johnzo

His first half in the 2016 semifinal against BC was pretty great. Still grumpy we let that one get away...

This is the first time we've beat Calgary in a game that mattered in a long, long time. HH to Hecht -- I groaned when I saw we were playing a replacement safety against BLM and I was anticipating eating some big time pain down the deep middle of the field .. but didn't hear his name called a lot by TSN.

This is beautiful. A print of this would look so good in my living room....

Wow, this is a great highlight reel -- brings back a lot of great memories from my first five years as a bomber fan. Thanks for posting it

Great response! Thanks TUP.

Yup, in Seattle. thanks for offering to answer questions! Here's the main one: how tightly is a match scripted? do the wrestlers know all the moves they're going to do ahead of time or are they improvising sometimes?

So I wasn't really a wrestling fan for the first 46 years of my life, but my wife and I just fell hard for Lucha Underground, we've been binging it on Netflix for the past few weeks. We're just hitting Ultima Lucha Dos now. And I hear from my friends that our local promotion, 3-2-1- Battle, is pretty great so we're gonna check that out. I have a ton of questions about how wrestling works from the inside, if people don't mind me asking 'em here.

Rachid Taha, Algerian rai-rock fusion performer, died yesterday at 59. He was most well-known in North America for this song, which was featured on the Black Hawk Down soundtrack. I saw him live about a decade ago and it was one of the top five shows of my life. Dude and his band tore the place up.

I think punters are getting better at placing their kicks. You look at long kick returns, most of them happen when the kick lands between the hashes. Today, punters kick the ball between the numbers and the sidelines, exactly deep enough for the cover team to arrive just after the ball does. I bet if someone charted it out they'd see that the majority of big punt returns happen when the punter outkicks the coverage and puts it in the middle of the field.

Growing up in the eighties, I thought awesome Canadian slotbacks were a Bomber birthright, from House / Poplawski through Alphin / Wilcox. Man it would be awesome if Petermann and Wolitarsky hit those heights.... Petermann wore 71 in training camp, shoulda kept it, that number looks good on a Canadian receiver.

not posting much now morningbigblue not as fun when team is slumping

In other US news, students at the University of North Carolina have torn down Silent Sam, a Confederate monument, Saddam-style. They are technically vandals, yes, and ideally that's not the way that change happens in a country with the rule of law. But let's check out the context of the statue -- here is an excerpt from the speech dedicating it. It is ******* vile stuff so I'm gonna put it behind a spoiler. So yeah, tear that motherfucker down. I'll chip in for legal fees. (just to bring it home, Brian Walker and Travis Bond played at UNC)

The Manafort jury has reached consensus on all but one of the 18 charges against him, so this could be a Very Big Week for Trump henchmen and the courts.

She was the Queen of Soul, but now she's a goddess. RIP Ms. Franklin.

It's confirmed that Manziel's absence was for concussion protocol: https://canoe.com/sports/football/cfl/alouettes-put-quarterback-johnny-manziel-under-concussion-protocol Pipkin likely to start this week. Fifth starting quarterback in nine games. Good lord.

The Als scored a go-ahead touchdown on the play when he was hit and it looked like he was turning the corner and starting to move the team. From a winning-football-games standpoint, the Als had every reason to leave him in.

So yeah, you've got both of them lined up on the punt team, you've got a lot of different fake options for the opposing STC to think about, and since Bennett appears to have some tackling skills you're not sacrificing any coverage ability with him in there.

You should know that the CFL is totally chill about protests that take place during the nation anthem. I suspect that a lot of American-born CFL players hold the same beliefs as NFL players -- when the police brutality protests were at their height last fall, there were a number of news articles asking the opinion of CFL players and my memory is that they were pretty sympathetic to the protesters...

Welcome Doug! I am Canadian born and live in Seattle now, but my wife is from southern Colorado and I have fallen in with a bunch of folks who've moved up here from ABQ so I've eaten a lot of green chiles and hooo boy nothing I ever ate in Canada prepared me for how goddamn delicious they are. You want some good Southwest / Canadian fusion eating, try green chile poutine -- just use a green chile burrito sauce instead of brown gravy.

Wonder if Briggs will be the other upback ... all kinds of fake possibilities with Briggs and Bennett in there.

Amazing how he turned it around after Austin was replaced .. he looked completely done in the first half of 2017. Wonder if Ernest Jackson will have a similar turnaround if/when he escapes the Als.

I remember when Zontar asked here about Westerman, everyone talked up how he got one major foul a game, usually at the worst time. So there ya go, Zontar. Westerman wasn't the decapitation shot, though, that was the linebacker Dean who took Nichols down by the face mask ... Westerman's was the horsecollar tackle from the front, a call I've never heard before.

Anyway, this Ingraham stuff is pretty ******* scary. I am a legal immigrant to the USA. I don't feel personally targeted by the current administration because I'm the whitest goddamn person on the planet (I'm mostly English + Danish) and my record is squeaky-clean here ... but every time I see a headline about targeting legal immigrants I get a little nervous. I need to get my ass naturalized soon, because this is my home, and I need to feel secure in it, and also being able to vote will be good. Just in case anyone is curious -- I don't resent "illegal" immigrants because I got to emigrate to the USA by choice, I was at the end of a bad relationship and needed a change, and hey, why not Seattle? But I could have moved anywhere in Canada, or a lot of other countries, and I would've been fine. I didn't come to the USA under duress, because my home country is a bomb-paved hellscape, or because there's no other way I can support my family, or because my government is killing people of my religion. A lot of those folks have faced enormous hardship that I simply can't imagine, and once they're here, they are paying taxes and working hard -- much, much harder than I do, with my super cushy office rocket programming job. And so I'm not going to condemn those folks on the basis of them being on the wrong side of a border as a survival strategy.

I dunno if the Irish and Italians and especially the Jews were welcomed back in the day, or even considered "white." There's lots of examples of violence and organization against them .... tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were turned away from America in the world war years. Which makes it especially galling to see people like Bill O'Reilly -- the descendant of Irish refugees -- going on about how refugees and immigrants suck.

O'Connor would have to win the remaining votes 70-30 to pull this off, and that's assuming no provisional ballots are discarded. It could happen, but I think this election is in garbage time. Tho of course O'Connor should do everything he's entitled to do to make sure the ballots have been cast and counted correctly.