this pestilent land has ruined me

Texas @ Tennessee +5.5: the big wet boy will be there! i'm so excited! 

South Alabama +20.5 @ Kentucky: you ess aye

Oklahoma @ Georgia -14: Laughed at the New Mexico-Oklahoma score last week. 

Old Mist @ Florida -3.5: My logic is: letdown game for Old Mist. 

Vanderbilt +9.5 @ Auburn: Much like college basketball in the 1970s, this needed a three-point line. 

South Carolina +12.5 @ Alabama: cocks joke. picking mostly underdogs this week, that's fine. 

TAMMY +8.5 @ LSU: tammy

Mizzou +6.5 @ Mississippi St.: Mississippi State is going to get decent again now that they will be playing Auburn. 

Tulsa +7 @ Arkansas: yuck

Week Four Picks: Literally Angry with Rage

Trump gave a horrifying comic book villain speech to the UN and the thing I'm most mad about is that in a later press event he made it clear he thinks the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England are all the same thing.

Texas -5.5  *shuffling note cards* I haven't seen this much orange since, since I looked at the president.

Kentucky -20.5  KROGER FIELD

Oklahoma +14  Georgia will win 15-2.

Florida -3.5  Florida almost lost to Auburn, but Old Mist has to have a let down after focusing all of their rage at Kiffykins, right?

Vanderbilt +9.5  Team of Destiny?

Alabama -12.5  This seems very low to me. Admittedly, I'm a fool, having made a series of bad career decisions. However, that doesn't seem to apply here.

TAMMY +8.5  Getting pushed around by Kentucky in your own stadium does things to a team. That's how the Joker became the Joker.

Mizzou +6.5  Not buying Mississippi St. just yet. We already have some Mississippi St. at home. ha ha

Arkansas -7  Arkansas will beat Auburn.

Week Four: Please keep your voice down, the guy from Green Day is trying to sleep for just a few more days

Cassette tape mix made by my friend Jake in the early 90's that had Green Day, Weezer, Offspring, other cool stuff: 

6-5 (18-16)

Cassette tape mix made by me today that is 14 tracks of Train's "Drops of Jupiter": 

4-7 (18-16)

___________________________________________________________________________

Texas -5.5 @ Tennessee

South Alabama @ Kentucky -20.5

Oklahoma @ Georgia -14

Old Mist @ Florida -3.5

Vanderbilt @ Auburn -9.5

South Carolina @ Alabama -12.5

TAMMY @ LSU -8.5

Mizzou @ Mississippi St. -6.5

Tulsa @ Arkansas -7

Week Three season's really flying by huh

It's already spooky season!

Georgia -24.5  How do you even score half a point. C'mon man.

NC St. + 3.5  I remember running around the backyard with my brother playing Wolfpacks and Commodores.

TAMMY -16.5  Can't Read, Can't Write, Can't-ucky

Alabama -19.5  Florida St. is literally in turmoil. 

Mississippi St. +4  Sandstorm is all like: do do doo do loo do do dooo dooooo

Mizzou -26.5  I'm going to a wedding in Troy this weekend. The ancient one in Asia Minor, I mean.

Auburn +2.5  Unbeatable

Old Mist +3  What's our boy Pat McAfee going to have to say about this one?

Oklahoma -22.5  It's sad that Oklahoma clearly wants so badly to touch New Mexico and New Mexico puts in the least possible amount of effort.

Tennessee -35.5  They call the dog Smokey because that's how he likes his women.

UTSA +30.5  meep meep

Week 3-CP0

"It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity” implies that this is a significant enough problem that they've had to include anti-deity-impersonation protocols in robot hardware. 

Georgia -24.5 @ Arkansas: Things look bleak in Arkansas. 

NC St. @ Vanderbilt -3.5: You don't just walk into whatever Vanderbilt stadium is called and expect to stroll out with a win. 

Kentucky @ TAMMY -16.5: This could get out of hand.

Flo-rida St. @ Alabama -19.5: Getting ready for the Q word (Qui-Gonn Jin) from Florida State. 

Mississippi St. @ South Carolina -4: Picking too many favorites. 

Troy +26.5 @ Mizzou: state pride

Florida @ Auburn +2.5: I do not think Auburn will win or cover but I am letting my Heart decide 

LSU -3 @ Old Mist: Lane will have something cooking

New Mexico +22.5 @ Oklahoma: this line is too high 

Kennesaw St. +35.5 @ Tennessee: they call this one "the battle of I-75" because 75 people died the first time they played

UTSA +30.5 @ Texas: they call this one "the battle of I-35" because that's the name of the road you can take most of the way between the two campuses

here are the records since Charles is so obsessed with them

Needs to win, ruthlessly competitive, completely devoid of compassion or empathy: 12-11

Here for the comraderie and the warm embrace of friendship in a cold, dark world: 14-9

Week 3(E) we have probably said that every single week 3 or maybe not

Eleven games. One for each gender.

Georgia -24.5 @ Arkansas

NC St. @ Vanderbilt -3.5

Kentucky @ TAMMY -16.5

Flo-rida St. @ Alabama -19.5

Mississippi St. @ South Carolina -4

Troy @ Mizzou -26.5

Florida -2.5 @ Auburn

LSU -3 @ Old Mist

New Mexico @ Oklahoma -22.5

Kennesaw St. @ Tennessee -35.5

UTSA @ Texas -30.5

Solemnly Remembering I Needed to Make Picks

There are 9/11 truthers doing a thing in front of the capitol.

Mizzou -5.5  In 2007 this was the biggest game of the college football season.

Auburn -34.5  Auburn is going to lose this game, aren't they?

Arizona St. + 14.5  Maybe Mike Elbow is good. But TAMMY is always reliable for one weird loss.

Michigan +5.5  Not sold on Brent Venables. Michigan realizes how lucky they are and try real hard.

WKU +40.5  This is the game Georgia screws around in and it's weirdly close.

Alabama -10.5  They're back.

Mississippi St +1.5  Jackie Sherrill and the boys have a little something for em.

Delaware +20.5  The world's smallest state.

Tennessee -12.5  No idea.

LSU -36.5  Usually, I would have taken the underdog. But Lane Train, baby.

Ohio St. +1.5  Will never believe Texas is back.

UNC-Charlotte +47.5  That is a lot of points.

Arkansas +12.5  Utah doesn't even have a coach anymore. He went to Michigan. Are the players calling the plays? Is this a Varsity Blues situation?

Week It Like You Two It

Missouri - 5.5 at Kansas: another classic SEC matchup

Southern Miss +34.5 at Auburn: They say the biggest improvement happens between week one and week two. Southern Miss might beat Auburn in that case.  

Arizona State at TAMMY -14.5: TAMMY

Oklahoma -5.5 at Michigan: I assume this line is because the bookies think Oklahoma will score either 5 or 6 points.

Western Kentucky at thUGA -40.5: a team of hand-picked mercenaries, assassins, and special operatives couldn't make me care about this one

Alabama -10.5 at Kentucky: This line and the Oklahoma line were two gigantic surprises. I would have guessed like 17.

Mississississippi State at Minnesoda -1.5: This is a cool game. The first two games of the season should be the bookies setting lines, and then a randomized selection of all the games with a line of 3 or fewer points, one home and one away, and then return game the next year. 

Delaware at Vandy -20.5: I was not delAware that they were playing this week. 

Tennessee -12.5 at Georgia Tech: Already making assumptions which I will not challenge for weeks, months, or years, and one of them this season is Georgia Tech: not that good.

La Tech at LSU -36.5: seems like the kind of game for which Lane Kiffin would run up the score. 

An Ohio State University +1.5 at Texas: I think Tressel and his boys have a little something for the boys from Austin.

Charlotte +47.5 at Old Mist: no

Arkansas +12.5 at Utah: "What's a Ute?" Classic. 

Delaware is 1-A? sure, why not

Missouri - 5.5 at Kansas

Southern Miss at Auburn -34.5

Arizona State at TAMMY -14.5

Oklahoma -5.5 at Michigan

Western Kentucky at thUGA -40.5

Alabama -10.5 at Kentucky

Mississississippi State at Minnesoda -1.5

Delaware at Vandy -20.5

Tennessee -12.5 at Georgia Tech

La Tech at LSU -36.5

An Ohio State University at Texas -1.5

Charlotte at Old Mist -47.5

Arkansas at Utah -12.5

Labor Day Links

1. Our Generation Ships Will Sink

2. AI Is Making Everything Worse

3. The Scratch

Presenting: 3E Preseason Awards

Announcing the 3E College Football Preseason Awards: 

• Offensive Player of the Year: Laterarius Kidwell III 
• Defensive Player of the Year: Jalen "Boogie" Baker
• Special Teams Player of the Year: Max Schlurp
• Coach of the Year: Burt Pickles

Congratulations everyone! 

why are there so many teams

They should go back to ten-team conferences. 

UTEP +41.5 vs Oklahoma: UTEP is cool

East Care of Lina vs Alabama -28.5: Pirates are cool 

Kent St. vs South Care of Lina -35.5: no

Baylor vs Auburn -7.5: I Believe

Texas St. +29.5 vs Texas: This would be a neat upset

Missouri St. vs TAMMY -40.5: TAMMY

Clemson +10 vs LSU: I think Lane whining so much about a backup tight end or whatever coming from the NFL suggests issues with the roster. I can't decide if it's funnier if Old Mist loses a ton of games or if LSU loses a ton of games. 

ULM vs Mississippi St. -28.6: Lamo

FAU +26.5 vs Florida: This would be a neat upset

Louisville +7 vs Old Mist: Of the second rank teams I hate, I think Old Mist going something like 4-8 would be the funniest. The real goal: a combined 17 losses between them. 

Picks. Then I have to drive to walmart to buy dogfood, catfood, cat litter, and a salad.

The salad is for our fish.

UTEP +41.5 that is a lot of points. also i initially typed 41.3 and its funny to imagine a bettor having internal turmoil over whether to take a team at +41.5 or if +41.3 is a better deal.

Alabama -28.5 kalen deboer looks likes if you over-inflated brett venables. Or perhaps Venables is sun-dried Kalen Deboer. 

Kent St +35.5 "lightning strike and thunder quake, they do not make the green grass make" don't know what this means. I think it was something I said about how the sound and fury of a storm doesn't make the grass grow.

Auburn -7.5 Ed made a eagle lego and told me war eagle. It later came out that my mom told him to do that. I do not care. War Damn. It's damning as a sport and society that if you say "the rape school," you have to further clarify yourself.

Texas -29.5 who the fuck is this quarterback

Mizzou St +40.5 ok missouri thinks they're a state now

Clemson +10 The personality cult of Lane Kiffin is amazing and I love him. What game were we talking about here?

Mississippi St -28.5 Croom was a good guy but how can you not put a hat on straight

Florida -26.5 McElwain has a little something for em this year

Louisville +7 I'm taking a city over a whiskey I invented every time.

well well well if it isn't the sec pick off

tough year

UTEP vs Oklahoma -41.5

East Care of Lina vs Alabama -28.5

Kent St. vs South Care of Lina -35.5

Baylor vs Auburn -7.5

Texas St. vs Texas - 29.5

Missouri St. vs TAMMY -40.5

Clemson vs LSU -10

ULM vs Mississippi St. -28.6

FAU vs Florida -26.5

Louisville vs Old Mist -7

Picks whenever.

links

1. "Somebody told you once that Internet sites are sometimes inaccurate. You hope it’s not true. How could you figure out which are the inaccurate ones using BRUTE STRENGTH?"

2. "Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media."

3. "I'll just have to keep going. I can't disappoint it. I'd be letting the suit down."

4. "Or maybe they’re just performing some Gnawa devotional trance music."

Them there kind of livin' can't hold Chaka for me, no

He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich

Three links

1. Halupedia: "Every article here is fabricated by a language model. Biographies, dates, footnotes, and quotations are invented. Nothing on this site is true. Do not cite Halupedia, do not quote it, and do not believe it."

2. Smush: "It's pretty simple: make words, get points."

3. Date the Globe: "Every day the archive releases a genuine historical map with the dates blacked out. Read the names on it — empires, colonies, countries that no longer exist — and pin down the year of publication in six guesses."

Hey, Vasquez,

lmao

Oh, now there is no sound, for we all live underground

Too low to dig, I might just touch hell -- hot!

What a great video. Every single song and every single video for Outkast makes me think, "If I looked and sounded like that, I would be the coolest man alive."

Big hands, I know you're the one

In the desert, you can remember your name

I always thought it was, "In the desert, you can't remember your name."

Like a nervous magician waiting in the wings

It's cool they got the fake Counting Crows band in this video.

Losing Skills

 

Maybe it’s no big deal! After all, most people don’t like reading and don’t do it voluntarily as adults. Most jobs don’t require in-depth reading, and the availability of good-enough LLM tools promises to reduce the number of those that do. In that context, do we really “need” to spend valuable pedagogical time and energy attempting to give everyone the baseline skills to follow extended narratives and arguments and potentially to develop their own? Arguably we don’t. We can do without that, as a society, or at least with much less of that—because presumably we need at least some core of people who can still read and write and understand on their own, if only to check that the AI is properly calibrated.

But the smaller the circle is, the less the arts of reading and writing will be pushed forward, and the greater the chance of eventually breaking the chain. And in the meantime, millions of people who would have had the chance to develop the difficult but rewarding skills that have been foundational for—indeed, all but synonymous with—intellectual achievement for millenia… won’t. Many, perhaps even most, would have chosen not to develop or even use those skills in any serious way, but at least they would have been free to make that sad choice. In the scenario that seems to be approaching, they’re not even being given the chance. And this is happening without anyone deliberating or voting or even directly deciding that we as a society don’t want mass literacy. 

Spare Capacity | Drinking Buddies

[Dave Matthews voice] I did it

Probably not my favorite Dave Matthews Band song, but it's definitely the one I reference the most.

I've got two tickets in my pocket, now baby, we're gonna disappear

Lithium

En passant: After the war, John Cade was made director of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital and moved his family into a house of the asylum grounds. The two hundred patients there included many manic-depressives and John became preoccupied by the “absolute failure” of psychotherapy to cure them. “Psychopathological explanations seemed to me to be singularly unconvincing,” he reflected, “and completely useless when it came to treatment or prevention of attacks.” He wanted to know the “essential nature” of the disease, and like many naturalists and herbalists and folk healers before him, he knew that the malady must come from some imbalance in the harmony of the body, in excesses or deficits or toxins.

In 1969: Forty-nine countries had approved the use of lithium, but the United States was not among them. Many years later, Cade himself would write that his cure was “made by an unknown psychiatrist, working alone in a small chronic hospital with no research training, primitive techniques, and negligible equipment.” Who could expect the Americans to care? In many official histories, American skepticism has been attributed to the lithia craze, to wariness around the substance in the decades after lithium had left so many Americans dead. But those with experience in natural remedies know the truth: the trouble was money. Lithium is found in water, in rocks, in soil, in the sea. It cannot be placed under patent. It has no commercial value. Even today, it can be made by pharmacists in-house, without the trade secrets of pharmaceutical conglomerates, without the true incentives of modern medicine.

Natural Medicine

 

Just like Adam and Eve, said you'd set me free

Top comment: "who is here because of the IG  the Gas Station Reel ?"

But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him

Female Warriors

While some female Norse soldiers had been found before, she was the first high-status female warrior ever identified. Or was she? The second it was suggested Bj 581 was a woman, every conclusion drawn about her when she was thought to be a man was questioned.

Maybe the grave goods were heirlooms or an homage to her family, and not about her. Maybe there had been another, male body in the tomb, and it had been removed while hers and the horses’ were left undisturbed. Maybe the 19th-century excavation had mislabeled samples. Maybe while chromosomally female, the individual had been intersex or had lived as a transgender man. Anything rather than imagine a woman may have led armies.

We've been very wrong about Stone Age women

Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?

Haunting, familiar, yet I can't seem to place it

I will wash the dishes While you go have a beer

I'm going hungry (going hungry)

The Changing English Language

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

[...]

And verely this name dyd me ſore affright, for who was this Maiſter wherof he ſpake? And what maner of man was he, that his very name ſholde be ſpoken wyth ſuche reuerence and drede. I wolde haue fledde but he purſued me and by myn avys he was the ſwifter, for he caught me full ſoone.

How far back in time can you understand English? | Image by Paul Lehr

I'm running through the world like a running back

Mr. Worldwide himself! This is a cool video because it's got all these broads in lingerie, then Pitbull looking like the bad guy in a direct-to-video Underworld knock-off.

AI Articles

1. A.I. Isn't People: "I’ve watched all three of my children learn what a cat is, and in each case the number of pictures of a cat they needed to see was not “all of them.” It was like, two or three? Half a dozen, tops. I helped them learn to speak and read fluently, and the number of Reddit posts required was not “every Reddit post.” I don’t need to know what mechanism underlies human intelligence to rule out the possibility that it’s the same as what a large language model does."

2. Child's Play: "The future they seem to envisage is one in which people don’t really do anything at all, except follow the instructions given to them by machines."

Classical paintings

There is a single explanation for the fact that the reconstructions do not resemble the statues depicted in ancient artworks, the fact that their use of color is un­like that in ancient mosaics and frescoes, and the fact that modern viewers find them ugly. It is that the reconstructions are painted very badly. There is no reason to posit that ancient Europeans had tastes radically unlike ours to explain our dislike of the reconstructions. The Greeks and Romans would have disliked them too, because the reconstructed polychromy is no good.

Were classical statues painted horribly?

our pets heads are falling off

"theres a miami in florida and a miami in ohio, theres an indiana in indiana and an indiana in pennsylvania"

I need the "Rich Men North of Richmond" internet freak to turn that into a viral sensation for us.

MIAMI (FL) +8.5 TEAM OF DESTINY

TIEBREAKER IS 1 POINT MIAMI WILL WIN 25-24.

My only New Year resolution is to win at least one segment of bowl pick them 2025

Miami vs Indiana (-8.5): team of destiny

Tiebreaker: 16 points

Still seems like this can't be right

This one's for all the Tostitos.

Miami vs Indiana (-8.5)

Tiebreaker if necessary: actual winning margin of victorious team. 

choo choo it's the lane train

beep beep, off the tracks, buster

Old Moist +3.5 This is a team of destiny. And by destiny, I mean institutionalized racism.

Indiana -4 Mean and nasty. Just knocking fools over. Taking what they want and not letting you even have a sniff. But enough about Taft, Nico, and New Madison. 

Indiana's name means "Land of the Indians", or simply "Indian Land".

Miami (FL) -3.5 v Old Mist: So does Old Mist have coaches? How is that working? 

Oregon v Indiana -4: I Believe

thumbs up!

 

All black, you can call me Johnny Cash (Johnny Cash)

We Truly Are The Home Of The Wonderful Pig

Semies:

Miami (FL) -3.5 v Old Mist

Oregon v Indiana -4

Picks by Wednesday afternoon?

_________________________________________________________________

FISH GOES BLUB