Hockey players really are the best.

Bill Keller’s WikiLeaks cover story is an incredible read, but I’m struck by how much richer it is online because of the embedded links.

He mentions CJ Chivers’ heartbreaking narrative, and then you’re reading it. Same with the "Collateral Murder" videos.

It can’t possibly have the same effect in print, can it?

One of the reasons Joe Poz is such a great writer is because he’s so obviously aware of his limitations.

"If you can’t go on radio and make a pretty air-tight argument that outdoor football is better than indoor, you probably don’t belong on the radio.”

It was also very nice of him to submit to a second interview with me after my recording device destroyed the first one. Maybe he’s a great writer because he’s just a great guy.

The truth is that anyone who spends $40,000 a year to be taught how to write by writers who cannot make a living by writing, or who imagines that fairness and common sense have anything to do with the publishing industry, could probably use a lesson in how life really works.

They reflect a guilty fear that, one of these days, millions of us are going to watch a man die on the turf.

Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist with the Defense Department, had come to the InterContinental to share some of the government’s research with the N.F.L.’s medical brain trust. (Concussions among the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, one doctor told me, could be “the next Agent Orange.”) “If you look historically, what really hurts our soldiers from blasts is artillery shells, mortar shells,” Ling said. “The combat helmet was designed particularly for mitigation of fragments. It does have some ballistic protection. You could shoot at the thing point blank with a 9-millimetre pistol, and you won’t penetrate it. That’s pretty doggone good. I’m surprised New York City policemen aren’t wearing the doggone thing. But, like, I wouldn’t play football with the thing. It ain’t that good.”

Now scrolling on ESPN's bottom line

"BREAKING: A pair of 28-year-olds were killed on Sunday afternoon when the Jay Cutler Bandwagon flew off Rt 66. Footage from seconds before impact shows Dave Hurley of Arlington, MA and Noah Davis, Swansea, MA, miming some sort of shooting motion, shrugging, then  high-fiving as flames engulf the pair. 
There were no other casualties. 

In fact, the accident might not have been uncovered were it not for Josh Kleinman, 28, who stumbled upon the smoldering rubble while searching for an errant Mark Sanchez pass.”

Let’s go for a drive/See the town tonight/There’s nothing to do but I don’t mind when I’m with you

Omar Gonzalez can’t predict football games, but he’s not bad on the field.

The cab leaves me at the corner of Union and Bond. I’m tired. I’m drunk. I’m pretty sure my friend is hanging onto the back of the car, ready to jump off and berate me for leaving the bar early. (It’s 1 a.m.) I look back; he’s not. I reach into my pocket to get my phone and read the text messages he’s sent.

It’s not there. It’s on the backseat of the cab, having slipped out of my pocket for the second time tonight. The cab is a block and a half down the street, picking up speed. Without thinking, I take off running.

I have two chances to catch him: The light seven blocks away and the one two blocks further. Once he takes a left onto Atlantic, It’s “hey AT&T, here’s $500.”

I’m sprinting. I am Jason Bourne. I know I can run for half a mile, flat out, without getting tired. I don’t know how I know this, I just do. I am flying. I’m catching this cab.

Except I’m not. I am Matt Damon playing Jason Bourne, if Matt Damon were a drunk kid, running in skinny pants and skate shoes, rapidly losing wind. There’s no way I’m catching this cab.

I reassess the situation. The cab, now three blocks ahead, looks like it will get stuck at one, if not both, lights. That’s a positive. There’s a kid lazily riding his bike 10 feet behind me. I gasp: “My phone’s in that cab. Can you try to catch it?”

He looks at me. He considers my plea.

He takes off down the street.

I am excited. I sprint faster in solidarity with my new friend and his rusting mountain bike. I’m running fast; he’s riding much, much faster. Both he and the yellow vehicle are disappearing in the distance.

Fatigue sets in. I can barely see. I just focus on sprinting. I don’t know why I’m still running; it just seems important. I’m not paying attention to what’s happening ahead of me. There’s just the pavement and my increasing urge to vomit.

My compromised senses note an object winding its way towards me. I look up. It’s the kid and his bike, riding uncommitted s-curves in my direction. The cab is nowhere to be seen.

He gets closer. Something in his hand is forcing him to ride erratically. My phone.

He hands it over, and I try to give him some money from my wallet. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “That was amazing,” I pant with far too much enthusiasm. “I kind of lost my car,” he says. “Well, I don’t know if it got lost or towed. I parked it on Union and Bond.” “Can I help with that?” I ask. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, and rides off.

When I finally make it back to the corner, he’s there, riding slowly around searching for his car. He nods at me and shrugs. I nod back, then walk into my apartment. He continues looking.

Soon after Garbage broke through in the United States, fire-haired frontwoman Shirley Manson mentioned to Spin that she joined a rock band for the sex. For some reason likely related to minor teenage rebellion, I relayed this fact to my mother one afternoon. In a teachable moment she said that was nice for Shirley, you know if that was the kind of sex she wanted to be having.

I listened, then ignored. Manson was famous, beautiful, and outwardly sexually aggressive; I was 14, shy, and in love with a woman on the cover of a magazine. Teenage boys can dream, can’t they?

Nothing happened, obviously. The singer married and then divorced a Scottish sculptor best known as the “ex-husband of Shirley Manson.” I grew up, wandered happily single around New York, and learned I wouldn’t want to date a rock star even if I could.

We both ended up in the right place. But the antiquated part of me can’t help wondering whether Manson would be happy during other weather patterns as well if she found herself in a committed relationship.

There is of course one thing we can squarely and firmly place the blame for these killings on, aside from Loughner himself: The handgun he used to carry them out.

I don’t know: I’d rather have bed bugs crawling up the Empire State building than jumping out of my pizza. And in Detroit, they learned how to drive cars.

In Ohio, it appears as though ticks are flying out of the sun. That’s just confusing.

“Comment is free, but the facts are sacred.”

In “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe,” Will Robinson Sheff’s lyrics saunter aimlessly around the absurd. It’s wordplay for the sole sake of wordplay, acoustically pleasing phrases devoid of any meaning. “Where the lock that you locked in the suite says there’s no prying / When the breath that you breathed in the street screams there’s no science.” Lovely. Empty.

During the four-minute and 26 second song, Sheff sings 216 words. Only nine of them matter.

The line “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax” enters right before the minute mark and disappears before sixty seconds end. It is, fittingly, not the pinnacle of the song or even the verse. It’s not the climax of anything, really; more a vital observation masquerading in the place where a throwaway remark should go. A wandering mind will miss Sheff’s best insight. (The following line, “No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX,” returns immediately to light, airy, ridiculous tricks with rhyme schemes.)

“Our Life” eventually peaks, hitting its highest note as pounded chords and a cacophony of noise explode behind Sheff’s silly simile: “Like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching / up some bad movie.”

The man in question is bored, but he’ll be fine; we don’t live movies. Nor should we. How simultaneously tiring and overwhelming would that get, spending our days trapped along a plot-line that’s crescendo-ing and descending rapidly enough to keep an audience happy?

It’s fun to watch America wake up.