No, he didn’t. It was not his plane which caused the disaster, though he was in the cockpit of his own jet, I believe. (Unless you have a conspiracy theory?) McCain did lose several planes, though, at least one of which the Navy attributed to pilot error, and was also responsible for an incident in Spain where he…

What I always say is that I think by 2050, assuming we have continuity of professional sports leagues, we’re well on the way to one of two futures:

This has been made more complicated because these days on a lot of teams the President of Basketball Operations is what we think of as the GM, and the guy with the GM title is his executive officer. But if you open it up to “head decision maker guy” ... 20? Some of whom I’d only know because they’ve been in the…

(1) (Filling for chocolate) Hazelnut, you troglodytes. (Drew almost got there when he mentioned Lindt.)

Yes.

relish and mustard.

Because it’s used for the whole area, not the city proper.

I assume Kyrie is delusional. (I am literally right now as I type listening to Brian Windhorst say “[he]’s a big believer in ‘Mamba mentality’”), but:

[looks at diagnostic criteria on Wikipedia] ...

Or build a lot of scorpion/giant crossbow things.

Heh - I’ve read a lot of blog posts informed by that book, but I basically refuse to buy it. It’s the sort of thing that I’m pretty sure would be better if it had been produced after the series was over (yeah, yeah), between careful readers pointing areas that are handled more coyly than the should have been probably…

I believe, off the top of my head, that Martin indicates two times in the history of Westeros that a dragon was killed by not-another-dragon: (1) during the first attempt to conquer Dorne, Aegon the Conqueror’s younger sister-wife was shot out of the sky by one of these very devices. (2) a crowd killed several…

I haven’t watched the show since season 5, but in the time I was watching, every military engagement or campaign not directly cribbed from the books didn’t hold up to scrutiny of tactics, strategy, logistics, numbers, or travel times.

Yeah. LeBron often seems like the guy who demands to get what he wants the way he wants it, and if there’s a player in the league who’s earned that kind of power god knows it’s him, but he does come off as seeming ... insensitive to the consequences. Especially since he returned to the Cavs - which may give credence…

The thing about guys who “at times look like the best player in the league” is that they aren’t the best player in the league, but people treat them like they are. Kyrie is great. He should be a future HoFer if his career arc maintains. But if he genuinely wants to go somewhere else to “be his own man” and that’s not…

“Kyrie wants to get out before the collapse” makes more sense to me than “Kyrie wants to be the focal point”. I guess Irving thinks he’s better than I do.

Not really fair to quote the 1991 article the Times references at length, and not quote fully from the 2017 Times article:

Sure. And this article doesn’t link them directly, but I’ve seen other places, including when other teams were for sale, saying basically “Forbes values the franchise at such and such,” and then go on to speculate as though the sale price were expected to be in that ballpark, where if that really happened it’d be a…

(1) I don’t know how Forbes does these team evaluations, so I’m not going to say they’re “wrong”, but you can look at the last ten years of NBA team sales and find that in that year, Forbes’ value was just about always significantly below the actual sale price.

My favorite dialogue from Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night: