With Joe Kelly wearing number 99 (great video by the Kelly family to announce this, by the way, it made me the perfect level of uncomfortable), let’s check in on other great #99’s in history and say why Joe Kelly is better than them. I’m using this list from Ranker, because it was the first one I found.
- Wayne Gretzky: Easy. Wayne Gretzky needed his own enforcers. Joe Kelly *is* the enforcer.
- Aaron Donald: This one is straightforward. Aaron Donald has one championship. Joe Kelly has two. And if you adjust for how large NFL and MLB rosters are, Joe Kelly’s are each twice as impressive. That’s a 4-to-1 advantage. Good luck catching up, Aaron.
- J.J. Watt: Burnley has sucked ever since J.J. Watt signed on as a part-owner and as the American face of the club. Or rather: Burnley has sucked *even worse than normal* ever since J.J. Watt signed on as a part-owner and as the American face of the club
- Aaron Judge: A lot of people point out that Aaron Judge could have ended the Joe Kelly–Tyler Austin fight and chose to play peacemaker instead. Just shows how scared Aaron Judge is of Joe Kelly’s wild eyes.
- Warren Sapp: This one is tough. This Ranker list is terrible. Sapp should clearly be ahead of Gretzky. I will point out, though, that Sapp had it easy in college. Those teams were loaded. If you plucked Joe Kelly from UC Riverside and dropped him at Miami in 1993, The U would still be flourishing today.
- Jason Taylor: Another tough one, but think about it this way: Is Jason Taylor better than Aaron Donald? Of course not.
- George Mikan: Brutal. NIT champion and NIT MVP George Mikan. I think he also wore glasses, too. But we mustn’t forget that George Mikan played basketball while Ted Williams fought overseas in various wars. And it wasn’t even like Mikan was a pacifist. I have a lot of respect for George Mikan, but Joe Kelly doesn’t hide from wars. Joe Kelly starts them.
- Manny Ramírez: I love that Manny made it onto this list. He was so good during that time with the Dodgers where he wore 99 and was trying to get pregnant. Before the pregnancy suspension, I mean. The man almost hit .400 post-deadline in 2008! Anyway, I think we all agree Manny Ramírez’s real number is #24. We’ve reached the end of the competition. Joe Kelly wins.
Tommy DeVito’s Agent Makes It Weird
Tommy DeVito living with his very Italian parents is believable. This guy is not. And it’s starting to make me wonder whether Taylor Swift really did accept a bag from the NFL to date Travis Kelce. We will come back to this. Probably tomorrow.
The Fighting Finns
Not the Fins. They did not fight. They went down mildly. The Finns, though? They’re upset. They’re upset with one another.
Finnish hockey player Mikko Rantanen scored a goal last night for the Colorado Avalanche, which was news because he hadn’t done that in a while and the Avalanche…well, actually it turns out they’re playing well. They’re in first place in the Central. I was told things were bad with the Avalanche, and I think I was fed a false report. This is why we always fact check before we pretend we know what’s happening in the NHL.
Now.
What Rantanen said postgame, lifted from ESPN’s writeup:
“It feels good. It’s one thing where I got a lot of extra energy. One of Finnish NHL player’s dad was talking shit about me in the media that I didn’t train last summer like I used to do. He was making things up, so, I think that was for him. If you talk shit it’s going to come back at you.”
The Finn in question? Ismo Lehkonen, father of Artturi Lehkonen, currently injured but also a player for the Avalanche.
The Finns are fighting.
Now. I did a report in 2nd or 3rd grade on Christmas in Finland, and it’s Christmastime, and Finns are from Finland. That makes me a great person to comment on what’s happening here, and what I can tell you is this:
It gets very dark in Finland around the winter solstice, and there are reindeer there. Also, Santa might live in Lapland. That was a big question the report had to leave unanswered.
James Trafford: The British Brock Purdy?
Disclaimer: I know I’m terrible at identifying people who look like other people. A lot of people look alike to me. But I ran this by multiple independent sources of confirmation.
I think Burnley’s goalie looks a little like Brock Purdy.
They have the same vague sadness in their eyes.
The Eggnog Recipe, Fargo, and Someone Stole Our Poop Can
In holiday news, I’ve located the homemade eggnog recipe I used last year. It’s from Tastes Better from Scratch, it contains plenty of dairy, and I can confirm that:
- It’s easy enough to make that a man who cooks four times a year made it. Don’t be intimidated by the idea of “tempering” eggs.
- Homemade eggnog is a hit at Christmas and New Year’s parties, so long as the party’s at least a little south of a rager. If you’re trying to rage, no eggnog, but if you’re looking to have any other level of fun, homemade eggnog slaps. I usually put brandy in it, because when else will you drink brandy if you’re in your 20s and you live in Austin?
I don’t think I’ll make this for Christmas, because we’re bringing Fargo to my parents’ place and I’m going to need eyes on her at all times to make sure she doesn’t try to play with the cats, and I don’t know if I’ll make it for New Years. Honestly, that’s why I’m linking it here. It disappeared from my iPhone history over the last eleven and a half months and I want a place I can find it when I need it.
In other Fargo news, going off the cat friendship:
Someone stole her poop can?
We have—we had, rather—this little trashcan outside the garage where we’d put her filled poop bags so they didn’t make our normal garbage can stink too bad. This morning? It was gone. Later in the morning we located the grocery bag from inside it, full of her poop (this was six houses down the alley, and for the record, it was Fargo who found it, potentially guided by the smell of her own shit), but the can remains on the loose. I wish the camera back there hadn’t run out of batteries. I can’t think of any scenario in which I’d be mad at someone for taking the can. I just want to know what in the world happened. Did they think there was something in there other than poop?
