Gather ‘round for another weekend bereft of Cougar news

Labrīt no Latvijas, where Team Kendall sits after nearly four months of doing hardly anything recreationally. If you ain’t into masks, head this way, because they don’t appear to be a thing over here. Then again, most of you probably hold U.S. passports, which are as valuable as a used piece of chewing gum right about now, so maybe don’t make any plans just yet.

You may have noticed the tumbleweed in the cover photo, which brought back memories of my three years in Eastern New Mexico, where dodging those bastards on the way to and from work could have been an Olympic sport on many days. The road ran north/south, and the wind almost always blew - exceptionally swiftly - out of the west. Once the land dried up and the tumbleweeds broke from their moorings, it was game on. If you hit one at a high rate of speed, it was best to head straight to the body shop without even bothering to assess the damage yourself.

Where was I? Oh yeah, nowhere. So anyway, given the confluence of the COVID-19 resurgence (USA! USA! USA!) and that portion of the calendar where nothing is happening even during a normal year, this has been another weekend of trying to fight for a table scrap of Cougar news. You won’t believe this, but we are going to bed hungry, again.

Unsolicited Podcast Recommendation

I went to Washington, DC for a conference in early March, and the only thing of value that I let with was a podcast recommendation from a fellow Airman who works at the Pentagon. He turned me on the The Art of Manliness, and I have enjoyed every one so far. From Teddy Roosevelt’s field notes to youth sports to techniques for handling difficult conversations to the story of Jimmy Doolittle and Eddie Rickenbacker, the show has it all. One of my personal favorites recently was the episode on grilling.

Book Club

Over half way through The Great Influenza, and the chilling parallels continue, mostly involving willful ignorance on behalf of people who are charged with knowing better.

This Week in Parenting

My son broke his arm. Not this week, but in the spring of 2017. Why am I bringing this up now? Well, this week we received a letter in the mail from the Florida Orthopedic Institute, telling us that his personal data may have been compromised as the result of a ransomware attack that the company recently suffered.

They then said that anyone whose data may have been stolen was getting free identity theft protection for a year or something, and that they had everything under control. Yeah, sure you do. You can’t even keep your idiot employees from clicking on random links from some prince in Namibia, but I’m sure you’ve all over this. In the meantime, my kid’s social security number is somewhere on Tor being auctioned off as part of a 10,000 SSN lot for some crime syndicate to utilize. Grape job, Florida Orthopedic Institute.

You Suck If...

Not having gone adventuring in quite some time had tamped down the memory of a chronic pet peeve of mine, that being these jackholes (almost always women but that’s neither here nor there) posing for some sort of Instaface story that will certainly result in scoring them a modeling contract. Yep, that offer to be the next highly-paid influencer on Snap-o-Gram is right around the corner, so you can go on posing in front of that church/bridge/Soviet-era KGB prison for as long as you need to.

Who cares if there are several other people waiting around for you and your idiot friend to snap 79 photos?! That perfect one is right around the corner! Keep shooting! So yeah, if you’re one of these people, you suck. Stop sucking.

Beer

Best beer I had this week: My new favorite beer-via-mail website got a whole bunch of beers from The Bruery recently. This week I tried White Chocolate. My god.

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Non-Sports

I guess this has all been non-sports but whatevs.

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