MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh  and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that too as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.

Where it was rare for QBs to gain more than a few years running it’s now common to see six or seven QBs in the Top 50 rushers in the NFL. Currently six QBs are in the Top 50. But where the competition have been race cars, Josh Allen has been a snow plow, going through, not around, defenders. 

Ask yourself, at what other position in what other league would the three best players at a vital position be allowed to switch team from 2023-24?. That’s what happened last winter when top candidates for 2024 OPOY— Barkley, Jacobs and Derrick Henry— all departed their former teams for slightly better paydays on the Eagles, Packers and Ravens. Doesn’t seem to make sense.

Damn that Tom Brady. Because of the now-retired NFL GOAT it is widely believed that an athlete in his 40s can still triumph over younger men. That a good diet, plenty of sleep and keen desire can sustain you against twenty-two year olds. It ain’t so.

Over the decades we’ve spoken with many parents and players trying to parse this CHL/ NCAA equation. It was a heartbreaking scene when they gambled on a CHL career that gave them no life skills or permanent physical problems. Or the promised NCAA golden goose never appeared after playing in a lower league for prime development years. 

It’s safe to say that as Canada prepares to defenestrate Justin Trudeau in the next federal election, Wayne Gretzky will not be invited to Rideau Hall for beaver tails with the PM. It’s likely he’ll experience the Bobby Orr blackout, becoming a non-person in Canada for getting too close to Trump.

The current version of Freeland is the plucky woman who was fired on a Zoom call by a man. A woman of integrity who then sent off a stinging letter of resignation in which she revealed she was being pushed aside for a Trudeau buddy Mark Carney. A fiscal warrior who resisted going $60B in the red (she was cool at $40B, however). And, BTW, could she please deliver the government’s financial statement before she’s fired?

Anonymous people spent lifetimes toiling on Nôtre Dame without ever witnessing the completion of their work. And still the master masons, draughtsmen and carpenters saw through their commitment. They worshipped the idea of a Gothic world reaching into the sky to be closer to God. While people perished from war, famine and plague over the centuries, there was money and energy still found to complete this astonishing church. 

Joe Biden wasn’t done with his revenge on Team Obama/ Clooney. For months he’d vowed that his respect for the law was so great he would not rescue his whoring son if he was in danger of jail. No pardon. Then, on his way out the WH door Biden dropped his bomb on those who’d fired him. No pardon become a big pardon. Not for just gun charges, but for anything he’d done dating back to starting work in Ukraine in 2014. 

Donald Trump’s call to reject those who’d prospered in Covid found willing ears in the United States. His resounding sweep in the 2024 elections— every state in the union moved rightward in voting—  was the final rebuke to those who preached certainty. The same people who sloughed off not one, but two assassination attempts on a presidential candidate as mere distractions.

It can be safely said that the 2024 U.S. presidential election couldn’t have gone much worse for legacy media in that country. Their biases, conceits and outright falsehoods throughout the arduous years-long slog toward Nov. 5 were exposed that night. Now they face irrelevance.

Like America’s ruling class before the 2024 election, Canada’s brahmins are blithely unaware they are being fitted for a rope in 2025. Confident they know best, they issue columns that declare that the public sometimes gets it wrong in elections. They faint in the face of Elon Musk making X into a dominant  political force. They assume the public is still listening.

Stephanie Cesca is a strong and capable storyteller. Her passion for detail and vivid imagination creates an authentic fictional world. Readers can see her characters in their mind’s eye. They can relate to their pain.

Throughout the book’s 384 pages, readers are kept guessing as to the killer’s motives. Could such rampaging violence be  a professional hit or a random act of madness? Or was the victim bludgeoned out of existence due to his shady business dealings and abusive, violent past?

Clewes is a sensory, effusive poet. Her lyrical words reflect a deep musical sense. In the third section, Calle Obispo, the poem of the same title, references Nobel Prize-winning poet and Polish-Lithuanian  author Czeslaw Milosz. The first stanza turns a plane trip into a spiritual experience.

Green’s complex, colloquial whimsy is grounded in a strong academic backbone and a broad knowledge base that references Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. And how she loves wordplay and puns,

Winning a literary award hikes a book’s profile, as the books are put on course curriculums, book club reading lists, and are listed as library best staff picks. This creates more profits for publishers, which is a boon for authors because it increases a book’s promotions budget.

I think books in this genre require a bright label along the spine: Beware. A second reading may be required to fully comprehend this book.