johnzo

Wow, that in a nutshell is your typical late-term Ottawa Rough Riders trade. Exchange your promising first round draft pick, a guy you can build around, for a great, but extremely high-mileage import DB. (To put it in more modern terms, it'd be like us trading Goosen or Chungh for Henry Burris in 2015.)

Great thread. This news is a year stale at this point, but here's another semi-recent mindblowing space thing: scientists using the Hubble have found GN-z11, the most distant thing we've ever observed. It's 32 billion light-years from Earth. When we look at it, we're seeing it as it was just 400 million years after the Big Bang. I know this is the way space and lightspeed work, but it's still freaky to me to think that observing distant objects is a form of time travel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11

That Argos boat logo is such a classic, way better than anything they've had since.

Holy ****. Is it a bluff? Is the Pyongyang motherfucker crazy enough to call it?

There's this strain of thinking in the USA, probably since Vietnam, maybe even Korea, that as a nation we don't fight dirty and seriously, we're too careful about ****. The people who think this way will get giant wood over dropping a huge bomb. It's a sign we're asserting ourselves and taking the gloves off. That's why they announce this ****.

New Mastodon. I can take or leave the song, but the video is fantastic. Love the final scene!

Neil McKinlay is a firefighter too. Was he the guy who was a part-time Lion on top of being a Vancouver firefighter? Also, former bomber Paul Clatney is a firefighter ... according to Wikipedia, dude has had a pretty awesome and varied career: he's been a CFL linebacker, a fireman, an Olympian, a minor-league hockey player, he even had a tryout with the Jays.

Last year they said that S.J. Green would not be ready for camp, he'd need a year of rehab. According to cfl.ca, he's on track to get into camp, though. Real happy to hear this, the league needs guys like SJG on the field. https://www.cfl.ca/2017/04/08/comeback-nearly-complete-injured-s-j-green/

Dunno what this means for the Esks, but I have to say that I prefered that the guy who held the rights to the Next Big QB also hated Chris Jones' guts. So this news is a mild bummer for me.

We played three games last year without Adams / Dressler / Smith. Mayo, not Denmark, was our most productive receiver in two of those games. With about 300 yards in just five games, he was on a 1,000-yard pace last year. Was a bummer to see him go.

This is not a Bomber problem. No team in the CFL is drafting really productive Canadian receivers these days. Check out this list of all the other receivers drafted in the top three rounds since 2013: Haidara, Adjei, Plant, Bailey, MacDonnell, Pierzchalski, Bastien, Demski, Harty, Durant, B. Jones, Smith, Brescacin, M. Jones, Blaszko Not a lot of production there. Durant put up 400 yards last year. Figure it takes a couple years for a CFL draftee to find their feet, we should be seeing receivers from the 2013..2015 classes start to make an impact, but for whatever reason, they're not. Sinopoli and Gore were the last consistently good Canadian receivers to come through the draft, and they were drafted back in 2010/2011. Sinopoli wasn't even drafted as a receiver, he was a QB when he arrived in Calgary and converted later.

Everyone reporting that Mike Flynn will testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. If I weren't on my phone I would post a George Takei "oh my!" gif here.

Yeah, he's falling back on the old Republican standby: "It's Obama's Hillary's Democrats' fault. They had seven years to plan for this. They passed fifty Obamacare repeal bills. And then they got unified control of the American government -- an opportunity that comes along about once a decade. Slam dunk, right? No, they shat down their pantlegs. Imagine a football team entirely composed of Johnny Manziel clones. That's the federal Republican party.

It'll be interesting to see if there's an Ollie North in this crowd of venal shitheads, someone who loyally takes the fall.

Washington State did take the Medicaid expansion. From what KBF says, it sounds like his friend is using the individual market exchange to buy her coverage. The Affordable Care Act has two big parts: The first is the Medicaid expansion, which raises the income limit for medicaid access. Medicaid is wobbly and has issues, but my understanding is that it's much, much better than having no coverage. No medical coverage means the only healthcare you get is on a cash basis, or in the ER. The second part is the health insurance mandate. This is for people who don't qualify for government coverage and who don't have coverage through their job. It tries to force people to buy health insurance by hitting them with a tax penalty if they don't and provides subsidies to make insurance coverage more affordable. The idea is that insurance companies need young, healthy customers to subsidize the older, sicker ones, and the mandate helps insurers do that. Additionally, all health insurance plans have to cover a bunch of stuff like maternity benefits that a lot of people may never need, but it's in their policy anyway. It's like if I bought car insurance and had to buy coverage for an RV as well, even though I don't own an RV. (I think this is a net good; pre-ACA, there were lots of complete junk insurance policies out there that would take your $100 a month and do absolutely nothing for you. But it sure doesn't look good for people looking at an invoice for a thing they're forced to buy.) So yeah, the insurance mandate is super controversial and there are tons of stories about people who have not been well-served by it. Their premiums have gone up and their access has gone down. Some states have only one insurer willing to sell individual insurance policies, the rest don't think they can make any money on them. Additionally you have the brutal optics of governments shoveling money into insurance companies, who are not well-loved. The ACA is in definite need of repair, but I don't think the AHCA really improves it, it destroys a ton of the good stuff in the ACA while improving none of the bad stuff.

I knew Kelvin Anderson was a good back, but I didn't realize he had eight straight 1000-yard seasons. Holy cow, that's amazing. Backs don't last as long these days... I remember a game during O'Shea's rookie year where he had like 20 tackles for the Ti-Cats, he was all over the field, like he was seeing the play a minute before it happened. Soon as I could, I changed my football number to 59. Been a huge fan ever since and was over the moon when the Bombers hired him.

Providers not taking your insurance is a problem for a lot of people in the USA, not just people who are buying individual coverage through the exchanges. I'm working in the tech field, have got prettty decent insurance and I still have to pick and choose providers based on who'll take my insurance, and I've had to fight with my insurance company to cover stuff. For me, it's an inconvenience and a pain but I can certainly see this being a way bigger problem out in the sticks. Were things better for your friend before Obamacare? Does she think that Trumpcare will make things better for her?

The Republicans and associated media have spent eight years playing defence. The only thing they know how to do is "But Obama!" and "Her emails!" Now, suddenly, they have to try to move the ball. Look at the AHCA, the flailing Repeal Obamacare legislation. They've got no playbook, they've got a QB who is despised by his OL, and the head coach is an idiot they hired from some message board, and he'd rather tweet and watch Sportscenter than run a practice.

Yeah, Newman came back from a pretty gruesome injury, I'll always respect that. Good luck to him in his next chapter.

I hope that Dave Winter's work pans out. He's been trying to do this for a long time ... back in 1998, Marty York reported that he had a deal with the league to do a game. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.sport.football.canadian/dave$20winter|sort:relevance/rec.sport.football.canadian/G-uj8E7cu2o/bGHc7HPbtDAJ I can't blame the CFL for holding him at arms' length, though. Nothing against Dave Winter personally, but video games are a rotten business full of pretenders and vaporware and if I were the CFL I'd wanna see a really good demo before opening up my IP.

Mass Effect: Andromeda releases tonight! I'm a huge fan of the series. Hopefully the mixed reviews of the preview are just the usual entitled nerdbleats and the game is up to the standards of the first trilogy.

My votes: Calvillo, Osbaldiston, O'Shea, Simon, Fernandez, Greer Four CFL all-time greats with long and distinguished careers plus two of the most dominant receivers of the eighties.

The "general public" is kind of a nebulous concept. Part of what makes the USA so chaotic is that the general public contains multitudes of people with values that aren't super compatible. Example: the federal government owns scads and scads of western land in sparsely-populated states like Montana and Utah. Grazing rights on those lands are highly highly regulated. Environmentalists, vegetarians, hikers and campers .. none of these folks want expanded grazing on federal lands. Beef ranchers feel differently, and beef ranching is huge in the western US, economically and culturally. So who do we regulate in favor of?

Speaking of EPA mileage regulations....