Such a person will always order food and drink with the word '"do," as if they're also going to attempt to hump it

Sunday 1/18/26

Couldn't have had a much worse prediction than the one I went with for the 49ers-Seahawks unless you'd done something like picked the Broncos over the 49ers in the 1989 Super Bowl. Not a competitive game yesterday! A no-doubter pretty much immediately.

Got the Bills-Broncos wrong, too, but at least the reasoning was sound. Josh Allen was bad. Bills can't win when that's so. Inevitably, I saw fans complaining after the game--and long after--about how the Bills were, what do you know, robbed by the officials. The refs gave the Broncos the game, blah blah blah.

I'm going to wander way out on a limb here and suggest that it was the five Buffalo turnovers that probably gave the Broncos the game and Denver needed the whole bundle to win, which I think says something about Denver, who also lost their starting quarterback to a broken ankle.

The Texans can beat the Patriots today. I don't think that would come as some great shock. But should the Patriots make it to Denver, that game becomes much more winnable with a back-up QB thrust into a starting role for the Broncos. Which isn't to say you ever want to see a player get hurt.

Maybe the Texans will come out of the East. A Houston-Seattle Super Bowl? Ratings would be done insofar as they can be down that much for a Super Bowl, which isn't about the game itself, of course, but "the event" and the eating/drinking event that day represents to millions and millions of sedentary, overweight, sour cream-brained Americans.

A thought about Josh Allen: This guy needs to stop crying. He seems like a nice man. But this thing where he cries after the team's season comes to an end has gotten awfully old. There's this weight that doesn't help the cause. And I think it's in large part self-inflicted with the Bills and Allen is a huge part of it. It's kind of like what the Toronto Maple Leafs do. They put this weight on themselves that helps them to lose as much, if not more, than their opponent does.

Can't do the weight-of-the-world thing as a quarterback. That's just more pressure, and more pressure leads to more mistakes when it counts the most. If Josh Allen played better and turned the ball over less, the Bills would have won that game, no problem. People will blame the coach, other players, but it was Allen. If he did his job--and he didn't even need to be great--the Bills would've advanced. Then he gets to the press conference and it's another year where he starts crying at it...you gotta stop with that.

Last night in my researches I discovered what may be the most remarkable Ted Williams stat and is one of the most remarkable stats I've ever encountered in any sport. I'll save that for a baseball and/or sports history type of entry on here. There are Wayne Gretzky statistics that make you think, "How is that possible?"--as with him averaging more than a point-per-period against the Detroit Red Wings from 1979-1991--and this is very much in that vein Splinter-wise.

The Dodgers pay so much money even for non-star baseball players--the .270/20 homer/70 RBI/3.0 WAR guy. It must be like a candy store for ballplayers. A too-good-to-be-true candy store. But, this is something that's always gone on in baseball: the big out-spender. The team that will pay more than anyone else. These things tend to be cyclical. One huge spender is superseded by another.

But you have to wonder how long this can go on for the Dodgers. It's LA and these ballplayers want to live there. You got the weather, the winning, a financially all-in organization, more stars coming in, more top players from "nearby" Japan.

This could keep going a while. Sure, other teams will win. But that may come to feel like a break in the Dodgers action, if you will. No matter how good you are and how much you spend, you can only win so many years in a row or however many championships in a given decade. That feels like small comfort, though, for non-Dodgers fans.

Some huge plus/minus numbers in last night's Celtics' win over the Hawks: Hauser +30, Brown and White +36, Queta +39. Brown put up 41 points in only 29:30 off of 30 FGA and 12 FTA. That's being pretty aggressive.

Watched all of the BC-Syracuse men's basketball yesterday from Conte. Had I known about the game this would have been a good one to go to, but I didn't until just as it was getting going. BC is bad as usual and Syracuse is just okay. BC tied it late with a three-pointer and then really asserted themselves in OT to notch the surprising win. My mom and dad used to go to BC basketball games in the 1970s. My mom really loved it. Texted her that the game had me thinking about the two of them doing that.

The other day at the Garden during the Rangers-Bruins game--this was that 10-2 drubbing in which Pastrnak had the six assists--a fan knocked another fan over a rail and he fell from one section to another.

What is wrong with people? It's quarter past four right now on Sunday morning, and I still here drunken idiots--adults--screaming in the street. Screaming. What do they scream? Sometimes they just scream to scream and make noise. These people don't deserve life. They shouldn't be here. The world would be better if they didn't exist. Now, I'm not saying I'd like to be their executioner, but if I learned that they all went out on a massive cruise ship and that cruise ship went down with no survivors, I wouldn't be like, "Oh, no, what a shame," and would instead think, "That works."

This isn't a college neighborhood. These are tech bros and business bros and whatever. In Boston. Where people are smarter than they are most other places, so imagine how dumb the people in the latter are, because these are Grade A idiots. One guy was screaming, "PATRIOTS LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO!!!!" and then his group started screaming, and the women this idiot and his friends were with started laughing and he's probably hooking up with one of them right now because this is how the world works.

I was reading about the over-the-rails incident at the Garden, and people were like, "Well, you can't really police alcohol sales because so many people show up loaded to begin with." Again, what the fuck is it with people? I can't imagine as an adult behaving like this. Or having conversations with another adult--age-wise, anyway--about getting shit-faced and how to best do that before taking the train in to North Station.

People never grow up. They're intellectually and emotionally clumpy fetuses walking around outside of the womb. These mucus blobs with legs and a mouth hole for making noise. How can humans be so simple? How can there be this little to us? How can we, as a species, be so collectively stunted? Just puerile garbage? You can be all of these things, and yet we are rarely anything, or at least not anything good. No one even tries.

That guy knocking someone over a rail at a Bruins game, is that thirty-eight-year-old guy you see out on the street or is in line in front of you at the Dunkin' Donuts saying, "Yeah, I'll do a...um...I'll do a donut and...um...I'll do a...two donuts...and...ah...um...I'll do a hash brown..." (Such a person will always order food and drink with the word "do," as if they're also going to attempt to hump it.) And he very probably has a wife and kids. Little, impressionable people that the world needs to not suck so that the world doesn't suck as much going forward are dependent on this man-child idiot to learn, to understand the difference between right and wrong...and yeah, that's probably not going to be super well.

This is normal behavior. Hardly anyone grows up, and if there are ten people in this world right now who actually change and change for the better, I'd be surprised.

It's a low bar, but Tom Brady is one of the best NFL analysts on TV. I bet many people don't like that. He knows the game better than the other analysts, though, and he's into it, which I admit to finding surprising. I expected him to be bored. Maybe he is, but that's not how he comes across. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Rick Bowness is back coaching in the NHL again and that's one of those double-take things, like Ellis Burks being on the 2004 Red Sox. Bowness coached the Bruins for a season in the early 1990s when they were up against the Pittsburgh Penguins. You kind of knew that the Bruins wouldn't get past them, and they didn't.

He keeps coming back around, and each time there's this blast-from-the-past factor, which I've become more accustomed to such that it's largely gone now for me. But I still think of him coaching that Neely-Bourque squad and then being gone just like that, such that you wondered if he was ever really there as he receded from memory save as a kind of "Oh, yeah, that guy" kind of guy.

Just looked it up--the guy who knocked the other guy over the rail at the Garden is forty-five-years-old. You tell me that boat going down wouldn't do more good than harm. That's one needed (damned) voyage. You could have a fleet of those boats that just kept going out. Couldn't make new ones fast enough.