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They may have been instrumental in this game happening, and appear to have almost volunteered. They did not, however, necessarily want to play the 49ers. https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49881494/nfl-season-australia-san-francisco-49ers-los-angeles-rams-week-1

I use a Kamado Joe, and overall it's fantastic. I can crank the heat to 800 or dial it in to 275 for 11 hours. I have a soapstone that is excellent for salmon and also a pizza stone. My only issue with the pizza stone is it can get too hot and the crust burns, so I put a barrier between the flames and the stone. My most recent success was almost a failure. I made modified version of Kalua pork (just scored the meat and used salt), tossed it on the smoker and nearly forgot about it because I got very busy. Forgetting about it was the best thing because I didn't open the smoker to check on it, and it came out with outstanding flavor. Bacon is going on this weekend. Got a great deal on a pork belly at Costco, so that will make enough bacon to last a couple of months. I stopped buying beef because of the cost, and it's an expensive mistake when it's done wrong. Edit: I have thought about getting a gas grill for simple food. Charcoal can take a long time to get hot, and I don't always like waiting longer than the food will take to cook for it to get hot. Also, my grill is well used and FILTHY! I really need to do a deep clean, but don't even know where to start, lol.

It's not Gutey's fault that their first round pick last year barely saw the field, and when he did, it was for end arounds.

This smoke isn't just from Canada, there are fires in northern Minnesota as well. They evacuated the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and one of the fires is just outside of Ely, MN. It's probably this bad due to the closer proximity the fires are to us.

I'm hearing this second hand, but allegedly it got so hot in my building that some plaster started melting from the walls. It's now a partially air conditioned building, but still closed to everyone. What a disaster.

We could probably start a separate youth sports topic as we diverge from the World Cup discussion, but I'll say as a parent of youth swimmers- there is so much pressure on kids to excel in their sport. Our kids attend arguably the best swimming high school in the state, but are not the best swimmers. So many kids go out for swimming that they have to cut swimmers, so they have to swim club year-round to keep up just to be on the high school team. If we put our foot down and forced them to do another sport, they could fall behind and not be able to continue on the high school team. We have seen first-hand that swimming 42 weeks a year on multiple teams can cause muscle and joint fatigue because they are being overused. I really want my daughter to do another sport in the spring instead of club swimming, but she doesn't want to get left behind.

I went into my buiding on Monday and my office wasn't actually that bad, but the elevator and hallway were brutal. One of my coworkers said his office got to 100 degrees during the heat warning, which I believe. My wife's building is another that has had reduced cooling, but it's not closed. It has been hovering around 80 most of the past couple of weeks, not condusive to much getting done. She is not allowed to be remote 100% of the time like I am due to my building being closed.

Great discussion on why soccer isn't a big deal in the US. Some additional thoughts: Parents often dictate what sport a kid is going to go into. They see soccer as a great entry point to team sports because a young kid can play without having refind gross motor skills. They just need to run/jog and kick a ball. Ever see a 5 year old try to swing a baseball bat or shoot a basketball? Once a parent sees their kid mature a bit, they move to other sports. Kids will play the sports their idols play, that means they most likely want to play football, basketball, or baseball. Those three sports are easy to access on TV and the radio, so it's not hard to follow the games. Soccer is not as readily on TV, even with more streaming options, and none of the best players (aside from Messi in the twilight of his career) play in the US. The top athletes in the US play basketball and football, with baseball coming in a distant 3rd. For many, they see those two sports as the golden ticket to money, either through a scholarship/NIL or eventual professional sports.

I am a UW-Madison employee. One of the chilled water distribution pipes burst late last week, so many buildings on campus are currently without air conditioning, my building included. They have closed the affected buildings, and are planning on having this resolved in about a month. That means we can't go to the office to work until they reopen the buildings.

We haven't been camping since Labor Day 2024. We have a trip planned this weekend, and my back decided to give out Sunday night. It usually takes at least a week for it to start feeling better, which means after we're done camping. I do not know how I'm going to pack and set up our camper Friday, but I do not want to cancel the trip because it's been too long since we've gone.

I said the same thing to my wife last night, only used Aaron Rodgers as my example.

You might want to check on those rental properties. I saw a lot of pictures of larger hail from the east side of Madison, and lots of cars in the surface lot at the airport were properly damaged by the hail. I know DeForest also had some gnarly winds overnight Monday night. We're in Middleton, and there were parts of town that also had the very large hail.

The severe weather in general this week. We avoided the baseball sized hail that some of Dane County received, but we still had golf ball sized hail. Fortunately, we have a metal roof, but there are a few small dents here and there, and somehow the solar panels appear undamaged. Our neighborhood is very sloped, with our street being pitched, and all of our back yards slope downhill (we're 2 blocks from Lake Mendota on a hill). Our neighbors on the high side of our house just moved in over the winter, and they inherited broken gutters that cause a lot of water to pour into our yard. The previous owners somehow mitigated it, but this year water has literally cascaded down the steps we have in the back yard, and it pools under our deck. The neighbors are aware that their gutters are broken, but didn't know the scale of runoff we were experiencing until we met with them the other day. New gutters won't be installed overnight, so I'm hoping they can come up with a solution to stem the runoff into our yard.

The ID.4 is on my list as well, but I've read horror stories about them having issues and being in the shop. My hope is that a used one will have been repaired already, but perhaps it was returned/traded in because it's such a problem child. It's probably one of the best options for us size-wise. I want something that's a small-ish SUV with AWD, but I'm sort of lost figuring out what to get. I'm looking at used because the depreciation is already built in, and I can pay cash for it rather than financing. The Mach-E is on my radar, but not much else right now.

Definitely not the same level of dominance over the course of 6-10 years, but the Middleton boys swim team has won the last four state championships, and the girls have won the last three. The two best boys swimmers are seniors, but the best girls swimmers are sophomores and juniors, so I suspect the girls run will last a couple more years.