Posts tagged “NFL”
- Plenty of excellent stories from Longreads: The Most Popular Editors’ Picks of the Year and Our Most Popular Stories of the Year
- My friend Steve the Bartender recently did a Christmas Cocktail Special livestream!
- Brilliant: ElevationLab has created an AirTag battery booster that lets you replace the default CR2032 battery with a pair of AA batteries instead, theoretically extending the charge of an AirTag for a decade.
- You’ve got less than a week until the big day, so don’t forget to check out my quick list of easy Christmas gifts for parents.
- This short video on the effects of a smartphone on your child is painfully accurate.
I know you’re getting tired of me talking about Shrinking, but I think it’s important to note that in a series featuring freaking Harrison Ford giving the performance of his career, it’s Ted McGinley – who plays Derek, the neighbor of Jason Segal – who rules the show. (McGinley was also in Happy Days, The Love Boat, and Revenge of the Nerds!)- A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools
- My son and I just happened to be watching TNF and were able to see the NFL’s first successful fair-catch free kick since 1976.
- I adored Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife. Just astounding writing. Beautiful in the best way, including the gut-punch, “In Memory Care, one sees and hears many things one wishes to forget.”
- I thought this was a super interesting article about the ethical and legal issues of using CT scanners to “hack” boxes of trading cards. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
- I cannot wrap my head around the fact that it’s now been more than two years since I first complained to Amazon about a bug in their Alexa iOS app—which makes it impossible to manage your Echo Show photo library once you add more than 120 photos—and they still haven’t fixed it. How can I be the only one who cares about this?
- A lone dolphin has been yelling into the Baltic Sea for years and no one is responding. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
- I’m a sucker for creative gift wrapping tutorials.
- Far too many of our Christmas decorations do not have a power switch. I got several of these inexpensive power switches and it took me about five minutes to splice them into the wires so now we can turn things off and on without needing to unplug them.
- “imagine falling in love with someone to find out they got you 8 maids a milking and a combined 23 birds for Christmas” – via @teewatterss
- I recently watched Little Shop of Horrors (Warner Bros., 1986) for the first time in probably 25 years and I’m happy to report that it’s still pretty great.
- Happy holidays! After considering risk factors such as age and exercise, scientists found that people who enjoyed at least five ounces of dark chocolate per week had a twenty-one percent lower risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
- Nike, NFL Announce 10-Year Contract Extension – via @sportslogosnet
- I can think of no insult worse than being told, “Go Back Home, Your Mother Made You Waffles.” – via kottke
- 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.
- Reminder that Breaking Bad was a TV show about the U.S. healthcare system. – via Melanie D’Arrigo (threads / bluesky)
- I’m confused by the many complaints I’ve seen online recently about the streaming quality of NFL games on Amazon Prime. I have AT&T Gigabit fiber at home and for regular TV use the DirecTVStream app embedded in my Samsung TV. If I want to watch something on Amazon Prime, I use their app instead, also baked into the TV software. I honestly think the image quality of the Amazon NFL games beats what I see on NBC, CBS, FOX, and ESPN on DirecTVStream most of the time, which seems crazy to me. You’d think AT&T would either boost DirecTVStream bandwidth (since they own them) or somehow hamstring the Prime bandwidth. But that’s not the case at all.
Anyway. This joke about berry packaging made me laugh out loud. – via Matt Margolis (threads / bluesky)- I am a big fan of Wyze and have their front door deadbolt, doorbell camera, several security cameras, two outdoor plugs (for controlling Christmas lights), a bathroom scale, and at least a half dozen WiFi outlets around the house. They’re great.
- For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
- Threes is the iOS game I’ve played most frequently over the last decade. According to its lovely Statistics page, I’ve played it 7,838 times and my high score is 90,147.
- “Learning from other people’s mistakes is a lot less painful than learning from your own.” – via Tim Harford
- Feel-good story of the day? Giant Spoon Taken From Arizona Dairy Queen Found Thanks To Pokemon Go – via @pourmecoffee
- I’ve returned to this article a dozen times since he published it. If you’re working with iOS widget development, check out Launching iOS Apps with a Custom URL Scheme
If you want to add a “Share on Bluesky” hyperlink to your WordPress theme, this is the snippet I’m using. Also note that my theme requires FontAwesome for the bluesky icon.
<span class="label label-primary nobreak me-3"><a target="_blank" href="https://bsky.app/intent/compose?text=<?php echo urlencode( get_the_title() ); ?>%0A%0A<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Share on Bluesky" rel="noreferrer"><i class="fa-brands fa-bluesky"></i></a></span>
- These printable gratitude zines are a wonderful idea. There are kid versions, too! – via @austinkleon
- All children’s clothes should have a blank tag where you can write your kid’s name. How is this not a thing? – via me
- “[W]hat’s most needed is not new recycling technologies but stronger regulations on plastic producers.” – The False Promise of Plastic Recycling
- Annual tooth and gum cleaning may be the single most cost-effective therapy in all of medicine, and millions skip this, causing avoidable problems down the road. – via All Predictions Wrong
- Do yourself a favor. Get an Amazon Subscribe & Save subscription to a six-pack of comfy socks. It’s fairly inexpensive, and it’s a great way to stop hoarding old socks. (Set it to deliver them every six months. You’ll thank me in May.)
- The number of Italian same-sex civil unions rose to a six-year high, defying the country’s conservative government’s attempts to make it more difficult for same-sex couples to start families. – via @crookedmedia
- I had no idea the standard movie disclaimer — “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” — is because of Rasputin! – via @kottke
- It’s unfair that Someone Like You (from Bang Tango’s 1989 album Psycho Café) isn’t more popular.
- Defeated Man Too Tired To Fight New $14.99 Fee On Phone Bill – via @theonion
- “In one hour alone, the sun pummels the earth with more power than the world uses in the span of an entire year.”
- “Look, nothing I can write in this letter could possibly prepare you for everything that is about to happen. I don’t even know where to start, to be honest with you. There’s just so much.” – via @playerstribune
- Big sports moments are when I miss my mom the most. Even little ones. I could text her at 2AM to ask if she was watching two unknown, unranked Hungarian tennis players locked in a tight match on ESPN3 and the answer would always be, “Of course.”
- “Homicides continued to decline in major U.S. cities — by more than 40% in some communities — during the first nine months of the year.” – via @crookedmedia
- How Marcus Smart’s support for cancer patients transformed children’s hospitals – via @theathletichq
- Please spare ninety seconds of your busy day today to watch Miss Piggy roasting Martha Stewart. – via @kottke
- What’s the roundest human-made object ever made? – via @thebadastronomer
- “Building beats talking. It beats being a full-time employee. It beats being well dressed or well spoken or well known. It beats being popular.” – via @ociubotaru
- “If you’re a parent, you know you don’t need a scientific study or some neuroscientist to confirm what you know from experience. There’s a part of you that didn’t exist until you had kids.” – via @dailydad, a fantastic newsletter
- I’m vehemently opposed to styling browser scrollbars, but I like the other nine items in this list of 10 CSS Tricks for UI developers – via @nnnirajn
- It’s effectively impossible to manage uploaded photos on Amazon Alexa devices using the iOS app because if you’ve uploaded more than about two dozen photos, the screen refreshes back to the top any time you scroll down more than a few pages. I posted about this on Twitter a few years ago, and I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed it.
- The complete lack of urgency from players and coaches, in the NFL and college, when down by two or more scores in Q4, makes me question whether any of these guys have ever played Madden. – via me
- The November 17th Bills–Chiefs matchup wasn’t just the game of the week, it was the most-watched NFL regular-season game of 2024 and the most-watched non-holiday game since 2007. – via @theathletichq
- Everything designed for children should be dishwasher safe. Everything. Lunch boxes. Water bottles. T-shirts. Nintendo controllers. Nikes. Backpacks. All of it. – via @gatordavid
- “Only a twisted type of fantasy can see [pornography] in a biblical figure, in a statue that is also an icon of the Renaissance and the most famous statue in the world. It’s not only absurd, it’s a worrying sign of sheer ignorance, in its most literal sense: a lack of knowledge of history – religious history, of Christianity and Judaism, and art history.” – via @italo.americano
- Transitioning to clean energy would reduce the volume and harm of mining dramatically, because a fossil fuel economy requires 535× more mining than a clean energy economy. – via distilled
- The research linking alcohol to breast cancer is deadly solid: Alcohol, regardless of whether it’s in Everclear or a vintage Bordeaux, is carcinogenic.
- The curious case of two Scott Stallings and one Masters invitation – via TheAthletic
- Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.
- Beyoncé to perform halftime show at Ravens-Texans on Christmas on Netflix
Sportico published a great article this month that should really drive home just how much American football dominates television broadcasting right now. NFL Swallows TV Whole, With 93 of Year’s Top 100 Broadcasts details the stranglehold the NFL has on the country’s advertisers. And three of the remaining top 100 were college games! So really 96 out of 100 broadcasts last year were football.
It’s literally the end of an era. After seven national titles, eleven SEC championships and one hundred and twenty-three players drafted into the NFL, Alabama Crimson Tide head football coach Nick Saban is retiring. College football is not going to see another legend like him for a while. I admire what he did at LSU and Alabama almost as much as I hated when Florida played against him.
The last regular season NFL game was a banger. After spending the day logging and wrapping and putting away all the decorations, my son and I spent a few lovely hours watching the Bills beat the Dolphins before I shushed him off to brush his teeth and get in bed. Goodbye, Christmas 2023.