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He wanted Mike Pence to overturn the election.
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He personally asked his aides to investigate seizing voting machines.
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He has suggested he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if reelected.
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He asked his supporters to hold “the biggest protests we have ever had” if prosecutors try to hold him accountable.
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He tried to persuade the Georgia secretary of state to find some extra votes for him.
243 regular-season wins.
35 postseason wins.
14 starts in a conference championship game.
10 wins in a conference title game.
10 Super Bowl appearances.
7 Super Bowl wins are a league record.
5 Super Bowl MVP awards.
Ayo Dosunmu’s impact on Illinois Basketball
Michael Bales, writing for Smile Politely, has a nice retrospective on Dosunmu’s Fighting Illini Basketball career. The whole thing is a nice little writeup, but the killer sentence is this:
Illinois may not have won the NCAA tournament in 2021, but thanks to the winning culture Dosunmu helped foster, they will have a serious chance to do so in 2022 and beyond.
That’s the impact. That’s the legacy.
The Washington Commanders
One legacy. One unified future.
— Washington Commanders (@Commanders) February 2, 2022
We are the Washington Commanders #TakeCommand pic.twitter.com/Eav9NOV5Mm
I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it either. I wanted Redtails as the new name and something akin to this concept, which is fantastic.
Drew Magary loves it, but probably not for the reasons the powers-that-be want.
It’s extremely boring, but at least it’s not racist.
Donald Trump is practically daring prosecutors to indict him
Kevin Drum, writing on his site Jabberwoking, marvels at how Donald Trump is out there just incriminating himself.
I haven’t written about the mounting evidence of Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election, mainly because it seems like we’ve known most of this stuff all along. But it’s true that we’re now at a point where Trump is essentially admitting everything in public:
As always, keep in mind that his supporters don’t care about any of this. Thanks to Fox News and others, they believe that Democrats stole the election and therefore Trump was justified in doing practically anything to fight them.
Why hasn’t the Justice Department just arrested him? Was any of this not illegal? This smells like it’s too expensive or time-consuming to actually prosecute and Trump knows it.
Look, Trump nor anyone in his family will ever face serious consequences for their crimes. There are a lot of investigations happening, so maybe something will stick? I’m just not holding my breath.
Tom Brady Retires
In a post on Instagram, Brady formally announced his retirement.
He’s hanging up his cleats to focus his time and energy on his family, businesses, and brands. He might be the greatest quarterback ever. Easily the best I was able to witness.
He holds NFL career records for:
No quarterback will ever win like Brady won.
Illinois and the problem with extremely weird circumstances
Eamonn Brennan, in The Athletic, has a fascinating look at how the NCAA Tournament committee will look at the resume of the Fighting Illini Men’s Basketball team.
On Nov. 15, star guard Andre Curbelo played disastrously in a one-point loss to Marquette, a game Cockburn missed. A week later, both played and scored in double figures as Illinois lost to Cincinnati by 20. OK, then! Thanks to concussion symptoms, Curbelo then missed Illinois’ next 11 games. Illinois went 10-1, with the lone loss coming narrowly at home to Arizona. Cockburn was brilliant throughout.
The duo finally got back on the floor together Jan. 17, against Purdue, for a game that fully showcased Curbelo’s dynamic potential when he’s playing well; ironically, it was perhaps in defeat that Illinois best showed what it might be capable of at full strength. Then, Cockburn missed Illinois’s trip to moribund Maryland with a concussion of his own, and the Illinois lost 81-65.
Then both players missed Jan. 25’s game against Michigan State … which Illinois won anyway! True story! And then Cockburn, but not Curbelo, who is in COVID-19 protocols at present, returned for the Northwestern escape last weekend.
Did you get all of that? Are you following? You’d surely need some kind of visual aid to do so.
It will be interesting to see how the committee sees it overall.
Mondays
Nicholas Bate, offering up more ideas about Monday.
Have no fear. Stare it straight in the eyes. Choose the play-list carefully.
Monday: a nomenclature, an attitude, a day in the schedule.
Not a reality.
Roses are red…
When you hear a rhyme which goes: Roses are Red, Violets are ‘Blue’… You need to prepare yourself to hear something which is at best only partly true.
Reboot
Nicholas Bate on productivity.
Use the time-period change to re-focus.
At the end of the day, consider tomorrow.
At the end of the week, consider next week.
At the end of the month, consider next month.
Consider? That’s plan, anticipate and schedule.
Howard Hessman, RIP
J. Kim Murphy, writing for Variety, has the news.
Howard Hesseman, a prolific character actor who became a beloved TV mainstay through his roles on sitcoms “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Head of the Class,” died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles of complications from colon surgery he had undergone last summer. He was 81 years old.
He was amazing on so many things.
My favorite is when he “wakes up” and creates the immortal Dr. Johnny Fever.
10 Things College Doesn’t Teach You
Matt D’Avella made a cool video about college and after. His videos are always smart and entertaining.
College rarely prepares you with practical life advice that will help you keep your shit together. But hey, who needs a six-figure degree when you have YouTube? In this video I want to dive into the 10 biggest things college doesn’t teach you.
Getting it Back
Peter Jackson’s Get Back has, rightfully, been much-discussed. This essay by Ian Leslie, for his site The Ruffian, is one of my favorite takes.
I think this is the definitive examination on Get Back. Perfect long read on a lazy Sunday.
This is Joe Rogan?
This is the worst rendition of “Who’s on First?” I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/YneZcoOmQU
— Robin Tran 🏳️⚧️ (@robintran04) January 26, 2022
I don’t give a shit about Joe Rogan, but this clip makes me think he has some of the stupidest people ever on his show. I highly recommend that you all watch the full conversation right here. There’s so much to learn and discuss, and I’m sure you’ll all spend the evening doing just that in the comments section.
Searching for Suzy Thunder
A really entertaining and interesting piece by Claire Evans about Susan Thunder aka Susan Headley, a pioneering phone phreaker and computer hacker who ran with the likes of Kevin Mitnick and then just quietly disappeared. This is just a wild, perfect profile.
She was known, back then, as Susan Thunder. For someone in the business of deception, she stood out: she was unusually tall, wide-hipped, with a mane of light blonde hair and a wardrobe of jackets embroidered with band logos, spoils from an adolescence spent as an infamous rock groupie. Her backstage conquests had given her a taste for quaaludes and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine; they’d also given her the ability to sneak in anywhere.
Susan found her way into the hacker underground through the phone network. In the late 1970s, Los Angeles was a hotbed of telephone culture: you could dial-a-joke, dial-a-horoscope, even dial-a-prayer. Susan spent most of her days hanging around on 24-hour conference lines, socializing with obsessives with code names like Dan Dual Phase and Regina Watts Towers. Some called themselves phone phreakers and studied the Bell network inside out; like Susan’s groupie friends, they knew how to find all the back doors.
When the phone system went electric, the LA phreakers studied its interlinked networks with equal interest, meeting occasionally at a Shakey’s Pizza parlor in Hollywood to share what they’d learned: ways to skim free long-distance calls, void bills, and spy on one another. Eventually, some of them began to think of themselves as computer phreakers, and then hackers, as they graduated from the tables at Shakey’s to dedicated bulletin board systems, or BBSes.
Susan followed suit. Her specialty was social engineering. She was a master at manipulating people, and she wasn’t above using seduction to gain access to unauthorized information. Over the phone, she could convince anyone of anything. Her voice honey-sweet, she’d pose as a telephone operator, a clerk, or an overworked secretary: I’m sorry, my boss needs to change his password, can you help me out?
Among her many accomplishments: nearly taking the LA phone system offline; sleeping with all four Beatles … you honestly couldn’t make this stuff up. It is wonderful.
The Important Thing
The important thing to remember about the VR Metaverse is that it’s not going to happen.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) January 26, 2022
Behind the Scenes of DeMar DeRozan and Ayo Dosunmu
When Ayo had his Illinois jersey retired, DeMar had to be there to support 🙌@AyoDos_11 | @IlliniMBB pic.twitter.com/UZELryl7Az
— Chicago Bulls (@chicagobulls) January 25, 2022
What a great video.
A Non-Zero Life
From Shawn Blanc –
As anyone who knows about building habits, long-term consistency is everything. There is an idea with habits and routines that you always want a non-zero day. A non-zero day is a day where you at least do something — just so long as you don’t do nothing: Do at least one push-up, floss at least one tooth, write for at least 1 minute, etc. Non-zero days keep your momentum always moving forward.
A few weeks ago, the thought occurred to me about having more than just a non-zero day — but rather, a Non-Zero Life.
A Non-Zero Life means building simple-but-healthy habits you can do every day that impact every area of your life: Your career, your health, your relationships, your money, your inner-personal life… Don’t let one of these areas slip away.
I am so incredibly bad at this.
The Unvaccinated Are the Extreme Fringe
Will Leitch on how finally the unvaccinated are the extreme fringe.
People like Djokovic — and Aaron Rodgers, and Kyrie Irving, and Joe Rogan, and Ice Cube — always think people are on their side, like they’re the leaders of some sort of vast movement, like they have public opinion entirely on their side. But they don’t. They’re in the vast minority. And it’s not just that: It’s that most people are absolutely furious about their vaccine stand, and they’re not going to stand for it anymore. People like Rogan believe the majority of people are on their side because that small number of people who are on their side are so loud. But being loud does not make you plentiful.
It is so tiresome to have these loud people dominating the conversation when a vast majority would prefer, they just shut up.
Dumb
I can’t stop thinking about how dumb the Cowboys-49ers game was. I don’t watch much NFL football, but I did have this game on in the background. The last play of the game, a shockingly dumb call that had Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott run the ball up the middle with 14 seconds and no timeouts left, slide down, then attempt to get his team lined up for a spike, only for the clock to run out after the center tried to place the ball himself instead of letting the referee do it, as the rule states was mind-numbing in its ineptitude.
Mini-Golf in Gerrymandered Districts
The Washington Post has an interactive game that’s smart and fun.
This is more fun than it should be.
