God, I can’t believe I’ve been paying 8 bucks a month to ESPN for the last 10 years or so since I’ve had cable. That’s a thousand bucks for a channel I have probably watched about 4 hours of cumulatively (the vast majority of my live sports watching is baseball on our local RSN). Cable bundles are the goddamned worst.

I like the Rita story as a parody of the manic pixie dream girl thing, but I agree that stretching it out as long as it did makes it uncomfortable. However, I’ll always love the Rita storyline because it gave us my favorite ending joke. When she walks across the pool and a very emotional Michael asks Gob if it was…

Spoiler Alert: a bunch of cgi magical warriors, in a world that also includes space travel and nuclear weapons, will essentially have a bunch of fistfights to settle the fate of the universe.

But to be clear, as a late-30s dad with young kids, i can confirm that sitting at concerts does indeed rule.

I regularly go to concerts in seated venues with my in-laws that are frequented by the baby-boomer-in-sport-coat crowd. Good shows though, like Lucinda Williams, David Bromberg, and Bonnie Raitt. But anyway, while I generally agree that sitting is cool, it’s awkward when we (led by my wife and mother-in-law) want to…

I know we all love to shit on Dusty Baker for his bizarre opinions and his alleged pitcher murdering, but the man has a lifetime .532 winning percentage as a manager, with 6 95+ winning teams, 7 division titles and a pennant. That’s really good.

I had a VHS tape with all sorts of highlights and goofy footage of the ‘93 Phillies, and I definitely remember that Dykstra, Daulton, Kruk, et al. had a weird little lair somewhere in the bowels of the stadium. There was a tv and couch and they had literally built walls around it made out of cases of beer. It seemed…

Oooh, and another thing to add: Pegboards! I got a 4x8 pegboard to put hand tools on in my basement and a bunch of variously shaped hooks, and now I want to put pegboards all over my house for pretty much everything.

And to add to my love of old stuff, when buying non-power tools, look for the old stuff too. A lot of them tend to last forever and are much higher quality than the new stuff. Old rusty tools that look like shit can often be restored relatively easily. To echo other commenters, estate sales are great. But I’ve gotten…

The biggest thing I learned owning an old house is that it’s usually worth it to try to learn (at least a bit) about traditional techniques and to seek out traditional high quality building materials. Home Depot sells a lot of modern stuff that’s cheap and easy to use (which appeals to DIYers obviously), but doesn’t…

Yeah, the only places around me (in New Jersey - surprise!) that have self-serve water are the microbreweries also. Which is good, because that’s where I do the vast majority of my outside-the-house drinking these days.

Dying by falling into canyons is just one chapter of “Death in Yellowstone.” Grizzly mauling and hot spring boiling is the bulk of the book, and those are far, far worse ways to die.

Just make them wear dorky reflective vests. Now that I’m old enough not to be affected, I don’t care what indignities children have to suffer.

I spent a summer during college working in Yellowstone, and there’s a very similar book, “Death in Yellowstone” (written by the NPS park historian no less!) that pretty much everyone in the park reads. I’ve never read the Grand Canyon one, but I can assure you “Death in Yellowstone” is a much more harrowing read. The…

Extend daylight savings time in the Eastern time zone for the whole year! Who cares if it’s dark in the morning? We should all be sleeping in anyway. Let’s make more use of our precious winter daylight hours in the afternoon/evening when we should all be doing stuff.

Whoa whoa whoa, my kid’s way too young for thematic elements.

What’s with the American flag patch on his sleeve? Does he think because he’s the president’s son he gets to wear some kind of uniform?

Yeah, Lebron to the Sixers would probably be just the thing to get me to care about that team again for the first time since the Iverson days. But god, all the Process trusting would probably just make my head explode.

Here’s a thought. Have whatever vague language you want, but force them to watch replays at normal speed (and maybe even give them a time limit). If you slow down the footage enough, there will always be a minutely detectable wobble. If it looks like a catch on the field, and reviewing several angles of film at normal…

As a dad, I firmly believe that all rock is now dad rock, since the youths seem to pretty much just listen to that new-fangled “electronic” “music,” which is one of the many reasons I insist they stay off my lawn.