The Fever Machine

The USMNT has two more games to play before Qatar sets foot in Wales to start their World Cup race in November. Both of these undeclared September matches will be friendly, meaning last night’s Nations League game against El Salvador was the final competitive game the United States will play until November. Unfortunately, fans who tuned in to Tuesday night’s game were disappointed to see what the squad looked like and what kind of tactical wiring Greg Barhalter would introduce, as well as those who wanted to see something easily recognizable as a football game. Heavy rain and an agincourt-ass playing surface rendered things like completing multiple passes in a row and running a physical impossibility. Instead, the game turned into a mud war, which is to say that we learned nothing. The Americans fielded an A-team, and despite the drawings, showed some real heart.

The League of Nations is firmly at the scrub level of the CONCACAF tournament. Last year’s final was an extraordinary and extremely ugly game of football which was only important because its calendar slot was more suitable for playing the best version of USMNT than the Gold Cup. The pair of USMNT matches against Grenada and El Salvador were technically part of a group stage that would not end until March 2023, when USMNT will probably play a completely different set when they begin another long World Cup cycle. So the game was technically a bet, only the smaller ones. That’s why I was surprised to see the healthy Corey Barhalter play in the top eleven, featuring Christian Policeman, Brendan Aaron, Tyler Adams, Tim Weh, Anthony Robinson and Yunus Musa. Why risk a long-term injury for playing a meaningless game on Salvador soil a few months before the World Cup? Apparently because it forms the character.

The game was a slog from Kick Off. The passes either died in the mud puddles or strangely chewed away from the pooling water above the play surface. Players would push the longball forward, knowing that the ball would probably hit the turf and die. USMNT played on white kits, which was either a ridiculous surveillance or a pretty good bit. The closest man in the first half hour could score when Tim Weh stood in line to kick the bike into a corner; He slapped someone in the face. Estadio Cuscatlan hosted a concert over the weekend and heavy rain on Tuesday turned the field into soup. That was Ethan Harbath’s goal before the start of the game.

Have you ever wondered what Jim Tomsula is doing these days? Has your daily life been interrupted for a second by this intrusive thought, wondering what could be the former salesman (separately) of Meat and Dormat? Okay, I won’t speak for you, but I wonder this all the time. Now there’s an answer: He’s doing great.

After his glorious one season as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, Tomsula was sacked in early 2016, condemned for roaming the railroads or returning to coaching on the defensive line, which is basically the same fate. He shaved his mustache and went to the Washington Commanders for a few seasons, then did a gig with the Dallas Cowboys that lasted until January 2021. At that point, he disappeared from pro football পর্যন্ত until now.

For the first time friends or lovers Raju and Bhim have met, a child is at risk of burning in a boat in the middle of the river. Raju stands on a bridge ignoring the disaster and sees Bhima excited on the shore and moving to get over it. Bhim, without hesitation, jumps on a motorbike (he works in a repair shop), while Raju jumps on a horse (it was attached to an abandoned vehicle) and grabs a bunch of ropes. No one says anything but Raju somehow successfully communicates to Bhim with a very small hand gesture that they both have to tie the opposite end of the rope around their waist and move towards each other at maximum speed (in the middle of which Raju is holding a flag in his hand, which seems strange Either but stay with me), then, just before they collide, turn to the opposite side of the bridge and dive. All this goes off without a hitch. As they sway toward each other, Bhima scoops the child in mid-air, while Raju, on the other hand, pulls the flag across the water. Then, I’m not kidding, Bhim throws the baby to Raju (away from the flames) while Raju throws the wet flag at Bhim. When they are swaying away from each other, the child is kept safe, when Bhima is again engulfed in fire, but remember, now the wet flag is wrapped around him. Even then, when Raju returns to Bhima, he checks to see if his plan works, and of course, Bhima bursts through the untouchable fire. This is a Goldbergian miracle in South Asian Rube !!! The two men hold each other’s wrists, and, for a moment, they are suspended in mid-air, and so begins one of the greatest (not gay) love stories of all time.

This is probably the most spectacular sequence of Indian blockbusters RRR-RRR is the acronym for star and director, but is already becoming an acronym Roar rebellionBut, to be honest, it’s hard to choose. Director SS Rajamouli’s Surprise Western Crossover hit is sold as a Telugu language epic action drama, a fictional account of two real revolutionaries, Raju (Ram Charan, possibly the most beautiful man in the world, whose hair just moves in a full three hours) and Bhim. (A very handsome Belushi-handsome NT Rama Rao Jr.) who joined the forces in the 1920s to fight against the British Raj and rescue a local girl. But like all the great South Asian spice movies, RRR The friend I saw it with adheres to one of the following principles: Why choose a genre when you can do it all? !!! It’s action, it’s melodrama, it’s humor, it’s a prison escape movie, it’s a historical epic, it’s a religious screed. And just like the scene I described (I’m doing a little justice to what I actually saw), this movie has domino-style creativity that Wes Anderson wants, mixed with multiple scenes (including a long bromance montage) with Bhim Raju on his shoulders. Goes. While the viral epic dance stops where the pair’s high-octane moves embarrass a whole bunch of white people, it’s hard to choose which moments are the most thrilling of the supernatural feats of flying, parking and fighting here. My friend’s favorite part, for example, is when Bhim rocks a motorbike over his head and holds it in such a way that it weighs a little more than a pot tree.

It is not uncommon to see an Indian blockbuster like an American outlet New Yorker And AtlanticIt is even rarer to see non-Bollywood films outside India. RRR Acquired among white audiences in the UK, Canada and even Australia. Siddhanta Adlakha, who is from Mumbai বাড়ি Bollywood’s home — but lives in New York and co-wrote a video with Patrick Williams RRR, And says that Indian films usually do not get much publicity because the diaspora market is a tight, word of mouth spread quickly. “But it, like, it keeps going and going, almost metastasized,” he tells me. He saw RRR The weekend of March was the opening week with most Telugu viewers, but during the week the crowds were 50-50 brown and non-brown. The movie was re-released on June 1 because so many people came so late. “Although it is a mainstream blockbuster in India,” Adlakha explained, “it has spread among non-Indian audiences almost like a cult film here.”

RRR’s The spread was more certain locally. Tollywood is the name of the southern Telugu film industry RRR Come on, more ambitious than Bollywood, which has historically demanded the most national attention and financial support, has taken everyone else to regional cinema. In The Takeaway, Adlakha describes Tollywood as a “Bollywood Squad”. It’s big. The verb is more at the top. Emotions can be even more melodramatic. It’s just more, more, and more. “While Telugu movies are known for their empad-up star power and genre blends, new filmmakers like Rajamouli have also improved their storytelling. Art expert Sangeeta Devi Dundu tells the BBC that Rajamouli has changed the landscape. Emotional undercurrent and [fact that] The characters drove the action sequences. “ RRR’s Influence-spaghetti from Western style bromans Sholay (1975) to Superman Mr. India (1987) -According to SV Srinivas, a pundit of South Indian cinema, Rajamouli’s films have “some parallels”. Though the subject of their persecution and resistance to the Hindu and Muslim brotherhood is present throughout Indian cinema, the story of the indomitable heroes fighting for the common good became the mainstay of Telugu films of the 1990s and RRR These elements especially attracted the growing Hindu nationalist movement in the country.

According to Al Jazeera, Tollywood has now surpassed Bollywood at the Indian box office. This is largely thanks to Rajamouli’s original breakout feature, which has made history for its opportunities financially and linguistically. A two-part pan-Indian film, Arm strength (Published in 2015 and 2017) Much like this RRR, About a man who helps his lover rescue a captive queen. With a budget of $ 59 million (more than double the average Bollywood blockbuster top), it was shot in both Telugu and Tamil and dubbed in Hindi and Malayalam, meaning it was not just a ramped-up show, it was a ramped up with massive appeal. – You were spectacular. As such, it brought in $ 314 million, making it India’s second most successful film at the worldwide box office and a fivefold increase at the Telugu box office. Still, it wasn’t RRR.

Like many movies during the epidemic, RRR’s The release was delayed more than once, which created expectations. Meanwhile, Western audiences are stuck at home and running out of things to watch, diving into international cinema. And with the spread of the superhero tent, extreme philosophy has become more familiar to them. “There is always a kind of overlap between the concept of superhero and the concept of Hindu mythology,” said Adlakha. “And these two things continue to act as influences in the big Indian fantasy films, because there is all this exposure from the West to superheroes.” But Western superheroes have turned a little (too) late. The Hollywood blockbuster Overall, Adlakha notes, have achieved a similar tongue-in-cheek standard, their actions are usually pre-conceived. Not only does Rajamouli closely associate his activities with the development of his character, he is also famous for presenting heroic worship in a way that appeals to potential audiences. For example, the scene in which Raju appears to look like a bow-arrow and a golden deity on an empty chest; Alluri Sitaram Raju is the real life hero of Jungle. “On one level, if you’re familiar with that image, it says one thing,” Adlakha says. With mythical glory. “

When RRR Finally released – the first Indian film to be launched in Dolby in the United States, opened in more than 1,000 locations in five languages ​​- Adlakha feels that the film’s combined exposure to Indian cinema for the first time has maximized its impact. Which is to say RRR Western audiences do not provide some of the bad stuff that has come to be associated with the Indian blockbuster. Conversations can be fascinating, with montages and Greek chorus-style music outside of saccharin often ridiculous; It can be difficult to measure if acting (especially white actors) is campy or just bad; Violence is ridiculously gross, and CGI can be brutal. But the whole thing is so funny that those elements are jumbled up. “For a lot of people here, they think of Indian cinema, ‘Oh, you know, music and dance, on top of that, it’s very stupid,'” Adlakha said. “And all these things apply RRRBut you can no longer dismiss them, they are the highlight now. “And since Western audiences are recommending these films, they are using recognizable comparisons like Rajamouli Indian James Cameron to make them more readable.” Maybe, for example, ‘Hey, look KGF2Go see Vikram,Adlakha says, “But unless it’s my friend Patrick or someone like him, until they start saying, ‘Oh, yeah, check this thing out so you can’t usually check it out,'” The ball is spinning. “It allows a movie like Adlakha, KGF: Chapter 2Kannada-language sequel, a near-instant hit post-RRR, Even surpassing it at a box office, which has become increasingly limitless. As Srinivas told me, “It’s not a universal theme, it’s about global mass culture. We’re all in it together.”

The moment the pumpkin toadlet jumps into the air, anything seems possible. The small frog, which is about the size of a bee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem rising above the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet starts to fly, something goes awry.

The body and limbs of the frog begin to rotate like starfish. And then it falls, until it lands on its back or on its head and inadvertently stops at the cartwheel or rear, until it rolls freely.

“Some people are just spinning,” said Andre Confetti, a graduate student at the Federal University of Paran in Brazil. “Some guys do This Move, ”Confetti added, moving his fingers in a circle like a water wheel.

“Frogs are flying in the air, in space,” said Amber Singh, who will soon be a master’s student at San Jose State University.

The pumpkin toadlet, which is a frog but not a toad, is so terrifying to jump on that its mere incapacity has become the subject of scientific research. A team of researchers from the United States and Brazil, including Confetti and Sing, say they have an answer: Miniature toadlets are so small that the fluid-filled chambers in their inner ear control their balance function rather ineffectively, destroying daring little jumpers crash landing. For a lifetime.

The paper confirms that there are many species of pumpkin toadlets, which belong to a species of small frog. BrachycephalusThe current “a very unusual jump with uncontrolled landing behavior,” said Thais Condez, a researcher at Carleton University in Canada who was not involved in the study.

Or, as Confetti puts it, “they do nothing right.”

It is not easy to have a bee-shaped spine. Pumpkin toadlets have made evolutionary trade-offs as small as reducing the number of digits in their legs from five to three. Rick Esner, an active morphologist at the University of Southern Illinois at Edwardsville and author of the paper, says frogs, which are famously moist, dry out more quickly when they are small. But sometimes it gets smaller: “To a pumpkin toddle, an ant is a huge food,” Esner said.

Credit: Andre Confetti

Frogs developed the ability to jump before they landed, which meant that not all frogs could master the second part of the process. Esner had previously studied a group of similarly inexperienced tailed frogs, which jumped quite acceptablely but landed on a full-faced tree.

Marcio Pie, a researcher and paper writer at the Federal University of Paran in Brazil, emailed Esner about the pumpkin toddle when he learned of his research on the stomach-flopping frog. Pie’s lab members begin collecting toadlets and other tiny frogs from the wild so they can jump and (try to land).

Pumpkin Toddlet lives an elusive life. Frogs live and feed on fallen leaves in the Atlantic Forests of Brazil, which makes them extremely difficult to study because of their size. “They are very small and secretive creatures,” Condez said. “Most of our knowledge about their behavior comes from rare field observations.”

Finding bug-shaped frogs in Brazil is a difficult task. Although bright as a pumpkin todlet chito, the leaf litter has neon fungus and other orange life. “It’s extremely difficult to get under the litter of leaves,” Confetti said. “Especially for me, because I’m color blind.”

Instead, the researchers had to hear the call of a frog, which sounds a bit like cricket. Back in Pie’s lab, the researchers placed each bank on a mirror surrounded by some obstacles and illustrated their attempts to jump. (Some had to cheer on their little backs with a soft tap.)

When Esner saw the footage, he burst out laughing. Then he immediately swallowed the problem of hand. The toadlets were so far from the belly-flopping-tailed frogs of the frog family tree, which meant that the problem was not the ancestor. Then why they could not jump? “It wasn’t a ‘eureka’ moment,” Essner said. “It was, ‘What’s going on here?’ Moment. “

Credit: Rick Esner

Esner proceeded to read a number of scientific papers, including a previous experiment in which researchers weakened the vestibular systems of the cane toad, which is usually a great grasshopper. Compromised toads exhibited as sharp landing problems as pumpkin toadlets.

Esner wondered if Toddlett’s problem had come down to size. Vertebrates are able to balance and orient themselves around the world because of our vestibular system: a complex system of fluid-filled chambers and canals in our inner ear. As our head moves, a fluid called endolymph produces a force that derails sensitive hair cells and signals our central nervous system to control our posture and movement. Despite the vast body size of vertebrates, these canals are fairly consistent in size. “In a bullfrog vs. a man or a whale, they don’t change as much as you would expect,” Essner said.

The researchers suspected that Toddlet’s tiny body and small skull limited the size of the semicircular canal in their inner ear and could prevent the fluid from flowing freely inside. “When you take a tube and make it smaller and smaller and smaller, the resistance to fluid flow increases,” Esner said.

David Blackburn, curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and Edward Stanley, an associate scientist at the museum, performed CT scans on museum specimens of 147 species of frogs, including the largest frog (Goliath frog). (“There are several species of frogs running for the smallest frog,” Stanley noted), and the pumpkin Toddlet. The frogs were stored in a “standard frog position, fairly rigid and not super floppy,” as Stanley described. He packed the preserved frogs in peanut bags in a ziplock bag and scanned them with a million dollar machine. Singh then rendered a 3D model of the frog’s semicircular canal from the CT scan.

The results reveal the semicircular canal of the measurement Brachycephalus And tiny frogs Pedophrine These were the smallest of any adult vertebrate, resulting in loss of motor control and subsequent chaotic landings.

Researchers have considered other possible explanations. Perhaps the pumpkin toadlets’ three-fingered foot slipped during the initial jump? Or perhaps their careful landings were meant to resemble a fallen leaf, fooling hunters in search of food? But the videos didn’t show significant slippage on Toddlet’s take-off, and the landing Toddlets didn’t have enough time to reliably resemble a leaf, the researchers wrote.

CT scans further indicated that the toadlets had created some internal bone armor to make it somewhat safer to be destroyed. “It looks like they’re wearing a backpack that has all the bones,” Stanley said, referring to the Pumpkin Toddlet species. Brachycephalus ephipium. Still, the pumpkin toadlet is probably more of a troll than a lipper. Esner suggested that jumping was probably an escape response, a way to quickly remove oneself from a dangerous situation. Better a poor horse than no horse at all. Also, “If you’re the size of a housefly, you don’t have to worry about breaking bones,” Essner added.

Pumpkin Toddlet lives in the Atlantic forests of Brazil, one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet. “Every mountain in southern Brazil has the potential for a new species Brachycephalus“We don’t know how much,” Confetti said Brachycephalus We have it in our backyard. “

But 85 percent of the region’s forests have been deforested and what remains is highly fragmented. “It makes me wonder how many of these species there were that we would never know about, because they are already gone,” Esner said.

Perhaps the takeaway of Pumpkin Toddlet is that not everything should be optimized. Just because you’re bad at something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, especially if you have a secret bone backpack and toxic venom glands. Even if the small jump of the pumpkin toddle is equivalent to the locomotive drawing of a horse, this does not mean that it should not walk, jump or roll in the damp leaf litter of an invisible forest. Each species should have the right to fail spectacularly, but on its own terms.

Credit: Rick Esner

Tommy Pham vs. Jock Pederson Fantasy football Beef, which was released to the world a few weeks ago when Pham slapped Pederson before a Giants-Reds game, seems to have reached its final stage. We all laughed when Mike Trout was revealed as league commissioner on the question, but then both Pederson and Pham said they were ready to move on, and so it seemed, everyone else was. And yet here we are, again, hearing the faint glimpse of beef on the grill, and we have some DP T-shirts to thank for that.

Before Monday night’s game against the Royals, some of the Giants players wore T-shirts that said, “Stopping players in the IR is not cheating.” You can undoubtedly recognize this as a reference to the Fantasy Football beef provocation, which was (and is not) a disagreement between Fam and Pederson over whether the injured players in the Fantasy Football League were cheating by hiding in the IR. Rate rate! Clever shirt, friends!

Unfortunately, neither Pham nor Pederson thought the shirt was funny. Pederson has spoken with San Francisco ChronicleSusan Sluser about the shirts, and she was legitimately upset that her teammates decided to wear them:

Pederson said he’s not sure where the T-shirts came from first – they were in his locker on Monday and he put them on a table in the clubhouse for teammates. He had nothing to do with them, and in fact, he was annoyed to see a portrait of his signature on the shirt, which he did not approve.

“It’s not a chaotic shirt,” Pederson said. “I don’t think I made it or I did anything and it would be okay to send things that have my autograph on it. I didn’t like it. “

San Francisco Chronicle

Before you are tempted to call Pederson a “gizm man, light up”, please note that he is the one who slapped the subject, and thus has a very good reason to try and resist Pham. On that front, I have some bad news for Jock:

Disclose IR rules ?? Disclose IR rules ???? No, he will not dare! This kind of increase in hostility will surely push this beef past the no return point. Rob Manfred must intervene immediately and try to establish diplomatic relations before it is too late.

The history of baseball is full of creatures who enjoyed a brief celebrity while their presence in a ballpark inspired a home team to win. Has been there An assembly rat, An assembly squirrel, an assembly cat, and an assembly goose, just to name a few. The pattern is clear: Rally animals have supernatural abilities. But an optimistic bird flew into a more powerful entity: the Philadelphia Philis bullpen.

The bird Defe which Defender’s fancy ornithologists believe is a gray catbird হয়েছিল emerged after a very bad start for Phils. In the first inning, the Marlins were outscored 4-0 after hitting a pair of homers to Jack Eflin, and when the home side loaded the base in the bottom half, Jetty Realmuto shook the tension by grounding in a double game. .

So in the second, it already seemed like it could be a somewhat dull loss for the Phillies. (Quick sidenote: It’s not as embarrassing to be ruined by the Marlins as it used to be. They’re slowly getting a kind of fun!) If you want to use a ticket already purchased, you can download Phyllis’s broadcasting director chose a shot of the diamond from the center field on a small camera stuck in the ivy as the background to this obstacle, and the timing could not have been better. A beautiful bird, which I chose to name “Robin” after the Phillies great Robin Roberts pitched, just flew near the lens and stayed there for a few seconds, delighting the audience.

Famous play-by-play man Tom McCarthy, mysteriously: “There’s a bird that attacked Larry the other day.” (Perhaps that means Phyllis Radio analyst Larry Andersen.)

This was neat! And with the Phillies 4-0, what else are fans going to do but admire the birds? With the exception of a few innings after its appearance, the Phillies have not lost. The choice of a Realmuto fielder drives Kyle Schwartz in the third. Rees Hoskins broke the three-run dinger in the fourth ball to level the game. And fifth, the hits got across four more runs in a parade. Suddenly, it’s 8-4. Rally Bird was the rider.

Then Phyllis Bullpen একটি a weak spot all year round ভাবে collectively slipped out of their hands, not once, but twice. In the seventh inning, Juris Familia let the two go and then saw Jacob Stallings go to the left field seat. Soon after his replacement, Serranthi Dominguez — usually the most reliable hand to them পাঠ sent Jazz Chisholm Jr. a fastball that flew to tie the game at eight.

Channeling Robin the Bird’s strength and courage, Hoskins used his lumber again in a single shot to make it 9-6 in the eighth floor. But the save flew far into the top of the ninth when Corey Campbell allowed the first three batsmen to reach the base and then Garrett Cooper allowed an RBI single that tied the game once again. Andrew Bellatti at least tried to save the tie but obscured Robin with this unfortunate sequence, where Realmuto dropped a pop-up into foul territory and Jesus Aguilera then capitalized on a double with two pitches.

Hard luck for our friend Robin. But perhaps this will not be the end of their careers as an immediate baseball mascot. They’re playing pretty well in Queens, I hear, and it’s a short flight away.

I never worked for a big chain coffee shop, but for about a year and a half of my life I worked at a local bakery that also had an espresso machine. I was quickly banned from working on espresso machines, mainly because I was much better at remembering drink orders and gossiping.

All retail work is good for gossip because you constantly encounter people who think they are better than you, almost always rushing for no reason and they will happily talk to their sister on the phone about how their boyfriend is cheating on them and they At night he would steal all his plants and run away with them (this is a real story I heard once).

This week’s gossip is about a few baristas who have their ears open to gossip but their colleagues are much more interested in what to do than the annoying people in the drive-through.

Join me this week Tobin Low. Tobin co-hosted the podcast Nancy, Which the general gossip team likes and is currently an editor This is American life. We had a lot of fun in this episode!

I talked to Tobin about why being a producer is a great job for a dirty person, how to be a fun gossip, and without any warning about the very specific fear of hearing a family gossip story told by your grandparents. We then enter the story of hourly wages, spilled milk, and a group chat to solve a workplace mystery.

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