The Avenger

Once you do an auction draft you'll never go back - been doing one in my league for about 15 years. I do play a couple of leagues for fun and then I'll do a snake draft because they are faster - did a 10 round draft in less than 45 minutes last night.

Wow - this is an amazing story - to hear from someone in a position such as yours on that day is incredible - thanks for sharing!

Normal airport logistics are an incredible feat, but what happened on 9/11 and the ability to quickly shut everything down was amazing - being a part of that industry and undertaking must have been quite the experience.

Fist day back in the office after attending the Bills home opener. Because I live in MA I had taken Monday off to drive back from WNY and 9/11 was a Tuesday - absolutely stunning sunny early fall day - not a cloud in the sky. I had been traveling to a client site in Pittsburgh pretty much every week but not that week because of my day off. Heard reports of a plane crash on the radio as I was driving to work. Then more news once I got into the office. Then things got really crazy and websites crashed due to volume and it was hard to get news. I called my wife who was at home and watching on TV and she told me one of the buildings collapsed - I couldn't fathom that. Just 2 years earlier we had moved from NYC and I was frequently working with financial clients in and around WTC - I was in that area all the time. Each of those buildings covered a huge city block and were over 100 stories tall - hard to describe how massive they were. Spent lots of time at 7 WTC where we had a client - couldn't understand how that building collapsed. People started calling me after flight 93 crashed - knowing I was flying to PA every week they wanted to make sure I was OK. Again, lucky I wasn't traveling that week or I would have been stuck in Pittsburgh (or wherever my morning flight would have been grounded). What I remember most was the silence - everyone was so stunned nobody could speak - everyone walked around like a zombie for days. I would come home and my wife and I wouldn't speak - we were so dazed and there was nothing to say. Absolutely horrible.

Covid spewing skank - no thanks. Also hate that she does the fish lips thing in selfies - WTF is that?

I think they realized he was under the control of a giant spider and wanted no part of that - poor guy....

Nothing kills you like long snapper contracts...

Jeez - watch it - if you say his name 3 times he appears, like that candy dude in the movie

Anyone who breads a wing should be summarily executed for the good of humanity

Saw a really interesting doc on Hulu the other day called "Donut King". It's the rags to riches story of a Cambodian immigrant who evacuated at the end of the Vietnam war and came to California with literally nothing. He worked a bunch of jobs but wanted to run a donut shop so he got trained to run Winchell's donut shop. Anyway, he became so big by opening shops and sponsoring other Cambodian immigrants that today more than 90% of independent donut shops in California are run by Cambodians - truly an amazing legacy. I had no idea because I live in MA where there is a Dunkin Donuts on every corner....

That is so much beard he might actually be the first guy to get tackled by his beard if a defender grabs a hold of it...

It's not about last year's prediction though (seriously - with the strides Josh made I think a lot of folks were undercounting the Bills) - I just don't know how you have the Bills losing that many games to weaker opponents in the division and still winning the division - it does not make sense (queue the Chewbacca Defense...)

SI has an article predicting every regular season game and team W/L record. They have the Bills at 12-5 (a bit low IMHO, but OK) with losses to (and here's where it gets funny): KC, Miami, Jets ad swept by New England Hey, the Bills could go 12-5 and I can see losing a letdown game to a team you should kill, but not 4 of them to weaker AFC East opponents. Baring major injuries/covid there's just no way that happens. https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/08/26/predicting-every-game-2021-nfl-season

Wake up, sheeple - you aren't watching the birds, the birds are watching YOU! https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/the-history Learn THE TRUTH and thank me later...

To see teenage boys go absolutely crazy over women's swimming was awesome

And somewhere Kerri Strug says, "Really?"

I also thought the voice was Jackie Mason's but it was Byner doing Jackie Mason and Dean Martin as the ant. Anyway, thanks to Jackie Mason for being the inspiration for the Aardvark...

Sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson, who won the women's 100M at the U.S. Olympic trials has tested positive for THC and has been retroactively disqualified - she will not run the 100M at the Olympics. Terrible mistake that she blames on the pressure of losing her mother just before the trials. I hate to see all that hard work go to waste, but when you're a world class sprinter you know the rules and you have to live with the consequences. A truly sad situation.

As long as this potential big TE acquisition works as well as the last one when we went out and got Charles Clay, we should have nothing to worry about...😝

Time to break out the clubs and hit the links with OJ....

- I hope this was something Pastrnak and his wife knew could/would happen - not knowing must be worse than any blindside hit he ever took - I am glad this did not happen at a time when he was still playing his season - I can't imagine what it would have been like to suffer such a tragedy and still be needed to play hockey

I was watching an old episode of this season's Lego Masters (I am several episodes behind) and I see the next challenge will be doing 4' towers that they try and knock down via a simulated earthquake. My immediate thought was that Fox must be so relieved that the episode had already already aired - can you imagine broadcasting a show about knocking down Lego buildings in the aftermath of this tragedy in Florida?

It's a terrible story and one that we don't see too often in this country, fortunately - I have seen stories about similar collapses in third world countries and the devastation is incredible. If there are inspections my guess is that that they wouldn't tell you much unless you could see things like cracks or concrete erosion. If floor joist connections were made improperly, insufficient rebar was used in concrete slabs, concrete was too porous to support designed load you probably wouldn't be able to detect such things, even if you did a pretty thorough structural inspection. Sadly, they only learn about these things after a tragedy.

In things I've seen about other building collapses around the word, and it usually comes down to the architect not properly calculating the load or forces at work, or the construction not following the pans correctly in in how it was constructed or the materials used (i.e. - improper concrete). There is also a chance that things like wind and salt air were more corrosive than anticipated and nobody designed/built for that. Given that this was built in Miami in the 80s when there was a huge construction boom and it was probably impossible to oversee everything, my money is on someone cutting corners in the construction and it managed to hold up for 40 years before suffering a catastrophic failure.

That looks like when Israeli forces were leveling buildings in Gaza a few weeks ago.... You can only hope that many of those units were either empty or owned by snowbirds who had gone north for summer....