with Guilfoyle.

“Trump thinks Greitens is problematic, and that Kim is annoying,” said one Trump adviser. “He said, ‘Why the f— is she working for him?’”

At reported issue is the idea that Trump doesn’t want Guilfoyle’s presence on Greitens’ campaign to look like an endorsement from him or Junior. So Trump’s really going to love this latest development: Rudy Giuliani will be stumping for Greitens in Missouri this weekend. Despite Giuliani’s mounting legal fees and financial troubles from Trump refusing to pay him for his work in attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, Giuliani is still a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. America’s Mayor was recently roasted after he boldly claimed that “everyone misses Trump’s policies,” so his endorsement of Greitens could easily be interpreted as a sign of Trump’s support for the candidate.

Maybe get ready for some shouty phone calls, Rudy.

(Via Politico Playbook, Fox 2 Now)

It should go without saying, but the past however many years have been a stressful time to be Britney Spears. As her conservatorship legal battle rages on, the pop star looks for moments to unwind, whether she’s vacationing in Hawaii or posting on her ever-active Instagram page. One of her latest photos turned heads and raised eyebrows, which has prompted Spears to respond.

A couple days ago, she shared a photo of herself sitting on the edge of a bathtub in the nude, wearing just a necklace as she shows off her bare back. Observant followers noticed, though, that the tattoo Spears has on the back of her neck, right below her hairline, was mysteriously missing from the photo.

Enough people called the photo fake that Spears felt the need to respond, sharing an image yesterday that reads, “While you’re talking behind my back feel free to bend down and kiss my ass.” She echoed that point in the caption and addressed the lack of tattoo in the original photo, writing, “Ok so … I edited out my tattoo on my neck cause I wanted to see what it would look like clean … and yeah I like it better so while you guys are talking behind my back go ahead and kiss my ass haters [kissy face emoji] [peach emoji] !!!!!!”

Back in June, Spears showed off the tattoo on Instagram, sharing a photo and writing in a post, “Have you seen the tattoo on the back of my neck before ???? It’s Hebrew, it’s a language written backwards !!!! It says Mem Hey Shin and means healing !!!! It’s my favorite tattoo but ironically you never see it !!!!!”

In celebration of Pride 2021, Romy Madley Croft (who performs under the name Romy) has covered Corona’s “The Rhythm Of The Night” and Olive’s “You’re Not Alone” for a special Apple Music live session. The xx guitarist and solo artist mashed both tracks up in a three-song set that went live today on Apple Music.

Speaking to Apple Music about why she chose these tracks to cover, Romy said:

“I’ve combined two songs into this cover, Olive – “You’re Not Alone” and Corona – “The Rhythm Of The Night”, both songs remind me of when I was about 17 and started going to Gay bars in London. The lyrics of “You’re Not Alone” resonate with the feeling of community I found in those bars and clubs and the friends I made and treasure to this day. I still love dancing to “The Rhythm of the Night” and I’ve always loved the lyrics and melody. It was fun to strip these dance songs down to their core and still feel so much emotion from them. I loved recording this with my very inspiring friend Marta Salogni at her studio in London.”

She also opened up about what Pride meant to her:

“This month I’m reflecting and educating myself about the incredible people who have fought and continue to fight to make the world a safer and more open minded place for the LGBTQ community. There is still so much more work to be done to protect and empower our community. I am proud to be a Lesbian, to me Pride exists all year round, not just for one month or day.”

In November, Romy, who released solo single “Lifetime” last year, spoke to the The Guardian about working on her debut solo album, and her journey to being more public about her sexuality. “I came out when I was 15, and my dad was really cool about it, and I’m very grateful for that,” she said at the time. “But I didn’t feel ready when we put out that first xx album, when we were about 20, to be really, really open about my sexuality. Over time, growing up and also just noticing how the world is changing, I felt a lot more comfortable being more public… To write about loving a woman and not feel afraid or embarrassed […] maybe it’s a growing up thing, and just not caring as much what people think.”

Listen to Romy’s covers above, and check out the rest of her solo set, where she performs “Lifetime” and The xx’s “Angels,” here.

Trevor Noah and The Daily Show are on a break until this fall (after issuing a heartfelt message), when the show will regroup for a studio return after over a year of at-home production. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the show won’t maintain a presence, as it’s doing while taking swipes at Fox News hosts, most recently with Tucker Carlson and Mein Kampf. That was an easy feat to accomplish, given that Carlson is Fox News’ most enthused promoter of white nationalism. With Sean Hannity, the job grew a little more complicated, for the Comedy Central show took on the task of highlighting Hannity’s “worst” moments.

As one might expect, this took awhile. The show emerged with 15 full minutes of Hannity grandiosity for the Fox News host who’s now dubbed as an “infamous hypocrite” as well as “Trump’s pillow talk buddy.” From there, the supercut spiraled into Hannity’s Hillary Clinton obsession, Russia Russia Russia, and the whole Michael Cohen mess, among other things, after beginning with this declaration: “We are all doomed. The end is near, the apocalypse is imminent.”

Settle in for some gloom from the host who can’t decide whether or not he’s a journalist. Perhaps he should vape a little harder on commercial breaks for a more relaxed vibe.

While his camp has not formally requested a move, Ben Simmons’ names have popped up in trade rumors from the second that the Philadelphia 76ers crashed and burned out of the NBA playoffs in the conference semis. Simmons’ flaws as a player, namely as a shooter (both from the field and the free throw line), were on full display, and now, there are major questions about whether him staying in Philadelphia makes sense for either the team or the player.

According to a report from Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, one such team that intends on getting in on the Simmons sweepstakes is the Minnesota Timberwolves, which would look to add him to their young core of players. The problem: All three members of that core are untouchable, including the guy who might make the most sense for Philadelphia to target in a deal, D’Angelo Russell.

In Minnesota, while the Wolves would certainly need Simmons to shoot more than zero times in the fourth quarter, they wouldn’t need him to be a No. 2 option on offense. Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards and D’Angelo Russell (the Timberwolves view Russell as a part of the core and want to keep it that way, sources said) give coach Chris Finch three accomplished offensive players to get buckets down the stretch.

It would make sense that Towns and Edwards, both of whom are really good fits next to a player like Simmons, wouldn’t be on the move. But even if there are ways to make a deal without Russell make sense financially, he’s the kind of player — younger, under contract for two more years, someone who can score and create for others — that the Sixers really could use with Simmons heading elsewhere. Perhaps this would be easier if Minnesota had its first-round pick this year, but even then, Philly is a team that is presumably in win-now mode and not looking to build for the future.

My grandfather was 103 years old when he died this past spring. Like probably a lot of America’s elderly, he spent the final year of his life essentially on house arrest inside of his apartment within his retirement community. In the time that elapsed between the last two times I’d seen him, he went from a relatively coherent version of the man I’d always known to a sinking shell, like an air mattress you push all the air out of just before you roll it up to put away. Extended social isolation was the one storm he couldn’t weather.

Even just a week before he died his personality seemed relatively intact. I didn’t know if he recognized my wife, who he’d met only once before, but when she lowered her mask he reached out his hand and delivered one of his stock phrases, “Just as beautiful as the day I met you,” — coherent enough to at least pretend that he remembered her.

When she asked, “Morris, how are you feeling?” he answered, “Oh, mildewin’” — his usual response to “how you doin’,” proving that he was a little off his game, but still had the presence of mind to try to play. When I gripped his frail but still substantial and scratchy hand for a handshake, he asked weakly “am I hurtin’ ya, honey?” the same way he had at virtually every handshake for the last 50 years. He even hit us with a few Armenian phrases on the way out. I have friends I haven’t seen in 20 years who still know the correct response to “eench bes es?”

When we returned five or six days later he’d taken a turn for the worse. He wasn’t conscious that second visit, his arms occasionally reaching out involuntarily as his organs failed, like he was trying to hug someone who wasn’t there. It was a disappointing end, as probably all ends of life are, though I couldn’t help but wonder how many more days, weeks, months he might’ve had if a year of near-solitary confinement hadn’t sapped his will to live. If there was one thing that perked up my grandfather it was seeing people. Still, not many people are lucky enough to get 103 years. Everything has a price.

He’d lived long enough to know that I’d finally gotten married, though he couldn’t attend the wedding. He lasted long enough to see my wife pregnant with our first child, but not enough to meet the great-grandson, which would’ve been his fifth.

Morris Samuelian had been born in December 1917, the year before the Spanish Flu killed millions, and, like some kind of human pandemic Halley’s Comet, left the world at the tail end of the COVID crisis.

As far as I could tell, the vast majority of those 103 years were pretty good. I’m not sure any human in recorded history had as many good years as my grandfather. His life spanned two world wars, the salad days of small-town America, and the pinnacle of a prosperous middle class.

Born to Armenian immigrants, he spent almost his entire life in the prototypical mid-size 20th-century city of Fresno — one of those places synonymous with “Anytown, USA,” almost always referred to, when acknowledged by pop culture at all, as part of a list alongside other sleepy salt-of-the-Earth bergs. As in, “the young soldiers were a cross-section of Americana. They came from places like Racine, Toledo, Fresno…”

He worked at his father’s (my great-grandfather’s) shoe repair store beginning at the age of 10, when he used to roller skate from his house to the store, from which he and his two younger brothers made deliveries all over downtown. The two stories he liked to tell the most from this time were about the brothel, over which he and his brothers would fight to make deliveries (until his father found out and banned it from their route), and the time they fixed shoes for future Pulitzer Prize winner William Saroyan. My grandfather always said they never would’ve charged him, but he didn’t even offer to pay.

My grandfather himself was more mechanical than artistic, obsessed with flight and with model airplanes from a young age. He moved south during the war and met my grandmother while he was building the tail sections of B-24s at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. She worked there as a courier, a feisty blonde of Norwegian ancestry from Glendale by way of Saskatchewan. They married at the Burbank Methodist Church in 1943.

Essentially the model of middle class rectitude, he worked hard, retired at 65, and then thrived in retirement, which lasted almost 40 years. In his seventies, he scored two holes in one and bowled a perfect game. He bowled until he was almost 100, and, in 2008, on the day when the Fresno Bee sent a reporter to profile his induction into the Central California Bowling Hall Of Fame, he rolled a 233 (I’ve never even sniffed a 200). The passage that hit me the hardest was,

Bowling also provided some stability for Samuelian during difficult times. When his wife, Ione, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he continued to take her with him to the bowling alley for as long as she was able.

“She’d sit on the bench and hold my sweater or jacket,” Samuelian says. “But as the disease progressed, it got harder for her to come.”

He loved bridge and backgammon, and towards the end of his life used to drive up to Table Mountain (he drove until he was almost 100) to play penny slots (not much of a gambler, but he loved to socialize). He was the kind of guy who would enter a room and trade a few well-worn jokes with everyone in it, a real let-me-introduce-you-to-the-waitress-here kind of guy. I used to think my grandfather knew everyone in Fresno. Once, when I was sitting in the backseat of his boxy eighties Buick, another car cut him off in traffic. “What a jerk!” I remember him saying (I only ever heard him swear while bowling). “And to think, I used to buy tires from that guy.”

He and my grandmother were married for 63 years before she died in 2006. She stayed in a care facility at the very end, once her symptoms had progressed too far for one old man to manage, but he continued visiting the facility for years afterwards. He knew people there now, so he’d pop by from time to time. He was retired for the entirety of my life, and that was, essentially, my dominant memory of him: going from place to place to socialize with different groups of people, who all seemed to know him by name.

For me, his death feels like more than the death of a person. It’s the end of an era, the death of an entire way of life — all those corny clichés that he always had a knack for making true. My grandfather was essentially the blueprint for How To Make It In America. He did all the things immigrants and children of immigrants were supposed to do, from expanding the family business to marrying a blonde. He lived in the same house, the one my mother and uncle grew up in, for more than 70 years. Even after my parents divorced while I was in college my grandfather remained the definition of stability. Stability built on “values,” sure, but values that were themselves built on the foundation of post-war prosperity, an exceptional lack of industrial competition, and a booming middle class. Is that a useful ideal, or a historical anomaly?

When my great-grandfather, Mugerdich Samuelian, came to central California from Van, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1910, he did what he knew. He fixed shoes. He adopted the name “Sam,” supposedly learned perfect English, and opened his own storefront, Sam’s Re-Nu-All, in 1917 (later Sam’s Luggage). You could track the suburban sprawl of Fresno, and by extension of the Middle American city in general, through Sam’s locations — starting in downtown, later opening up a location in the then-new Fulton Mall, closing downtown, going uptown to Blackstone, and eventually shuttering altogether when the Blackstone store closed in 2003.

Even the neighborhood where my grandparents lived feels like a time capsule — a grid of modest, ranch-style homes with low ceilings, with square lawns now beginning to overgrow or with cars parked on them. The original owners have mostly died or moved away, to newer neighborhoods with grander footprints and more open floor plans.

It feels like my grandfather cashed out at just the right time. He never went to college but did well enough to stay retired for more than 40 years and never run out of money. He survived the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and inherited the New Deal. I was born during Reaganomics and inherited the financial crisis.

My grandfather had two children, a two-car garage, a bowling team, a golf group, a bridge group, and a vacation home. As far as symbols of working-class success go, it’d be hard to beat that cabin by the lake. My great-grandfather built it in 1915, with a big deck and a lakefront view just up the trail from Huntington Lake in the Sierra National Forest. The lake itself was created only a few years before the cabin, filled by adjoining dams and part of the massive hydroelectric project that provides water and power for the naturally arid fields of Central California and the population centers of Southern California. My grandfather and the place he was born grew up in tandem.

Huntington Lake is sort of a poor man’s Lake Tahoe, a great place to ski, sail, and swim, as long as you can tolerate the 60-some degree water, fed entirely by melted snow. I never went in without a full wetsuit, but my grandmother swam around in nothing but a floral one-piece and a blue-bathing cap, sighing leisurely like she was at a hot springs resort. “Norwegian blood,” she’d say, as if she didn’t graduate high school in Glendale.

“Grandpa Sam” loved to fish for rainbow trout off the dock. Grandpa Morris was much more lukewarm on the idea of spending his summer days up in the woods, away from his bowling and his golf. But my grandmother loved it, so my grandfather tolerated it. The family cabin was passed down to my grandfather and his two brothers, and to their children in turn. It was the hub around which the generations rotated.

The cabin lasted, like my grandfather, more than a hundred years before it flamed out. The Creek Fire of 2020 burned for more than three months before it was finally contained in December — the fourth-largest wildfire in California history (five out of the top six were from 2020; the sixth was from 2018).

I’d stayed at the cabin just a week before it was evacuated, my first time back in 20 years, having moved away at 18 and not quite appreciating it enough to make the trip home from San Francisco or LA or New York City or San Diego. Having moved closer to home, and with a wife and a stepson and a couple of dogs, and with travel limited, it suddenly made much more sense as a vacation spot. For a long weekend we fished and threw sticks for the dogs and watched my stepson and his cousin jump off the dock, perusing the old picture books and the kinds of keepsakes and trinketry that tend to accumulate in 100 years of one family owning a rustic Summer cabin. Sitting on a sun-drenched deck overlooking a shimmering lake, my wife asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this place before?”

We had such a good time that we made plans to return the following weekend. The morning we were set to leave, my mom, who was staying for the week with my stepfather, called to tell me not to come. They’d been evacuated. The roads were closed soon after. We waited with fingers crossed for the next week or two, hoping the fire would miss us like so many had before. Wildfires, generally speaking, are pretty normal in California, when the brush dries in the hot sun and the winds of late summer and fall fan the flames.

Once the area had stopped smoldering and the roads were open again I drove up one afternoon to see it. It was a little hard to find the way, since even in the age of the iPhone you mostly had to navigate by landmarks. “When you hit the meadow turn left,” and so forth. Those old landmarks, half-remembered from childhood, were now not only distorted by memory, but actually warped by fire or obliterated completely. The meadow was still there, luckily, so I knew where to turn.

The sign on the driveway identifying it as the Samuelian cabin remained, looking oddly brand new, the paint not even discolored. Everything else was a mess. A few pieces of what used to be the metal roof dangled limply from the stone chimney stack, swaying gently in the breeze. Almost everything else was gone. Even the walls of what used to be the shower had distorted in the heat and folded in on themselves. The stone chimney still stood, but the fire had weakened the grout and even other parts of the stone pathways and retaining walls had crumbled.

It was sad to look at, but also beautiful in a way, the view to the lake now more expansive and unobstructed than ever. The area hadn’t been charred into ugliness. Many of the trees remained and even on some burnt ones the higher branches were still lively and green. The big logs lining the switch back trail my great grandfather had made who knows how many decades before, Grandpa Sam’s trail we always called it, even though he died before I was born, were all powdery ashes. You’d never know it had existed at all if you hadn’t been there.

It was sad, of course, but consciously I didn’t know how much it was fair to mourn. Certainly not in the middle of a pandemic, when so many people seemed to have so many bigger problems, real problems — losing their jobs, losing their friends, losing members of their own families, etc.

Cabins can be rebuilt. Memories remain, even when mementos burn. Losing the cabin foreshadowed losing my grandpa and, I worried, perhaps a lot more. Was it fair to mourn? How much of a fuss should you make over losing something you were lucky to have for all those years in the first place? After all the years of hoping the fires would miss, should we be sad that they finally didn’t? Or grateful for all the years that they had?

For a time it was a gorgeous place in the sun. I suppose you had to be there.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.