IKEA Monkey

Let’s talk about the unwritten rules of being a baseball fan. They’re incredibly important. Wait, no, they’re silly. Incredibly silly. OK, both.

“What we gotta do is trade a first-rounder in 2021 and some prospects for Mike Trout.”

— Talk Radio Steve, banging that dial and sharing his thoughts

We need a reliever. We just need to hit in the clutch. We need to score a run here. People have used the majestic plural to describe a sports team since it was invented by Jean-Paul Sportstême in 1783.

It’s bad, and you shouldn’t do it.

But we can at least add context to this impulse. I’ve done it without thinking, and I’m here to talk you through it. The desire to use the royal “we” is strong, and it’s not entirely without logic, especially when it comes to baseball teams. It goes something like this:

Point: Baseball games are long. Baseball seasons are long.

We’re talking 162 games a year, three hours a pop. That’s 486 hours, but you’re not including extra innings and the MLB All-Star Game and maybe a couple of games you attend in person or the pre-game show or the post-game show or the post-postgame show, which is definitely the best part of baseball in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s social media and talking about the team with friends and family. There are a lot of ways to spend time on a baseball team.

Let’s call it 400 hours a season. This is the equivalent of 50 eight-hour days or 10 work weeks. If you work a regular full-time job, think of 20 percent of your day, every day, going toward baseball. It’s an absolute time sink, this weird sport.

Now think of it after a decade. 4,000 hours. That’s 166 days, except nobody stays up 24 hours a day. If you think of them as waking days of 12 hours, you’re talking a year. A year of your life — a year out of your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, what have you — spent following the ups and downs of a sports team.

You might feel like you’re a part of something. You’ve committed an unhealthy amount of your life to this hobby, and it defines you in a way. When you’re talking about this hobby, you’re going to reference the chunk of your soul that has detached from your body and attached itself, remora-like, onto the side of a sportsball team.

We need a reliever. This collection of 25 players, the manager that decides how best to deploy them, the general manager who builds the team, and the person who spends a fifth of his or her waking life on all of them. They all need a reliever. It’s entirely natural when it’s put it like that.

At the same time, you’re not on the plane from Arizona to Cincinnati to Chicago to Milwaukee and back again. You’re not enduring hours and hours and hours and hours of rehab work to come back from a torn ligament. For you, a dude goes away to Tommy John Land and then reappears as a plot twist in Season 2. You’re not getting yelled at on the road or catching flak at home when your tweets suck for two weeks straight. You’re sleeping in your own bed, most of the time.

You’re not on the team. It stinks, I know, but you didn’t make the cut. They posted the roster at the end of spring, and I’m sorry, but you’re not on the team. Therefore, I’m not so sure if the “we” is appropriate.

It’s hard to blame someone for slipping, though. When someone commits this much to something, they’re a part of a tribe. Film nerds, Deadheads, baseball card collectors, Pokemon Go enthusiasts ... it doesn’t matter. And when it comes to sports, where the idea is to best the rivals in a zero-sum competition, it absolutely feels like you’re an essential part of this. Your cheers, your positive vibes — heck, your cash money — are a small part of the team’s successes or failures.

I go back and forth on this. It’s such a minor infraction and so easy to understand. What is sports without fan participation? Aren’t fans the reason this whole business exists in the first place? Why not let them be a part of this and use the royal we?

Counterpoint: Maybe make the tiniest effort to stop saying “we” about your sports team

In other words, stop it.

Oh, that sketch didn’t age well as we all reevaluate how we discuss mental health, but it sure applies to this scenario. If you use “we” when discussing a professional sports team’s exploits, consider stopping it. Just catch yourself and make a mental note not to do it next time. There was a time when I kept saying “Yeaahhh baby” in an Austin Powers voice, and then I stopped it. We can all get through this together.

It will take time. It will be rough, and I applaud your efforts. Sometimes I still want to bust out a “Yeaahhh baby” at a completely inappropriate time, like a parent-teacher conference, but ...

I get it, you’ve invested a whole mess of time in this, and so have I.

At the same time, stop it. Saying “we” when referring to a sports team is weird, and you will be judged. Thank you.

Stop it.

Temperatures across the United States plummeted today, with parts of the Midwest experiencing wind chills of 40, 50, even 60 degrees below zero—and that’s in Fahrenheit. As if frozen pipes and frostbite weren’t dangerous enough, some folks are learning about one of the rarer, scarier side effects of super-cold…

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Or Alabama or Clemson, if you prefer boring bets.

The college football offseason is upon us, but you can already place bets on who will win the national championship. Caesars Palace has released odds for every single FBS team in the country, and just look at how glorious it is:

Sure, the odds that matter are probably ones like Alabama 5/2, Clemson 2/1, Georgia 6/1, Oklahoma 20/1, and so on. But folks, the real intriguing bets lie with the 10,000/1 teams.

Sure, there are probably a lot better things to bet on than something this far in advance ...

I won’t claim that there is never a good opportunity to bet a national championship future. However, I do not see anything in this group that I identify as value.

For me to put my money down on a wager 11 months in advance, it had better be something that screams value, almost to the point of having been mistakenly offered by the casino. Something like a team I believe should be the top favorite being offered at 10/1 or better, or a team with an excellent shot to actually make the Playoff being offered at 30/1. I do not see that opportunity here.

Keep in mind that on a normal game wager with -110 odds for each side, the house’s expected margin is 4.7 percent. However, with these odds, its expected margin is roughly 41 percent, 10 times that of a normal bet.

... but on the other hand YOLO, and look at all of these 10,000/1 teams you can bet on!

• Akron
• Ball State
• Bowling Green
• Central Michigan
• Charlotte
• Coastal Carolina
• Colorado State: Maybe this wouldn’t be the case if you RUN THE DAMN BALL, BOBO.
• UConn: Probably a little too low if you ask me, tbh. The Huskies gave up 50 points a game last year, just saying.

• Georgia State
• Kent State
• Liberty: No respect for Hugh Freeze and Jesus handling his junk in Year 1, smh.
• UMass
• New Mexico
• New Mexico State
• Old Dominion: The Monarchs upset then-No. 14 Virginia Tech last season, come on, Vegas!
• Rice
• San Jose State
• South Alabama
• Texas State
• UTEP
• UTSA
• Western Kentucky

Other than laughing at these longshot odds, this again shows how lopsided college football is, especially in FBS, and how hard it is to compete with the big programs if you’re a smaller school. With 130 teams and only five power conferences, your chances at winning a title are pretty slim. It’s a really small window to begin with:

The sport where teams only play 10 percent of the other teams at their level is the one with the smallest playoff of any major American league.

Look, I’m not saying that placing a bet on any one of these teams will yield any sort of positive result, but if you wanna brag about putting your money down on Texas State or UConn to win the national title, you now can.

More people should eat pasta for breakfast. The combination of carbs, fat, and (sometimes) protein welcomes one into the world in a most comforting way, and often there is cheese. It also tends to reheat well, which means you can make a big batch and eat from it throughout the week. There is no downside.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Do you want to get some weed?" asked my friend Lee one evening. "I only usually smoke if there's something to munch on," replied my other friend, Tony. "Smoking and munching go hand-in-hand for me. It's an essential part of the experience. Your cupboard's fucking bare, so I think I'll pass."

Lee pointed out that any dealer we called would pass a 24-hour supermarket en route to us. And what do supermarkets sell? Chips. This kicked off a long argument about whether or not a dealer they hardly knew would bother going to the store for them, and precisely how far you could push the dealer/customer relationship. Would someone selling weed run other errands in return for cash, or would he want to stick strictly to his job description? We decided to call one up and find out.

Surprisingly, the dealer had no problem dropping off the chips. I don't smoke weed and hadn’t been too bothered about the outcome until that point, but the fact that he was willing to pick up and deliver a perfectly legal product got me thinking how far we could take this. Would they bring over non-food items? What was the most out-there thing I could feasibly pick up?

Over the next few days, I came up with a list of progressively more contrived items to request, each one requiring a greater amount of effort on the dealers' part than the last. Yes, cocaine might be stronger than ever, and dealers might have diversified into Xanax and 2C-B. But can they handle a quiche? Let's find out!

1. Rolling Papers

I gathered the numbers of 15 dealers and had five items planned, meaning I had three tries for each—but figured I'd preserve a few with the early requests. Turns out I was wrong.

Rizla rolling papers are a fairly plausible request of a weed dealer, no? You wouldn't go to a restaurant and not be handed a knife and fork; my thinking was that the same logic applied here. However, after offering all three dealers an extra ten bucks to pick me up some skins, two of the guys said they weren't going to be around for a few days, while the third sounded really paranoid and kept asking why I didn't just go to the store myself. A fair question, but also: Did he consider that he'd be making at least a $9 profit? We'll never know. He said he'd call me back twice, then ghosted me.

2. Victoria Sponge Cake

The next thing on the list was a homemade Victoria sponge cake. The logic here was to test whether dealers would be willing to extend to cooked foods, or if their limits lay at delivering simple packaged snacks, like chips. This time, I developed a detailed back-story.

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“It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the President of the United States told an assemblage of news anchors at an off-the-record White House meeting some weeks ago. “But I’m still doing it.” To a certain extent, that groaning is just standard Trump shit—his signature all-caps triumphalism is balanced by an equal…

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Water is cool, but fizzy, fruity seltzer water is more fun. And right now, you can load up on tons of fun with the help of an Amazon coupon. Get an 18-count original sampler pack of Bubly sparkling water for just $9 after the coupon is clipped, and start sipping on an assortment delicious seltzer from sun up to sun…

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Cardi B is well known for her rigor in political science, her fandom of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her keen interest in current events. She is also known for not suffering fools and, over the last couple of days, has had to educate some unfortunate people who have come for her regarding her political cognizance.…

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I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump made an untenable case Saturday that a Mexican border wall would be a magic bullet for America's drug problem.

A diocese in Kentucky has apologized after videos emerged showing students from an all-male Catholic high school mocking Native Americans outside the Lincoln Memorial after a rally in Washington.

The Indigenous Peoples March in Washington on Friday coincided with the March for Life, which drew...

On January 18, Washington D.C. hosted both the March for Life and the Indigenous Peoples March. A viral video shows dozens of teenagers from the March for Life, many wearing MAGA hats, taunting and mocking a Native American drummer.

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If the January blues hadn't already got to you... the world's cutest dog, Boo, has died of a broken heart.

Every now and again, a film project floats its way across our desk for which no reasonable response is possible, save one: “Hey, nice!” Such is the fate of The Lovebirds, a new romantic comedy set to star certified A.V. Club favorites Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani as a couple on the run. Toss in the fact that it’s…

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This article contains plot details from A Simple Favor.

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Donald Trump’s personal lawyer has insisted he “never said there was no collusion” between the president’s campaign team and Russia. Rudy Giuliani said he had “no idea” if campaign staffers had been working with the Kremlin ahead of the 2016 election, and only knew that Mr Trump had not. The remarkable claim came during a CNN interview on Wednesday in which the former New York mayor complained about “false reporting” of the Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Cabin crew for international airline Malindo Air have been accused of helping to smuggle heroin and methamphetamine worth millions of dollars from Asia to Australian cities, as part of a multinational syndicate.

When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease called fatal familial insomnia, she soon found out that she had inherited the disease, that there was no cure, and that she’d be dead in “a decade or two”. Despite almost no scientific training, Vallabh and her husband both quit their jobs to work on a cure. Talk about going all-in.

Within a few weeks of the diagnosis, Sonia had quit her job to study science full time, continuing classes at MIT during the day and enrolling in a night class in biology at Harvard’s extension school. The pair lived off savings and Eric’s salary. Sonia had expected to take a temporary sabbatical from her real life, but soon textbooks and academic articles weren’t enough. “The practice of science and the classroom version of science are such different animals,” Sonia says. She wanted to try her hand in the lab. She found a position as a technician with a research group focusing on Huntington’s disease. Eric, not wanting to be left behind, quit his job too and offered his data-crunching expertise to a genetics lab. The deeper they dove into science, the more they began to fixate on finding a cure.

They’re now on the brink of getting their Harvard PhDs and are pushing ahead with a promising medical therapy.

As soon as the couple began their presentation, Lander says, there was a sense of “pushing on an open door” — quite a surprise, given the agency’s stodgy reputation. “People still flat-out don’t believe the FDA was cool with it,” Minikel says. Afterward, one of the 25 scientists in the audience pulled Lander aside and said, “That was one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen.” Schreiber agreed. He alluded to a pharmaceutical company he’d helped set up early in his career. “Twenty-four years into that company, there was nothing to show for it. Not one thing,” he says. “For two graduate students who are not trained in science to come in and do what they did? Absolute forces of nature, savants. They keep seeing things that other people don’t see.”

Update: D.T. Max wrote a book on prions and prion-based diseases called The Family That Couldn’t Sleep. I looked in the kottke.org archives and found a 2010 post on a National Geographic article Max wrote about sleep that specifically referenced fatal familial insomnia:

The main symptom of FFI, as the disease is often called, is the inability to sleep. First the ability to nap disappears, then the ability to get a full night’s sleep, until the patient cannot sleep at all. The syndrome usually strikes when the sufferer is in his or her 50s, ordinarily lasts about a year, and, as the name indicates, always ends in death.

(via @mattbucher)

Tags: D.T. Max   medicine   science   Sonia Vallabh

Late night's flaming orange beacon of light-turned-intrepid podcaster Conan O'Brien sat down for a chat with Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times recently to talk about his revamped TBS show. It was a fantastic interview, which isn't all that surprising considering O'Brien has repeatedly proven himself to be one of the sharpest and most lucid conversationalists in the business. But in between some lively chatter about his creative process and personal life, O'Brien took a brief break to offer us readers an important reminder about our own lives—namely, that they are insignificant and mean absolutely nothing to the cold and indifferent universe.

It all started casually enough, with a question from Itzkoff about how O'Brien wants to "go out," before O'Brien veered into an existential pit of despair fast enough to make Jean-Paul Sartre's googly-eyes spin.

"At this point in my career, I could go out with a grand, 21-gun salute, and climb into a rocket and the entire Supreme Court walks out and they jointly press a button, I’m shot up into the air and there’s an explosion and it’s orange and it spells, 'Good night and God love,'" O'Brien said. "In this culture? Two years later, it’s going to be, 'Who’s Conan?' This is going to sound grim, but eventually, all our graves go unattended."

He just keeps getting darker from there:

You’re right, that does sound grim.

Sorry. Calvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I’ve been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there. And by the way, I’m the only late-night host that has been to Calvin Coolidge’s grave. I think’s that what separates me from the other hosts.

I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.” None of it matters? “No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.”

Somehow, though, this bleak thought-spiral apparently doesn't get O'Brien down. As he put it, it actually gives him a sense of relief. "It’s so funny because you’d think that would depress me," he said. "I was walking on air after that."

So there you have it, folks. All apologies to Silent Cal and the genius of Clark Gable, but Conan is right. All your great hopes and dreams and successes and failures add up to nothing. Everyone you know and love will eventually be forgotten and rot silently in the ground where they will, if they're lucky, help feed the roots of a tree that will rot and die itself, and on and on until the sun someday explodes and swallows the Earth in a fiery, violent, wholly meaningless end.

At least we have Conan's new show to watch in the meantime!

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The tone of Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club is reminiscent of that fuzzy feeling at 4 p.m. on a Saturday after a long night of partying and a shorter morning of napping, when you’re no longer fucked up but still definitely not right. Even with that said, the show took a particularly bizarre turn Monday night by going full…

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The vast majority of us eat pizza, and we all have preferred toppings we stick to as strongly as we do to our favorite sports teams or beloved Sopranos episodes. Personally, I gravitate toward pepperoni and mushroom. No anchovies, please.

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Whoa ...

UCLA’s Katelyn Ohashi dropped pure fire on Saturday night with a perfect 10 gymnastics routine that had absolutely everything.

An ode to music of the late-70s and 80s, Ohashi’s performance is just so much friggin fun. Since UCLA uploaded the video early Sunday it’s been viewed over 15 million times, and everyone is picking out their favorite moments.

This performance wasn’t the first time Ohashi had the most fun on the mat, or performed to Michael Jackson either.

There’s something just amazing about the amount of fun she’s having while performing. We’re used to gymnastics being precision-based to the point of nerve-wracking intensity. Ohashi went out there and just let it fly, and we were left with something truly stunning.

President Donald Trump somehow managed to transcend absurdity on Monday evening when he welcomed South Carolina’s Clemson Tigers to celebrate the team’s recent national champion win, by serving them only the finest spread of fast food offerings. Piles of burgers, fries, and salads from McDonald’s and Wendy’s sat on priceless White House silver trays, with packets of dipping sauces perched in gravy boats.

Trump claimed that he chose the menu due to the government shutdown, being that White House staff, including chefs, are furloughed, while bragging that he was paying for the fine meal out of pocket. Which is all well and good but you’d think that an alleged billionaire could dip a little deep into his pockets to hire legitimate caterers.

But that’s neither here nor there, because while continuing to pat himself on his back for the grand gesture, Trump tweeted out one hell of a whopper (pun intended) on Tuesday morning.

“Great being with the National Champion Clemson Tigers last night at the White House. Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamberders etc.,” tweeted Trump. “Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!”

Where to begin. Aside from the fact that there were absolutely in no way over one thousand burgers on the table (earlier that day, he told reporters 300), literally the president of the United States spelled the word “hamburgers” as “hamberders.” It seems as if he was going for “hambergers” — which, to be 100 percent clear, would still have been incorrect — but then misplaced the “g” for a “d.”

At any rate, “hamberders” was trending in full force on Twitter shortly after the tweet, for obvious reasons.

Hamberder update! Trump finally deleted and corrected his tweet, a full three hours later:

Legendary and beloved Broadway star Carol Channing has died, her publicist Harlan Boll confirmed to CNN Tuesday.

Three children who were playing outside climbed into an unplugged chest freezer and died after the lid closed and they were unable to get out, a sheriff in northern Florida said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sharply condemned Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa, the highest ranking GOP official to publicly rebuke King over comments he made to The New York Times that were sympathetic to white supremacists.

Veteran Republican Rep. Steve King will be blocked from committee assignments for the next two years after lamenting that white supremacy and white nationalism have become offensive terms.

King, in his ninth term representing Iowa, will not be given committee assignments in the Congress that began...