johnzo

Yeah, Taynted is killin it these past few weeks. Just saw High on Fire for the first time live. Holy crap. Most crushing show I've seen in awhile. They've got the perfect metal combination of punishing heaviness and ninja fluidity. I got so caught up in it that I jumped in the pit. I'm a big guy, 6'0" and 220ish and still I got tossed around like a bottle on the ocean. So much fun. And I'm gonna get to see Voivod in a couple months! I've seen them a few times, but never as a headliner. Pumped for that.

Is it true that defensive players are instructed to headhunt the QB on a pick or a turnover? I seem to recall that Anthony Calvillo got totally creamed by a blindside block when he was cruising around pretending to play defence after he threw a pick.

I have heard that amphetamine usage in Major League Baseball has been pretty commonplace for a long time and I bet in other sports as well. Down here in the states it's easy as pie to get an ADD / ADHD diagnosis and a legal speed script. I'm not sure what the league can do, as it's regarded as legit therapy (though I gues other PEDs are legit therapies too) Speed: it's not just for kids anymore!

The United States does not have poor people. It has temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Regarding that long thing about Republican voters voting against their self-interest ... there was a revealing situation in Kentucky last November. First, some background: the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, expanded Medicaid coverage so that more people would receive it. Medicaid is basically government medical insurance, but it's means-tested so not everyone is eligible for it. Thanks to the weirdness and funding of American government, the federal and state governments share funding and control of Medicaid, and thus states could decline the expansion. Some Republican-led states did. However, Kentucky, one of the poorest states in the USA, did accept the Medicaid expansion. Then, last November, they elected a hardcore Tea Party guy as governor. During his campaign, the dude promised he would burn Obamacare out of his state (and throw the newly insured off the Medicaid rolls, though I don't think he ever spelled this out.) People were wondering, how did this guy get elected given the substantial number of people who were going to lose their insurance? There were a lot of them, maybe enough of them to decide the election. Studies showed that a lot of them didn't vote. They didn't show up to the polls. This may be because they're apathetic, or because of vote suppression. One of the Republican planks is that voting is too easy. Republican politicians are generally against early voting, mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, compulsory voting, absentee voting, Sunday voting, or anything else that drives up turnout. There's also a pattern of minority / non-Republican friendly voting areas receiving inadequate voting infrastructure that makes for long, discouraging lines and make it impossible for working people to vote without taking vacation or sick time (which a lot of working people in the USA simply don't have.) Anyway, just after he was sworn in, the Kentucky governor came around and decided not to get rid of Obamacare, but to tweak it somehow.

I am definitely pumped for No Man's Sky. It's weird that it's gonna be on the PS4, it doesn't seem like a console game at all. But I am a big nerd for space sims and I remember the dark times of the 2000s when no one could be bothered to make any, so anything that popularizes them is cool by me. Anyone out there into the turn-based 4x games? I've played a bunch of Galactic Civilizations 3 and I am really keen to see how Stellaris and the rebooted Master of Orion come out. Right now I'm learning to play Cities:Skylines. Trying to figure out how to make a beautiful city with no luck. All mine look like Charlie Brown's xmas tree. It's a golden age of PC gaming right now. Last generation I was totally a console guy but I'm not gonna even bother with an xbone or PS4 this time around. Everything I want to play is on Steam or Gog.

Denmark caught passes from Pierce, Brink, Goltz, Elliott, Hall, Brohm, Willy, Marve, and Davis. Not a lot of star power there, and only two of them are even still in the league. I'd rate TE above Denmark -- Edwards was productive even in games when he was the only decent receiver we could field and was perennially over 1000 yards.

My favorite Ricardo Montalban story: at one point he was the designated ethnic actor in LA -- if you needed to cast a role with any hint of melanin, whether it was Brazilian or Pakistani or Portuguese or Turkish or whatever, you probably cast him. So he was getting a lot of work and one night he wound up on a late night talk show along with a cowboy actor. He was talking in that super sexy rich accent of his, and the cowboy actor started teasing him about talking funny. "When you hear someone speak with an accent," Montalbahn replied, "that means they speak more than one language. How many languages do you speak?" Ever since then, if I hear someone speak with an accent, I think of that story.

In the USA, just like in Canada, your murderer is probably someone you know, most likely a family member. Spectacular mass killings like Sandy Hook where strangers kill a bunch of other strangers get all the news, but in terms of the number of dead, they're like 5% of the total last time I looked. The biggest thing you could do to solve the USA's gun violence problem would be to disarm domestic abusers. I would love to see the cops confiscate guns from anyone who is the subject of a spousal restraining order. I'm sure the mens' rights advocates would scream bloody murder about this but **** 'em.

As a Bomber fan, you've got tons of relevant experience dissecting train wrecks. You'd be a natural to cover this thing. You watched the entire Mike Kelly season, so you're already prepared to cover a guy like Trump.

This one's easy: because the previous rules were stupid in opposite directions. Tobacco smoking rules were too permissive; it's stupid to allow people to light cigars on airplanes and in restaurants. And the dope laws were straight-up tyranny. Society doesn't benefit from jailing potsmokers (and, for a bonus, in the USA those laws were horrendously racist, targeting minorities far more than they targeted white people). And there's more work to be done in the USA on this. To this day, Americans who have any kind of controlled substance bust are ineligible for a bunch of federal stuff -- like student loans. How does it help society to keep 16-year-old Johnny Dopesmoker out of college? So evolving in opposite directions makes complete sense. Here in WA, the rules about smoking are largely harmonized regardless of what you smoke -- no smoking in public places, not within 25' of a doorway, etc. Big exception that I know about is that you have to be 21 years old to buy dope, but only 18 to buy smokes. TF is totally right on dope vs. booze, in my experience. I've known dope addicts and alcoholics and the alcoholics have it far worse. The legalization efforts in the US were all driven by citizen initiatives / referendums. The powers that be were simply uninterested in legalizing dope, they were content to just fill the prisons with bullshit dope convictions and look the other way. To this day, the federal DEA refuses to acknowledge that dope is anything but grease on the slide to hell. In fact, the federal "drug czar" is prohibited by law from ever advocating for a relaxation in drug laws. As for bunk weed, it's interesting to see how the stuff is evolving here. In the bad old days of prohibition, everyone was trying to grow stronger and stronger dope and what you got was straight-up Hypnotoad. Nowadays you see an evolution in the other direction, milder strains are becoming popular because Mr. and Mrs. Dopesmoker don't want to be couchlocked by a single toke.

Seeing as how Odds n' Sods was the only redeeming thing about a lot of Bomber losses .. I wonder if we could get DoD credentialed to cover the Republican convention...

The numbers don't back this up. He finished pretty much as he started. Pro football contracts are so ridiculously one-sided that I almost always side with the player in contract disputes.

Oh man I'd love to have Matt Walter as a Bomber. I was always surprised at how little dropoff I saw in the Calgary running game whenever he spelled Cornish. Having him would give us great roster stability in a position that sees a lot of injuries. We wouldn't have to destabilize another position on the team if Harris went down.

Love that old Argos logo. Way classier than the dumb block A.

I remember my dad telling me, when I was a teenager, that he wouldn't disown me if I married a native woman. (hypothetically speaking, there was no actual native girlfriend in the picture for me at that point) Which was a nice well-intentioned gesture and all, but it says a lot that he felt like he needed to say it at all. This was quite a few years ago, but have things gotten better? Re: white people racism, sure, whites can be discriminated against. But for the most part me and other white people don't have to worry about that kind of ****. This, to me, is the difference between discrimination and racism. It's racism if you're conscious of it all the time, if it dictates your behavior in everyday life. Less "I'll get beaten up if I visit these reservations," and more "The cops are paying extra special attention to me whenever I walk down the street where I live." For instance, once I was walking with a black friend through Seattle. I went to cross against the light and he stopped me even though the intersection was completely free of traffic. "I can't cross against the light because cops are just looking for an excuse," he told me. He was also super anxious about anyone about ever holding any kind of illegal substance when we were driving around together because black people are way more likely to be pulled over than white people, and him being in a car with any kind of dope probably meant he would be arrested, even if he wasn't the holder.

Yeah, consider how hard it is to intercept ballistic missiles, and those are a lot easier to detect and move at about a third the speed (about 5km/s) of the Atlantic meteor.

http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/tim-tebow-fifth-most-popular-quarterback-according-to-poll-022316 I wasn't too alarmed about Trump, I figured his act would wear out and he'd go away. But maybe I was a little too sanguine about this because America's relationship with reality is clearly kinda strained at this point.

The latest thing is transphobia bathroom terror. A dozen American states, out of nowhere*, have suddenly awakened to this menace, labeled it the "War on Gender" and have advanced legislation preventing trans people from using the correct restroom. My own state, Washington, had a bill in committee to prevent access to womens' washrooms by anyone who "possesses male anatomy or male 11 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)." Like they're going to put TSA backscatter x-ray machines and DNA swabs in front of all restrooms in the state? Idiots. It's the politics of fear and division and it's one reason I'll never be a republican. When you punch down and bully people weaker than you in the service of your election prospects, you can go to hell. * not nowhere, there's a bunch named ALEC that coordinates state-level legislation like this across conservative states.

I suspect Marshall is more of a Pat Barnes than a Brandon Browner. Gotta admit it is nice to have that Bomber -> Seahawk pipeline still going tho.

Around here in NFL-land, where everything is so ******* serious, you very rarely see fans wear anything but official player + number combo on their jerseys. When they do, they get written up on jersey fail websites. Whenever I'm watching the CFL live, back in Winnipeg or Vancouver or at the Grey Cup, it's pretty cool to see all the laid-back people doing their own thing and wearing CFL jerseys with their own names on them or with silly nicknames or whatever. Rock on, you chill weirdos.

So who did you wind up getting stitched on your girlfriend's jersey, Noeller?

Just two years ago. Depressing to see how fast things change ... Lirim and Cotton both recommended strongly in this thread. Must .. resist .. urge .. to .. point .. out .. that .. I totally called it on Cotton.

Congrats to the Argos. Nice to see them in a right-sized facility outdoors!

I'd be over the moon if Henoc signed a single-year contract for 2016 with us. Every extra starting national makes our team more robust and injury-proof. Every extra starting national makes it easier to stack our OL with cheap imports. Who cares if he's not loyal to the Blue unto death? In a league of non-guaranteed contracts where team legends like Weston Dressler or Allen Pitts or Geroy Simon can be cut as soon as they are a moment too old or expensive, loyalty is foolish. I also don't care if his agent is an ass. That's Walters' problem. More and more young CFL players are going to be signing single-year contracts, so high-frequency player movement is gonna be something that CFL fans just need to get used to.

Always be a fan of his after that great 2014 season. Best of luck in TO, LH!