Here is New England Patriots President Robert Kraft in his press conference about “Deflate-gate”.

And video tape footage of the person responsible for deflating the footballs.

Bill Nye the Science Guy inquires on the Patriots’ explanation for how the balls got deflated.  The Patriots provide a demonstration.

See where this all ends up, I guess.

Thomas Friedman wants you to care about the Ukraine.

Ukraine matters — more than the war in Iraq against the Islamic State, a.k.a., ISIS. It is still not clear that most of our allies in the war against ISIS share our values. That conflict has a big tribal and sectarian element. It is unmistakably clear, though, that Ukraine’s reformers in its newly elected government and Parliament — who are struggling to get free of Russia’s orbit and become part of the European Union’s market and democratic community — do share our values.

It’s an interesting gambit.  It doesn’t take too much to see some ugliness within the erstwhile Ukrainian opposition, such that the American isolationist impulse of viewing this as “black hats against black hats”, even if you have to slide with Ukrainian territorial integrity here.  But here Thomas Friedman insists that the new government is good, better than the old government.
It appears to be more… hm… Thomas Friedman-esque?

Bwah ha ha.

“We shall overcome #MLKDay,” the team’s official account tweeted Monday, which honors Martin Luther King, Jr. The tweet also included a picture of quarterback Russell Wilson crying after his victory Sunday and a quote from King that read: “Faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first steps.”

The organization deleted the tweet after users called it tasteless and offensive. Within two hours, the football team posted an apology.

We apologize for poor judgment shown in a tweet sent earlier. We did not intend to compare football to the civil rights legacy of Dr. King.

Except they kind of just did.  One’s overcoming 400 years of systematic oppression.  The other is overcoming a 16 point deficit in a football game.  They’re comparable.

On the other hand, I think sports reporting is silly.  You’re searching for analogies to make it real with the Real World, and how they’re metaphors for things and stuff.  Maybe they can do what Scientology did, and piss off the estate of Winston Churchill and tweet about “Our Finest Hour”.

What other highly bad historical analogies can you think of to describe some dramatic sports comeback?

An example of the silliness of sports writing.

With about four minutes left, Wilson became Fran Tarkenton, Joe Montana and John Elway rolled into one.

What?  Only three hall of fame greats?  How about:
With about four minutes left, Wilson became Fran Tarkenton, Joe Montana, John Elway, Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, and Otto Graham rolled into one.
Of course the flip side is that for the first fifty-six minutes of the game, Wilson was Ryan Leaf, Stan Gelbaugh, and Ryan Lindley all rolled into one.

For what it’s worth, here’s the North Korean news coverage of The Interview.

We’ll see how they follow up on this news.

Human Rights Foundation founder Thor Halvorssen says the group plans on buying copies of “The Interview” — which depicts the assassination of North Korea’s leader — and including them in upcoming balloon drops over North Korea.

Hm.

Previous balloon drops have included colorful items: copies of Bravo show ‘Real Housewives,’ films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, chocolate, USBs with offline versions of Korean Wikipedia and American dollar bills. While the items are considered contraband in North Korea, there’s a black market for the material.

Great.  Kardashians are supposed to topple the regime.

I can’t find this quote from a critic of the drop saying “We can better than a damned buddy comedy.”

I see Time Magazine with one of their impulse buy packages — “The 100 Greatest People in the Bible”.  Curious.  I know who number one would have to be.  Jesus.  It’s like a classic rock radio station that does those “Memorial Day” ranking lists of whatever number of songs their station is (99.2, 992 …) — “Stairway to Heaven” is always going to be number one.  Jesus is the number one bible figure.

But I’m wondering who number two is.  Is it Mary or Moses?  Curious, I open the magazine up, and see.  They wimped out.  It’s not ranked.

I see the phrase “Gordon Pross arrest” as a search someone recently got here with.

I assume that whoever was looking, found this item posted in the Ellensburg Daily Record , circa 1992, about the end of Gordon Pross’s suit against prison mistreatment following his (storied in his various congressional campaigns) arrest in 1988.

Beyond that, to the question that turns up in the query, “Who replaced Doc Hastings?” — one Dan Newhouse.  It’s worth noting that had it not been for the top two primary, the man replacing Doc Hastings would have been one Clint Didier.

What’s this mean?  Newhouse voted for John Boehner for Speaker.  Didier probably would’ve been with that tea party contingency and plucked about… probably not joining the “Colin Powell” voter, though.  (Maybe have voted for goddamned Louie Gohmert?)

Contrived Political Theater in Spain.

Wearing a top hat and surrounded by supporters mostly dressed in outlandish military uniforms, Vicente Candela stormed the town hall here briefly last month and proclaimed himself mayor of Ibi’s 24,000 residents.

It was, Mr. Candela said, “a coup d’état with humoristic violence,” over in about eight hours. He then handed power back to Ibi’s official mayor, while street cleaners removed the debris of a pitched battle between Mr. Candela’s rebels and his opponents, during which they pelted each other with flour and rotten eggs, amid the deafening noise of firecrackers.

This day of playful, ritualistic political upheaval is held in Ibi every Dec. 28, and traces its origins back as far as the role reversal in the Roman Empire’s festival of Saturnalia, when masters provided table service for their servants, according to José Vicente Verdú, a lawyer who has researched Ibi’s history.

But in modern Spain, the satire has been imbued with outsize significance as scores of corruption scandals have forced the ouster of several mayors and helped plunge support for Spain’s mainstream parties to record lows.

Wear funny hats and take over for a day to “release steam”.

Then again… Not funny hats (totally conducive to the culture of the country) and not “release steam”…

US prosecutors have charged two men with conspiring to overthrow the government of Gambia, in the latest fallout from last week’s failed coup attempt in the small West African nation.

One of these days, that mock coup celebration will take hold for real, the beleagured leaders just deciding “Screw it”, and letting the guys in funny hats and egg yolks have it all.  Then what the rabble do?

Where the Hell are my flying cars?

And why are we stuck pondering the political progress of politicians who toadied up to David Duke in the early 1990s?