Started my journalism career in sports, also in a Midwestern city. Former Brewer Jim Gantner once kicked me out of his college summer league team’s manager office after a loss while I was on deadline. Covering the local summer league was one of my favorite duties - mostly I stayed in the office and took calls from surl…

I once covered a high school soccer playoff game with one of these overzealous dads. The dad was running the sideline, yelling instructions to his daughter who was in the defender position (relatively certain he was not an actual coach on the team). He started shouting some weird instruction to her over and over (I…

Oh man, big plus one for Melon Collie. One of my favorites from the 90s, and one I appreciated more with time. 

I remember naively thinking I was a beer snob, just because I liked fancy beers, until I met actual beer snobs. People with special beer fridges who age beers and actively trade them online, and have ABVs memorized for some of the major microbreweries (are they just breweries at that point?), who can spend more than a…

OK, I really do think that Coach Chaw needs to be Netflix’s next original series, about a down and out Texas football coach trying to do just good enough this season to keep his job. Coach Chaw battles his inner demons and life’s struggles while keeping his players motivated for “footbaw!”

Definitely the best okonomiyaki in Japan is in Osaka. I equal parts horrified and fascinated by this.

Not only that, but they will have to prove that they had a reasonable amount of knowledge that what they ran was probably false. Libel, especially on a public figure, comes with a very high legal bar. 

A real Frank Shirley, that one!

It’s hilarious how it didn’t occur to this sister that the fact that it was local and one day was likely WHY so many people RSVP’d. Somehow she drew the conclusion instead that the high RSVP rate somehow meant everyone would want to then travel to an island for four days.

FWIW Wisconsin doesn’t have road tolls, but they hand you a case of beer when you get your driver’s license, so point taken.

The only appropriate reply is “Um, coach, maybe you should worry less about my posture and more about, oh I don’t know, winning football games maybe?” 

Japanese use of English swear words always cracks me up. BTW, I love that area around PuroPuroLand. The name of the stop escapes me right now, but as I recall it’s a short hop from my host-family’s train stop in Inagi. I wish I could go to lunch at The Don donburi-ya right now!

As someone who once taught English immersion in Japan, I will tell you that’s not typical - while English is taught extensively in the schools, most of it is book learning and very little time is spent on actually speaking the language. The exceptions were children I worked with who had spent time in the US or England…

Federal wire fraud. Essentially the feds were arguing that Adidas representatives committed wire fraud against the school because their payments rendered scholarship-eligible players ineligible to play at NCAA schools because they were being paid (by Adidas reps).

Huh, too bad to hear — I loved MosBurger when I visited Japan. On one of the return flights we were served a build your own MosBurger, which was ridiculously laborious and kind of awesome. (It was like a burger transformer, as you manipulated the box to create the burger.) Hope they figure this out. 

We got one in Wisconsin too!

Very nice writeup and guide - I loved the Eccleston and Tennant eras but I struggled in the later Tennant early Smith era. (I liked River Song a lot though.) I was thinking about just jumping on with the newest, now female, doctor, and after reading this I think I will do just that! Nice work! 

This is my favorite football idea.

“Well then you wait... you wait!”

That was my thought - holy hell. Even without the basement shitting, that dude sounds unhinged.