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The best college football TV guide listing
College football start this weekend. One of the more annoying first world problems is finding out what game is at what time and on what channel. Enter https://cfb.guide/
It does just that. If you create an account, you can set your time zone and your favorite teams. During game day, it even tracks the scores.
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Facial Stimulation Clears Brain Waste and Boosts Aging Minds
An interesting therapy possibility: clear brain waste with facial stimulation.
Researchers have discovered a safe, non-invasive way to enhance the brain’s waste clearance system by mechanically stimulating lymphatic vessels just beneath the facial skin. This gentle technique significantly improves cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drainage—a critical function that declines with age and contributes to cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s.
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Middle class restaurants disappearing
Once rapidly growing commercial marvels, casual dining chains — sit-down restaurants where middle-class families can walk in without a reservation, order from another human and share a meal — have been in decline for most of the 21st century. Last year, TGI Fridays and Red Lobster both filed for bankruptcy. Outback and Applebee’s have closed dozens of locations. Pizza Hut locations with actual dining rooms are vanishingly rare, with hundreds closing since 2019.
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American state capitalism
Not sure if Reagan envisioned American state capitalism.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
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Texting the number on the sign
In every city, there are painted signs on telephone poles. In Portland, Kate Bingaman-Burt texted one of the numbers and conversed with them about the craft of sign making.
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What does a coxswain do?
A friend of mine has a daughter who will be on a collegiate, Division I rowing team as a coxswain. It’s been interesting hearing about the recruiting process and what they do on a boat–they’re the brains.
“They’re pretty much in charge of the whole race,” says Tom Sanford, the Director of Rowing at Marist. “They are a coach while they’re on the water”. Sanford also likened coxswains to jockeys in a horse race.
The most important position on a rowing team, the coxswains are the ones responsible for steering the boat. They do this mostly by yelling loudly, but they also use a rudder and a GPS system that displays the boat’s performance metrics, such as speed and strokes per minute, on a screen. They have to be small in stature so that they don’t weigh down the boat and also possess great leadership skills.
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Automobile polo
There was a time in the early event of the automobile, polo matches were held. Cars. A ball. A person with a mallet hitting said ball.
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The case for memes as a new form of comics
There is an argument to be made that memes, the visual kind, are a new form of comics. Communicating an idea or argument in an unexpected way.
In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”
For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.
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ChatGPT as a therapeutic tool
Can ChatGPT act as a therapeutic tool? Possibly, but you still have to recognize it for what it is.
As ChatGPT became an intellectual partner, I felt emotions I hadn’t expected: warmth, frustration, connection, even anger. Sometimes the exchange sparked more than insight — it gave me an emotional charge. Not because the machine was real, but because the feeling was.
But when it slipped into fabricated error or a misinformed conclusion about my emotional state, I would slam it back into place. Just a machine, I reminded myself. A mirror, yes, but one that can distort. Its reflections could be useful, but only if I stayed grounded in my own judgment.
I concluded that ChatGPT wasn’t a therapist, although it sometimes was therapeutic. But it wasn’t just a reflection, either. In moments of grief, fatigue or mental noise, the machine offered a kind of structured engagement. Not a crutch, but a cognitive prosthesis — an active extension of my thinking process.
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What modern kids want
Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.
One reason kids retreat to their phones is they can’t connect with other kids in an unstructured way.
