Listens

My bud Adrian is traveling through Asia. He met a Dane in Thailand, who hipped him to this Norwegian soul singer-instrumentalist. If you want proof that the world is round just let this pass through your brain one more time: A Texan in Thailand having a guy from Denmark recommend a Norwegian musician who sings soul.

And he’s good. Here’s another.

Thank You

If you’re a new follower of this blog or my Twitter account, thank you for doing so. This blog provides analysis year-round as I research, write, and edit my annual publication the Rookie Scouting Portfolio. Now it its eighth year, the RSP is available for download every April 1st. Beginning last year, I allowed readers to prepay/order the RSP beginning in March for the April download due to reader demand to make it so. I will do the same again this year – stay tuned.

Most of all, I want to thank those of you who purchased the 2012 RSP and/or previous RSPs, which are available year-round.  Thanks to you, I have donated over $1800 to Darkness to Light to fulfill my pledge to readers. D2L is a non-profit with the mission of preventing sexual abuse through community training and awareness. As someone who understands the lasting damage that can happen from this type of abuse, raising awareness may not always prevent this predatory behavior, but the ability to help parents and communities understand how to deal with abuse can limit the scope of the damage that often occurs when a victim’s cries for help are met with denial or blame.

If you haven’t purchased the RSP in the past but you enjoy the content on this blog, I encourage you to take the plunge. Past issues of the RSP (2006-2011) are available for $9.95 at the link above. The 2012 RSP is $19.95 and I donate 10 percent of each sale to this cause. Get something that my buddies at DLFootball.com say is worth every penny while supporting a great cause in a fight to prevent sexual abuse.

Fantasy Throwdown

To give full disclosure, yes, I beat my wife in a Throwdown. She challenged me to a game of Fantasy Throwdown last week. Click on the photo for a close up of the score.

But this wasn’t the best family game of the week. My daughter, Chandler, read my blog post and challenged her sports-loving boyfriend.  Didn’t turn out so well for the boyfriend.

Although the Cowboys game wasn’t scored when she took this screen shot, she won a nail-biter. Not bad for someone who has only watched football a little bit in her life. Perhaps there’s some sort of osmosis in play here, right? Wishful thinking I suppose. Anyhow, try FantasyThrowdown. It’s free, simple to play, and addictive.

Football Reads

• The 2013 Panthers are so attractive Bill Parcells could be led out of retirement Chase Stuart as a terrific, stats-focused blog called Football Perspective. Check out this good piece.
• Dynasty League Owner? Check out DLFootball.com
• Underclassmen – Should They Stay or Go? – Russ Lande gives advice to three prospects. Only one of them gets the nod to leave – Cal WR Keenan Allen.

Non-Football Reads

• Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math – If you read one thing today – no, if you read one thing this year – read this article by Bill McKibben. Yes, there’s still hope.
• The Cliff Notes to McKibben’s Must-Read – Yes, I know something about you guys, thanks to the power of analytics. Read it.
• Capitalism vs. Climate – Naomi Klein’s article from The Nation. Her main takeaway? “The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.”

Views

Perhaps another reason not to believe everything you see on TV? Fantastic stuff.