This time of year is pretty stressful for a subset of teams that play up and down the English Football League pyramid, as this is when select teams lock promotions and relegation from one league to another. Up and down the EFL food chain, the better teams get promoted to the next league, while the bad teams get relegated to lower leagues. There are huge financial implications to all of this. If you want a crash course on the system and how a team can go from the lowest league to a whisper away from the Premier League, watch ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ on Hulu.

A photograph has emerged of the Southampton analyst allegedly observing Middlesbrough’s training session last Thursday, just 48 hours before the two clubs met in the Championship play-off semi-final first leg.

The photograph, originally published in the Daily Mail but which The Athletic has also obtained, shows a young man standing, half-covered by a tree at Middlesbrough’s Rockliffe Park training ground holding up his mobile phone. He has been named as William Salt, a member of Tonda Eckert’s backroom analysis team.

The image will form part of the evidence Middlesbrough provide to the English Football League (EFL) as they seek to have the greatest sporting sanction possible imposed on Southampton, including expulsion from the play-offs. Middlesbrough also have details of a credit card used by the ‘spy’ at the golf club adjacent to Rockliffe.

Middlesbrough are gathering other evidence and have a statement from a former member of Southampton’s staff regarding the practise of ‘spying’ on opponents before matches, according to sources briefed on the matter. The Teesside club have engaged the services of high-profile sports lawyer Nick De Marco and want the EFL hearing to begin before the weekend. The play-off final is May 23, with Hull City having already booked their place.

Michael Walker – The Athletic

Hearkens back to the ‘original’ Spygate between the New England Patriots and the NY Jets (a controversy that was really based on a technicality of where the video was being captured from, but I digress…) only this one is interesting because of the stakes involved and the fact that the winner of this match is slated to play Hull City in 10 days time to determine who gets promoted to the Premier League. At the same time, I don’t know how much of an advantage can be gained from watching a soccer/football team practice compared to, say, learning the signal patterns or plays of an American Football team where success is so much more reliant on knowing the set plays about to be run. Soccer/football is such a more fluid sport where broader game strategy and tactics produce advantages.

UPDATE: Looks like Southampton were rightly removed from the Championship play in game to see who goes to the EPL. Middlesborough will play Hull City on Saturday 23 May.

The story of Robert Johnson and his “deal with the devil” to obtain his legendary guitar skills still peaks people’s interest – from Keith Richards to Bob Dylan to the movie Sinners as the most recent example. So when a newly discovered recording of his “Cross Road Blues” surfaces, you need to give it a listen:

Though it contains no reference to any such unholy pact, nor to any denizen of the underworld, “Cross Road Blues” does have a haunting sound that goes with the shadowy ambience of the man’s short life story. Some of that had to do with the less-than-ideal quality of the recordings that have long circulated, but this test pressing of Johnson’s second take sounds different. Uploaded by sound restorer Nick Dellow, it was originally made in 1940 straight from the metal master by Columbia Records producer George Avakian, who would go on to work with everyone from Miles Davis to Edith Piaf to John Cage. The sonic muddiness of most Robert Johnson releases thus far has done its part to prevent modern-day listeners from getting quite what the big deal was about him. But perhaps the unprecedented clarity of this recording will get the hair of young musicians and mature connoisseurs alike standing on end.

via Open Culture

Yes, this video is having a moment. But the choreography is spot on. And you also can’t keep your eyes off of Yung Lean in the center of, er, the storm. No notes.

On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago.

After a blast of guitar feedback, 22-year-old Kurt Cobain politely announced to the crowd at the small club called Dreamerz: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” With that, the band, then a quartet, launched into the riff-heavy first song, “School.”

Jacobs surreptitiously recorded the performance, documenting the fledgling band in raw, fiery form more than two years before Nirvana’s global breakthrough with the album “Nevermind.”

Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades in Chicago and other cities. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.

Christopher Weber – AP

For all you audio slaves out there, Jacobs’ full collection is now digitized on the Internet Archive site for your listening and downloading pleasure. While the collection includes a ton of bands that I have personally never heard of, it also includes concerts from, beyond the bands noted above, well known bands like Belle & Sebastian, Pavement, The Sugarcubes, The Afghan Whigs and The Cardigans to name a few.

My personal favorites are below, and they sound excellent:

• R.E.M – Live at UIC Pavilion – Oct 19, 1986
• R.E.M – Live at Circle Pavilion – University of Illinois at Chicago – Nov 4, 1987
• The Cure – Live at The Bismarck Theatre – Nov 9, 1984
• Nirvana – Live at Dreamerz – July 8, 1989

You can read more about the backstory and the effort to digitize the full collection at https://aadamjacobscollection.org/

UPDATE: There is also a video documentary about this project.

UPDATE 2: A much quicker and more entertaining interface to play these recordings!

Just a stunning photo from the Artemis II mission of the moon eclipsing the sun. No notes.

Take a few minutes to check out the rest of the photos (on their Flickr account no less. Blast from the past!) from the mission. Some really incredible shots including the below.

This absolutely incredible photo taken (by Kayleigh K) moments after LA Angels Right Fielder Jo Adell robbed a *third* home run of the night off of the bats of the Seattle Mariners. You can see all three of the catches in the below video.

There are several things going on here that bring this into focus:

• First of all, the game had very few runs, ending in a 1-0 victory for the Angels. So right there, these three catches saved 3 runs (all three of them were hit with no men on base) and the game for the Angels. Who says defense is not important!
• Then, the last two catches happened in the top of the 8th and top of the 9th innings respectively, with the Angels still clinging to that one run lead.
• Finally, if you watch the below video and pay attention to the replay of the last HR saving catch at about the 3:25 mark, as Adell falls into the stands, you can see the photographer of the above photo – Kayliegh K – quickly get to her feet and have the presence of mind to get her phone camera fired up to take the above photo. Really amazing to see her react like this in real time as its happening just feet in front of her!

But most importantly, Claude helped me clean up and fix many many issues and items behind the scenes on the server. This included clearing out about 1.1GB of unused images, cleaned up and optimized numerous CSS files into one ‘master’ file, and some WP Database cleanups.

All of this is stuff that I’ve wanted to do for a while but did not have the skills or knowledge to know where to start. By ‘vibe coding’ with Claude, I was taken step by step on the process and as part of this, I learned about how to interact with the AI engine and how to make edits to my website server via SSH and Terminal.

This didn’t come without some hiccups including twice having my site barf and render nothing but code on the homepage in two different instances – issues that we were not able to triage and figure out what triggered these issues. Hopefully they will not resurface.

So, overall, I have to say that this AI thing may have a future.

Just a random photo I took on a commute home from NYC in early March. Photo is looking north on 6th Avenue at Broome Street in Tribeca.

Last night at Brooklyn Steel, a concert venue in the Williamsburg section of the NYC borough, Michael Stipe – former lead singer of R.E.M. (one of my favorite bands) – took the stage with Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy to sing “These Days” and “The Great Beyond”. This was the first time he has sung these songs on stage in about 18 years. I happened to be at this show with friends – all of us hoping this would happen. The show itself was fantastic. Having Michael Stipe make a cameo took it to another level. I took a video of the performance from the back of the room that I would have posted, but I then found the above video on YouTube that was far better than mine.

Mr. FitzGerald, strong-jawed and sarcastic, said by his own account that he was not especially good at running the finances, which often created stress for his family. “I’ll go down as one of the rottenest businessmen ever,” he said. But making money was never the point for him. “My art was solving problems and making this block come to life,” he said, and “I picked a great block.”

Before the vintage shops and tattoo parlors of today, the plot of land several miles north of the Battery had been many things: in the seventeenth century, Peter Stuyvesant’s farm; in the eighteen-thirties, a home to the Manhattan developer Thomas E. Davis, who built a row of brick Federal houses and named the block St. Marks Place after the church around the corner. By the early twentieth century, it was a hardscrabble community of working-class immigrants.

When Mr. FitzGerald arrived in the 1950s, the block “was not hip,” said Ms. Calhoun. “You would have seen Ukrainian immigrants sweeping their stoops, grandmothers leaning out of windows, children running through the streets.”

Alessandra Schade, NY Times

The article notes that Mr. FitzGerald has been living on St. Mark’s place since the late 1950s and has been in his awesome (!!!) apartment, also on St. Mark’s, since 1974. Over the years he acquired several properties on the street and has made it his mission to ensure that those who operate on the street help preserve the vibe that he has worked so long to keep alive. This is the NYC that we will lose as it gets taken over by franchises and new buildings.

From the obit:

During the 1990s, Genesis was seemingly everywhere: in commercials during the MTV Video Music Awards; on an episode of “Roseanne,” when the title character’s son, D.J., huffs off to play Genesis at a friend’s house when his parents won’t buy him a Nintendo; and in the 1996 movie “Swingers,” when Trent, played by Vince Vaughn, makes Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed in a popular hockey game.

And of course, how could you forget ads for Sonic the Hedgehog and other games that invariably ended with a character from the ad saying a quickly vocalized “SEGA!”

The old Pennsylvania Station in NYC has always been a fascinating topic for me. I wish I could have seen the grandeur of that building when it was vibrant and active. Imagine the beauty of today’s Grand Central Station in Midtown, only on steroids. From what I have been told, the scale of the old Pennsylvania Station was breathtaking. If Pennsylvania Station had survived through to today, I could only imagine what it would look like if the same care and attention to restoration was given to it as was given to Grand Central.

This is about a month old but wanted to post about it anyway. There was a really interesting article in the NY Times talking about the albatross of fixing Penn Station in NYC to both attempt to make amends for the both disastrous 1963 decision to raze Penn Station AND try to fix what has easily become the worst traveler experience in the country (and maybe the world?).

The article describes how so many competing stakeholders – NJ, NY, Port Authority, Amtrak, NJ Transit, LIRR, NYC, Madison Square Garden – and the insipid politics that come with all of those groups have left us where we are today – where commuters to NJ and Long Island essentially have to burrow themselves into a soulless hole in the ground under /Madison Square Garden in order to get home after a long day at work.

In New York, a long line of strong-willed elected officials — Mr. Spitzer included — have pledged that a makeover of Penn Station was on the way.

In 2006, Mr. Pataki, the Republican governor, spoke of creating “a visionary new Pennsylvania Station.” His successor, Mr. Spitzer, said in 2008 that he was committed to a revamp of Penn that would “redefine Midtown Manhattan.” In 2016, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo likened the station to “seven levels of hell” and, rolling out his own $3 billion plan, vowed, “This will get done.”

Most recently, the current governor, Kathy Hochul, said that “New Yorkers do not deserve what they have been subjected to for decades at Penn Station” and presented a revised version of Mr. Cuomo’s proposal with an estimated cost of more than $6 billion.

After all of that talk about all of those visions, Penn Station remains a confusing, overburdened labyrinth of hallways and stairwells buried beneath a 20,000-seat entertainment venue.

What I found most interesting is how the same 21-track layout built 100+ years ago for less frequent train routes is still in use today – making for additional delays as the higher volume of trains need to get in and out of the station, and that the already cramped platforms were made MORE cramped because 1,000+ additional pillars needed to be added underground in order to support the weight of MSG. Maybe that was the signal to those wizards back in the 1960s that their decision was not a really good one.

After living in the NYC area for most of my life, and after visiting different countries and cities around the world, I can easily say that Penn Station and much of the public transport infrastructure in the NYC metro area (NYC, Long Island and New Jersey) has been woefully under-invested in. It is a complete failure that the whole of all NY and NJ elected officials and anyone even remotely associated with this situation are owners of.

I mean, take a look at this Fantasy NYC Region Transit map that was recently posted on Reddit. How great would it be to have a seamless transportation system where the NYC region could function as a real metro area – where I could take a train from New Brunswick, NJ on one line “directly” to 79th Street, as opposed to fragmented systems siloed by cities and states. One can dream.

The above photo – haunting, devastating and yet beautiful all at the same time – from the Eaton Fires in Southern California in January, 2025. This and others can be found in the Top 25 News Photos from The Atlantic. Kinda surprised the collection didn’t include a screenshot of “Signalgate” chat that Jeff Goldberg was included in.

An absolutely insane apartment hit the market on October 15th in NYC’s legendary “The Dakota” apartment building on Central Park West on the Upper West Side. It is the first time this unit has been on the market in 40+ years. The apartment is a 3 bedroom, 4.5 bathroom unit with 13.5 foot ceilings, with most of the unit overlooking Central Park. Take a look at the listing here – the place is incredible. According to the listing, the apartment is going for a cool $24 Million. A 30 year mortgage with 50% of that sticker price as a down payment would run about $74,277 a month and monthly maintenance is an equally staggering $18,693 (Bringing the total monthly cost to about $92,970).

From the listing:

The gracious layout unfolds from a handsome mahogany-paneled vestibule leading into a stately central gallery. From here, the magnificent park-facing library-with its original fireplace and intricate detailing-opens via pocket doors to an expansive 600-square-foot living room, where wonderful Central Park views create an atmosphere of timeless elegance. Across the gallery, a grand 24-foot formal dining room, complete with fireplace and original pocket doors, overlooks the Dakota’s enchanting interior courtyard and fountains.

The Dakota got its name because when it was built in 1884, there was absolutely nothing around it, so for its residents back then, it felt like they were living in the Dakota territory relative to the rest of NYC, that was situated so much further downtown.

The Dakota is also famous for being the location where the 1966 Roman Polanski film “Rosemary’s Baby” was filmed. It is also, sadly, the site where John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980.

I found that this year there was a high number of kit designs that employed some pretty complex patterns and graphics (Netherlands club Volendam and their insane third kit being the winner in that category! :). While that was challenging to deal with, the new toy on the market to help me out this year was Generative AI, and specifically Google’s AI Studio, which did a more than respectable job of replicating some of these complex patterns. Now that I am past the ‘crunch’ of getting them all done, I will circle back and see if I can improve on any that I’m not exactly thrilled with. And of course, if any kits that have not yet been updated are subsequently announced, I will update them accordingly.

Another little feature that I added to my Wallpaper galleries is a small yellow “NEW” icon/bug on the top right corner of Wallpapers that I have added to the site over the past 7 days (it is based on the upload date of both “net new” and “updates” of older versions). When you hover over the icon/bug, it also displays a little tool tip indicating the day that I added/updated it. This little feature is more valuable in galleries like College or the US pro leagues, where items there do not get updated as frequently, and therefore, you can see when something has been updated. I have tested it on Firefox, Safari and Chrome/Brave browsers (Desktop only) and seems to be working fine but let me know if there are any issues. This feature is only active on the Desktop version of the site.

So there you go, Internet. Show off your loyalties to your favorite team on your favorite computer/device.

I do my best to replicate and be as true as I possibly can to the team / kit’s original design, however there are often circumstances where I have to take some artistic liberties and license due to unique elements of the pattern used on the original and not being able to find the same design online. The advent and advances in AI capabilities is making this a bit easier to handle and manage.

Now that I have finished the top four five English levels, I’ll next take on the English National Leagues North and South. I’m also debating going to do the European ones first (already did Belgium) and then returning to do the English National Leagues.

For the four English leagues I’ve done so far, I’ve updated 100% of Home kits, 97% of Away kits, and 77% of Third kits (as of 5 Sept 25). A handful of these missing kits (mostly 3rd kits) have not yet been announced as far as I can see. I’ve experimented with using AI to help generate some of the more complex patterns, with middling results. :) I will circle back on them at a later date. If patterns are omitted, it was a decision, and I will also circle back on them at a later date to improve them.

An absolutely spectacular project from The Pudding. They basically did a text/word/phrase scan of all the public Google Maps images of the five boroughs of NYC to find out what were the most used words and phrases in the city. And the results are incredible.

The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

You can even do a search for whatever word may be of interest to you and create a map of its location.

Here is a visual of all the instances of the word pizza

via kottke.org

Nice and relatively well edited/selected list of the Top 100 Movies of the 21st Century from the NY Times. As you can see from the above image, I am proud to report that as of today, I’ve seen 62 of these fine feature films. For what it is worth, there are several of the remaining 38 that are on my ‘to watch’ list which would have brought that total up a bit higher.

The ageless wonder Mel Brooks announced that they are making “Spaceballs 2” with a pretty funny reveal video. The original is a hilarious spoof of the Star Wars universe, featuring such characters as Yogurt, Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz and such classic cheesy humor lines like “May the Schwartz be with you.”, “She gives great helmet.”, and “Prepare ship for ludicrous speed!” to name a few. I just hope Mel is around to see this movie’s release in 2027.

If you’ve never seen this classic comedy, you can watch it on YouTube (rent) or it is available on Max (Or HBO or HBO Max or whatever they are calling it today).

Some amazing goals from the past year in the EPL. Happy to see this collection being led off by an Anthony Gordon goal – later followed by a spectacular one from Alexander Isak vs Liverpool – from my favorite team Newcastle United. Its been a great season for NUFC, winning the Carabao (League) Cup (Newcastle’s first domestic trophy in 70 (!!) years) and qualifying (barely) for European Champions League (second time in three years!). I’ve been a Newcastle United fan for a long time – suffering through the quagmire of the Mike Ashley ownership era that feels like a lifetime ago – and it is wonderful to have a team in the EPL that is competitive and has a set of players that you would want to hang out with at the local pub.

Fifty years on, the classic absurdist comedy film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” still holds up as one of the funniest movies of all time. A fun article from the BBC interviews Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam as they recall how they and the rest of the iconic comedy troupe created the comedy classic:

An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975. Terry Gilliam, who co-directed the film with Terry Jones, thinks he knows why. “Every time I watch it I’m completely bowled over by how incredibly wonderful it is,” Gilliam tells the BBC. “It’s still so funny, and I just love everything about it.”

The Monty Python team first appeared on TV together in a BBC series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in 1969. Five of the six members – Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin – had honed their craft in student comedy societies at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The sixth, Gilliam, had moved to the UK from the US, and provided animated segments which linked their surreal sketches. In 1971, some of these sketches were reshot and compiled into a film, And Now for Something Completely Different, but the Pythons had ambitions to make a bona fide feature film – or some of them did, at least.

Nicholas Barber – The BBC

Many of the bits and lines from the movie have become catch phrases and have entered the common lexicon in the US and Britain. “Tis but a flesh wound”. “I fart in your general direction.” and many more. The creativity that they used to address problems that they faced in order to create the movie are legend – going to the music bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd for funding, using empty coconut halves to hilariously mimic the sound of horses trotting instead of using real horses, and shooting all the castle scenes at the same Scottish castle, just from different angles. If you somehow have never seen the movie, it is currently available on Netflix and Peacock, and YouTube and it has never been funnier.

This past Friday, at Boston’s Old North Church, there was a “Lantern Service” commemorating the 250th anniversary of the famous “Two If By Sea” signal noting how the British Army was arriving in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. The whole service and video is about 2 and a half hours long. I tried to share the video to start at Professor Richardson’s speech, which is about 25 minutes long and starts at the 1:18:55 mark, however that function on Vimeo was not playing nicely, so if you just want to see her speech you will have to fast forward to that mark (like an animal :P ). Its a really neat event if you have the time to watch the whole thing and very timely as we observe the crazy happening in our country these days.

The Major League Baseball season has gotten off to a spectacular start with everyone abuzz over the newest toy to hit the sport – the “Torpedo Bat”. Over the opening weekend series between the Yankees and the Brewers, the Yanks blasted a record 15 home runs (and 9 in one game), many of them from players using this new bat. As a result, this new bat design may make its inventor, Aaron Leanheardt (Gift Link – WSJ), a wealthy man:

When Aaron Leanhardt was a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was part of a research team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history.

What his colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when Leanhardt wasn’t toiling away at the lab, he was moonlighting as a speedy shortstop in a local amateur baseball league. Leanhardt was good enough to play in a 2001 All-Star Game at a minor-league stadium in Lowell. He hit .464 that season.

“We didn’t even know about that,” said David Pritchard, a professor emeritus at MIT.

More than two decades later, the baseball world suddenly knows all about the 48-year-old Leanhardt. He’s the inventor of the so-called “torpedo bat,” perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.

Leanhardt’s creation exploded into the mainstream this weekend, when the New York Yankees tied a major-league record by bashing 15 home runs in the first three games of their season. Nine of the homers came from players who have adopted the torpedo bat, including three from infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr.

Jared Diamond – The Wall Street Journal

Now, teams and players around MLB and all other leagues are scrambling to get their hands on this new bat design that may transform the game a way that we have not seen in years, maybe since they reduced the height of the pitchers mound in the 1960s.

This may be ‘old news’ but if you get the chance, go watch the movie Kneecap (Netflix link). It is a semi-biographical story about the real life Irish rap band of the same name and how a Belfast teacher (DJ Provai) joined the brothers Moglai and Mo to form the band. Very entertaining story with an overlay of the ever present tensions between the Republic of Ireland, the Brits, and Northern Ireland (Belfast). I’ve said this to a few friends – I can’t believe this was not nominated for an International Oscar.

And while you are at it, take a listen to their great song H.O.O.D.

A dog with a job, ah, what the f**k is that?
When our poor Micky’s just sitting in the flat
Sipping on his cans and smoking rollies
‘Cause all the best jobs are taken by doleies

And almost everything Trump is doing or threatening to do to the economy will cause higher, not lower inflation. I don’t know what if anything is going on in his mind when he asserts that tariffs will reduce prices, but tariffs are in fact sales taxes on imported goods, and does anyone think that sales taxes make stuff cheaper?

Then there are plans to deport large numbers of immigrants. Trump is reportedly angry that deportations aren’t moving faster and has reassigned top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If he manages to pressure them into rushing things and we see large-scale roundups of immigrants — I’m not specifying illegal immigrants, because a rushed, pressured effort is likely to sweep up many legal immigrants too — the economic impact could be devastating. Grocery prices would be hit especially hard, because both agriculture and food processing, especially meatpacking, rely on immigrants for much of their work forces.

The one piece of Trump’s economic agenda that at least sounds as if it could reduce inflation is his promise to increase energy production, presumably by eliminating environmental regulations so that fossil fuel companies can “Drill, baby, drill!” So let’s talk about why that won’t work.

Basically, any large decline in energy prices would lead to a fall in production, driving prices right back up. In today’s world, U.S. shale oil drillers are the marginal producers — the producers whose decisions set both a floor and a ceiling on overall oil prices. As I write this, the benchmark price of U.S. crude oil — the West Texas Intermediate price — is just over $70 a barrel.

And here’s the thing: any substantial decline in prices from this point would make drilling new wells unprofitable in many U.S. oilfields:

Paul Krugman

When Americans went to the polls in November, a major theme that drove people’s decision to vote as they did was that inflation and grocery prices were too high and they felt the current president would do a better job. It was a key message that the current president campaigned on. He even boasted that he would ‘immediately bring prices down starting on day one’ after he took office. And people bought it as if they were living in some Steve Jobs ‘reality distortion field‘. The sad truthiness of the situation will likely be very different:

Trump, then, obviously won’t deliver on his promise to reduce prices, which was never credible. He won’t even reduce inflation — the rate at which prices are rising. Instead, it seems highly likely that inflation will rise on his watch. This in turn means that the Fed won’t cut interest rates, as he has been demanding, and may even raise them if the inflation picture gets ugly enough.

Paul Krugman

So to summarize: people cited the economy, inflation and prices as being their key decision point on who they voted for in November, then to turn around and vote for this administration who broadcast that their current approach – tariffs (aka taxes on foreign goods), purging Government agencies and jobs – which will likely result in higher prices, higher unemployment and questionable economic forecasts, is what they would be doing. How does this make any sense?

Newcastle played Birmingham this past weekend and it was a dog fight of a match that Newcastle eventually won. Birmingham is no joke and they are in pole position to get promoted to the Championship (hopefully along with Wrexham!) . Even though Newcastle won, there was an an incredible goal by Tomoki Iwata that got lost in the shuffle and briefly tied the match at 2-2. Watch it below and pay attention to the last replay of it, with the camera facing the Newcastle goal. Not only does the shot curve left but it ‘feels’ like the shot accelerated as it got closer to Nick Pope in the Newcastle goal. Just an incredible volley and goal.

I have pivoted to posting almost exclusively about the coup happening in the United States right now. My focus will be on this crisis for the foreseeable future. I don’t yet know to what extent other things will make it back into the mix. I still very much believe that we need art and beauty and laughter and distraction and all of that, but I also believe very strongly that this situation is too important and potentially dangerous to ignore. And it is largely being ignored by a mainstream press that has been softened up by years of conservative pushback, financial pressures, and hollowing out by Facebook & Google. But I have an independent website and a platform, and I’m going to use it the way that I have always used it: to inform people about the truth of the world (as best as I understand it) and what I feel is important.

I have pivoted like this a couple of times before: in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the pandemic. This situation feels as urgent now as those events did then. Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.

Jason Kottke

Following his lead, and that of several other prominent “internet editors” (Dave Pell ; Laura Olin; Jason Kottke; Ryan Broderick and so many others who fall under my moniker for these folks), I will also feature articles, events, social posts/strings and other relevant content that hopefully exposes all the crazy stuff that is systematically hollowing out the government industrial complex of the United States. And I want to be clear, I think the government should always take a look at how they currently do things and ask the hard questions about how they can make things run more efficiently for the American people. What I do not think should be done is arbitrarily demolish and do away with important divisions of the government for nothing more than political reasons.

To me, I think the most frustrating part of what is currently taking place is that we all saw it coming. It was presented and exposed in full color during the campaign leading up to the November election. When Joe Biden addressed the nation last month and noted that an ‘oligarchy’ is going to take over the US Government, we saw a spike in Google searches asking what the word ‘oligarchy’ means. When “Agent Orange” said the other day that the US should take over Gaza (his administration tried to slow walk that nuclear statement back), Arab American voters have the audacity to say they felt betrayed by him. Hey, lets vote for a guy who put up a ‘muslim ban’ during his first term and see what happens.

At this point, the citizens of the US need to expose and protest all the illegal activity that is taking place and make every effort to rise up and challenge what is happening. As has been stated before, Democracy is fragile and it can not be taken for granted.

The FBI is preparing to disband a team of specialists charged with combating foreign threats to US elections, a source familiar tells CNN. The shuttering of the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force and planned reassigning of team members follows a directive from incoming and newly sworn in US Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolving the team. The special task force was established by former FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2017 following a wave of foreign influence operations targeting the US electoral process, including Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election that Trump won.

CNN

Because clearly there is no need to have anyone in the US Justice Department focus on ensuring that there will be no overt foreign influences on the integrity US elections. What could go wrong?

About a month ago, Newcastle United walked into Emirates Stadium in London and clinically dispatched Arsenal 2-0 on their home turf, giving Newcastle a sense of inevitability heading into yesterday’s second leg of the Carabao Cup Semi Final at St James Park in Newcastle. Last month’s win in London even led Arsenal’s coach Mikel Arteta to hilariously blame the loss on the types of footballs used in the match. And almost on cue, Newcastle United finished off Arsenal by the same 2-0 score – thus 4-0 in aggregate – in yesterday’s match. And of course, the Newcastle fans made sure to remind Arteta of his gaffe.

The critical pieces that helped drive Newcastle’s pair of wins was the midfield combination of Bruno Guimarães and Sandro Tonali. Game by game, Bruno is developing his legend in Newcastle and his shadow is getting larger and longer. So it is always nice to see media outlets like The Guardian put out such complementary write ups about Bruno and the sometimes unsung impact he has on the Newcastle squad when he is needed most:

Bruno Guimarães is writhing on the turf. Could be trouble, this. He almost seemed to spin through the air as Myles Lewis?Skelly clipped him. Landed awkwardly. Still down. Clutching his calf, and maybe his rib too? The Newcastle physios crouch expectantly at the touchline. Eddie Howe wears a concerned expression. Referee Simon Hooper brandishes a yellow card.

At this, as if suddenly possessed by a bolt of divine grace, Guimarães slowly rises from his slab and accepts the benedictions of his teammates. Less than 45 seconds later, he will be sprinting at full pelt towards the edge of the Arsenal penalty area and playing an outrageous no?look pass to Joe Willock with the inside of his heel. Miraculously, Bruno Guimarães has cheated death again.

In a way, those 45 seconds of Newcastle’s 2-0 win against Arsenal were perhaps the purest distillation of that volatile and mystifying substance known as Total Bruno: the boundless skill and the base-metal skulduggery, the artistry and the industry, the beauty and the ugliness, all in one irresistible package. This is a player of sumptuous technical gifts on the ball and yet whose most compelling attribute is probably what he does without it: the 2023?24 Premier League leader in terms of distance covered, well on course to retain his crown in 2024-25.

Jonathan Wilson, The Guardian

So now, Newcastle heads back to Wembley Stadium for the 2nd time in 3 years to compete for the Carabao Cup Championship (the Carabao Cup, also known as the EFL Cup, is open only to the 92 teams in the top four divisions of English football compared to the FA Cup which is open to all teams in English football) this time likely against a strong Liverpool squad. Three years ago, they lost to an overachieving Manchester United club. Lets hope that they finish off the final leg of this journey and finally (!!!) bring home some hardware to the Northeast of England.

An amazing snippet from his obituary on The Athletic (probably a paywall):

Growing up, Uecker was actually a pitcher. He didn’t finish high school and in 1954, at the age of 20, he enlisted in the Army. He hoped to avoid going overseas by playing military baseball with soldiers who had played in the minors or in college. Since, Uecker hadn’t yet done either, he lied. According to a USA Today article in 1997, he said he had played at Marquette, given that it was a college in his native Milwaukee. “Marquette didn’t have a team, but they never checked,” he said. After his time in the service, Uecker became the first Milwaukee native to sign with the Braves.

Will Sammon – The Athletic

So we leave you with his classic call of Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn’s first pitches from the movie “Major League” – “Juuuust a bit outside” – which became a running one line gag in baseball and other walks of life.

UPDATE – 17 Jan ’25: Another great little tidbit that I picked up today regarding Uecker. In 1964, as a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, he hit two home runs for the year – one off of Gaylord Perry, the other off of Sandy Koufax. Koufax had a 1.74 ERA that year and he gave up just 13 home runs in 200+ innings pitched all season. One was to Bob Uecker.

There are several wallpapers that I’ll probably go back and update/improve/touch up over the next several months. And there are some teams that have released their Third kits which I am sure I have missed. If anyone sees any items that don’t look right or any items I may have overlooked, please drop me a line. Otherwise, feel free to download any and all the wallpapers you may want to show off your team/club loyalties!

Over the years, I have kept Archives of the previous year’s designs and I am considering publishing links to those collections for folks to download in full (i.e. a Dropbox link). More to come on this if there is any interest.

Below are links to the English/Scottish league page and the European page. You can also get to them via the site’s main navigation (obvs).

A Google Street View image of a man loading a large white plastic bag into the boot of his car has led to the arrest of two people on suspicion of murder. The alleged crime took place in the sparsely populated Spanish province of Soria in the northern Castile and León region. Last week, the dismembered body of a man was found in the cemetery of the village of Andaluz, which has 12 inhabitants…

The accused man lives seven miles from Andaluz in the municipality of Tajueco, which has a population of 50 people. El País newspaper reported that “nothing ever happens [there] and if something did happen, surely nobody would know about it, or so the alleged murderer must have thought when he put a bundle in the boot of his old burgundy Rover last October that has led investigators to believe it could be a corpse”.

It added: “The man became overconfident. Just as he was bending down to put the bundle in the boot, with no neighbours or onlookers near by, something happened that hadn’t happened for 15 years: the Google Maps car passed.”

What are the odds of this happening?

h/t: NextDraft

An interesting collaboration from, of all places, WeTransfer and specifically, their arts platform WePresent, and the Dutch photographer and film maker Robin de Puy. American.

“AMERICAN” is a collection of audio, film and photographic portraits by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Robin de Puy. The series was created in the US between 2022 and 2024. Her images invite us to look closer at and listen to the stories of a cross-section of people who make up one of the world’s most powerful, extreme and divisive countries, at a politically turbulent and poignant time. Beyond globally-renowned celebrities and politicians whose voices and opinions we are privy to, what are the thoughts, concerns and dreams of the largely unheard citizens of America?

“AMERICAN”, a project envisioned by De Puy in collaboration with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, consists of 25 episodes in which we meet and hear the stories of an extraordinary collection of people.

They profile a ‘Jack of all Trades‘ from Uncertain, Texas and a bunch of young boys from Arkansas whose go to move with the ladies is, well, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

The site is easy to navigate and has some really interesting profiles of the wide and diverse tapestry of people that live here.

Via WebCurious

The Washington Post has lost at least 250,000 subscribers since announcing last Friday that it would not endorse a candidate for president — roughly 10 percent of its digital following, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Post would not officially confirm that figure, saying it was a private company, but it was reported in a story in the newspaper that cited documents and two unnamed sources who were familiar with the figures. Another non-endorsement last week has caused thousands of Los Angeles Times readers to cancel subscriptions, although not nearly at the Post’s level.

For the leader of a company so focused on the customer, they could not have had a more tone deaf approach to this decision.

Honestly, I’m not even sure how the idea is believable to anyone for more than a minute or two. First of all, exposing Trump and honestly reporting on his enshittification of the modern world would bring in a whole lot of clicks, as would, you know, defeating the new fascism. That’s the kind of thing you break out the Big Boy Fonts for. Most of the country was literally dancing in the streets when Biden won—there would be zero loss of profit in uncovering Trump’s malfeasance and downfall. Not to mention, actual investigative digging would turn up some truly incredible stories. There is no reason not to investigate the ways the GOP has tried to set up cheating in this election, but it barely makes a blip in the headlines when yet another scheme turns up and is promptly not dealt with.

Second, when Biden was floundering in the polls, did the media go hard on Trump to maintain a close race and all those thirsty terrified eyeballs on their content? Fucking no. I was there. You were there. They ignored every insane thing Trump said during the debate and came together in an almost unprecedented unity to thump Biden out of the race and convince everyone he had Parkinson’s. Aaron Sorkin, of all over-blessed people on this dumbass rock, published an op-ed saying if the Democrats were actually serious about the threat of Trump, they’d completely non-democratically nominate Mitt Dog-on-a-Hot-Car-Roof Romney as their candidate the day before Biden dropped out. The media landscape was so unified that that was the creator of The West Wing’s solution: Well, if EVERYONE was conservative, we wouldn’t have all this division! Don’t like the new Hitler? Go with Himmler! See? All fixed!

…

Now, of course the media criticizes Trump. They made billions doing just that. It’s the journalistic Eden they want back, so that they can copy/paste someone’s misspelled tweet and plaster Democracy Dies In Darkness above it. But they also carry water for him while offering nothing but scorn to any Democratic move or action, and super-gluing a megaphone to the lips of anyone with a grievance against them not fixing every problem instantly with a deadlocked Congress so that both sides look equally wretched. They insist on detailed policy from Harris while asking how Trump’s tummy is feeling today. Constantly ask how a Democrat is going to pay for programs to actually help people while never bothering to ask how a Republican plans to pay for infinite tax cuts, absurd tariff plans, and orgiastic military spending. Or if they do manage to squeak out a real question, most outlets turn right around and pretend Trump didn’t answer by rambling about nailing Haitian swans to lawnmowers or pledge to nominate Clarice Starling as Attorney General.

Catherynne Valente

Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process. The deal—the first of its kind for Runway and one that could become a blueprint in the entertainment industry—comes as creatives, actors and studio executives debate whether to use the new technology and how to protect their copyright material. Advocates say generative AI can enhance creators’ work and help a cash-strapped industry save time and money.

Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate Studio, expects the company to be able to save “millions and millions of dollars” from using the new model. The studio behind the “John Wick” franchise and “Megalopolis” plans to initially use the new AI tool for internal purposes like story boarding—laying out a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds—and eventually creating backgrounds and special effects, like explosions, for the big screen. 

via The Wall Street Journal

The screams that you hear are from all the union members that produce movies, TV and digital content who just emerged from a strike where this very scenario was the key sticking point in those negotiations. How this plays out will be very closely watched. As will be the next studio that signs a similar deal.

Tim Banazek was, like many of us, bored during the heights of the Coronavirus pandemic and decided he’d assuage that boredom by buying several boxes of old baseball cards. After sharing his purchase on his Facebook feed, a friend from his daughter’s softball team said “You should see my Dad’s collection!”. And woah, was this some sort of a collection! It was so massive that Mr. Banazek bought it. From the NY Times article:

The collection includes at least every Topps baseball set produced from 1954 to 2016, as well as roughly three decades’ worth of completed sets of basketball and football cards. There are an estimated 10,000 Michael Jordan cards, 6,000 Kobe Bryant cards and 4,000 LeBron James cards. There are at least five different Babe Ruth cards, not to mention Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio cards; authenticated tobacco cards of Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and others from the T206 and T205 set (1909 and 1911); hundreds of signed balls and bats; rolled-up sheets of uncut cards; and game-used catching gear worn by the Hall of Famer Bill Dickey.

The collection of artifacts extends well beyond sports and includes original and authenticated postcards of Marilyn Monroe from the 1950s; sealed boxes of cards from “Star Trek,” “Star Wars” and Pokemon; and turn-of-the-century cigarette cards featuring images of stage actors popular at the time. Some of the collection is stored in literal shoe boxes. Other sets are sealed in their original packaging, fossilized bubble gum still sitting in packs.

Mr. Banazek has tried to catalog the chaos, but he suspects he has opened only 5 to 10 percent of it, leaving the tantalizing possibility of ever-rare gems yet to be discovered. His friend Darren Wieder started inventorying the cards with a scanner and stopped after about 80,000.

“There are boxes and boxes of cards that are the ones with uniform pieces, bat pieces, signed pieces, and we haven’t even gone through that,” Mr. Wieder said. “Some of that stuff could be worth a fortune. We don’t know.”

You have to think that there are some real collector’s gems in this massive collection. The fact that the article already states that there are 5 (!!) Babe Ruth cards along with cards of other baseball legends such as Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson speaks volumes about the scope of the collection. Could another Honus Wagner card be buried somewhere in that storeroom!?!

We recently went through the baseball card and memorabilia collection of a family member and while that was a fairly large undertaking, it probably represented less than 1% of what is in the collection noted in the Times article.

I would love to spend a day going through that warehouse to see what may be hidden inside some of those banal boxes!

You always see how your plants change over time but this video of time-lapse video and photos of multiple plants, fruits, and vegetables is super cool.

As is often the case, Jon Stewart says out loud what we all saw last night and now can’t unsee.

In the year 2024, how is it possible that the best two people the United States of America (!!!) can present to be the leader of the free world is a narcissistic, adult diaper wearing, dumb wannabe fascist, 34+ time convicted felon up to his ears in legal trouble and a career politician who regularly gets tongue tied, who is well past his prime and struggles to stay engaged, both of whom are over 78 years old? Maybe Biden should have started every rebuttal with “Felon say what?”

In a unassuming building in the shadow of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., sits the Folger Museum and its unprecedented collection of 82 copies of Shakespeare’s “First Folio”. For the past four years, this small museum has gone through a redesign and renovation in an effort to make it more welcoming to visitors who may, or may not, be familiar with the works of Shakespeare and the importance of the “First Folio”.

Shakespeare’s “First Folio” is a collection of 36 of his plays and writings published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. It was published by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell. The ‘First Folio’ was significant because it represented the first publication and reliable text of about 20 of his plays. As of today, only 235 original publications of the ‘First Folio’ exist, of which 82 are housed at the Folger Museum in Washington, DC.

The Folger Museum has been around since 1932, however it has never been known as a ‘destination’ museum in DC or ever had much of an audience – only seeing about 60,000-70,000 visitors a year. As the NY Times article notes:

The building needed “a different handshake,” said Witmore (who is retiring at the end of this month after 13 years at the helm). Previously, visitors entered by climbing the steps to the marble facade, inscribed with soaring quotes from Ben Jonson and other long-dead writers. Now, they follow the descending garden path ringed with a poem by Rita Dove, which exhorts visitors to “clear your calendars, pocket your notes.”

Inside, the first wall panel reads, in big letters, “Shakespeare?” And then below: “He was then and there and he is here and now. Discoveries await!”

Behind it, in a small anteroom, visitors catch a glimpse of part of an intricate black mirror by the African American artist Fred Wilson, who represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Opposite it, first seen reflected in its surface, is George Gower’s famous 1579 portrait of Elizabeth I, in milky white lead makeup.

Hung nearby are archival materials relating to Ira Aldridge, most likely the first Black actor to play “Othello,” in 1825. Before that, the role was played by white actors in blackface.

The question of whom Shakespeare “belongs” to is also addressed pointedly in the main exhibit, which pivots quickly from a brief sketch of Shakespeare’s biography to the British colonization of North America, which began in the very years Shakespeare was writing.

Jennifer Schuessler – NY Times

The newly refurbished museum hopes to become more of a destination for fans of Shakespeare, with a goal of highlighting some of the quirky interpretations of his seminal works:

Some artifacts highlight the weirder ways that Shakespeare has saturated the culture. There’s a poster from an 1853 production of “The Taming of the Shrew” performed on an icebound ship in the Arctic. A 1984 board game called The Twelfth Night Murder is spread out in one case, as if ready to play.

The exhibition also seeks to bring the First Folio down to earth. Today, it may be the ultimate literary fetish object. (In 2020, a copy sold at auction for nearly $10 million.) But it’s also just a book, made by human hands, and sometimes messed up by them.

Jennifer Schuessler – NY Times

Definitely worth a visit next time I’m down in DC.

Interesting article profiling Jason Arasheben, a celebrity jeweler who has created several intricate and outrageous championship rings that recent pro sports teams have earned. For years, the company Jostens has dominated the ring industry – remember the Jostens tables on your college campus encouraging you to order a senior ring? – but these days, Jason Arasheben has been encroaching into this space.

Arasheben, a celebrity jeweler whose clients include the rappers Drake and ASAP Rocky, is investigating the history of the contending teams, the connections to their cities and any other interesting facts that could be infused into an extravagantly bejeweled ring. He is also scouring his personal contacts for anyone who could facilitate a meeting with the wealthy owners of the winning franchises.

“You just have to start connecting the dots,” said Arasheben, the chief executive of the Jason of Beverly Hills jewelry house near Los Angeles. “Billionaires talk to other billionaires.”

In the past few years, Arasheben has established himself as a go-to jeweler for title-winning teams — carving out a corner of the market long dominated by Jostens — by creating dynamic rings that include reversible faces and detachable compartments.

“He’s reimagined what the championship ring is all about,” said Eric Tosi, the chief marketing officer of the Vegas Golden Knights, who won the Stanley Cup last year.

“Athletes are naturally competitive, but owners are also competitive,” he said. “They want to outdo each previous ring, so the rings are getting bigger every year. I’m not sure how much larger they can get, otherwise they’ll be plates.”

NY Times

The complexity on some of the more recent rings for the Milwaukee Bucks, Las Vegas Golden Knights and the LA Rams is pretty impressive. The tops of the Knights and Bucks rings are able to be removed and used as a necklace. The Knights and Rams rings have mini replicas of their hockey and football arenas, with the Knights rink detailing from where they scored 9 goals in their championship clinching win.

With my Celtics currently up 2-0 vs the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Championship, here’s hoping we see a sweet Celtics ring with a replica of the fabled Parquet floor from the Garden.

As has been previously reported, the show is not a reboot or spinoff of “The Office,” but rather a new mockumentary show with a new cast set in the same universe. For the first time since the show was first revealed to be in the works in late 2023, plot details are now available. The official logline states: 

“The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.”…“It’s been more than ten years since the final episode of ‘The Office’ aired on NBC, and the acclaimed comedy series continues to gain popularity and build new generations of fans on Peacock,” said Lisa Katz, president of scripted content for NBCU Entertainment. “In partnership with Universal Television and led by the creative team of Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, this new series set in the universe of Dunder Mifflin introduces a new cast of characters in a fresh setting ripe for comedic storytelling: a daily newspaper.”

Joe Otterson – Variety

And this:

Warner Bros. will release the first of its new batch of live-action “The Lord of the Rings” films in 2026, which will focus on Andy Serkis’ Gollum.

Original “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy filmmaker Peter Jackson and his partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are producing the movie and “will be involved every step of the way,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during an earnings call Thursday.

The project is currently in the early stages of script development from writers Walsh and Boyens, along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, and will “explore storylines yet to be told,” Zaslav said.

Jennifer Maas – Variety

So to recap, streaming services are costing more, competitors are partnering together to offer bundled pricing for their combined services, and the studios are re-treading existing content that leaves you with that ‘meh’ feeling after you have spent 6-50 hours watching a movie trilogy or series.

This illustrates how much of a crap shoot the movie and television entertainment industry is and how difficult it is for these organizations to develop a model that is sustainable when they have “IP” that is truly revolutionary. How do they balance extending a series or movie without beating it to death or risking ruining the reputation of the whole entity because the spinoff was terrible. It is a challenge that these organizations deal with regularly, yet they seem to be ignoring the warning signs from previous attempts. Is anyone really asking for yet another Lord of the Rings movie about Gollum? Especially after Amazon’s ‘Ring of Power’ didn’t exactly light the world on fire? I’m interested to see how this all plays out – both from the creative and business perspective!

The VASA framework (short for “Visual Affective Skills Animator”) uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.

Ars Technica

So if you thought that all the deep fakes that are out there now were lifelike and difficult to differentiate from reality, this takes it up several levels. The below example is from the Microsoft page describing the overall project noted above.

The enduring image from the days immediately after the slayings would be the Bronco cruising down eerily empty freeways, trailed by a fleet of police cars. For seven hours on Friday, June 17, the celebrated former athlete eluded authorities who had planned to arrest him that morning. Behind the wheel of the Bronco was Simpson’s boyhood friend and former NFL colleague Al “A.C.” Cowlings. In the back, reportedly holding a gun to his own head, was Simpson.

Tipped by news reports, crowds gathered along the Bronco’s route as it sliced through Orange and Los Angeles counties. Some bystanders cheered, “Go, O.J., go!” as the Bronco passed, as if they were witnessing one of his legendary runs on the football field. Others held up signs: “We Love the Juice,” “Save the Juice.”

An estimated 95 million people — bigger by several million than the number who tuned into the Super Bowl that year — watched the slow-speed pursuit on television. Later, some commentators would trace the roots of reality TV to the surreal, 60-mile car chase that transfixed the nation and ended without violence in Simpson’s driveway, where he finally surrendered.

LA Times

To really get a sense of how important the OJ Trial and spectacle was, I would highly recommend watching “OJ: Made In America” and then follow that up with the excellent ESPN/30for30 documentary June 17, 1994

I watched this whole game last night. What a moment for college sports to witness this. She has been doing this for four years now and as her college career comes to an end this March, folks need to take a step back and appreciate the moment. Similar to what Jay Bilas recently wrote in a nice appreciation of her

Clark is now the all-time scoring champion of NCAA women’s basketball. She is the most exciting and recognizable college basketball player in the country. Period. Men or women. Her games sell out, at home and on the road. Every sports fan knows her. Every. Single. One. Yet, the responsibility of carrying the women’s game doesn’t seem to faze her one bit.

She is not the Pete Maravich or Steph Curry of women’s basketball, she is a singular star in American culture, having cut her own trailblazing path along with the likes of Ann Meyers, Nancy Lieberman, Cynthia Cooper-Dyke and others.

Jay Bilas on ESPN

As of today, she has 3,569 career points after last night’s performance, where she eclipsed the NCAA scoring record previously set in 2017. She is now less than 100 points from breaking both women’s AND men’s all time collegiate records – Kansas’s Lynette Woodard’s scored 3,649 career points (She played in the AIAW era before women’s sports were part of the NCAA) and LSU’s Pete Maravich had 3,667 (which was done in an era when Freshmen didn’t play AND there was no three point shot) – with four regular season games to go. This will be appointment TV. Whether you played basketball or not, you just have to really appreciate what she has done to for the game of basketball – men AND women!

Her career stats at Iowa are pretty staggering and what impresses me the most is that her Assists have continued to rise along with her points scored. She’s scoring points and she is still getting the rest of her team involved:

So if you have the chances, check her out in the next four games of Iowa’s regular season. And hopefully a deep run in the NCAA Tournament. She will not disappoint.

The scenario: My wife took a drive last night to drop off one of our cars to my son who goes to college nearby. The plan was that my wife would drive drive the car that was to be dropped off and then I would leave home about an hour later and drive over to pick her up because we were then going somewhere else.

Before I left home, I wasn’t fully sure exactly where my wife would be so I checked “Find My Friend” to pinpoint her location and used that location for my directions. After I left home, my wife texted me to go to a different location. And this was the interaction with Siri via Car Play:

Wife (Read to me by Siri via Car Play): Go to parking lot behind the student center.

Me (dictating to Siri via Car Play): OK. No problem. Send me your exact location.

Wife: Sends me an Apple Maps location pin via Messages/text of the above location.

Siri reading my Wife’s last text: [Wife] responded with a text I can’t read.

So here I am driving my car as Siri says that it is unable to read the text that she sent with her location. You would think that Apple’s iOS should have been aware that the device is in “Car Play” mode, and that I was actively at that moment using Apple Maps Directions. So based on that, if an Apple Maps location pin is sent via Messages, Siri should have then been able to detect that an Apple Maps location pin was included in the message and deliver, at minimum, a ‘canned’ message to that effect, instead of saying that it can’t read the contents of the message at all. To me, Siri should have be able to assess the situation and contents of the message and audibly say “[Sender] has sent you an Apple Maps location. Would you like to open this location in Apple Maps?” The next level, super smart move would have been for Siri to also ask “Do you want this location pin to be set as my Apple Maps Directions destination?” All of these apps are native Apple iOS apps, so there should not have been any 3rd party/’walled garden’ or privacy situations present.

After Siri responded saying it could not read the text, at the next stop light, I had to then quickly grab my phone, open it, open Messages, get to my wife’s text, click on the location pin, which then opened in Apple Maps, and set that as my new Apple Maps Directions destination.

So I’ll acknowledge that this is a ‘first world’ problem and that the pro move would probably have been to call my wife instead of handling this via text while I am driving in my car. Yet even if I called her, she would have then had to tell me her location and I would still would have had to find a way to input that specific information into Apple Maps so I knew where to go. However, Apple’s Car Play is designed to handle this exact scenario. Or so one would think.

Jon Stewart is returning to ‘The Daily Show’ on Mondays for the next year or more, and will also be Executive Producer of the show. This is wonderful news. From Oliver Darcy at CNN:

The comedian, who during his 16-year run as host of the Comedy Central program established it as an entertainment and cultural force, will return to host the show each week on Mondays starting February 12, Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios announced Wednesday.

Stewart, who returns as the 2024 presidential election season heats up, will also executive produce the show and work with a rotating line-up of comedians who will helm the program the rest of the week, Tuesdays through Thursdays.

“Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, chief executive of Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios, said in a statement.

Oliver Darcy

I was always so disappointed when he left the show ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. I hope he will make up for it this time around.

Comedy is the truth and few are better than Jon Stewart at exposing the hypocrisy that is rampant in our world today.

I’m a life long New England Patriots fan. I grew up in Boston. I have rooted for my home town Boston and New England teams for my whole life, even though I have not lived there for a long time. From the time I started watching the Patriots – when they played at rickety old Schaefer/Sullivan/Foxboro Stadium – they were a pillar of ineptitude. They were hopeless to the point where it was ingrained in the psyche of the New England fan base. The Patriots were always the fourth fiddle in Boston, after the Red Sox, the Celtics (often alternating at the top), and the Bruins. They were never very good, save a few seasons in the mid 1970s and a fluke run to the Super Bowl in 1986 when they got smoked by the Chicago Bears. They were the afterthought in the Boston area even when Mr. Kraft bought the team in 1994. The Patriots started to demonstrate progress when they made the 1996 Super Bowl, only to lose to the Brett Favre led Green Bay Packers. Back then, I optimistically thought that I would be lucky if I lived (at the time, I was in my 20’s) to see them win one Super Bowl.

Things started to really change in the year 2000 when they made the smart move on hiring Coach Belichick, and then got lucky by drafting Tom Brady in the 6th round of that year’s NFL Draft. And as they say, the rest is history. Between 2000 and 2019, that combination – along with all the other players and people who worked with the franchise – led the Patriots to 9 Super Bowl appearances, 6 Super Bowl Championships, and 17 AFC East titles. Those 6 Super Bowl could easily have been 8 (or they could easily have been only 2). I’d argue that had they beaten the Colts in the 2007 AFC Championship, they would have wiped the floor in the Super Bowl against the Rex Grossman led Chicago Bears. Belichick is at his best when going against an over matched quarterback (See: Jared Goff of the Rams in SB LIII).

And this brings me to an appreciation of Coach Belichick as he departs the New England Patriots after 24 years as their Head Coach. He is simply the best football coach we will ever see, and the fans of New England should be appreciative that they (we) were able to go along on this ride with him for almost a quarter century. Sure, Coach Belichick was gruff and ornery in press conferences, yet he did that to not give away any information to the competition. Brilliant. Duh. Sure, he had his controversies – some were legitimate, others were fabricated. Yet, throughout all those distractions, he was still able to prepare the team for the next challenge. The level of management needed to run a professional football program of this scale is pretty profound and he was able to sustain excellence for an extraordinary period of time. There has been much said about who was more impactful to the success of the Patriots – Tom Brady or Coach Belichick. The past few years seem to show it leans towards Brady, however I will take the middle lane and say that they needed each other. I don’t see Brady being anything near as good as he became without Coach Belichick, and conversely, I think Brady did things that took the franchise to places even Coach Belichick couldn’t have dreamed of.

My personal connection to Coach Belichick is that he lived in the same town as me when I finished high school in New Jersey, and he was the DC of the New York Giants. In fact, he lived next door to a high school friend of mine. I recall my friend saying “Look out for Bill Belichick. He will be an NFL Head Coach one day and he will be great.” And the story goes that, one day back then, my friend happened to run into Coach Belichick on their street, and my friend proceeded to share advice to (!!) Coach Belichick about how best to stop Eric Dickerson (the great RB of the 1980s LA Rams). As if Coach Belichick needed to hear any guidance from a kid in the local high school!! I saw my friend a few months ago and we still had a good laugh about that story!

So thank you Coach Belichick. And thank you Tom Brady. And thank you Mr. Kraft. And everyone else that was part of the Patriots’ success.

As I said earlier, I would have been happy with one Super Bowl championship. Coach Belichick led the team to 6. It should have been 8. Maybe 9. But I’ll gladly take the 6 (and hopefully more in the future). It is 5 more than I ever would have dreamed of.

A number of Republican Senators—including then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)—agreed, saying they would acquit Trump but expected him to answer to the law rather than the political system. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said. “We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.” 

Interestingly, Trump’s argument that he cannot now be charged with crimes makes the Republican senators who voted to acquit him complicit. It’s an acknowledgement of what was clear all along: they could have stopped him at any point, but they repeatedly chose not to. Now he is explicitly suggesting that their behavior shields him from answering to the law. 

Heather Cox Richardson

What an utter asshat. I honestly can not wrap my head around what makes “Mar-A-Lardo” appealing to people.

Norman Lear passed yesterday. He was one of the most important and influential television producers of all time, single handedly responsible for all time classic shows like”All In The Family“, “The Jeffersons“, “Maude“, “Good Times“, and “Sanford and Son“, to name a few. There have been numerous great stories and articles shared over the past day or so about Mr. Lear, who from all accounts, still had his fastball at the ripe old age of 100. For me, I’ll just leave you with the above pilot/premiere episode of “All In The Family”, which still crushes 52 years later. If you get the chance and can find the series on you local streaming service, take the time to watch it. It is still funny and tackles social and political issues that are – sadly – still relevant today.

Amazing time capsule video of R.E.M. making their national TV debut on the Late Show with David Letterman in October 1983. On this appearance, they played two of their earliest hits – ‘Radio Free Europe’ (off of their first album Murmur) and ‘So. Central Rain’ (off of their second album Reckoning). The performance of ‘So. Central Rain’ was such an early cut of the song that they actually had not given it a name – it was the song’s national premier! What is even more unique is that they actually played two songs on the show. On most late shows (SNL being the exception), bands only play one song, a trend that generally conveys to this day.

First – look at how young they all look! From Letterman to the band itself. This was from a time when R.E.M. was literally just getting started and had just released the aforementioned album “Murmur”. Michael Stipe was so shy in those days that he did not even engage with Letterman when he greeted the band after playing ‘Radio Free Europe’. Second – look at the set of the Letterman show where they played! It looked like someone’s basement – which was probably in keeping with the venues they were playing in at the time!

I think everyone has ‘concert regrets’ – shows that you had the opportunity to go to but did not attend for any number of reasons – apathy, conflict, punishment, etc. For me, one of several concert regrets is not going to see R.E.M. at Drew University’s Baldwin Gym in 1985. Look at that set list. Amazing! I had just moved to a new town in New Jersey at the time and for whatever reason, I did not go to this show. They were gaining in popularity and on the verge of exploding, but were just not there yet. It was *the perfect time* to see them.

R.E.M. continues to be one of my all time favorite bands. Listening to R.E.M. today brings back a flood of smiles and memories that are attached to their songs. If you are a fan, Michael Stipe just sat down for an interview on the podcast Smartless.

A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter.

Dell Cameron, Dhruv Mehrotra from Wired

To me, this is hardly a stunning revelation. You always had to know this sort of thing was happening somewhere deep in the bowels of the US Government. The rub is that it was finally made public.

Stories like this validate to me that behind the walls of the old money Robber Barrons of years gone by are some astounding pieces of history that are waiting to be discovered and shared.

A guy named Alex Clausen – a map dealer – was parusing a virtual estate sale for Gordon and Ann Getty (as one does) where a unique map called a portolan chart caught his eye. What was unique to him was that the item description stated that the map was from 1500 – 1525, while the drawings and details on the map itself said to him that it was from an earlier time, which in turn would make the map that much more unique and valuable. And boy was he right.

The first known reference to the chart came from Italian scholar Pietro Amat di San Filippo, who saw the map in the library of a Corsini family palace in Florence in 1888 and included mention of it in an article he wrote for the Italian Geographic Society. The scholar tentatively dated it from 1347 to 1354. It changed hands several times before Ann and Gordon Getty purchased it in 1993.

The couple had the map restored and for years it hung in the library of their San Francisco townhouse. They paid roughly 56,500 British pounds for the map, then the equivalent of about $85,000. Nearly 30 years later, Clausen and the team from Barry Lawrence Ruderman purchased it for just over $239,000.

Los Angeles Times

After the purchase, Clausen and his team did more research and determined that the map dated to 1360 (!!), which turned that $239,000 purchase into an artifact worth a cool $7.5 Million.

Making the discovery “was really rewarding from an intellectual perspective,” Clausen said, surveying the chart, which measures roughly 2.2 feet by 3.7 feet and is framed in a heavy case at his office in La Jolla.

“And, of course, it’s also rewarding from a commercial perspective, because it takes something that I think was a reasonable buy from what it was listed as and moves it into an absolutely different category.”

Los Angeles Times

So if you have an extra $7.5 Mil hanging around, the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart of 1360 is here for the taking.

Wallpapers – English and European Soccer

Over the latter part of the summer, I cranked out updating approximately 900 Wallpapers across my posted collections on the site that represent all English Soccer League team kits – from the English Premier League through the National Leagues (National League, National League North and South), as well as leagues in Scotland, and Europe. There are still a few laggards however as of now, the stats reflect that I have updated all Home kit designs across all leagues, all except 3 Away kits across all leagues, and 65% of Third kits across all leagues (not all teams have third kits).

Wallpapers – Music

I’ve quietly added several to this collection – either on my own or via the occasional request. For this collection, I have been trying to track against the top 500 albums of all time, as ranked by Rolling Stone’s annual list. I’ve always been happy with the design of these wallpapers, in that you can prominantly see the name of the album and the artist, while at the same time you can see the song list and the album art on the two corners of the background while using your computer. Whatever you would be working on would be in the middle of your screen, yet you can see the songs and/or the album art in the right and left corners and immediately recognize what album it is.

My Media Diet

Building off of something that Jason Kottke does on a semi regular basis, I thought I’d share a few of the media items that I have been consuming recently.

Stop Making Sense (IMAX) – [Grade: A] David Byne dancing with a lamp and making it compelling. The classic concert movie was re-relased and remastered . It looked amazing on the IMAX screen.

Welcome To Wrexham – Season 2 (HULU, FX) – [Grade: A] – The well documented story of the ups and downs of how two Hollywood actors purchased a Wales soccer/football team is well into its second season. The show’s first season was excellent. The show’s second season is rivaling it, and the best is yet to come!

The Gold (Paramount+) – [Grade: A] You had me at British spy series based on the real Brinks-Mat robbery.

Star Wars: Rebels (Disney+) – [Grade: C-] I’ve been trying extremely hard to watch the full Star Wars saga in the proper order. After plowing through the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, I am struggling with Rebels. I’ve heard the last season makes it worth it but I’m skeptical. The only thing keeping me motivated is that Andor is next.

Slow Horses: Real Tigers (Book) – [Grade: B] After watching the first two seasons of the series on Apple TV+, I decided to read the books from author Mick Herron which correspond to the series (Slow Horses, Dead Lions) and then read the third book – Real Tigers – ahead of the 3rd season. Solid read yet the real revelation is that Gary Oldman’s depiction of Jackson Lamb is spot on.

Foundation (Apple TV+) – [Grade: C] I’ve been told the 2nd season is better and easier to follow but I have been struggling with the first season of this series.

Sex Education – Season 4 (Netflix) – [Grade: B] Really enjoyed the first two seasons of this series. The fourth season was solid however it started to get cluttered with so many storylines. Otis, Maeve and Ruby steal the season.

Beckham (Netflix) – [Grade: B+] I learned a few things about “Becks” and grew to appreciate him after watching this. He is surprisingly humble and grounded even though he was, and is, one of the iconic figures in soccer and style over the past 25 years. If you are in the middle of the Pop Culture – English Premier League fan venn diagram, this is for you.

Seinfeld (Netflix) – [Grade: B+] I rewatched all 9 seasons over the past several months – each episode is only 23-25 minutes. The jokes still hit. Some of the tropes felt a little dated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Americans (Hulu) – [Grade: A] Rewatching this as well. I loved this show when it was on TV and that point of view has not changed.

Back in 2005, David Foster Wallace (DFW) gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. As with many things that DFW did, it took on a life and legend of its own. Here is the speech set to a whiteboard session authored by Mark Wooding, who runs the After Skool YouTube channel and has done a similar exercise for other important audio.

The speech starts with a great parable and goes on from there. Worth the 23 minute listen.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

DFW

The amount of preparation and practice that Cruise and the film team did ahead of the final shots of some of his most iconic stunt scenes is pretty insane. For the big motorcycle jump scene in the most recent movie “Dead Reckoning”, they created a replica ramp in England where Cruise practiced repeatedly. In the “Fallout” movie, Cruise prepped by practicing 16 hours a day on how to fly a helicopter to nail the key scenes in the movies.

At night he performed at amateur shows and worked as a singing waiter. He had just begun to get paying work as a singer, using the stage name Joe Bari, when he was drafted.

He arrived in Europe toward the end of World War II, serving in Germany in the infantry. He spent time on the front lines, an experience he described as “a front-row seat in hell,” and was among the troops who arrived to liberate the prisoners at the Landsberg concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau.

After Germany surrendered, Mr. Bennett was part of the occupying forces, assigned to special services, where he ended up as a singer with Army bands and for a time was featured in a ragtag version of the musical “On the Town” — directed by Arthur Penn, who would go on to direct “Bonnie and Clyde” and other notable movies — in the opera house in Wiesbaden.

He returned to New York in August 1946 and set about beginning a career as a musician. On the G.I. Bill, he took classes at the American Theater Wing, which he later said helped teach him how to tell a story in song. He sang in nightclubs in Manhattan and Queens.

A series of breaks followed. He appeared on the radio show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the “American Idol” of its day. (The competition was won by Rosemary Clooney.) There are different versions of the biggest break in Mr. Bennett’s early career, but as he told it in “The Good Life,” he had been singing occasionally at a club in Greenwich Village where the owner had offered Pearl Bailey a gig as the headliner; she agreed, but only on the condition that Joe Bari stayed on the bill.

When Bob Hope came down to take in Ms. Bailey’s act, he liked Joe Bari so much that he asked him to open for him at the Paramount Theater. Hope had a condition, however: He didn’t like the name Joe Bari, and insisted it be changed. Dismissing the name Anthony Benedetto as too long to fit on a marquee, Hope christened the young singer Tony Bennett.

NY Times

Here are two snippets of an interview he did with Howard Stern back in 2011. The first one talks more about his time serving in World War II and how that experience impacted him. The second talked about his own trouble with drugs, how Frank Sinatra gave him a warning, and how he wished he did the same to Amy Winehouse.

Joey Chestnut once again won the annual 4th of July Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest, downing 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Over the years, the performance of the professional eaters participating in the annual Hot Dog eating event have shown a remarkable level of improvement (if you want to call it that), starting when Takeru Kobayashi burst on the scene in 2001.

On July 4, 2001, Takeru Kobayashi, a newcomer at the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, systematically swallowed 50 hot dogs and soggy buns in 12 minutes, doubling the contest’s previous record.

Six years later, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut dethroned Kobayashi at the Coney Island showdown and in 2021, he set an all-time record of 76 hot dogs and buns in just 10 minutes.

In the 20 years before Kobayashi’s debut, the average champion had to eat about 16 hot dogs and buns to win the contest’s “Mustard Belt” prize. Now, they have to eat more than that just to qualify — typically 20 dogs in 10 minutes — and at least triple that to have any hope of winning.

The Washington Post

The article goes on to talk about what is the ‘perfect body type’ for extreme competitive eating and how much more a body could take to surpass Chestnut’s record of 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes (spoiler: Chestnut thinks someone could push 90 hot dogs!).

I’ll stick to what I had yesterday at a neighbor’s 4th of July celebration: a hamburger and a chicken slider, a few beers, and some great desserts.

Rick Astley and the Blossoms covering ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths at Glastonbury Music Festival is just what we all need these days. They pretty much crush it. Apparently, he and the Blossoms did a full set of 16 songs from “The Smiths” and I am here for all of them.

Related: See Rick Astley covering the Foo Fighters “Everlong” during the pandemic

To start, you turn on the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, turn the volume down, and wait for the the MGM lion to roar (some say you wait for the third roar). At that point, you fire up Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album and keep the audio on. From there, you sit back and watch as the music from that album plays in snyc with the scenes from “Oz”. It is uncanny. Like many things that combine marijuana, Pink Floyd and some unrelated movie or album, it started as an urban legend back in the 1990s – watch “Oz” while listening to “Dark Side of the Moon” and smokin’ a doobie – but really seemed to take hold in the late 1990s when an article authored by a then 19 year old Charlie Savage started to make the rounds on this new thing called ‘The Internet’.

Like other band members have done consistently over the years, Waters denied that Pink Floyd intentionally structured its 1973 album to align with the 1939 film. (As Alan Parsons, the recording engineer who helped create “The Dark Side of the Moon,” pointed out in a 2020 interview, “We didn’t have VCRs back then.”) Waters described it as more of a “cosmic coincidence.” Then he launched into a story he had heard about a cop in Louisiana who, out on patrol one night, pulled over a tour bus for weaving. Penetrating its smoky interior, he discovered none other than Willie Nelson in the back, listening to “Dark Side” while watching “Oz.”

“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Waters said, “but I like the story.”

“Yeah, I don’t even want to investigate that — I want it to be true,” Rogan replied. (Journalistic principle compelled me to email Nelson’s publicist, who wrote back four minutes later to say, “It doesn’t sound true.”)

Rogan went on: “I’ve watched ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ listening to ‘The Dark Side of the Moon,’ while high on marijuana. And if it’s not on purpose, it is a cosmic coincidence because it’s kind of amazing. It’s kind of amazing how it just flows.”

I happened to stumble across a reference to this exchange online, but there was little chance it would escape my attention for long. That’s because I have a strange connection to the phenomenon: Nearly three decades ago, I wrote the first article about it when I was a summer intern at The Journal Gazette in my hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind. In recent months, as various music magazines and websites have been putting together packages about “The Dark Side of the Moon” in honor of its 50th anniversary, I have received a surge in interview requests about this article I wrote when I was 19, which has become an absurd footnote to my career as a national-security and legal journalist.

The link has been a recurring intrusion into my thoughts for years. Alerts I set up to deliver email to my inbox when someone writes about one of my New York Times articles also bring word of new references to that old Journal Gazette piece. And if those fail, friends and family text or email me whenever they see it mentioned in the wild. Every year or so, another co-worker stopping by my desk or a government source I’m meeting for a drink brings it up with a chuckle. At some point, somebody stuck the fact into a brief Wikipedia entry about me, and since then whenever I give a talk about something like surveillance or drone strikes or presidential power, people introducing me have often mentioned it — much to the audience’s amusement.

I didn’t come up with the idea of pairing these two works. I’m not the inventor of “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.” But in a strange sort of accident, I played a key early role in its becoming a cultural phenomenon. Before my article, “The Dark Side of the Rainbow” was just a word-of-mouth thing on an early internet message board. Hardly anyone knew about it, and those who did had no idea who came up with the idea or where it started.

Charlie Savage, The NY Times

There are many urban legends like this out there related to Pink Floyd, The Beatles and other bands. While none of these ‘collaborations’ appear to be intentional, it is yet another example of how creative people can get when they have some time, some music, some movies and a doobie.

We lost rock legend David Bowie way too soon, however there is not a shortage of footage of the rock icon to remind us how supremely cool and influential he was. At the Wende Museum in Culver City, CA is a very intimate collection of photos of Bowie as he traveled by train, boat and automobile from Japan to Europe because he was not comfortable flying:

In 1973, after performing in Japan as part of his Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, Bowie headed home to Europe through the Soviet Union. He was fearful of flying and journeyed by boat, car and train with a close childhood friend, Geoff MacCormack, a percussionist and backup vocalist on the concert tour. The trip included a week on the Trans-Siberian Express from the city of Khabarovskto Moscow, where they stayed for two days.

Before they embarked on their trip, Bowie bought a 16mm movie camera in Japan and MacCormack, who later made a living as a songwriter and producer in advertising for 20 years, bought a Nikkormat camera. They documented their journey on and off the train, capturing the landscapes whizzing by, their fellow travelers and each other, both posing for the camera and in candid moments. Footage from Bowie’s “The Long Way Home” film is also on view at the Wende.

“This exhibition is basically holiday snapshots,” says Olya Sova, who guest-curated the Wende exhibition. “Not David Bowie in the studio, no makeup or posing with lights. It’s just two friends traveling together and having fun and exploring places that are really different from their reality.”

Deborah Vankin, The Los Angeles Times

I really love when candid, intimate photos of famous people surface in today’s world – photos from before they became really famous – and these few shots fit that bill. I would love to get out to LA to see the full collection before the exhibit closes!

h/t: Laura Olin

Diamond, the Sinclair subsidiary that operates under the name Bally Sports, skipped its payment to the Padres a couple of weeks ago and had until the end of its grace period on Tuesday to make the team whole and maintain their long-term agreement. Choosing not to meant Tuesday’s game against the Miami Marlins was the last Padres game under the Bally Sports umbrella. Moving forward — starting Wednesday, continuing through the end of the season and resuming in perpetuity — MLB will air Padres games through its streaming service and on different cable channels.

MLB will provide Padres games through its MLB.TV app for free through Sunday. After that, in-market fans can continue to stream games for $19.99 a month or $74.99 for the rest of the regular season on MLB.com and Padres.com (postseason games air on national platforms). Through this process, Padres games will no longer be subject to blackouts. Local fans can also watch Padres games through a variety of cable providers — AT&T U-Verse, DirecTV, Cox and Spectrum — on a different channel. fuboTV will also continue to air Padres games through its platform.

In a release issued late Tuesday night, MLB stated that the new approach would increase the Padres’ reach from 1.13 million to about 3.2 million homes within the team’s TV territory.

Alden Gonzalez, ESPN

What we are seeing here is the the first crack in the local/regional sports broadcasting ecosystem as a result of the rampant “cord cutting” that is happening around the country and the world. The significance of this can not be understated. We may very well see a few more teams/regional networks suffer the same fate and that will mean that the league(s) will start to take over “local” broadcasting services. The economic implications on the league will be very interesting to watch as the sky high valuations of many MLB teams have historically been tied to the value of the regional sports networks that the individual franchises have huge stakes in. If those broadcast rights shift to the leagues, how does that impact the individual teams, especially if the streaming subscription dollars do not add up to the ‘per household’ fees traditionally paid through cable packages?

Another interesting element this highlights and also brings into focus is one that has been around forever – the fact that not all fans of said teams are located in that region of the country. I am a displaced New Englander who lives in the NYC metro area. For as long as I have lived here, the only way I have been able to watch the Red Sox on broadcast or cable TV has been if the Red Sox were playing the Yankees or Mets (or the Braves on TBS), or if they were being broadcast nationally (regular season and/or playoffs).

If I wanted to be able to see all the games of my favorite teams – basically to mimic what I would be able to watch if I was living in New England – I’d have to subscribe to ‘league pass’ services from the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and drop an additional $750/year. And that’s not even counting if I’m a soccer fan where an MLS subscription would be another $100 via the new Apple TV+ deal or that the English Premier League has many games broadcast on NBC’s Peacock premium streaming service.

If I wanted to be able to see all the games of my favorite teams – basically to mimic what I would be able to watch if I was living in New England – I’d have to subscribe to ‘league pass’ services from the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and drop an additional $750/year. And that’s not even counting if I’m a soccer fan where an MLS subscription would be another $100 via the new Apple TV+ deal or that the English Premier League has many games broadcast on NBC’s Peacock premium streaming service. Or, I could just move back to the New England region.

• RT @NUFC: ONE STEP CLOSER.

  HOWAY THE LADS! ???? https://t.co/SzXpTxkn81 2023-05-19

• RIP to a Syracuse legend. https://t.co/pU30vYqSQk 2023-05-19
• Syracuse legend #44

  https://t.co/clDgLU27vB 2023-05-19

• RT @Coach_McNamara: Congratulations @carmeloanthony! National Champion @Cuse_MBB, All-Time @NBA GREAT and a LEGEND in this game! No one deserv… 2023-05-22
• RT @ProjectLincoln: https://t.co/K0IuxnEmWG 2023-05-24
• To me, it sounds like he said Rondi Santis and I can’t stop hearing it. https://t.co/GEt0EMi2WU 2023-05-24
• RT @therecount: Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) calls out Republicans who “clowned” him for “not having best credit … and being denied an apartme… 2023-05-25

Several years ago, when out in Los Angeles, we took a ride over to see the original Brady Bunch house. From the outside, it ‘felt’ surprisingly small and if you did not know the significance of the structure, you would probably miss it in it’s non-descript neighborhood nestled nearby one of the many freeways out in LA. Back in 2019, the fine folks at HGTV purchased the house and renovated it to all its Brady glory, down to the olive green fridge and the orange Formica in the kitchen. And today, you can purchase the house for a cool $5.5 Mil.

The five-bed, five-bath spread still largely resembles the home fans remember. For instance, the living room is a near replica of the original set. HGTV faithfully recreated the famous floating staircase and green floral sofa. Plus, they even 3-D printed a horse statue that viewers saw positioned atop a credenza.

Yahoo News

The actual real estate listing for the house is here.

On an average day, with an average golfer, the odds of hitting a hole in one is about 12,500 to 1. For professional golfers, the odds of a hole in one fall significantly to 3,000 to 1. Most hole in one shots are similar – the ball, which is 1.68″ in diameter, lands on the green, rolls towards the cup, which is 4.5″ in diameter, and then falls in, which is then followed by vigorous celebration and high fives all around. So then, what do we think the odds are of a golfer of any skill level making a hole in one on the fly? Meaning, that 1.68″ diameter ball doesn’t touch the green and literally lands right in the 4.5″ diameter hole. The odds have to be astronomical. And that is exactly what happened at this weekend’s PGA Championship when Michael Block, a golf course pro from California (not even a PGA Touring pro!!), aced the 15th hole at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, NY. Take a look at the video. It is a stunning shot. It even took Mr. Block several minutes for it to register that he aced it.

Continuing with my high level of interest (obsession?) with the wreck of the Titanic (for whatever reason, I just can’t take in enough detail about the topic), some very high detail digital scans of the wreck site were released yesterday, showing it in amazing detail. It is so detailed in fact that you can see the serial number on one of the ship’s propeller blades. From the article:

The Titanic has been extensively explored since the wreck was discovered in 1985. But it’s so huge that in the gloom of the deep, cameras can only ever show us tantalizing snapshots of the decaying ship – never the whole thing.

The new scan captures the wreck in its entirety, revealing a complete view of the Titanic. It lies in two parts, with the bow and the stern separated by about 800m (2,600ft). A huge debris field surrounds the broken vessel.

The scan was carried out in summer 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project.

Submersibles, remotely controlled by a team on board a specialist ship, spent more than 200 hours surveying the length and breadth of the wreck.

They took more than 700,000 images from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction.

Rebecca Morelle from the BBC

The 2022-23 season in the English National League (England’s 5th tier football league) has been defined by the phenomenal race at the top of the table between Wrexham AFC and Notts County. As good as Wrexham was this season, Notts County was equal to the task, keeping everyone in suspence all the way to the critical match at the Racecourse on April 10. It was a battle for the ages with (essentially) automatic promotion to League 2 (England’s Fourth Tier) to the winner, while the 2nd place team likely had to reckon with the playoff round for the final promotion spot. And as we all know, just about anything can happen in a playoff round, as Wrexham found out last year.

Yesterday, Notts County took on Boreham Wood with the winner going to Wembley for the National League Playoff final. Boreham Wood has the best defense in the National League. Notts County accumulated a record 107 points this season, a clear 25 points better than Boreham and only bested by Wrexham’s 111. All those facts didn’t matter yesterday, as Boreham took a 2-0 lead in the first half. And from there, Notts County staged a comeback for the ages – scoring the tying goal in the 97th minute of regulation – literally the last minute of the game (And you must remember, the April 10 game against Wrexham was decided in the last minute as well) – and then scored the winning goal 30 minutes into extra time. Just watch the highlight reel above. It is an amazing summary of the game – especially because each team had ample opportunities to score throughout the entire game.

The quality of football in the English Premier League is world class – there is no argument there. However, the energy, passion and enthusiasm that we have witnessed through this year’s National League season has been every bit as spectacular.

A fake, AI generated trailer in a world where Wes Anderson took on ‘Star Wars’. Just fantastic. I have nothing more to add.

Wow

Owen Wilson as Darth Vader

The movie drops in November. I am sure there will be a few other trailers that will drop between now and then. I really enjoyed the first movie – I honestly think that as time continues to hurtle forward, it will be looked back on in the same light as the original Star Wars. Villeneuve did an amazing job of creating a world in the first movies and clearly defining the key players. I am confident that Part 2 will continue the build on the strength of the first movie.

What is most appealing to me about this whole story is how ‘all in’ both Reynolds and McElhenney are with their responsibility to the club and the city of Wrexham. There was a lot of conjecture early on that they both were doing this as a publicity stunt, but it is obvious from the documentary, from the way they have engaged with the Wrexham community, and from the level of investment that both have made to the club and the north Wales region, that they are fully 1000% committed for the long haul. Hell, Reynolds just bought a home outside of Wrexham. League 2 is just the first step in their quest. They have their sights set on the English Premier League. And the scary thing is – they may just get there. Earlier this year, Wrexham participated in the FA Cup – an elimination tournament that all English teams from the EPL to the National League participate – and went to the round of 16 by beating 3nd Division Coventry City at their home field, and then came thisclose to beating 2nd division Sheffield United. (Had they won that Sheffield United match, they would have hosted Harry Kane and Totteham Hotspur on Wrexham’s home field, The Racecourse Ground, which would have be an off the charts event). This team is legit and can hang with many of the top teams in English soccer.

I sincerely hope that Wrexham succeeds in their goal to achive automatic promotion to League 2. And I sincerely hope that Notts County wins the playoff to secure their promtion to League 2 as well, because they are just as deserving. I am, and will always be, a Newcastle United fan first – who themselves are having a spectacular season in the EPL – however I am unapologetic about joining the many newly minted Wrexham fans out there and look forward to riding this as long as they will let me.

Also, in honor of both teams, here are their Desktop Wallpapers that I created reflecting the kits they wore for yesterday’s match: Wrexham (Red) and Notts County (White)

File this under information and analysis you didn’t know you needed, via Yahoo and The Independent:

Crystal Owens, a PhD candidate in MIT’s mechanical engineering department, spoke about her and her team’s study, in which they examine the fan-favourite snack, during a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. In their work, which was published in the Physics of Fluids journal last year, these scientists studied the equal distribution of an Oreo’s creme, in which it ends up on both side of the wafer when the cookie is broken apart.

Speaking to WSJ, Owens went on to explain her team’s method: putting the cookie between two counter-rotating plates, through a device called a rheometer. She said also said that when they glued different Oreo flavours to the rheometer, it would twist the cookie open at different speeds.

However, after placing over 1,000 Oreos on to that device, these MIT scientists still found that nearly 80 per cent of the creme stuck to only one side of the wafer. Owens went on to note that regardless of how fast or slow the rheometers opened the Oreo, the results didn’t change.

“We also tested the cookies by hand—twisting, peeling, pressing, sliding and doing other basic motions to get an Oreo apart,” she said. “There was no combination of anything that we could do by hand or in the rheometer that changed anything in our result.”

The Independent

And at the very bottom of the cited article is a great YouTube video demonstrating an amazing Oreo hack. Take some milk from a straw and ‘blow’ it into the creme filling of your Oreo and doing that creates a ‘creme infused filling’ in your cookie! Wow!! Must try this next time!!

h/t: Dave Pell and Next Draft

Dick Fosbury, the man who literally transformed the sport of high jumping with his unique ‘flop’ method, died today. The above video details how the method of high jumping that he introduced in the 1968 Mexico Olympics transformed the sport and quickly became the ‘de facto’ method and style of high jumping to this day.

The technique has been compared to a corpse being pushed out of a window. Like Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Fosbury’s flopping struck many onlookers as residing somewhere between a physical feat and a joke. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd oohed, aahed and laughed watching Fosbury compete.

But the last laugh was his: The high-jump bar kept being raised, and Fosbury kept clearing it. He finally executed a Fosbury Flop at 7 feet 4¼ inches — earning him not just the gold medal, but an Olympic record at the time.

NY Times

What is most interesting is that Fosbury was an engineering student and took a mathematical, problem solving approach to his sport, with the end result being his innovative flop method. What is most bizarre in this video – primarily because the “Fosbury Flop” is so common today – is the footage of how high jumpers used to do high jumping. They would go feet first – which makes zero sense when looking at that method in the year 2023.

One of the main reasons for concern is that now Nike is manufacturer of the AFC Richmond kits/uniforms (vs. the previously fictional company Verani Sports). And with this change also comes new home and away kit designs for AFC Richmond, which I have in turn created as desktop wallpapers. You can find them below and in the Random > TV Tab gallery here on my site. Believe!!

Update: You can see previous Ted Lasso wallpapers here or in the TV tab on the Miscellaneous page.

I am just a sucker for these types of stories – where footage of a seminal event is unearthed. As long as I can remember, the story of the Titanic checked all the boxes for me, way before James Cameron’s movie of the same name was released. So when the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute this week released previously unseen footage from their very first exploration of the wreckage site in 1986, I was all in. Yes, I sat and watched the whole video. Imagine being the scientists in 1986 and being the first humans to see the wreckage since it hit the ocean floor on that fateful night in 1912?

In a milestone that will definitely make you feel old, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Titanic’s (the movie) theatrical release and to celebrate, the studios re-released it in select theaters! So last weekend, I went to see it with my son – primarily because he had never seen the movie before! The movie has been made fun of, has been meme-ed to death, and has received its fair share of criticism, yet watching it again on the big screen was spectacular (!!!), I have to say. I picked up things I had not remembered or noticed the first few times I’d seen it. Seeing Leo and Kate 25 years younger was pretty awesome. And the scenes at the end when (spoiler alert) the ship is sinking and the stern of the vessel starts to raise out of the water were just stunning on the big screen! You can try all you want, but you won’t get that same experience watching it on your TV in a living room. Yes, the movie could have been shorter. Yeah, the water that breached the ship was ice cold in real life, yet the actors in the on-ship scenes made it feel like they were wading in the town pool on a 75 degree day. Yeah, Jack could have fit on the piece of wood with Rose. For all it’s flaws, seeing Titanic in the theater was an outstanding experience and I would recommend you take advantage of this opportunity to see it on the big screen!

“I collect paintings of murderesses. This is one of the Manson Girls – Susan Atkins – who is a Jesus freak now”

“I collect fake meat. I have fake meat all over the house. It makes people very nervous when they are walking around. Also candy. Everything is fake in the house. I like the idea of fake food everywhere.”

“Here is an electric chair. It is not real, but it is an exact replica of one that was used in “Female Trouble”. It makes the telephone repairman very nervous when the come in the house and all workmen do their job very well because I just spy it out of the corner of my eye when explaining what needs to be done.”

John Waters

With all the distinctive homes and designs of his that did get made, there were even more that never got made. So architect David Romero decided to do something about that by using computer generated models to create visuals of some of distinctive designs of his that never became reality. Many of the renderings can be found at his site Hooked On The Past and his Flickr gallery. My personal favorite is the rendering of the National Life Insurance Building in Chicago, which is the last of the examples below.

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

Joan Didion, 1961

It is a short essay that packs a punch. Worth the read.

Last month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, held several meetings with company executives. The topic: a rival’s new chatbot, a clever A.I. product that looked as if it could be the first notable threat in decades to Google’s $149 billion search business.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who had not spent much time at Google since they left their daily roles with the company in 2019, reviewed Google’s artificial intelligence product strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings who were not allowed to discuss them. They approved plans and pitched ideas to put more chatbot features into Google’s search engine. And they offered advice to company leaders, who have put A.I. front and center in their plans.

The re-engagement of Google’s founders, at the invitation of the company’s current chief executive, Sundar Pichai, emphasized the urgency felt among many Google executives about artificial intelligence and that chatbot, ChatGPT.

NY Times

It is not just Google who are realizing how transformative and ‘cage rattling’ tools like Chat GPT. Universities and colleges all around the world are freaking out about how Chat GPT can spit out a well written dissertation about just about anything, raising alarm bells of how students could rely on such technology to help them get their homework done.

Even beyond text, AI is creating art, visuals and virtual worlds that just don’t exist. Check out this Instagram called The Visual Dome. None of it is real.

The irony is that people have been interacting with AI technology for years – think about how you have interacted with most big banks or other companies when you call their Customer Service systems. They have been using AI generated capabilities to handle a wide range of inquiries from people before ever reaching a human representative.

I’ve seen several articles cite technology and business leaders cite the time they first saw and interacted with distinctive and game changing technologies that have fundamentally altered the world – Netscape Navigator, and the iPhone being two of them – and they have all said that Chat GPT is another one of those game changers. The future is the present, folks.

In an all digital world, vinyl records continue to make quite the comeback since the trend started to take hold in 2006. As a percentage of albums purchased, vinyl records share of sales continues to grow. Yet when you put it in the broader context of all digital consumption and downloads of single tracks, vinyl represents less than 5% of all sales. From Statista:

So how big is vinyl’s comeback really? Should we all dust off our old record players to prepare for the analog future of music? According to Luminate’s 2022 Year-End Music Report, LPs accounted for 43 percent of album sales in the United States last year, which is quite substantial. Factoring in streaming and downloads of single tracks, however, that number drops to less than 5 percent of album equivalent music consumption, which puts things in perspective.

Statista

Sometimes you come across an article or story that just generates a visceral reaction. And this seemingly innocuous article on Vox titled ‘Job interviews are a nightmare — and only getting worse’ was one of those articles. I have some thoughts and opinions.

The article is talking about the sheer absurdity that job interviewing has turned into. And honestly, this is not a trend or a situation that has just materialized recently – it has been a slow burn that has gotten impossibly worse over the past 10-20 years.

Job-seeking can be a real exercise in immersive futility. It often feels like you’re tossing your resume into the abyss and praying to the recruitment gods for a response. If and when you get that response, the landscape doesn’t always get easier. Companies are seemingly coming up with new, higher, and harder hoops to jump through at every turn. That translates to endless rounds of interviews, various arbitrary tests, and complex exercises and presentations that entail hours of work and prep. There can be good reasons for firms to do this — they really want to make sure they get the right person, and they’re trying to reduce biases — but it’s hard not to feel like it can just be too much.

Emily Stewart, Vox Media

As illustrated in the article, the pervading trend from companies big and small includes meeting 10-20 people over the course of several weeks, having marathon all day interview sessions where you sit in a room and deal with a cattle call of different ‘team members’ and ‘stakeholders’ from across the organization you’re interviewing with. And logic just tells you that there has to be an inverse relationship with the liklihood of being hired relative to the amount of people you meet during the process. In every organization, each individual has their own agenda and priorities that is in part dictated by the role they hold. So when those people are meeting candidates – for their direct team or for teams adjacent to their own – those folks evaluate the candidate relative to what their goals and priorities are. So it makes logical sense that with so many competing agendas, with so many individual personalities, the chances that a candidate satisfies every single one of those people gets lower and lower with each interview. And add on top of this, the absurdity of some of the questions, requests and ‘assignments’ that some comapnies ask candidates to partake in, and you are left with an impossible labyrinth to navigate. From the article:

Reporting for this story, I heard anecdotes about hiring processes that ranged from irksome to hellish. One recent graduate described having to take a series of intelligence tests, go through two interviews, and provide five references — all of whom were asked to complete a 15-minute questionnaire — for an entry-level position at a nonprofit he was told he didn’t get two months later. One woman’s job offer was contingent on her getting a reference from her current manager, who wasn’t aware she was on the hunt for a job.

Another man was told to start looking for apartments across the country after being flown out for a final interview, only to follow up a couple of weeks later and learn that the recruiter simply forget to tell him he hadn’t gotten the job. “My interviewing experiences have been worse than dating, with the ghosting and non-responses,” he said.

Among friends and colleagues, swapping interview horror stories can turn into a sort of sport. One of my former coworkers was asked to build out an entire content strategy for a popular financial newsletter and work with the team in the office. She was unemployed and scared, so she felt like she had no choice but to sign a waiver agreeing for her work to be used for free — work that was apparently good enough to be sent out to their readers but not to land her a position with the company. Looking at the company’s Glassdoor reviews, it’s obvious she’s not the only one who’s been subject to this sort of treatment.

“There’s a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate,” said Sondra Levitt, a leadership and career coach with Korn Ferry, an organizational consulting firm. For example, it might make perfect sense for a company to ask a candidate, especially at the executive level, to do some sort of presentation about their vision and what they want to accomplish. Where it gets hairy is when the company asks a candidate to create, produce, and submit a full-blown marketing campaign, which happened to one of Levitt’s clients recently. “The candidate felt like they were just trying to get free information and free work through the interview process,” Levitt said.

Emily Stewart, Vox Media

I’ve been out of work a couple of times in my career and reading this article just made me shudder as I recalled similar nightmares – from being ghosted after several interviews, to organizations failing to inform you they have gone in a different direction, to being asked to pull together strategies and presentations to illustrate how you would tackle a problem. Probably the most frustrating aspect of the way interviewing is handled today is the fact that the organizations will just not tell you why you didn’t get the role – mostly because they are afraid of violating laws (which, to be fair, does have some merit). They deliver some generic bs line or a 3 line auto generated email from Workday saying ‘Thanks for visiting but you didn’t get the job’ that leave you questioning your sanity when you know you were qualified or even over-qualified for the role. You almost have to be a unicorn to survive the process and actually get hired. Many times, after the fact, I would call the recruiter and/or the hiring manager and ask them directly why I didn’t win the job or ask them to explain to me where my experience fell short or which of my responses to interview questions didn’t hit the mark, all in an effort to self-improve and get better at how I approached the interview process. It was rare when I got an honest answer.

As a company, you clearly want to ensure that you make the right hiring decisions and develop a strong and positive working environment. What is clear from reading the article, and from personal experience, is that companies have taken this to an extreme that results in everyone losing. We’re all adults here – we all have our own jobs and lives. I’d much rather be told early on that it is not a fit, so we can all move on. Dragging the process out by having useless additional meetings, or ghosting candidates with no explaination or update is just unprofessional and in poor form.

The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms. 

If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what? 

What happens to all the content you have created? Where will the archive of all your funny memes and jokes be? What is going to happen to all those selfies you felt cute in but didn’t delete later? 

The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it. 

Owning your content and controlling your platform is essential, and having a personal blog is a great way to do that. 

The Verge

The Verge article hit home for me because in the early 2000’s, I felt such a sense of engagement and discovery as the web was maturing, as “new” technologies and capabilities such as CSS, and RSS were enabling such neat things to develop online, and new communities like Flickr (remember them! Wow, did they miss the mobile boat!) were transforming how we interacted online.

For me and this site, it has actually been going since 2003 although it has never had a huge following, probably in part because I need to do a better job of being consistent in the frequency and volume of my posts. I aspire to compete with Jason Kottke, Andy Baio, John Gruber and others, to name a few. And I know I have a long way to go to get there. I’m going to try to find quirky stories, unique items, and do my best to share my ‘mildly opinionated’ thoughts on some of the things that are shaping our society these days. And we’ll see where it takes us.

What I have thoroughly enjoyed these past few years has been how a small community of fans and enthusiasts has developed as a result of all the Desktop Wallpapers that I have created and shared on this site over the years. I started that journey 6 or 7 years ago when I became frustrated with all the terrible looking wallpapers that were out there for the sports teams that I follow. In addition, I fell in love with all the wonderfully quirky and simple wallpapers on the site Simple Desktops and thought, I could take that aesthetic and apply it to my favorite sports teams. I then noticed that the teams in the English Premier League had really interesting uniforms/kits and thought it would be cool to mimic them but on computer wallpapers. And from there, it exploded. So if you are new to my site and community, check out some of the galleries of wallpapers that I have created and download whichever ones you find compelling.

And with that, I’m calling it a night and going to watch some TV and/or movies.

If you thought the politics of a disgruntled suburban soccer mom’s vitriol against the town’s soccer coach was bad, you clearly did not play soccer in suburban NJ, because those moms will take on the US Men’s National team coach (paywall) without blinking an eye, as Danielle Reyna did to Craig Berhalter:

To set the record straight, I [Danielle Reyna] did call (U.S. Soccer sporting director) Earnie Stewart on December 11, just after the news broke that Gregg had made negative statements about my son Gio at a leadership conference, I have known Earnie for years and consider him to be a close friend. I wanted to let him know that I was absolutely outraged and devasted that Gio had been put in such a terrible position, and that I felt very personally betrayed by the actions of someone my family had considered a friend for decades. As part of that conversation, I told Earnie that I thought it was especially unfair that Gio, who had apologized for acting immaturely about his playing time, was still being dragged through the mud when Gregg had asked for and received forgiveness for doing something so much worse at the same age. Without going into detail, the statements from yesterday significantly minimize the abuse on the night in question. Rosalind Berhalter was my roommate, teammate and best friend, and I supported her through the trauma that followed. It took a long time for me to forgive and accept Gregg afterward, but I worked hard to give him grace, and ultimately made both of them and their kids a huge part of my family’s life. I would have wanted and expected him to give the same grace to Gio. This is why the current situation is so very hurtful and hard. At the time I called Earnie, many people were trashing Gio on social media due to Gregg’s comments, and I didn’t know when or if this would stop. I just wanted Earnie to help make sure that there would be no further unwarranted attacks on my son. I thought our conversation would remain in confidence, and it didn’t occur to me at the time that anything I said could lead to an investigation. I’m not criticizing Earnie here. “I very much commend the recent efforts by U.S. Soccer to address abuse of women players, and I understand now he had an obligation to investigate what I shared. But I want to be very clear that I did not ask for Gregg to be fired, I did not make any threats, and I don’t know anything about any blackmail attempts, nor have I ever had any discussions about anyone else on Gregg’s staff — I don’t know any of the other coaches. I did not communicate with anyone in U.S. Soccer about this matter before December 11, and no one else in my family has made any statements to U.S. Soccer regarding Gregg’s past at all.  I’m sorry that this information became public, and I regret that I played a role in something that could reopen wounds from the past.

The Athletic (paywall)

Now, the USMNT did not have any chance of seriously competing for this year’s World Cup in Qatar. It was a ‘we’re happy to be here’ appearance and anything beyond making the knockout stage was playing with house money (being that the USMNT didn’t even qualify in 2018). Would playing Gio Reyna have changed the USMNT’s outcome? I’m guessing probably not. The Netherlands team the US lost to was an exceptionally well coached team that was playing chess compared to Berhalter’s checkers strategy. Playing Gio may have made the matches in the knockout stage a little easier however I’m not convinced he would have been a difference maker vs the Netherlands, much less the next round opponent Argentina should we have advanced.

The way Berhalter handled the Gio Reyna situation was a failure of leadership to not clearly and truthfully communicate the reasons for his decisions to the player, the press and by proxy, the fans of the USMNT team. I can also relate to Mrs. Reyna’s perception on how Coach Berhalter’s negative statements about Gio in the conference she noted above were unfair, damaging, and, frankly, an immature way of handling the situation. Reading between the lines, it seems that the long and deep relationship that the Reyna and Berhalter families had probably gave Gio and his parents the perception that he was going to get ample playing time in the World Cup and when things didn’t go exactly to Gio’s liking, there was likely a sense of disappointment that clearly went south quickly. The way Gio reacted was immature, yet even though he has been playing soccer at some of the highest levels in the world, let’s remember that he’s still all of 20 years old. Suburban soccer mom’s can be a nasty bunch sometimes, and even when you’re the Head Coach of the freaking US Men’s National Team, you can be taken to the woodshed by a mom who’s pissed her son did not play as much as they would have liked.

Photos from a recent trip to the old Bell Labs building – now called Bell Works – here in New Jersey. This building was originally build for Bell Labs, the innovative division of what is now AT&T. It was a research and development office that created such (ahem) minor innovations as the transistor, the laser, the concept of cellular communications, and the solar cell . The building and campus was put on the list of 10 most endangered historic sites in 2007 and was under threat of being razed in favor of houses and residential units. In 2013, the 500+ acre campus was purchased by Somerset Development Corporation and the facility was re-purposed into a multi-purpose living and working space.

The renovated interior space is just spectacular. It has restaurants, office space, recreational areas including simulated Golf courses and an indoor full size basketball court. It is really cool and a place I plan on going back to soon.

And for you Severance fans, yes, this is the same place that they used for some exterior and interior shots of Lumen Industries.

On the eve of the 2022 World Cup, thought I would share an amazing gallery the BBC published detailing photos from World Cup finals of the past, dating all the way back to the first World Cup final that took place in 1930 in Uruguay.

Over the past 92 years photographers have been in attendance at 21 finals to record what they witness – the colour, the excitement, the goals and the glamour. BBC Sport has partnered with Getty Images to bring you the best photos.

The 1930 showdown was between the hosts and Argentina in a rematch of the gold-medal game at the 1928 Olympics, which was won by Uruguay.

Thirteen teams took part in the inaugural tournament. Four arrived from Europe on the same boat, training on the top deck as they travelled.

BBC

Yesterday, I was working from home and my wife texted me that a fairly large package had been delivered (I was on a Zoom call). I pondered this for a second and wondered if I was expecting anything of any significance and thought nothing much of it at the time. Later, when I was free, she brought the box down to the basement where my office/den/”man-cave” is. And again, I was still befuddled as to what this could be.

Now, as visitors to this site may know, I have a hobby of creating device/computer Desktop Wallpapers – something that started several years ago when I thought it would be cool to design backgrounds for English Premier League teams that matched their kit/jersey designs. Since then, I regularly get ‘special requests’ from people all across the internet that I do my best to fulfill. And on each of the Wallpaper pages on my site, I include some links to give people the opportunity to donate to me as a recognition of the time and effort it takes to make these items. One of the links I include is to my Amazon Wish List. And on my Wishlist, one of the items that I had innocently added was the Webaround Big Shot, a large green screen background that you can attach to the back of your desk chair in order to have a cleaner display of the background when on a Zoom call. So instead of having my basement showing behind me when on said Zoom call, I could have something like Coruscant (Star Wars) or hipster lofts or the skyline of NYC.

Of all the items on my Wishlist, this was the item that some anonymous person took the time, money and effort to order for me as a gift. I am assuming it is a gift from one of the many ‘regulars’ that solicit Wallpapers from me however I am not at all sure to be honest, as Amazon does not reveal who purchases things from your Wishlist. What I do know is that this person could easily have chosen from a long list of other items on my Wishlist that were far cheaper than what this item cost. I’m somewhat fascinated and intrigued as to why they chose this item compared to the others on my list. No matter, the generosity is noted!

So, whoever the individual is out there on the Internet who purchased this wonderful Webaround Big Shot green screen background that mounts on the back of my desk chair – I would like to send to you a hearty THANK YOU and a note that your gift is recognized and appreciated!!

Oriel Malik remastered a few scenes from the Wizard of Oz in 4K quality video and it is like watching the movie for the first time. The detail that you can see on the Scarecrow’s face is something I never noticed. And the artwork on the backdrops of the scene is also so vivid. Below is the scene of them meeting the Tin Man and the quality and detail is just as impressive – the scenery pops and it is transformative. There has long been a rumor that you can see one of the Munchkin actors hanging from a tree in the “Tinman” scene, however that rumor has long been debunked as instead being a bird from the LA Zoo being used as a prop.

That big off-white thing sticking out of that bedrock is a tusk from a Wooly Mammoth. Yeah, those Wooly Mammoths from pre-historic days. A group of students from the University of Virginia were on a research trip to Alaska and they saw this while traveling down the Koyukuk River:

“We’re on this trip to basically to study the arctic, the idea of the arctic as a sanctuary,” said Epstein. “We did a river float trip, as part of what we’re doing and the mammoth tusk was pointed out to us. It’s amazing! During the time of the last glaciation and timing of the Bering Land Bridge, or what we call the mammoth steppe, that area was populated by lots of grazing animals, the mammoth being one of them. It’s not surprising that you’ll see this, but it’s also amazing to see in person.”

The metaphor that can be taken from this photo is not lost on me. This is especially true with water levels across several major rivers and lakes in North America at historic lows, exposing some amazing and sometimes grizzly finds – including two long dead bodies in Nevada’s Lake Mead.

Before the Smashing Pumpkins were, well, The Smashing Pumpkins, they were a band out of Chicago trying to find their sound and looking to catch a break. This video (about 60 minutes in length) is from 1988 and was apparently filmed for a local Chicago cable access show (aka shows filmed out of people’s basements and broadcast on local cable before YouTube. Kids, ask your parents about it or go watch Wayne’s World) Pulse Basement Live. The sound of their music in this video is noticeably different than the sound that they developed in the later 1990s on albums like Siamese Dream, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and Adore. I can hear and feel the influence of 1980s bands like The Smiths in some of the earlier songs in the video. It feels like in real time, you are seeing them test new sounds and try to figure out what their sound should be. Really amazing time capsule video of one of the more influential bands of the 1990s.

This video of yesterday’s Kentucky Derby is incredible. The eventual winner, Rich Strike, was 2 spots from dead last heading into the final turn – and an 80-1 long shot to boot – and then took off and passed the whole field like they were standing still. On top of all of this, the team managing this horse did not know that their horse was even in the field until Friday when another horse had to drop out.

I don’t know all the rules of Snooker. Heck, I may not know all the rules about traditional eight ball pool. But what I can surmise from watching this 6 and a half minute video of Ronnie O’Sullivan clear the table in a Snooker World Championship match from 1997 is that this guy is damn good at what he does. This is a masterclass in billiards and how to set yourself up for the next shot.

A bit over 20 years ago, some priceless notebooks from the famous biologist Charles Darwin were stolen from the main library at Cambridge University. After the staff of the library initially thought they were put back on the wrong shelf, they soon realized that they were in fact missing.

It was back in 2001 that the notebooks, which represent some of Darwin’s first inklings of his radical theory of evolution by natural selection, were originally found to be missing. They had been removed from storage to be photographed, and work was recorded as completed in November 2000. But during a subsequent routine check made in January 2001, it was found they had not been returned to their proper place. At the time staff believed they may have been mis-shelved.

Fast forward 20+ years, and whoever clipped them, had a change of heart and dropped them off in a bright pink bag with a little note wishing them a Happy Easter.

Surprisingly, there was no closed circuit camera footage in the area where the bag was dropped. The university is scouring other footage from the day they were returned in hopes of identifying the person who returned them.

Over the course of the past two years, as we have all been home because of the pandemic, I’ve been consuming a lot of movies and TV. I have been diligent about checking out reviews and listening to critics before diving into new TV shows because I already am ‘in deep’ on too many TV shows. Whenever I engaged in any of the many ‘prestige’ television shows that are out there, a key criteria is the legitimacy and believability of the storyline relative to the premise of the show. And what I mean by this is the following: if, for example, a show is based on a fantasy premise, then it needs to effectively create the world-view that you are entering and set the proper context and boundaries in which the fantasy can operate within before it becomes truly unbelievable to the viewer. Similarly with ‘real world’ stories, the same thing applies. The story needs to be rooted in reality and clearly be cognizant of the timeframe and context in which it is set.

One show I have recently been watching is “Yellowjackets” on Showtime. The show’s storyline centers on what happens in the 25 years since a plane crash stranded a fictitious 1996 NJ high school girls soccer team in the wilderness after they won the state championship and were heading to Seattle to participate in a national high school soccer tournament (i.e. a tournament that presumably includes each state’s high school champion). The show is really good and does a great job of balancing the storylines of what has become of the survivors in present day 2021 and the closely held secrets of what really happened to the survivors in the wilderness back in 1996.

As good as the show and the acting is, there are a few glaring gaps with the 1996 portion of the storyline that I just can not get past. I’m going to do my best not to spoil anything about the show.

• The show says that the survivors of the crash are stranded in the wilderness for 19 months. There is no part of me that would believe that a plane full of upper-middle class (mostly) white girls from a seemingly well-off suburban NJ town would be left out in the wilderness for almost two years. I went to a soccer crazy high school in a town very similar to the one portrayed in the 1996 storyline of “Yellowjackets” and there is no way on earth that parents in the town would have let this go without a full-on 24/7 search and rescue effort until the crash site was discovered.
• Also depicted in the 1996 storyline are several pretty severe injuries from those that survived the crash – both as a direct result of the crash and from attacks from wildlife in the area where they were stranded. I honestly don’t buy that those that suffered these injuries would have recovered the way they did in the show. The injuries were just too bad, and it would have been too easy for things to go sideways.
• As is well documented, the show says that the plane crashed ‘in the wilderness of Ontario’ as a result of the pilots having to fly further north than the normal route to Seattle in order to avoid a severe storm. The storm that they were avoiding must have been some sort of super storm because after looking at typical flight paths from Newark to Seattle, they would have really had to go far out of their way to be routed over that area of Canada. Further, the wilderness depicted in the show at the crash site seemed much more in keeping with the terrain of the Canadian Rockies compared to Ontario.
• I really wish the show did more to bring in the storyline of what was happening in NJ in the weeks or months after the accident. It would have been much more realistic to engage with the families back in NJ and to understand what they were doing to try to determine what happened to the team and their plane. It is such a major gap in the show. Maybe the show-runners did not feel that they could effectively juggle three major story arch’s (1996 crash site, the 1996 families trying to find their kids, and the survivors living ‘today’ in 2021) and while I can appreciate that, you don’t need to look too much further than ‘Game of Thrones’ to see how a show has deftly threaded a similar needle. They could have, for example, dedicated one ‘stand alone’ episode within the season to the families at home in NJ and how they were coping and trying to solve finding the plane. They could have extended the season from 10 to 12 episodes to accommodate the same. There were several options available it would seem to me.

The acting in this show is really good, and there has been a lot of speculation as to where the story will go in its second season. There are some serious “Lost” vibes being bantered about in online forums – mainly due to several ‘cult’ like and super-natural themes that are presented early on and via one key character. Definitely check the show out! Hopefully you enjoy it as much as I am and you can get past the concerns I have noted!