No clue about Howard Johnson’s, but Howard Stern is a longstanding but steadily declining American shock jock and former TV host.

I would just about bet the texture is similar, but maybe more uniform. I think the goal is to make a goopy sweet and tart syrup reduction that’s vaguely reminiscent of what a proper fruit pie filling would be like, and then construct a cobbler the usual way.

Shout out to Star City, on either Apple TV or the high seas. It’s alt-history set after Gagarin, but his presence looms large, and we might get a flashback eventually. It also shows a similar Soviet tour for the fictional first woman on the moon.

“Why is he just separating families, like, is that what he likes to see? Does that make him, like, happy?”

-14-year-old daughter, Sarah

Yes, to the extent his misery allows him to feel “happy.” She’s a smart kid.

Consumers turn to older DDR4 RAM since prices haven’t gone up as much as DDR5

In absolute dollars, sure, but hoo boy those percentage jumps are ROUGH! I bought 16GB of no-name DDR4 for my aging desktop 15 months ago for USD 22. That same listing is now USD 100, and still pretty close to the cheapest retail I see, though that’s only with an admittedly superficial search of Amazon and PC Part Picker.

LOL, everybody knows you couldn’t stop playing FPS games until you’d played Quake 2.

Duh.

Statistically speaking, the first part basically already happens. 90-97% of civil cases in the US settle before trial.

In a system that depends on interpreting unique fact patterns and evaluating and weighting “real-world” evidence with varying levels of subjectivity, I’d say that’s already as predictable as it’s supposed to be. What’s left has to do with inherent uncertainty on that 3-10% of close cases and clients with differing risk profiles (and pettiness), more so than it does with scummy lawyers bullshitting their clients, though TBF that definitely happens.

If anything, the issue with adversarial civil litigation generally, and the American system specifically, is that any uncertainty whatsoever breaks so drastically in favor of the party with more resources that reasonable claims settle when they had an excellent (but not guaranteed) chance at trial.

Florida formalwear there on the left.

There are so many. Some highlights though:

• There’s a salary cap of $6.5M, which is actually more “League One” than Championship, but there are loopholes to exploit (Beckham rule and its offspring most prominent among them), and MLS is full of Americans and Western Hemisphere players who are good but would never get UK work permits so their wages are a bit depressed compared to second and third tier British players.
• Maximum senior roster of 30 players, of which 10 are (nominally) supposed to be on the equivalent of 1800 pounds/week. Exceptions here as well, but in broad strokes the bottom of the roster is WAAAY cheaper than even the middle.
• Several of them are supposed to be 24 or younger, further limiting the pool.
• There is an internal market to trade them around, but teams can only have an average of 8 non-domestic players. Rules slightly vary for the US teams versus Canadian.
• The league is legally one business, and holds all contracts. The “owners” are investors in the league who have a contractual agreement to manage a team. It happens much less often than it used to, but you occasionally see things that appear to be league office meddling in player movement.

Yeah, no worries. One of the beauties of soccer is that playing it is not hard, but playing it competently is, and playing it at a high level is insanely difficult.

Don’t get me wrong though, in spite of the perfectly good reasons not to be, I still love American football, and you’re right that the other way around would be a literal bloodbath.

The NFL team would be miserable and probably have soft-tissue injuries, and eventually would not be able to stop the soccer players from navigating around them like cones, assuming they ever could. Assuming the soccer players could learn the byzantine rulebook in a reasonable timeframe, they would be instantly broken into little pieces and do nothing of note. No one would enjoy either contest, and we would learn nothing.

As for why they didn’t catch on, first I’m not so sure they didn’t, as tennis in particular has always had its place in the American culture, though its association with the “country club” class may have limited its ceiling. American soccer has its issues, and it is not pressuring the “traditional” American team sports, but attendances are healthy, sponsorships are good, and quality of play is decent, with a starting 11 being roughly comparable to the bottom half of the English second division. Roster rules would mean an MLS club would quickly get ground into dirt in that English second division, but matchday 1 might be pretty competitive. Taking your question more generously, though, competition from baseball, followed by organizational disarray, followed by competition from college gridiron football, followed by competition from professional gridiron football, accompanied by the “not invented here” syndrome, left it seen as a sport for immigrants and then as a safe yet cheap option for suburban children. Meanwhile ice hockey and basketball were also carving out their markets.

Televised World Cups and Pele started to erode that some, but more organizational disarray left the country without a proper professional league from 1984 until 1995, and when it was restarted it was intentionally done in a manner to control costs and favor management, which it ironically was able to do because it could always argue the players could seek employment in other countries.

NFL athletes would have the conditioning and stamina to at the very least compete in a soccer match

A few might not be utterly exhausted and wishing for death, but running around attempting to play soccer for ninety minutes is not the same as succeeding. Even Wide Receivers and Defensive Backs with some soccer experience aren’t going to hang with any professional team; that’s just not what they train for. Then there’s the skill issue. It would be like asking which Indy car would do better in the America’s Cup. ;-)

Yup. Give 'em laptops or tablets if you like. Maybe you break their distance vision in exchange for saving their backs from the half a dozen hardback tomes and trapper-keeper we used to lug around. Textbooks can be updated quicker, incorporate video, and if there are public domain texts, they can be provided for free. Completing worksheets with a keyboard and trackpad also doesn’t worry me, and I actually wish we had class discussion boards when I was in school.

Leveraging tech because it provides some practical benefit is just common sense, but thinking the tech is the benefit is stupid, so of course that’s where we are, driven by the olds you mention, as well as a healthy ecosystem of ed-tech grifters.

Did they bury something interesting here, or was it literally just this?

Macron, who is hosting the gathering, was picked up on a camera’s microphone asking Zelenskyy if he had a bilateral meeting with Trump as they walked the grounds of the Hôtel Royal. Zelenskyy’s response is inaudible. Macron encouraged his counterpart to stay longer in France, to which Zelenskyy responds that he “need[s] to go to Brussels on the 18th.”

The monkey-bar wings idea is a pretty nice touch, actually, as is figuring out a way for it to be outside, or maybe just accepting that it COULD be.

So I looked this up. It’s the viewing/sitting/fidgeting area for an interactive art installation at the San Francisco airport called the Butterfly Wall. As a kids area, yeah it’s still a bit sterile and eye-rollingly “sophisticated,” but they left out the actual attraction, a tank-like thing with very satisfying-looking hand cranks that raise little goassamer-winged mechanical butterflies that than then descend like fancy versions of the parachute men you’d get from the dentist because he won’t keep candy. I’ve seen tonally similar things at a dozen different parks, museums, and botanical gardens, and this one is actually kinda nice in that being indoors it can be a little more delicate.

As others have said, most kids areas I’ve seen are much less ST:TNG-coded, and even SFO has others that are “better.” My kid is through the “every random play area must be experienced” phase, but she’s traveled a lot, and we’ve seen tons of aviation themed mini-playgrounds and open spaces with primary-colored benches along the walls.

Pet peeve time: this kind of cherry-picked observation is weaponized laziness, the social media equivalent of stand-ups thinking it’s clever to muse, “why isn’t the whole plane made of the black box stuff?!”

High risk, high reward.

Fair enough, I may have inferred a bit too much, so here is what the CEO said:

And so third parties, the reason you saw some of these really high numbers, is we’re like, ‘A Rivian? And what’s a Rivian?’ So they they don’t know the car, and they quote an enormously high number, the insurance company agrees to it, and then that happens.”

A couple of years ago, I was applying for a work visa, and they needed my college transcripts. Despite matriculating in 19somethingsomethingoldold, my class was one of the first to use an online system that was able to be migrated into multiple subsequent generations of registrar systems, so they needed to have my school email ID, which I hadn’t thought about eleventymilliongetoffmylawn years, so THAT meant placing a call to campus IT, and providing enough personal information for them to look it up.

And that, my online friends, is when you are forced to viscerally confront that you were a deeply cringe knowitall who spent way too much time thinking your personality flaws were edgy superpowers and that knowing the name of a random reference in a Bertrand Russell book you barely understood proved how smart you were.

TL:DR: Poor scale and awareness due to being a niche brand, overly large aluminum body panels requiring either massive replacements or complicated welding, small shops guessing that it must be even more exotic and expensive than the CEO claims, and insurers shrugging and moving on because the volumes aren’t hitting their financials hard enough for them to care.