173 Comments

Number 1 on my Christmas Wishlist: Wilcox staying at Cal.

While I've been critical of Wilcox, especially this year, after looking at the 2022 schedule, this is probably NOT the season to be breaking in an entirely new coaching staff...the even year schedule means 5 conference home games, + 2 very winnable non-cons (v. UCD and a bad UNLV team). If Garbers is in fact gone, as seems to be the case, the quicker we get a grad transfer in learning the system the better (Adrian Martinez would be great).

But with stability and barring catastrophic roster upheaval, 7 home games makes 2022 a potential breakout for JW as talented underclassmen start to see the field.....

Gotta go lie down...this bout of positivity has me feeling lightheaded.....

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Too much eggnog and Christmas spirit has gotten you soft and positive. Go get that lump of coal and lie down for a while.

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I just mixed myself up a fock-load of bah humbug and am feeling much more myself…

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What's interesting is that Garbers hasn't said yet that he's in the transfer protocol. Is he still trying to decide? Is he trying to see what happens to the coaching staff? Is he waiting for a team to reach out to him? We need answers!

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I highly suspect that he's going to try the NFL and if that doesn't work move into his post football life.

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who are you and what did you do with Jimmy Chitwood?

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Malort

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It's grim. I lived in Chicago for the better part of a decade and during my years of peak drinking and never touched the stuff until I got back to California. It's like deep dish. No one in Chicago really touches the stuff. Just tourists. And, yes, Zachary's is infinitely better than anything found n Chicago.

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It's perfectly acceptable. Tastes like pencil shavings in gasoline but Cal went 4-0 this year when it was at our tailgate.

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sounds good to me.

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Malort is now mandatory (malortatory) until we lose. You should temporarily stop after we lose - a malortatorium.

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pqtm

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Never tried it. But the wikipedia (a great site made popular by W4C reader GoBears49) page suggests it's related to absinthe, so I may enjoy it.

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Who is GoBears 49?

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I had some absinthe a couple of years back at a party. Apparently it was popular with the Paris art and literary scene in the early 20th century. I didn't notice any hallucinations, though.

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I think Cal football has a 4 game winning streak when the CGB tailgate has shots of it.

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I've never had it, the name sounds gross enough to put you off

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It is NASTY.

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Would you use gasoline to describe Malort?

From what I read on Wikipedia, the "mal" part ofvthe word seems apt. Yeesh!

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I didn't have it for the Furd or the $C game so I feel like if I start having it then Cal football will lose.

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Did you have it for Wazzu?

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The first 2 games we had it I was out of town. Coincidentally those were two wins. Colorado and Oregon St.

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Alright, that settles it...it's going to take some sacrifice on your part, hag, but we're gonna need you out of town at least 4 of 7 home games next year, preferably the Stanford tilt but most definitely UW/UO/UCLA...

I figure barring another COVID mess, we can probably handle UCD, UNLV and U of A at home with you in attendance, but can't afford to take any chances if the Bears are gonna bowl in '22.... ;-)

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Leo DiCaprio

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He was always a really good actor, just took a while for people to realize it.

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I can't tell if I think he is really good or just good. I've disagreed with people who call him really great, since I just don't see it.

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Can't think of a single thing he was bad in, also, generally choose good projects.

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J. Edgar is not too good. But yes, in general his batting average is high.

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Missed that one, you watch a lot of movies.

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My problem with him was his baby face. So after he earned his chops doing What's Eating Gilbert Grape, he kept trying to portray himself as older/respectable by growing patchy facial hair and scowling a lot. Conversely, Brad Pitt knew he had a baby face and just went with it.

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There was an awkward period after Titanic where he kept trying to play older than was appropriate. (That's why Catch Me If You Can is one of his best roles from this time -- he's supposed to look younger.)

I think The Departed was the first time I felt like he was fully past the "baby face" issue.

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I liked Inception, Django. He was a a very good actor, though seems like a complete douche nozzle. Par for the course in that way I suppose

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I liked him in the Quick and the Dead. The role was a kid striving to be perceived as older and more respected than he was--which was kind of where he was at in his own career at that time. Also good in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

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Was? Has he died?

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Typo, sorry! Is I mean

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Blood Diamond is one of his best, IMO.

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Catch me if you can, another film

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Titanic

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the craziest thing about Titanic will always be the fact a novel was published 14 years earlier...about the largest passenger ship at that time named Titan.....which hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank....in April....with ~3000 people on board.

https://www.cruiselinehistory.com/sinking-of-the-titanic-and-the-titan-coincidence/

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It's one of a lot of films on my list of "you'd think I'd have seen it but..."

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SAME

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My opinion of this movie has changed over the years. When it first came out I was a teenage boy determined to dislike anything that was driving teenage girls crazy. I never saw it in a theater and later watched it on VHS . . . which means grainy resolution and a picture that chops off the sides of the widescreen view. I hated it, having first watched it in that format.

In recent years I've caught up with it on my HD widescreen TV and it plays much better. It's melodramatic, to be sure, but the spectacle works as it should (if nothing else, James Cameron knows how to deliver good spectacle). I still have my issues with the movie -- the dialogue is often clunky and Billy Zane is pretty terrible -- but now I think it's pretty good for what it is.

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Agreed. I saw it in the theater and enjoyed it, tho I am a history buff and enjoy that type of historical fiction schitt....thought the story with the Titanic as a backdrop was kinda cool. And the special effects were damn good for the time. It definitely could be a little shorter, and the post-sinking ending remains one of the dumbest in the history of film, but as far as epics go, it was pretty good.

The most obnoxious thing about the film tho was Cameron at the Oscars, by far. Just STFO already, James.

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Yeah, Cameron's self-centered performance at the Oscars did not help this film's reputation at the time.

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Never saw it either, and since I had a teenage cousin (female) at the time who thought it was the absolute greatest thing ever and had seen it 15 times, kinda put me off the movie.

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I've never seen it either. I remember flipping through the channels and stopped on HBO and watched a few minutes. I distinctly remember the ship is starting sink. I left to run errands for an hour or so, came home, turned the tv on and the ship was still sinking. It was at that moment I knew I would never watch it all the way through.

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Same. I'm sure it's a fine film, but I'm not interested.

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spoiler alert: the ship sinks.

Of course I'm joking but this actually was why I was highly suspicious of this film - we all know how it ends. But it was because of that fact that I was curious enough to watch it.

It's a good film. It's not going to change your life, but there's a reason that it made like seventy-threeve-trillionteen dollars.

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I have no interest in seeing it.

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I saw it once. Meh.

Then I saw Avatar and I was thoroughly disgusted by James Cameron. "Unobtainium", indeed.

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Also, "The Towering Inferno" was a better movie.

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haha, that seems like an over-reaction, sure it was a completely goofy movie, but visually it was a least well done (Avatar).

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Over-reaction to a trite plot and script? The devil you say!

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it's not enough of a cultural touchpoint for people my age and slightly younger that not seeing Titanic can be a bit so it's just lack of interest on my part.

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Once you have seen a few real disasters, I find that disaster movies such as this are depressing at best, frustrating, and can be disturbing. Why on earth would I choose to spend elective recreational time making myself feel bad (other than watching poorly coached football!)?

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This is how I feel about dystopian things, too

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My wife enjoys dystopian movies because it is escape from our personal dystopia of constant work.

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I haven't seen it yet, but am super interested in tracking down a way to watch "The Six" - a documentary about the six Chinese survivors of the Titanic sinking who arrived in New York and were immediately deported.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/jjIOni4LIL0

Film Website:

https://www.thesixdocumentary.com/

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We'll see if i can put that to work.

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DBD Not Official Financial Advice

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I just learned the hard way that almost every insurance agent in the US will happily commit fraud by lying to you to make $200 commission on insurance that won't cover you but will stop talking to you if you take up more than $200 worth of their time.

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Insurance is selling air. It’s crazy our healthcare system is based on private insurance companies. I think they are the fattest target to eliminate; pharma is greedy sure but at least they develop new medicine .

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One fund I'm in had a 5.9% increase yesterday.

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lets hope you had a lot of it and it stays that way ...

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Let's hope it increases 5.9% every day for the next forty years

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Yeah that's likely.

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DBD Test Kitchen

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So I bought a giant bag of dates for Thanksgiving because I am unable to read basic information, and I had made a date + shallot based salad dressing.

I was watching old Bon App videos and watched the grilled cheese one and Sohla makes a pokhara battered grilled cheese with dates. Well, I don't have time, patience of batter to make that - but I have dates so I've been making grilled cheeses with dates the last couple of days, and man, they are GREAT.

https://youtu.be/TpY7B00Pqf8?t=262

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Make a date shake.

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You could also make sticky toffee pudding.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12500-sticky-toffee-pudding

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this is the only acceptable way to deal with leftover dates

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The only way I can get more than one date is if I buy them. Usually I store them in a dark closet.

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Kinky

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Fetish dates...it's a whole new thing.

8MM dates, Pulp Fiction Red Ball dates, double-sided dates....we could go on an on......

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DBD AV Club

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went to the HS orchestra winter concert last night (my daughter plays the viola). It was rather nice just to see the youths playing in person again - AND the big innovation of the year is that rather than the "before times" approach of stacking everyone in the gym for 3 hours while they worked through orchestra and band and jazz band (7 total performances), they're breaking things out to keep occupancy and duration limited, so we were able to be supportive and still get out in an hour.

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I've had a similar positive feeling from the college bands, the marching bands, but also the campus band and wind ensemble. Like a lot of things, the Covid experience taught them and the rest of us to appreciate what we have and have had, and that it actually can be lost in an instant.

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Revolutionary good idea regarding organization of the program!

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it did seem terribly sensible - and they'd even given the auditorium a coat of paint while all the kids were doing "remote school" last year.

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Hawkeye Episode 4 (will watch later)

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Really enjoying Renner + Steinfeld. And I was dumb and didn't realize that was [redacted] for like 3 minutes even though I told people [redacted] would appearing.

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Our crumbling democracy

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Ron Bloom out. Louis DeJoy now on the chopping block.

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1468396262835859457

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When DeJoy is fired, indict his a$$ and jail him.

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Roger Stone invokes the Fifth to not testify. Okay, so we both agree that he committed a crime.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/roger-stone-invokes-fifth-amendment-033300740.html

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Remember how Devin Nunes quit his job to run Trump Media? Here's a pitch deck for a reverse-takeover vehicle that appears like it's meant to capitalize Trump. In terms of pitch decks, this is the dumbest, most ridiculous one I have ever seen. And I have seen thousands of these.

Comparing their start-up to being twice the size of Netflix is straight up stupid. Zero users. Zero people. Zero business. Zero anything except funneling money to Trump. It so transparently awful, it seems like a joke.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1849635/000119312521348593/d242442dex992.htm

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He's taking himself public. Incredible hubris with nothing but hot air.

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Gov. DeSantis wants to protect Florida from increased storm activity due to global warming by ensuring it's not called that. He avoids any "leftist stuff" like science, actionable policies, and logic. Let's call it the "Hope and Prayer" method.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-gov-desantis-proposes-plan-232500861.html

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Similar to their approach of contraceptives, the old “pull out and pray” method has now been applied to climate change. I’m sure it will fail just as spectacularly.

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Honestly though if it requires coming up with a new name for climate change to get him to combat it, who cares. Give him some dumb figleaf to let him save face so he doesn’t have to admit he was wrong and move on.

Words pick up connotations over time that drag them down. There is kind of a natural process of renaming things to get beyond undesirable connotations that happens anyway.

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Yeah, but - by pretending climate change doesn't exist, he can't do anything about root causes, the actions he's taking won't do anything to slow down why they have to spend all this $$$ protecting Florida from rising seas.

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I don't disagree with the branding issue, while silly, its also a thing. I'm more worried that those fixated on labeling will wiff badly on measures that are actually effective AND actionable/affordable, and make progress on the problem.

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Russia' GRU must be laughing their asses off because of their smashing success

Newsmax's cover:

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1468393370712260614

Tucker Carlson defends Putin

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1468401459154857985

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I doubt they actually had anything to do with this, but they did get the ball rolling.

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I never realized Newsmax was/had a publication

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That's an ambitious strategy for a tv outlet whose audience lacks reading comprehension

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well, they can read, it's just not clear how they're deciding what to believe other than "if those treasonous liberals say it, it's a lie"

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Irony is still dead. 1/6 defendant who pepper sprayed capitol police wants to be released because a) he was maced in jail and b) risks being radicalized in jail.

https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1468401946251841536

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Today in Omnicron

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Well, this happened.

https://twitter.com/NeriZilber/status/1468601219782516753

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Sup, Prime Minister

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absolute legend

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Cue Finisshing jokes in 3-2-1.....go.

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Top comment: What’s her phone number? Asking for a friend.

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4am? I'm out by 9 pm and I don't turn 36 for about a week...

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not gonna lie but i was in bed by 9:30 last night

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Scheduled my booster for next Friday. When the missus got hers, she was able to get a next-day appointment, but the soonest I could schedule at the closest pharmacy was Sunday. That's an encouraging reflection of the local uptick in vaccination/booster rates.

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Mine is this Sunday.

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No 3 is next Wed and No 2 is the following Sunday afternoon after the Cal/Dartmouth game.

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Mine is next Tuesday (finally).

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Just got my booster on Monday. I took the Moderna to mix and match with the Pfizer. But now I'm seeing reports that the Pfizer is particularly strong against Omicron. Gah.

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I'm encouraged by early indications that getting the third shot of a vaccine seems to do the business with this variant. Hoping that the FDA approves it for 16-17 year olds soon.

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also crossing fingers re: little kids, since my 4 year old niece remains the only member of the family completely without a net here

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My 8 year old twins got really sick from the second shot and I had this moment at like 3am when I was holding them, and they were shivering uncontrollably, that I thought shit, did I make some irreversible error? But after a day they were ok

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Pro

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Keenan Allen is put on Covid-19 list but he still has a chance to play this Sunday because he is vaccinated. Good for him. Not sure if he can get two negative tests in time but hope he can, and hope no health issues for him.

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I don't particularly understand cricket scoring but I understand that's bad

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I recently watched the movie Lagaan, which did help me understand how cricket is played. The way scores are reported in news articles like this is still baffling to me, though.

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Aldon Smith: felony DUI on Monday. Some guys aren't equipped for adulting.

https://www.tmz.com/2021/12/07/aldon-smith-arrest-dui-causing-injury-charge-nfl/

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I thought it was a great come back story last year. I guess some guys never learn.

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You have to wonder with guys like this if he’s got brain damage already. Remember when Chris Henry jumped out of a moving truck? I think football is not long for the world. 20ish more years maybe?

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He’s going to jail.

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nah, he's rich. He'll get counseling and will be back on the streets in no time

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Not quite the Michigan Goal, but Zegras' assist is 🔥🔥🔥

Zegras: https://twitter.com/spittinchiclets/status/1468392702731501568

Michigan Goal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TPk4RGqwVo&t=38s

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Other College

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Josh Newberg predicts Rattler to UCLA. Rattler has 3 years of eligibility. Wither Ethan Garbers.

https://247sports.com/PlayerInstitution/Spencer-Rattler-at-Oklahoma-237355/CurrentTransferInstitutionPredictions/

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Hmm...go from one Garbers to another as QB1?

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May be short-lived...IF Wilcox does get the Oregon job, gotta figure TDR would be on Cal's HC list, no?

Jay Norvell made a somewhat lateral move to Fort Collins this week too....which makes sense...8-4 in the Mountain West with a 1st round NFL QB - that's gotta be a 10-2 team.

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Jay Norvell torched every bridge on his way out of Reno saying it wasn't a lateral move.

https://twitter.com/justinmichael/status/1468343274515533824?s=10

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The Rams play at Nevada in 2022...that's gonna be an interesting game.

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I would hope Cal would do better than DeRuyter as HC

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I would as well...but suffice it to say, Knowlton's lack of imagination with his MBB hire does not really inspire confidence.

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The discussion on Addicted to Quack is surprisingly pro Wilcox. There is some finger pointing at Cal saying "Cal? Who can win at Cal?"

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If there is a team in the conference with a HC, OC, and DC made up of Cal alums, I would be a fan of them too.

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Somebody set up a gofundme account to get Wilcox back to eugene.

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With the kind of money Oregon athletic department has, I wouldn't pitch any of my own money for it

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They’re not wrong, tho Wilcox should bear a large share of responsibility for his record at Cal. The administration is not responsible for his inability to put a competent backup QB on the field @UA, or Moore’s fumble @ UW, or Nikko’s TD drop @ UO, or letting TCU run up the gut for 50 to cut the lead to 5 at half...and the facilities are good enough...not Oregon good, but few are.

Wilcox as HC w/ Joe Brady as OC IS something you could sell to Duck fans and has me concerned. UW was never an option...this is.

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this. so much this. Say what you will about lack of institutional support and the city of Berkeley, but they weren't the ones mismanaging games in crucial moments

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I keep thinking of McCaffrey running amok in a conference championship game, which is unfair of me, but there you go.

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depends on whether they win I guess

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oh wow what's it like watching your team be competent for an entire game

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Glad to see that his health has improved so he can come out of retirement.

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I really HOPE his health has really improved AND will remain improved. It's been a problem 2x already, and I would have been very leery given his history and age.

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Yeah dude, stress is like smoking. He may feel fine when he’s just golfing, but I don’t know, concerns me how he holds up under the lights. Wish the best for him though!

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He's gotta figure out how to head coach like Steve Spurrier. That dude golfed EVERY day, year round.

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SCU vs Cal on saturday, the only team that should stop the Bears from going 4-0 over the next few games

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Idaho State tonight I think. Pac-12 Bay Area.

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Cal

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Gavin Reinwald in the portal. Graduate.

https://twitter.com/rivalsportal/status/1468711135230767106?s=21

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It's Latu and Terry time....and it's going to be glorious.

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Dec 8, 2021Liked by SGBear

Go Bears!!!

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I guess this on his death?

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time to stop supporting water polo

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Look what students get if they go to a MBB game.

https://twitter.com/TheBenchCal/status/1468703730480467976

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I'll take the transfer portal with a side of Adrian Martinez please

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I'm not sure how much of Martinez's inconsistency that led to an incredibly poor record in close games isn't on him. I suspect Cal (and most Cal fans) are not looking for another way to lose numerous close games, even though they are experienced with that.

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Lost in the anti-Martinez buzz is that he nonetheless played really, really well in close games v. a laundry list of elite programs: Michigan, Ohio St., Sparty, Wisconsin, Iowa, Purdue and Oklahoma...Garbers struggles to keep us in any of those games.

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Gotta think some of those U of Hawaii players could help, including their leading rusher...a large quantity want out of Todd Graham’s program.

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Can you throw a forward pass? Let me introduce you to Berkeley, son. We have fuckloads of weed

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