Posts tagged “college football”

• On The (Apocryphal?) Rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Cartoons – via kottke, natch
• With the possible – possible – exception of Sonny Corleone‘s toll booth scene, I cannot think of anything in the universe that wouldn’t be dramatically improved by adding a college marching band.
• Netflix is developing a reality television series based on the classic board game Monopoly. Fingers crossed that the producers convey that the only realistic way to win the game is to hoard all the money and property, causing everyone else to eventually quit in despair and destitution, and that unfettered capitalism is actually terrible for any species. – via The Dailies
• Good news! AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its journalists
• A federal judge ruled former Florida QB signee Jaden Rashada can proceed with his lawsuit against Gators football coach Billy Napier over a $13M NIL deal gone wrong.
• There are actually a few cool items in this Wirecutter article: 18 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do
• Instagram users under 16 will no longer be able to livestream or unblur nudity in direct messages without parental approval. This seems like something that should have already been the policy, but I guess I’ll take the win. – via me
• Why don’t we remember being a baby? Infants can encode specific memories, a new Yale study shows, suggesting “infantile amnesia” might be a memory retrieval problem.
• When Is This Going to Stop?
  • POTUS signs executive orders to… boost coal production.
  • China slams Vance for ‘peasants’ slur as tariff war intensifies – via thebasement.nz
  • WTF? Administration orders half of national forests open for logging – via moudhy.bsky.social
  • 20 Rude Questions the Media Should Ask – via markjacob.bsky.social
  • Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Looms

• You probably never considered how awesome it would be to hear Rick Astley perform an acoustic cover of the Chappell Roan hit Pink Pony Club, did you? – via @jacksongagne.com
• The team at The Athletic put together a sweet Bluesky college football starter pack.
• Mustaaaaaaaaaard! – via kottke
• As a kid I only ever barely paid attention to Star Trek — we were a Star Wars family — but the way Chekov (Walter Koenig) repeats, “Botany Bay,” as he realizes his predicament is just phenomenal.
• Humor is vital to effective protest, and the Democrats suck at it. – via @kurtandersen.bsky.social
• I may have linked this already, but it’s worth a repost: “Wherever you get your podcasts,” is a radical statement.
• “If no laws have been broken, there should be nothing to hide.” – via @beyer.house.gov
• I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought:
  • The detention of Mahmoud Khalil means we are a hop, skip & jump away from political persecutions. It’s a steep, slippery slope from here to “speak out against [the administration] and go to jail.” – via @joycewhitevance.bsky.social
  • I don’t even want to include the subject matter here, but these people are pure evil.
  • McLaurine Pinover, the chief spokesperson at OPM and the current administration’s official tasked with defending “DOGE” personnel cuts, posted fashion influencer videos from her office.
  • Listening to Chris Hayes interview Robert Garcia (D–CA) on his Why Is This Happening? podcast is not likely to make you feel any better about the future of our country, but it is pretty interesting.
  • California, New York, and Maryland all confirmed their first cases of measles this week.
  • EPA head says he’ll roll back dozens of environmental regulations, including rules on climate change

• Your Worst Is Not the Worst, the latest issue of Making It Work from Youngna Park, is powerfully relatable. Trying to explain to young children what’s happening in the world in 2025 is so, so hard.
• Behind the Collapse of Technicolor and Why Its Failure Is Sending Shockwaves Through the VFX Industry
• I quickly fell in love with the Hulu sci-fi series Paradise, starring Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden. Check it out.
• How Pop-Tarts turned an easy-to-forget bowl into one of the college football season’s best moments
• “There is not one Yeezy shoe left,” said Adidas chief financial officer. “It has all been sold and that episode is behind us.”
• And now, the bad news:
  • How “DOGE” Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save
  • Marco Rubio is often the last to know when foreign policy decisions are made in the White House.
  • A truly troubling read: “We believe this rush to comply is a sign that universities are willing to become an institutional wing of the new segregationists.”
  • POTUS Signs Executive Order Handing U.S. Public Forests Over to Private Logging Industry
  • The Strategic Crypto Swindle: A bitcoin reserve would be a government-backed grift.
  • A leaked memo calls for VA to lay off as many as 83,000 employees this year.

• New jazz fellowship honors the genre’s elders and gives them each an unrestricted $100,000 grant. – via @phillewis.bsky.social
• Welcome to Chicken Town presents exactly what its URL says it does. – via @erikahall.bsky.social
• Thomas Perry is likely the strongest player in the 2025 NFL Draft. You’ve probably never heard of him.
• While the individual accumulation of wealth offers an illusion of safety, does it simply create more instability and insecurity in the long run?
• After Pressure from Georgia Senator Ossoff, White House Restores Funding for HBCU Students Studying Agriculture
• College Football 25 broke video game records. Can EA Sports keep everyone happy?
• You Have No Rights
• Good News for People Who Love Bad News
  • Once social security checks stop showing up, millions of Americans will finally understand the scope.
  • After All This
  • The Environmental Protection Agency will move to reverse its 2009 declaration that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare — a step that would threaten most major climate regulations and make it harder for future presidents to enact new ones. – via @vanhollen.senate.gov
  • “You’re not going to like what I’m saying next, but we are in the middle of a totalitarian fascist coup in this country.” – via @anildash.com
  • FDA Cancels Meeting of Vaccine Experts Scheduled to Advise on Flu Shots
  • It IS Happening Here
  • The White House on Wednesday denied reporters from Reuters and other news organizations access to [the administration’s] first cabinet meeting.
  • It seems almost unavoidable that we are headed for a deep, deep recession.

• Super Bowl LIX for Dummies
• A Super Bowl Preview, Minus the Football: A look at the musical acts, the famous fans, the commercials and all of the other things surrounding the NFL’s signature event
• 5 Classic Super Bowl Commercials That Still Warm Our Hearts
• The Tunnel Runway: How Sports Became Fashion’s Newest Catwalk
• Kendrick Lamar aims to infuse his Los Angeles hip-hop flavor into New Orleans while staying true to his storytelling roots during Super Bowl halftime performance.
• Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid loves food as much as football.
• Will there be an interception thrown in the Super Bowl? Patrick Mahomes has not thrown an interception in eight straight games. Jalen Hurts has not thrown an interception in nine straight games. – via Tuesday Morning Quarterback
• Why is Tom Brady worth $375 million to Fox?
• Football’s Hidden Fanbase: How the NFL is Winning Over Women
• Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie reveals how Andy Reid’s legacy led to Nick Sirianni hiring.
• “To listen to a Toni Braxton song about a beautiful man is to realize that she is singing about Jalen Hurts. You can’t be mad about it because it’s never been fair: You are not Jalen Hurts, and he always has been.”
• Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Derrick Nnadi took on the role of a coach as he trained Parsnip, a 4-month-old puppy, to make his debut at Puppy Bowl XXI.
• If Patrick Mahomes and his Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl, the debate is over. Mahomes would become the greatest playoff quarterback of all time.
• Bonus: The NCAA has a good breakdown of where Super Bowl LIX players attended college.

• Just in time for Penguin Awareness Day (on Thursday, January 20th), the Wildlife Conservation Society‘s Argentina Program has released amazing underwater selfie video recently taken by a male Gentoo penguin fitted with a special camera.
• Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said, “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.” – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter
• In the city of Poznań, Poland, a group of eight clams controls the local water supply through a clever bio-monitoring system. – via kottke
• I have been trying unsuccessfully for a while now to find the recipe for the Pistachio & Orange “Redemption Cake” that Amelia Le Bruin made on The Great British Baking Show: Holidays (S7: E1 “The Great Christmas Baking Show”). If anyone has any leads, please let me know. [Update: I sent her an Instagram DM and she replied to tell me she’d try to find the recipe in her notes!]
• Oysters and Beer Have Always Been on the Menu at One of America’s Oldest, Most Renowned Restaurants. I have been here many times, including a memorable birthday dinner in my 40s, and can confirm that The Union Oyster House is a national treasure. – via my dad
• Netflix Is Telling Writers to Dumb Down Shows Since Viewers Are on Their Phones – via The Dailies
• The essay Who Goes Nazi? from the August 1941 issue of Harper’s Magazine should be required reading at every high school in America. – via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
• It was fun to read about all the wild Christmas gifts NFL quarterbacks got their offensive lineman last week. Did you know that NFL teams are required to provide “three dozen sliced oranges for halftime” for the visiting team? And that each team easily goes through at least 80,000 Uncrustables each year? Oh, and Notre Dame winning the Sugar Bowl on January 2, 2025 ensured a Black head coach will be in an FBS national championship game for the first time ever. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• People often ask me what I think their children should study to learn how to be a programmer, or create video games or apps and I always answer that they should start with the absolute basics. Learn Bash Scripting in 10 minutes is a great example.

• Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
• Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
• ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
• Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
• On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
• You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.

• Eight vignettes about power and (mis)understanding, and children, I guess, from Making It Work – via kottke
• For the first time in 37 years scientists have observed orcas wearing dead salmons as hats – via @nerdist (threads / bluesky)
• Take notes, not photos: Recent research found that if you want to strengthen your memory, taking notes by hand beats taking pictures every time—because it keeps your brain engaged and focused. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• Florida’s furious finish on the recruiting trail caps stellar month for Billy Napier – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Just one retail chain was enough for Taylor Swift to have the top-selling book last week and the biggest publishing launch of 2024. – via The Hollywood Reporter (threads / bluesky)
• “No big deal, just a 12-foot long jump wearing football pads while clearing another human being.” – via @cfbalerts (threads / bluesky)
• Where to donate your money to fight climate change effectively – via @vox (threads / bluesky)
• Bluesky brings the fun, weird vibes of old Twitter back to life – also via @vox
• “I accidentally used my mom’s fabric scissors to cut wrapping paper and now the cops are here.” – via @wdgoodnight

• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew premieres December 3^rd on Disney+ Wow. The trailer looks amazing.
• If you know anyone with an iPhone — and, duh, of course you do — one of these MagSafe power bricks is a great gift idea.
• Superman Is Still America’s Greatest Superhero: We need Christopher Reeve now more than ever.
• How Selling $160 Sweatpants Turned a SoCal Surfer into One of America’s Richest Women – via @forbes
• Forget Matt Gaetz. Merrick Garland Is America’s Worst Attorney General. – via @usnews
• I would rather watch three straight hours of Progressive commercials than another Avatar movie.
• Pamela Hayden, the voice behind Milhouse Van Houten, will retire from The Simpsons after 35 years. – via @dailycosmicmarvel
• It’s always been somewhat puzzling that Donald Duck chooses to use an airplane to fly and a boat when he’s in the water. I don’t have a problem with his insistence on eschewing pants. But I find it deeply, deeply disturbing that he carves a Thanksgiving turkey for his family. – via me
• Here’s everything you need to know about the new 12-team college football playoff format.

I wish I could think of something uplifting or witty to say by now, but I don’t. I’m sure that day will come soon, but today I’m just … tired. Hopefully these links will brighten your day a little.

• Meet Armando Villarreal, the man behind college football’s coolest helmets. – via @theathletichq
• Choose your decade and channel-surf the past on virtual TV sets. – via Laura Olin, who has a fantastic newsletter
• Allegedly, you can now scrub your personal information from Google searches. Here’s how to do it.
• JSON Crack is a free, open-source data visualization app capable of transforming JSON (and several other structured formats) into interactive graphs. – via @sung.kim.mw
• “1500+ free HTML templates for websites, landing pages, blogs, portfolios, ecommerce and admin dashboards” – via @devluc
• Great news for people who love bad news: This year won’t just be the hottest on record — it could be the first to surpass the 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold laid out in the Paris climate accord. – via @scientific_american
• “Vanity Fair hits it on the nail.” via @deirdre.assenza
• Related: “Unfriendly reminder that good people don’t support rapists.” – via @iamayortrightkay
• Apropos of nothing: It’s nearly impossible to be a depressed ball of rage-filled anxiety while listening to Clair de lune. – via @gatordavid
• Please tell me Taylor is working on a “The White House” version of “The Black Dog”. And if she’s not, maybe Weird Al can get on it. I hope it’s shitty / in the White House… – via @gatordavid