All the news, views, and filtered excellence fit to consume during your morning grumpy.
1. Twenty years ago today, the Buffalo Bills pulled off the greatest comeback in NFL History, beating the Houston Oilers in overtime 41-38 after overcoming a 32 point deficit. The game is a mythical event in Buffalo history and even though the game wasn’t sold out, roughly 420,000 people claim to have been in the stands.
I was not at the game, but I was listening to the great Van Miller broadcast the game on the radio – just an incredible memory of my adolescence. It’s been years since I’ve heard the broadcast and I thought I’d never hear it again, but local media historian Steve Cichon of WBEN put the broadcast up on his website last night so that we could all relive the magic of that day. I suggest you take a few minutes today to reminisce about those magical Bills teams and enjoy the dulcet tones of one of the greatest play-by-play announcers in NFL history. Damn, I miss when the Bills were awesome, don’t you?
2. Looking to get your act together and improve your productivity in 2013? Allow me to recommend some tools and browser plugins that will limit your social media consumption and/or improve your attention and focus.
I’m a big fan of this app:
TrackTime – Audit how you’re spending your time on your computer.
This good-looking app tracks everything you do on your computer, spitting back out a sort of “attention audit.” How much time are you spending in Firefox? How many hours a day in your email client? What are listening to on iTunes? If you let TrackTime run in the background, it builds these patterns into a lovely rainbow-colored timeline of your online life. Its most effective use is as a sort of wake-up call: If your daily timeline shows you shifting between apps and tasks every 2 minutes or less, you know there’s a problem. For Macs only.
There are some great tools available to make you more productive, so there is no excuse for being a time wasting slacker. Get more done, be better.
3. What do former Sabres owner Tom Golisano. the Government of Norway, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have in common? They’re amongst the top lifetime donors to the Clinton Global Initiative, donating between $10-25MM.
4. Matt Taibbi on the biggest Wall Street/political scandal of 2012.
“If it’s true that the 16 biggest banks in the world were fixing global interest rates, then it’s hard not to argue that that’s not the biggest financial corruption case in history,” Taibbi says in a web exclusive for Current TV. “I fully expect that we’ll find out in the end that American banks were involved in this scandal.”
And the band played on…
5. The differences between Democrats and Tea Party lunatics is largely informational, not ideological.
Actually, the vast majority of Tea Party backers agree with the vast majority of Democrats in their opposition to cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The main difference is that the Tea Party backers seem to believe that there is some other area of government spending, other than defense, that can be cut back to reduce or eliminate the budget deficit. Of course this is not true.
This is all a nice way of saying that Tea Party supporters are stupid, by and large. The Republican party has become a regional party buried in the deep south, leaving the rest of the country to design ways to work around the unhealthy, uninformed and broadly confused electorate found in the southern “taker” states.
Fact Of The Day: Jesus is mentioned more often in the Quran than Muhammad while Mary is mentioned in the Quran more than the New Testament.
Quote Of The Day: “Much of what we see depends on what we are looking for.” – Phil Callaway
Video Of The Day: “The N Word” – Louis CK
Song Of The Day: “Strictly Game” – Harlem Shakes
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