At this stage, nobody knows how good this Illinois Basketball squad will be. As of right now, a couple of players aren’t even yet on campus. In the meantime, we get fun videos of the team running pickup games. I’ll take it.

There were so many lies that needed checking from the debate… Here’s one from PBS. Here’s one from NBC. Here’s one from CNN. Here’s one from the Associated Press. Here’s one from _The New York Times_. Here’s one from ABC. Here’s one from USA Today. It would have been really good to have these happening as the debate was going on with the moderators, like real journalists.

This show happened on my birthday and I really wanted to go. Ace and Peter screwing up “Deuce" is about right. I ended up seeing this exact same show a few nights later in St. Louis.

Will Riley, the newest, arguably most exciting and last member of the Illinois men’s basketball roster won’t be brought along slowly despite entering the college game a full year early. Coach Underwood said, “I think he’s got a ceiling and gives us a ceiling that can be very, very high on that end of the court.”

In other news, Terrance Shannon Jr. was drafted in the first round by the Timberwolves. It’s a big deal.

And while we're on the subject, let's all practice some more. Repeat after me.

yah-koo-CHOH-nis. yah-koo-CHOH-nis.
EE-vee-sitch. EE-vee-sitch.
HUM-rick-house. HUM-rick-house.

— Robert Rosenthal (@ALionEye) June 25, 2024

Keep it for reference later.

Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery repair with visible “scars.” The Brazilian advertising firm Leo Burnett Tailor Made came up with the clever idea of selling tubes of Oreo frosting so that people could repair their broken Oreos in the same way. In the promotional video, the agency expresses that it hopes to convey that customers saddened by their broken Oreos can create a new narrative for their traumatized cookies.

Extremely important: _Scientific American_ has a piece on how the dual-heart cardiovascular system of a Time Lord might work.

Illinois Athletics has released an amazing video. It captures the raw emotions of being a student-athlete at the University of Illinois and showcases every sport.

I love every second of this. Every. Second.

Perplexity is a powerful and effective search tool. No invasive ads, surveillance, or other crap. It presents you with a simple, footnoted explanation of exactly what you’re looking for.

The problem, according to a _Wired_ investigation, is that it “is able to achieve this partly through apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want accessed by bots…" That’s not cool.

Even worse: Perplexity then plagiarized the story about how Perplexity is a bullshit machine.

Ramin Setoodeh has written a book about Donald Trump called _Apprentice in Wonderland_. For the book, he interviewed Trump six times, and the things he witnessed were mind-blowing.

Trump’s grasp on reality was never that firm, but now, what’s left of his brain is in free-fall. If he’s elected in November, he’ll just be handled by the Project 2025 group, and that shit is really bad. Seriously, everyone should vote Democrat in November.

Willie Mays, one of the best players ever in baseball, passed away on June 18th, 2024.

Obviously, he was the greatest San Francisco Giants player. The “Say hey kid” made one of the most iconic plays in baseball history in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. Some say he was the best baseball player ever.

For many, he was baseball.

The four members of R.E.M. were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and sat down with CBS Mornings Anthony Mason to discuss the honor, their careers, their opposition to a reunion, and more.

I was never a big R.E.M. fan, but I respect their music.

The jury in Kansas deliberated for only 90 minutes and came back with a full acquittal over the rape and sexual battery charges the former Illinois basketball star Terrance Shannon Jr. had to endure for most of last season.

I can’t imagine the ordeal he was put under and how well he handled the situation. Many people would have crumbled. He did not.

Jonas Hollerup Helle is a visual artist from Copenhagen who created The Talk. He recut old episodes of Charlie Rose to have notable people interviewing each other. Bernie Sanders and Slavoj Zizek. A very funny Will Smith/Chris Rock. And a meeting between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams that has the strong vibe of being a conversation in the afterlife. However, that piece has a sequel. And it is _chilling_.

Since 1982, people have admired the drawing by the late Patrick Nagel that graced the cover of the Duran Duran album _Rio_. But who was the model that inspired it? The mystery has been solved 42 years later.

Apple crammed an overwhelming number of new features into its WWDC 2024 keynote event. This video showcases the highlights. The proofread/rewrite tool may have just killed Grammarly.

I’m a big fan of vanilla. I love the smell and taste of vanilla. I add it to my coffee, use it in my aromatherapy, body wash, and cologne, and, of course, I love vanilla ice cream. Apparently, this is the best ice cream. I’ll have to try some.