Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all who celebrate!
“Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, a Democrat, just became the 13th voting member of Congress to give birth in office. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, was the 12th when she welcomed her first child last year. And under current House rules, neither was able to vote while on leave from recovering from giving birth.”
“Mass deportations would completely upend the ongoing recovery in Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina from last year’s hurricanes. It would stall the rebuilding of LA after fires … and at this point, anyone anywhere is at risk of having their home impacted by a climate disaster. So everyone need these skilled workers.”
“The public needs to be reminded of what DEI actually is, rather than allowing Republicans to continue to use it as a dog whistle for unchecked racism and bias. DEI has brought about wage transparency, reporting systems for workplace assault, guaranteed parental leave, and many more benefits to workers. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have also created better products, expanded addressable markets, and yielded higher market returns. Standing against any of these outcomes would position the right wing as an enemy of capitalism and of everyday workers—both of which Trumpism claims to champion.”
“Netflix has created a pyramid scheme of attention, with no end in sight. And yet if the streamer admitted how little impact its movies make, it would undermine its long-running pitch to audiences, Hollywood talent, and their business representatives that the company is a grand star-making enterprise that produces great cinema with commercial appeal.”
“Trump doesn’t want anything. He just want the tariffs. He’s convinced they can raise vast sums of money that will let him enact tax cuts later this year, and he likes that. That’s it. There’s no theory of the case. There’s no underlying rationale. There’s no 4-D chess. He just wants the money, and he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that he’s raising it from Americans, not foreigners.”
“While human diets have long included relatively small quantities of microbes—think of the live bacteria in yogurt, or the oven-killed yeast in bread—researchers at universities and dozens of startups across the globe are now investigating whether some microbes could serve as a caloric substitute for a wide range of foods and ingredients, including eggs, milk, meat, and flour.”
“Somewhere between 60 and 80% of high school students reported having gambled in the last year, the National Council on Problem Gambling reported in 2023. A study commissioned by the NCAA found that 58% of 18-to-22-year-olds had bet on sports – although it should be said that in most states this is illegal before the age of 21. On college campuses, that number was 67%, and the betting happened at a higher frequency. While most people can limit gambling to a bit of occasional fun, medical journal the Lancet published a paper in November finding that 16.3% of adolescents worldwide who bet on sports developed a gambling addiction. (The Sports Betting Alliance, an industry group, pointed to studies conducted in Massachusetts, Indiana and Connecticut that found the rate of problem gamblers across the population to be roughly between 1 and 2%.)”
“The quiet scourge of the foul ball”.
RIP, Fay Vincent, former MLB Commissioner.
“In some ways, President Donald Trump’s DEI purge has been so indiscriminate you could be forgiven for thinking the entire federal government is being put through a mindless find-and-replace function. At the IRS, the Wall Street Journal reported, the employee handbook lost its sections about the “inequity” of holding taxpayer money and the “inclusion” of a taxpayer ID on a form. That isn’t the DEI you’re looking for.”
RIP, Alvin Franklin, guard on the UH Phi Slamma Jamma basketball teams that played in the 1983 and 1984 NCAA championship games.
RIP, Gary Phillips, first University of Houston men’s basketball player to earn first-team All-America honors who won an NBA championship with the Boston Celtics.
RIP, Allyce Ozarski, Emmy-nominated TV producer.
RIP, Tim Campbell, former star lineman for the UT Longhorns, younger brother of NFL Hall of Famer Earl Campbell.
Roy Wood Jr is a mensch.
I’m ambivalent about the idea of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, but I’ll give it a chance. It certainly has the potential to be awesome.
“What we saved from the federal government’s data purge”.
RIP, John Shumate, former NBA player and NCAA men’s coach who was on the 1974 Notre Dame team that ended UCLA’s 88-game winning streak. He scored 21 points and had 11 rebounds in that game.
“Here’s the thing: An agency that is defined by loyalty to a person, rather than principles can neither be guided nor reined in by rules. It is built around, and driven by, contempt for them.”
“The song, however–I know the song, even if I did not know its title until I began to write this post. (“Beautiful Things”) I suppose until this week I assumed it didn’t even have a title–that it was a prototype, engineered in a remote Walgreens lab dedicated to building the perfect drugstore song. Boone seems like a nice guy and is a committed and dynamic performer; I wish him personal happiness. However I would be happy to never hear this song again in my life, or anything that sounds like it.”
“If the president wanted to cause airline disasters, it’s hard to imagine what he would have done differently.”
RIP, Irv Gotti, DJ, music and TV producer, co-founder of Murder Inc. Records.
“Whoopi Goldberg has alerted fans of a fake weight loss ad using her likeness on Instagram. Goldberg said the ad used artificial intelligence to sell a drug she does not use.”
“But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to Chinese companies — introduce a number of glaring security and privacy risks.”
RIP, Virginia McCaskey, longtime owner and matriarch of the Chicago Bears, daughter of team founder George Halas.
“Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber“.
“Say hello to the Superb Owl.”