SoTier

Pileated woodpeckers started coming back in the 1990s as more and more former farmland became forest lands. They are mostly forest birds and don't often come into urban/suburban areas unless there's a particularly choice supply of insects in a tree(s). There are several pairs nesting in the woods around Bergman Park and Hundred Acre Lot, two wooded parks on the outskirts of the Jamestown. Mostly you hear them rather than see them. There calls sound sort of like Woody Woodpecker, and their drumming is really loud as they literally rip chunks of trees apart getting to their quarry.

So many times, teams make and/or win the Super Bowl because they get lucky ... their playoff seed, injuries, bad/no calls by refs, and especially "fickle finger of fate" plays, the most notable one being David Tyree's "Helmet Catch" which enabled the WC Giants to beat the previously undefeated Patriots in the final 2 minutes of SB XLII. I think the Broncos offered Lucifer a better deal for their team soul, and the Chiefs have lost their remarkable luck. Karma is a you-know-what.

I want the Chiefs out of playoff contention ASAP, and losing to the Colts is another nail in their playoff coffin. Better Jones than Mahomes every day and especially on Saturdays or Sundays in the post season.

Pheasants aren't native birds. They were introduced in the late 1800s and early 1900s to establish populations in about 40 states, but changes in agriculture -- especially clearing hedgerows around small fields to create much larger fields -- has decimated those breeding populations, and so most birds used for hunting today are stocked birds. Pheasants need the brushy areas between small grain fields (wheat, oats, corn) for protection and nesting.

Not exactly in my "backyard" but while driving back to Jtown from our family camp in the Town of Persia in northern Cattaraugus County, I spotted a bald eagle in the Town of Conewango. He flew overhead and landed in a pasture. He was really impressive. While not exactly "common" like robins, cardinals or bluejays, bald eagles are numerous in Cattaraugus and Chautauqua Counties. There are numerous nests in these counties including some right around Jamestown. It wasn't always that way. Bald eagles in the lower 48 states were almost extinct (along with other top level raptors like ospreys and peregrine falcons) in the 1960s when the insecticide DDT was banned. In the 1990s, the first bald eagles were raised and fledged in NYS from eggs brought from Alaska, including a group that was raised and released in the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge between Rochester and Syracuse.

My Dad's family always named their female dogs they named either Queenie or Ginger. Investigating the family history, I came across a photo and a couple of letters from my youngest aunt to my Dad when he was overseas in WW II that referenced a small white dog named Queenie who apparently replaced "old Ginger". Growing up, we had a string of Queenies and Gingers although we also had other dog names.

Maybe he's a mean drunk.

All of the teams in the NFL passed on Brady at least 5 times, including the Pats. People forget that Diggs as a veteran WR helped Allen become a significantly better QB, something that any rookie WR, no matter how great he might become, couldn't have done. Diggs now seems to be helping Maye develop into a good/great QB as he did with Josh. I think that it was only in his last year as a Bill that Diggs morphed into a team cancer making it rather hard to plan to replace him.

As long as Woody Johnson and his family own the Jests, nothing is going change with that team, no matter how much draft capital they accumulate. I think that Indy will likely regret giving up those two firsts in the long run for a DB. They are obviously all in to win this year before the clock strikes midnight for Daniel Jones. This is the perpetual take on the Jests for most of the last quarter century. Even a blind squirrel can do better than the Jests.

Mahomes played poorly because of the Bills defense harassing him relentlessly all game. McDermott decided to try to win the game outright because he was confident in that defense ... and unlike in the playoff games against KC in the past, the defense came through with flying colors. On the final play, the Bills defenders chased Mahomes out of the pocket and forced him yards back from the LOS to the point that when Mahomes finally got the pass off, it didn't make the end zone. The Bills DBs broke up the play, but even if it had been completed, it wouldn't have mattered since time had expired.

Speak for yourself. I'm not stressing because the Bills don't have a big name #1 WR. I'm not sure that OBD is either, especially if they believe that Palmer can come back soon. If the Bills make a trade for a WR, it will be for a modest WR about like Palmer. Look around the league. Injuries to key personnel happen all the time, not to just the Bills. Last year, the Lions great team in September was derailed early, starting with losing Aiden Hutchinson. Last year, Jayden Daniels took the Commanders to the NFC Championship game as a rookie. This year, in his first game back from a hamstring injury, Daniels dislocated his elbow. The decision to kick the FG was the right one. The execution wasn't there, but that's on the players not the HC. Execution again. Several times during the game, McDermott called TOs to help get the defense settled because of all the new defenders in the secondary, and the Chiefs had fewer opportunities for mismatches. Specifically for the 4th and 17, Spagnola seems to have faked out Bosa just enough to make him hesitate for an extra second so Mahomes could throw. I wouldn't cut Prater until/unless I had somebody better ready to sign or Bass was ready to come back. I believe that Prater had a minor calf problem prior to the game.

I think that exact scenario was mentioned by someone on the broadcast when it happened. It makes sense, too. It would also work best on good/great veteran pass rushers like Bosa.

The Chiefs aren't the Fins or Jests or Raiders. They aren't going to ever wave the white flag until a team can get up by several TDs as the Eagles did in the SB. One of the announcers on the evening league highlights compared the Chiefs to cockroaches when reviewing the Bills-Chiefs highlights; they're hard to kill.

Bishop has shown some promise this season, but this is the first time that he has played an outstanding game, so no, we haven't "been here before".

Penix is supposed to start for the Falcons. 👍

OP, since you feel the need to instruct Bills fans in math, it's only fair that I instruct you in English grammar. Apostrophes (') are used to show possession or to make a contraction. They are never used to make nouns plural. If you are talking about 2 or more people who cheer for the Bills team, you are talking about fans. A Water Buffalo hat that belongs to a Bills fan is a fan's hat. Two Water Buffalo hats that belong to 2 Bills fans are fans' hats. If you want to combine two words to make one word or a long word into a shorter one, you use an apostrophe: was not = wasn't or cannot = can't. You have other grammatical errors, but I picked the lowest hanging fruit because you should have mastered apostrophes back in grammar school. PS: I don't think most Bills fans are particularly concerned about the Bills despite their 5-2 record because of your model. I think that they're (they are) concerned about less esoteric things, like losing two games in a row before the bye to the Patriots and the Falcons.

No small island can "handle a Cat. 5", especially one of the top three strongest hurricanes to ever be observed in the Atlantic basin.

Whyever would I trade a HC whose teams tend to outplay their talent level for a HC who has demonstrated that his teams have had less success with much more talent, especially in the playoffs? People whine about McDermott "wasting" Josh Allen, but it was Harbaugh wasted the first five years or so of Lamar Jackson's career by keeping Greg Roman as his OC rather than insisting on developing Lamar as a better passer. I don't know why Harbaugh's teams fail so often in clutch situations like the playoffs, but they do. They seem to be teams that play well with leads but have no ability to overcome adversity. Pass on both Harbaughs, but especially the one from Baltimore.

I think that the Steelers as an organization may not value QBs as high as they should. I think they value defense more than they do offense even as the NFL has morphed into a passing league. Moreover, until this season, they seemed reluctant to trade assets to acquire better offensive talent. They were content to "let the draft come to them", which isn't the best way to acquire a franchise QB. Their current situation is not unlike what they went through after Bradshaw was done. They went 20+ years between Bradshaw's last season and Ben Roethlisberger's rookie year in 2004. During that time they survived and made the playoffs with some regularity with QBs like Bubby Brister, Kordell Stewart, Neil O'Donnell and Tommy Maddox as their QB. It may take them another 20 years to find Roethlisberger's replacement, especially since there are more teams today. What is worse than missing on a franchise QB? It's gotta be kicking a first round QB to the curb and then seeing him go on to the kind of success that Mayfield and Darnold have had.

I remember watching her in the Lassie when I was a really little kid and the series was in black and white. Lassie ran for 19 seasons, 1954 through 1973. It changed to colored film in 1965. Lockhart was the third and last female lead in the show, following Jan Clayton and Cloris Leachman. Lockhart played Ruth Martin from 1958 through 1964 before becoming Mrs Robinson in Lost In Space in 1965.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be on Jamaica and waiting for this beast to strike. There's no place to go. It reminds me of watching Katrina inevitably bear down on the Gulf Coast as a Cat 5 hurricane in 2005.

AJE has had a couple of pick sixes similar to the one he had today ... gets close to the QB in the "shadow of the end zone", blocks a pass, and grabs it for a walk in TD. Dowdle has gashed almost everybody this season. He had back-to-back 200+ yard games in the last 3 or 4 weeks.

My points were independent of each other. Flacco's success fades as teams figure him out. At this point in his career, he doesn't seem as capable of overcoming that as he did when he was younger. Regardless of how Flacco plays, the Bengals problem remains their defense. It would have been their problem even with a healthy Burrow ... as today's game against the Jests showed. While Flacco threw an INT on the last play of the game, they had the Jests down 15 points in the fourth quarter and let them score 2 TDs, a 2 point conversion, and a PAT.

The Steelers didn't have much, if any, film on Flacco on the Bengals. As teams figure out what the Bengals are doing on offense, Flacco's success is going to diminish. In his previous stints as a backup, Flacco has tended to look good early on and then his play drops off. More importantly, as somebody upthread posted, quarterback is not the Bengals' problem.

Why do we regularly see/read/hear of multimillionaires/billionaires who engage in insider trading, fraud, Ponzi schemes or even commit violent crimes in order to make more money? Some people are just never satisfied with what they have, no matter how much that might be, and have to accumulate more by whatever means necessary. They have always been around in human history, and we frequently label them "great" as in Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon. American bankers and industrialists like John D Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc are venerated figures.