unclevlad

Perfect game for the offense. The blocked extra point is special teams.

The Djokovic visa hearing has adjourned; the judges are considering the arguments. CNN says it's possible there'll be more argument Monday morning, but that they hope to decide Sunday (Australia time.) edit: he lost. He's left the country. YES!!!!

I wonder how much I could've won by taking the Bills and giving 28...yes, you can bet stuff like this in Vegas. I think Josh Allen doesn't mind playing in cold weather. 20/24 for 306, 4 TDs, no picks. 7 possessions, 7 TDs. SAFE bet he's coming out. The Bills' kicker, OTOH...but this last one DOINKed in, so who cares. 47-10 halfway through the 4th. Mr. P, that's not a cleaning, that's a complete teardown, trying to find salvageable parts. And not finding many.

OK...all of you who saw this first half coming, raise your hand. I think a beer is in order, myself......to celebrate.

Shades of The Catch!!! And yes, I wrote this BEFORE Iain Eagle said it...

Except that the Jets played in 14 playoff games between 1998 and 2010, winning 7. Mind you, since then...... The hallmark of Jets futility is their mastery in losing spectacularly. Marvin Lewis made an artform of keeping most games close...and getting burned at the end too often.

Raiders are showing they don't belong. 2 big mistakes already, still the 1st quarter. On a kickoff, grab the ball right at the sidelines? Then fall OB. First down could've been at the 25, if the ball goes into the EZ; could've been at the 40 of it just went OB. And it was going that way. Instead...it's at the 2. Do players NOT THINK??? They're lucky to avoid the safety on 3rd down. HECK!!!! of a punt...54 yards with not much return. Still, Bengals have great starting position.

First one: well, I *believe* I've never had biscuits and gravy. And from what I know of the recipe, I have no interest there. At all. So...can something go when it was never there in the first place? Pancakes...well, that stack would be foolish when your A1c has hit double digits. But I don't give them up; I just don't do a stack. Kodiak Cakes. One nice-sized pancake every now and again. With a berry topping...usually the mix, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries. Zapped in the microwave, with cinnamon and stevia. No, it's not real maple syrup...but IMO it's the next best choice. Absolutely better than the ccommercial maple and corn syrup blends, and not as sweet as commercial fruit syrups. Second one: never been a big fan of wings. Too messy. The wing meat from a roasted chicken is, I'll grant, one of my favorite parts, but they aren't worth the trouble. Or cost. Pizza...RARE these days, but once or twice a year I indulge. First one: well, I *believe* I've never had biscuits and gravy. And from what I know of the recipe, I have no interest there. At all. So...can something go when it was never there in the first place? Pancakes...well, that stack would be foolish when your A1c has hit double digits. But I don't give them up; I just don't do a stack. Kodiak Cakes. One nice-sized pancake every now and again. With a berry topping...usually the mix, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries. Zapped in the microwave, with cinnamon and stevia. No, it's not real maple syrup...but IMO it's the next best choice. Absolutely better than the ccommercial maple and corn syrup blends, and not as sweet as commercial fruit syrups. Second one: never been a big fan of wings. Too messy. The wing meat from a roasted chicken is, I'll grant, one of my favorite parts, but they aren't worth the trouble. Or cost. Pizza...RARE these days, but once or twice a year I indulge.

Detailed oral arguments will be tomorrow evening, according to CNN. The locker room isn't on his side, either. SportCenter had Tsitsipas and Murray answering some questions, and neither is happy. Believe Murray used "holding the tournament hostage." EDIT: NYT so it might be paywalled...in summary, Djokovic is reported to have made multiple mis-statements, to have done public appearances (unmasked) while suspecting he might be positive, and to have done another appearance when he knew he was. He broke Australian rules about travel...and apparently lied about that. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/world/australia/novak-djokovic-australian-open.html An update on CNN also cites, as part of the argument for cancelling his visa, that allowing him in would promote anti-vax sentiment and even could lead to civil unrest. I could readily see picketing the Open, so "civil unrest" is maybe a slight reach, but that's all. So, even if one buys Djokovic's arguments, that argument is very hard to counter, IMO. We'll see; there's some nasty politics at work here too, but my feeling right now his, he's gonna lose. Is it wrong to consider celebrating tomorrow night, if he does?

Lakers played in Sacramento the other night. The Kings had a little fun with Russell Westbrook. They played Cold As Ice at intro...well, he was 6-26 in his last 2 games. They played it every time he missed a shot...which may have gotten a bit old. Because he was 2-14, including 0-5 from 3. So apparently the NBA is telling them to knock it off. Say wha................???? Not vulgar. Safe for work. Timely and appropriate. Gimme a break, this is great for the fans. Heck, Westbrook wasn't even upset in the postgame.

So the Aussie government has again cancelled Novak Djokovic's visa. This isn't the last word; another appeal has been filed, and in fact, the hearing starts in about a half hour (6:15 ET). I think the odds are against him, as it seems most believe he's at least been misleading on his paperwork. And, no surprise I'm sure, I really, really, REALLY hope he loses. On the flip side, if he does play...as Tony Kornheiser pointed out, it might be amusing to watch just to see HOW vocal the crowd is. The Open is restricting seating to half capacity, except those sessions already sold beyond that. (Yeah, how would you pick who to throw out? Not a decision I'm fond of, but all options are bad.) The comment was, this was gonna be Philly on steroids. Yeah, if anything, that might be an understatement. The Open's hosed. They published the draw...with Djokovic as the #1 seed. My guess is, if Djokovic's visa remains revoked, they'll treat it like a late injury...a lucky loser from qualifying gets his slot If he can play, I suspect that privately, they'll hope he loses VERY early, so the hostility can at least be left behind. The LAST!!!! thing the Open wants, I have to think, is handing Djokovic the trophy as the champ, to a RESOUNDING!!!!! chorus of outrage.

"I would say when you rewind here and go back to a year ago ... I'd say the organization was in a pretty rough spot, and I think from where we were then to where we are now, we're in a lot better position," Caserio said Friday. "And quite frankly, I think that's because of the leadership and the guidance and the direction that David Culley brought in this football team." --Nick Caserio, Texans GM So your coach put your team in a better position...yet you fire him anyway. This isn't the political forum, so I think I'd best stop right there...other than to say, the Texans are on my Loathe list now. Heck, they've moved below the Raiders and Jags, since both excised their cancers.

Nor would any free agent who's looking to...you know...WIN, go there. They're actually OK for 2022, but I saw 15 players whose contracts expire after 2023. So the future is likely turbulent. It's not surprising that NFL.com lists the Houston job as the worst HC opening. Below the Giants. Well, enough of that. Break out your bones. Brew the tea. Spread the cards. Use your favorite method...but, I'm sorry to say, reading the chicken entrails is NOT permitted...and make your Fearless Football Prognostications!!! Saturday is afternoon and night slots LV vs. Cincy...I kinda see Burrow having a good game. Weather's gonna be cold at least. So Bengals. Pats vs. Bills...sorry haters. Hope I'm wrong here, but in rematches, I like the team that lost last time around. Belichick will make the changes. Pats. Sunday is standard 3 slots Eagles vs. Brady...duh. Again, hope I'm wrong, but no way I'm picking against Brady here. Niners vs. Cowboys...should be no contest; Cowboys by a lot. That said, they play poorly often enough. Still...yuck...Cowboys. Steelers vs. Chiefs...Ben has his retirement speech ready to roll for the postgame, I bet.... Monday Cards vs. Rams...which team makes the fewest mistakes? Cards have lost 4 of 5, scoring 23, 12, 16, 25 (win), and 30. Lost to the Lions, Colts, and Seahawks. Beat the Cowboys but that's a big source of my concern about the Cowboys. Nope. Can't pick the Cards, even tho Stafford is also exceptionally shaky the last few games. So...I'll pick the Rams.

Huh, well, missed that one. David Culley got fired today. Nice golden parachute tho. Perhaps literally. His contract was fully guaranteed...3 more years. Total of $17M. Considering he's 66...maybe volunteering to coach at a high school or small college sounds pretty good. Obviously, his retirement is set. EDIT: this was bouncing in the back of my brain; the echoes were deafening... https://www.espn.com/blog/houston-texans/post/_/id/26166/houston-texans-set-coach-david-culley-to-fail-then-fired-him One of the more thorough shred jobs I've seen in a while. And of note: I checked. The preseason over-under win prediction for the Texans was....4. And the article notes, the situation will be worse next year, quite possibly, with a MASSIVE amount of dead money counting against the cap. And with an owner and GM that appear to be erratic at best. With a horrible roster construction that'll take multiple years to turn around. This may well be the worst opening in the NFL.

Wellll.....the guy is an idiot. Talk radio shouldn't have any legal protections...the numbers of incoming calls should be recorded. A subpoena should be trivial to get the number of that caller, and hopefully that'll target a search effort. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me that this elevates the case status; it's like waving the red flag at the cops. Hopefully the guy will be caught soon, for so many reasons. And when he is...in the US, what he's done is parental kidnapping, and I suspect in Canada, with their vaccination policies, it might even be child endangerment. #1, I hope the kid gets returned to her mother ASAP, but #2, I hope this guy gets put away for a few decades.

I submit that not being vaccinated would be an exemplar of what is meant by "not in the best interests of the child." It would be interesting to hear about similar cases in different parts of the US, particularly anti-vax-heavy ones. Because I think most judges would agree. Not all, but most. EDIT: bopping around some of the stories on BBC news, found this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59960949

This would never have reached this point if time was kept in a sane manner. https://www.espn.com/soccer/africa-cup-of-nations/story/4568330/referee-mistakes-ruin-tunisia-vs-mali-at-afcon-and-threaten-to-overshadow-a-fun-tournament I will never buy that keeping stoppage time some vague, deep, dark secret is in service of fair competition. Not ever.

It's me. There's a limit to how unrealistic I'll go. Personally, I'd buy none of your justifications. But I also do NOT like turning the rules into silly putty, and, at least going through Absorption, you have to. They're abusable enough; I think it's a terrible idea to take an extremely broad ruleset and open doors like this; it's like...no, there are no rules, do what you can get away with. Not my cuppa. Aid is kind of interesting. D&D Epic Rules had a feat called Spell Stowaway. Pick a spell; when that spell is cast by anyone near you (with a pretty long range, actually), it is as if you were also the target of that spell. But it required Spellcraft 24 ranks...which means 21st level. And you had to know the spell; it wasn't arbitrary. It was also 1 spell, chosen when you took the feat. Now, more generally in D&D, counterspelling created the notion that there was a spell construct that was formed. Such a construct was detectable, and could be interfered with. I can buy extending that to powers...SOMETIMES. I don't buy it for any Characteristic; far as I'm concerned, these are, let's call it, Readied powers. They're always there to be used; using them has no external signature. Note that if you've got, let's say, an MP with a bunch of physical augmentation package slots, when a slot is activated, you could allow there *in that moment* to be something to trigger on. But not after. Flip side...in principle something like a Blast would involve something sufficiently tangible that it could trigger an Aid. I probably wouldn't allow this either, as it still feels too disconnected. At least in most cases. Say your Aid has Trigger: when a Blast or RKA is used nearby, your Aid kicks in. It's Aid to OCV, only against the source that fired the trigger. The attacker effectively gets painted *for you*. THAT, I can buy, easily; you're tracking back to the source. Kind of a cool power, too, IMO. (In a way this is roughly similar to how the Air Force took out the Iraqi missile sites. The missiles were guided; to do that, a tracking radar had to be active. So the pilots just locked onto the radars. Bye bye radar. When the radar cuts out? The missile self destructs. 2 for the price of 1.) Absorb X to emit Y...not even an issue. Common in the real world. Kinetic energy can be turned into electricity...I've got a watch that does that. Light can be turned into electricity...the photovoltaic effect. Electricity can create light...LEDs. All of these have direct application of effect A onto target B, which is converted into C. I've got no problem with producing END; I have a problem connecting A to B.

https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/33050352/novak-djokovic-profile-selfishness-sports-leaders-failing-us-all TL;DR -- Sports in general have put money over safety, and high-profile stars have been some of the worst offenders, using their status to assert a privilege to act the way they want.

Ugh. Out of perverse, morbid curiousity, I just reloaded the WorldOMeters page. Last time was my prior post, so 4 hours ago. In that time alone, 1.2 million new cases. Granted that case reporting has time dependencies and it's not a rate or anything like that, but in one local afternoon...more than we ever got in a full 24 hours. Oh, and scrolling down...the total for the day broke 3 million handily. (3.1 million, and their data day isn't over yet. Think it's getting close, tho.)

I'll grant this is supers, but for plausibility, I still want some sort of vector connecting the 2 actions. How does my movement create something that you can absorb, assuming I never make contact or even close to melee range? Also, how do you scale this? Absorption is based on BODY done, and nothing here is doing BODY. So there would have to be some form of scale defined. For me, this just makes little or no sense even in supers logic, so I wouldn't allow it. If I did, tho, the absorption would have to be defined as AoE, presumably Radius, and honestly, I'd lean to saying it costs END. This is WILDLY different from normal Absorption.

Hoo boy.... We crossed the 300 million case number a while ago...and at this point, we can barely see it in the rear view mirror. According to WorldOMeters...over 18 million new cases worldwide *in the last week*. Yeah...highest we got before was a tick over 900,000 new cases a day. Right now it's pushing 3 million. I never got measles. I vaguely remember getting the vaccine tho, as a kid. I did get mumps...hadda be around 5 or 6, I'm pretty sure, because I remember which house we were in. There was just NO QUESTION, tho, back then...we stayed home, we isolated. End of story. If you want a reminder...Ancestry.com used to offer a trial period, or even pay for it for a bit. Chase down your family tree. When you're getting back into the 18th and 19th centuries...start looking at how many of the kids never made it to their teens. It can be quite the eye-opener. Or look at things like life expectancy estimates back then. Most of em exclude deaths under the age of 2, in that even today, the risks are higher in that period, and they'd skew the data badly. The biggest changes in life expectancy come when the childhood diseases stop being a massive threat, I believe. You can also search cause of death statistics. Unfortunately, the anti-science, anti-vax crowd won't care.

And the Captain Obvious Saw This One firing...Joe Judge is gone. Obvious because once the GM goes, his coach is out on the edge of the branch and the woodpeckers are swarming. NFL.com is saying that Flores didn't get along with Miami's GM, and the owner sided with the GM. This was talking in the context of Deshaun Watson. Watson apparently would've approved a move to Miami with Flores, so that perhaps suggests Flores wanted him, and the GM didn't. I lean to the GM; I *do not* want a flake, as Watson absolutely appears to be, as my QB. It kinda looks like the HC firings are probably done for now, unless there'll be some after the first round of the playoffs. No one there seems overly threatened should they lose. And the Broncos ownership situation is on track to resolution. There were legal complications to selling the team; those have been resolved. How long it'll take to find a buyer? Not long......if you have nearly $4 BILLION dollars to plunk down.

I'm sure lockdown fatigue is very real. And entirely understandable. Over and above the feeling of privilege that's rather pervasive...as we've pointed out, we've completely lost the understanding of just how dangerous infectious diseases typically are. This is the first time in the memory of probably 95% of us where an infectious disease caused a long-term problem. Sure, there've been nasty situation...Legionnaire's, for example...but that was never broad. Ebola was a horror story that happened somewhere else. We have to go back, I think, to measles. Because...guess what...in the US at least (and I suspect in most first world countries), vaccination is mandatory to go to school. So...the risk and consequences of measles have been swept up, tossed into the trash, and taken out to the dumpster. Shorthand? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Fair bit of discussion this afternoon on NPR. Earlier versions of Covid have been targeting the lower respiratory area, which means serious complications/ventilation requirements are notably higher. Omicron stays up higher, so it's a lot less likely you'll hit the hospital...but it spreads a lot easier. (This might also explain why it bypasses the existing vaccine relatively readily. Different enough structure is suggested by the fact that it prefers a different part of the body.) But that means you've got a push and a pull effect...very much higher case rates, lower severity. And unfortunately, based on the numbers...the case rates are more important. The hospitals are more strained than ever. GOOD news here: hospitalizations are shorter.

Mets announce they'll retire Keith Hernandez' number, IIRC in June. All I have to say is...what the HECK took so long???? Granted, he spent more time in St. Louis, but in 6+ years, he hit just under .300 with 80 homers and 468 RBI. 3 time All Star. 5 time Gold Glove. 2nd and 4th in MVP balloting. All in that time frame. Went into the Mets Hall of Fame in '97; voted the Mets top all-time first baseman. He's not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the voters have always favored strikeouts and sluggers.