2026-01-26 08:27:37
The first half of Sunday's AFC championship game, played between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, was ugly and halting, featuring two bumbling offenses questing for any sort of foothold or forward momentum. Denver quarterback Jarrett Stidham, thrust into action by Bo Nix's season-ending ankle injury last weekend, connected on a deep ball on Denver's second drive, setting up a Broncos touchdown and creating the fleeting, illusory, tragic, and extremely unfair hope that he might have the ability to differentiate between a hornet's nest and his own butthole. New England's Drake Maye, who had no such excuse, led the Patriots to five punts and 67 total yards of offense.
New England's lone score of the first half came at the end of a 12-yard drive following an astoundingly boneheaded turnover from Stidham: On a short third down in his own territory, Stidham retreated 20 yards under pressure and then desperately chest-passed the ball toward the sideline. A referee blew the play dead, which prevented what should have been a lovely scoop-and-score for New England's Elijah Ponder. Stidham's fling was initially ruled intentional grounding—which it most certainly was, in the sense that the ball was grounded and it was super intentional—but after conferencing the referees agreed that he'd flung it backwards, which is a fumble. The Patriots took possession, and three plays later Maye scored on a quarterback draw.
The most important moment of the first half might ultimately have been Sean Payton's decision, on fourth-and-1 from New England's 14-yard line early in the second quarter, to call a pass play instead of kicking a field goal. Stidham was very nearly intercepted on a shitty out-route, and the Broncos lost possession on downs. Perhaps it only seemed this way, but I would swear that Denver never completed another pass in the game, nor gained any yards, and in fact emerged from the tunnel after halftime nude, eyeless, and drenched in blood, and ran around howling "liberate tutemet ex inferis" in inhuman screeching voices.
2026-01-26 01:44:53
Paul Allen, longtime play-by-play announcer for the Minnesota Vikings and "the voice" of the Minnesota Vikings Radio Network, took a moment on his show on KFAN Friday to engage in some easy right-wing propagandizing. In a conversation about dangerous sub-zero temperatures in the upper Midwest, and in the manner of one who is certain of his footing, Allen made a crack about the residents of Minneapolis who've filled the city's streets this weekend to protest the violent occupation of their city by unaccountable, marauding federal goons.
"Do paid protesters get hazard pay?" asked Allen, as first reported by Awful Announcing. "Those are the things I've been thinking about this morning." The conversation moved on to football, after one of Allen's hosts refused to engage in this line of commentary. Allen was not to be deterred. "Everybody's catching strays this week: [Brian] Flores; Kevin Stefanski, from Baker [Mayfield]; Charlie 'Biyatch' caught one out of nowhere; they're just all over," Allen said, in a discussion about NFL coaches and former players, before wrenching the subject back around to his preferred talking point. "Paid protesters caught one out of nowhere this morning," he continued, an apparent reference to his own ill-advised joke from minutes earlier. Allen was again met with awkward disengagement, and quickly pivoted back around to sports.
The clip was reportedly removed from the show's podcast feed. Allen posted a weepy, performatively Christian non-apology to his Twitter account Saturday afternoon, careful to avoid expressing anything even vaguely like community solidarity but assuring his followers that his face was, at that moment, tear-streaked:
2026-01-25 23:56:16
Giannis Antetokounmpo will miss the 2026 NBA All-Star game. He hurt his calf Friday night in a loss to the Denver Nuggets. Calf injuries are serious business, linked in a few prominent cases with catastrophic Achilles tendon ruptures, and this is Antetokounmpo's second already this season. He's going to be out for a while. This will be the second consecutive All-Star game he's had to miss due to injury, and the third in four tries, although in 2023 he made a brief ceremonial appearance, scoring one gimme bucket in 20 seconds of action.
Antetokounmpo will also fall short of All-NBA honors. The threshold for qualification is 65 games, and Giannis, who has already missed 14 games this campaign, would need perfect health and attendance after the break in order to make it to 58 games, which would already be the fewest he's ever played in his 13 NBA seasons. There are no automatic contractual consequences triggered by Antetokounmpo failing to make All-NBA, but it's significant anyway: He's made one of the teams every year since 2016, and has made the first team for seven consecutive seasons. As pointed out by Dan Feldman on the Dunc'd On podcast, that's the longest active streak and the seventh longest in history. And, because Antetokounmpo was producing perhaps the best individual season of his career, he was something like a lock to extend it.
Antetokounmpo will miss the playoffs, also for the first time since 2016. It's not clear that he's quite grasped this reality. He's hoping to return by mid-March, by which time the Bucks will be moldering in a ditch. "I'm going to work my butt off to come back," he said Friday night. "That will probably be the end of February, beginning of March. Hopefully the team will be in a place that we can at least make the play-in or make the playoffs and just take it day by day, try to get better."
2026-01-25 21:21:55
On Saturday in Minneapolis, federal agents surrounded 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who'd been filming them in the street with his phone camera as they conducted the federal government's violent invasion and occupation of the city. Video taken by others on the scene shows that agents pepper-sprayed and tackled Pretti as he attempted to assist a protester whom an agent had shoved to the ground without provocation. With at least three agents firmly holding Pretti down, a fourth drew his pistol and fired several shots at him from point-blank range. Within five seconds, agents had fired at least 10 shots, and Pretti had been executed in broad daylight, in the middle of a busy city street, by masked assailants who, as of this writing, have not been identified or apprehended.
Pretti, an American citizen, reportedly had been carrying a handgun on his person, which is legal in the state of Minnesota. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told reporters that Pretti was a lawful and permitted gun owner. Video from the scene appears to show one agent disarming Pretti just before another shoots him, meaning that at the time of his summary execution, Pretti was unarmed and pinned to the ground by at least three agents of the federal government.
Within hours of the murder, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had lied about it, circulating extravagantly false claims that Pretti—whom DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused of "domestic terrorism"—approached agents intending to "massacre" them and "wanted to do maximum damage," and characterizing the shooting as "defensive shots" by an agent "fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers." Multiple videos from the scene unmistakably show this to be false. Pretti did not in fact approach the agents at all; his hands were plainly visible as the agents approached and surrounded him. The only thing he was holding was his phone.
2026-01-24 04:28:48
Was the biggest sports story in Ireland this week fake, or just early?
The National League hurling and football seasons kick off this weekend, ending several months of Gaelic sports famine. On Monday, the government-owned broadcast network and news service RTE ran a blockbuster piece about a pro-Palestinian protest by players on Dublin’s squads. According to the article, written by RTE’s Niall McCoy and labeled as “Exclusive,” members of the Dublin sides decided “to refuse to appear in front of Allianz-branded signage” this season because of the insurer’s business dealings in Israel since the Gaza invasion. The RTE story inspired other Irish athletes to chime in with support, generated related protests, and overwhelmed all other opening weekend news. Then, the story got refuted.
Allianz, a German-based insurance giant, has been the leagues’ title sponsor since 1993. So avoiding the company’s logos on game broadcasts is no simple chore, and would at the very least mean the protesting players would be declining man-of-the-match interviews and award ceremonies. That would complicate matters for RTE, which has domestic broadcast rights for the All-Ireland and National League football and hurling competitions, which are not only the biggest annual athletic events but are part of the island nation’s identity and history in ways that few sports are tied to any other country.
2026-01-24 00:50:28
The origin of Michael Connelly’s new true crime podcast, Killer in the Code, was a rather far-fetched tip fielded by Rick Jackson, a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. A self-described “cold case consultant” named Alex Baber told him that he’d cracked two legendary mysteries. The first was the killing of Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the Black Dahlia, whose bisected corpse was left in South Los Angeles in 1947. The second was the five homicides committed in the Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969 by an epistle-happy psychotic calling himself the Zodiac. All six homicides, Baber claimed, were committed by one man—and there was proof.
The evidence was, in part, a name found in “Z13,” the cipher the Zodiac mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970. This was his third cryptographic missive; he’d sent two much longer efforts the previous year. “My name is —,” the killer wrote and, in lieu of his identity, provided a string of 13 characters. Unlike the earlier ciphers, which have been decoded (the first within days, the second in 2020), Z13 had not been definitively solved. Baber claimed to have cracked the code and to have unearthed the name of the killer: Marvin Merrill.
This is not the first outlandish attempt to solve the killing of Short, or the subsequent Zodiac homicides. History is littered with such endeavors—fingering all sorts of unlucky souls as America’s great uncaught murderer, whether it’s Janice Knowlton pinning the death of Short on her own father or San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith using the 1986 bestseller Zodiac to connect the crimes to Arthur Leigh Allen. There was even a prior effort to link these two specific cases, when former LAPD detective Steve Hodel attributed the crimes on his own father.
