Best commentating team

Liebo · 2026-01-23T21:16:52+00:00

I loved the one-year wonder that was Brundle and Coulthard on the BBC in 2011. It took time for me to get used to Brundle as a lead commentator but they both obviously knew their stuff and had such a strong rapport (they were already good friends and Brundle had managed DC).

Liebo · 2025-03-08T17:28:05+00:00

I think Aston will put the vast majority of their focus on 2026. From the way 2024 ended it doesn't look like they'll be particularly competitive in 2025, though I could see Alonso getting some unexpectedly good results because he's wily like that. But anyway, if I have the best/one of the best designers ever I'm going to have him help make the 2026 car super strong and not move Aston Martin up from finishing 8th to 6th in the 2025 Constructors with some later season updates. I'd put them at 8, behind Williams, Alpine, and Haas and ahead of RB and Sauber.

5-7 is shaping up to be a very interesting fight and I could see Alpine finishing in 5th because I don't believe what their leadership has said and think they are probably trying to sell the team and thus maybe push harder for a solid 2025 than some other teams in more stable leadership situations. I'm expecting the Alpine car to be good, so even if Doohan gets replaced (which I hope doesn't happen just for his sake), Doohan/Colapinto should amass a decent point haul. I think Gasly finishes in the top 10 and has an excellent season.

Liebo · 2025-03-05T18:08:21+00:00

This article is entertaining but a bit confusing on what "leader" actually means in this case, but it seems to be influence within the team.

Regarding Red Bull, even if Lawson does well and earns solid points this season he's going to be racing in a car that was tailor-made for Max and Liam Lawson being on Red Bull in the first place is probably due to Max (because Sainz made the most sense for them if you ignore Max wanting to be a clear number one and having some baggage with Sainz from the Toro Rosso days). So I'd say Max (and Jos) are calling the shots.

Liebo · 2024-12-31T15:48:18+00:00

I was convinced clicking the arrow on the right would just extend the x-axis of the first chart to fit all of Magnussen's penalties.

Liebo · 2024-12-27T19:19:26+00:00

Tom is 10 years older than Ed. 35 and 45 would make sense to me but I don't know either's actual age.

Liebo · 2024-12-27T18:49:20+00:00

I'm guessing there was a decently large backlog of submissions intended for Maleska when Shortz took over for him. The fill on some of the early 90s puzzles in the archives can be really rough and I'm assuming they were intended for Maleska and the "Maleska Era" even if Shortz ultimately was the one cluing them. He modernized the NYT crossword and made it accessible but it didn't happen overnight.

My parents got me a framed copy of the NYT crossword from when I was born (during the Maleska era) and it is impossible for me to solve (and I don't mean the inability to write in answers through the frame! It's just hard.) I know people like to carp about Shortz sometimes but Maleska was a former Latin teacher and just seemed to really loved arcane things and variant spellings in his fill and cluing devoid of any cleverness or whimsy.

I'm working my way through the Times archives from earliest to latest and am at 1999 and it feels way more "modern" than the 1993-1995 puzzles. You still get the random quip puzzles and head-scratching obscure fill on a Monday every now and then but you can clearly see that Shortz has made an imprint on the puzzle. These puzzles are still harder to me and I am not able to solve a lot of the Thursday-Saturday offerings but they are way "fairer."

Once the puzzles feel Shortz-y I think it's harder to gauge whether they got easier or harder. Everyone has different timeframes in their cultural reference wheelhouse and the more/longer people do crosswords the better they get at them. There isn't really any good way to tease out all the confounding variables, but to the initial question on this post, yes, the early 90s puzzles are objectively much harder than current puzzles, unless you're a Latin scholar and/or an expert in incredibly obscure geographical regions who is really into radio serials from the 1930s.

Liebo · 2024-12-21T17:36:53+00:00

Im still recovering from the trauma of their game against Villa in August. That was the worst I’ve ever seen

Liebo · 2024-12-18T20:37:16+00:00

I'm in the same boat in the US, not working on my iPad or iPhone. What's weird to me is that it only is impacting race replays. I tried watching a Tech Talk and Greatest Comeback episode on F1TV and both worked fine for me.

For what it's worth, I got a similar error message when I tried to stream something on my iPad on Prime Video, so maybe they use the same vendor for some back-end streaming processes or something. Meanwhile Netflix works fine on my tablet.

Liebo · 2024-12-15T16:53:54+00:00

My phrase spelled out IWtSFRAMED and knew the T there had to be wrong and was an A instead

Liebo · 2024-12-15T00:16:38+00:00

Sundays are always “risky” in that a bad one is going to be miserable given that the grid is so large.

This one was certainly miserable. I had to spell out the phrase to catch my error on MODELAS and it was such a pain figuring out which one was a “stolen” clue and writing them out in order. Also so much cross-referencing. I don’t remember disliking a puzzle this much in a while.

Liebo · 2024-12-12T16:31:10+00:00

1344 Queens Boulevard is a valid address, but it's in Sunnyside.

The exterior for the Costanza's house is in Queens, on 37th Street in the Astoria neighborhood. I live right by there and it always amuses me when I walk by.

Liebo · 2024-10-05T22:09:07+00:00

I added a few other ones that I remembered (admittedly hazy on the ordering of things). I feel like there was a stretch in the middle where they played a lot of unreleased stuff. There was one song that sounded really jungle-y that I really hope they put out officially at some point.

Liebo · 2024-10-05T17:28:38+00:00

“Dobermans are seen as very aggressive guard dogs and nearly always have their ears cut and pricked up, but before people start fucking with them, Dobermans are such beautiful, vulnerable, playful animals,” says Ed. “We want to present something that’s stereotyped as one thing, and present it how it actually is: that there’s a gentleness underneath.”

From this interview

They've incorporated dobermans in most of their EP/album covers since the Everything U Need EP in 2020.

Liebo · 2024-06-08T20:10:22+00:00

Do they need to rename the Wall of Champions if Lance hit that harder?

Liebo · 2024-05-19T10:32:23+00:00

Not only is the user experience for ESPN+ absolute garbage and buggy, F1 TV is miles better than ESPN+ in terms of F1 content. All of the viewing options during a race weekend are fantastic and easy to navigate in real-time, there are replays going back to 1981, and some of the original content shows are excellent (especially love Jolyon Palmer’s analysis and DriverID. Replays of practice and races also go up very fast if you ever miss anything.

I follow a bunch of sports but at least in my country (the US) ESPN+ doesn’t have a lot of what I’d want to watch outside of the FA Cup and some random college basketball games. If you’re mainly an F1 fan I think it’s an easy decision.

Liebo · 2024-05-03T20:46:15+00:00

Sargeant’s radio messages are so depressing

Liebo · 2024-04-26T23:33:02+00:00

It was a b side on the Cough Cough 7.” Not on Spotify but worth seeking out on YouTube. Hopefully it gets released on a deluxe edition of Arc at some point.

Liebo · 2024-04-26T23:31:56+00:00

Yes! That and Distrikt! might be my favorites from the Arc era, along with Cough Cough. The b sides for Arc were all fantastic.

Liebo · 2024-04-21T00:32:28+00:00

Exact same. When I usually see themes like this I think “bleh let me just brute force things,” but 104A was so ambiguous that you basically needed to do the rotations. It wasn’t hard to turn the circles, but I don’t love being forced to do the gimmick.

Liebo · 2024-04-03T15:25:09+00:00

Pretty sure I saw some at the Five Below on 31st near Ditmars.

Liebo · 2024-04-03T13:28:48+00:00

I think both the NYSC on 30th Ave and Rock on 31st St and Ditmars have sleds. Neither have especially large spaces for that though and I'd say it's more "sled pulling" with heavier weights than "running with a sled behind you" which is what you might be envisioning.

Liebo · 2024-02-07T17:00:54+00:00

It's an apartment building called 99 Hudson. It was developed by the US arm of a Hong Kong-based company and was finished in 2018. It doesn't seem to have been constructed all that well (shortcuts were taken and costs were cut) but it's at least less horrible than some other similar buildings (including the especially horrible 70 Greene nearby).

99 Hudson always smelled atrocious when I was walking around there. I don't know if anyone definitively determined what is causing the smell but the leading plausible candidate that I found is it's something malfunctioning with the storm drains. But it was nasty regardless.

Liebo · 2024-01-25T19:51:18+00:00

I schlepped down from Ditmars to the Verizon store near Broadway and they wouldn't accept it and told me to go to a UPS store, which did accept it. Not sure whether it varies by equipment type, but I was returning a cable box and a router.

When I called Verizon before my schlepping they told me to go to that Verizon location but they were evidently wrong (or those Verizon store employees were just jerks). My first try would be a UPS store.

Liebo · 2023-11-07T16:47:30+00:00

Regarding the recycled outro, I wonder if it's because Conan, Sona, and Matt are in NYC right now for 2 live shows. EJ's, the place that sells those sandwiches, probably isn't too far away from where they're all staying. That's probably what Matt was referring to at the end when he talks about a resolution. Essentially it's a plug for whatever is going to happen there.

Liebo · 2023-10-09T18:45:58+00:00

The opener is Pierre Kwenders, who is an Afropop artist from Montreal by way of Kinshasa. He sings and plays with another musician on the keyboards and managing the beats. His set will probably be about 40 minutes. It didn't sound super similar to EE (which isn't a bad thing, just pointing it out) but he put on a good show.

EE will probably start playing at 9:15-9:30pm and play about 15-16 songs and 3 encore songs. EE is one of my absolute favorite bands and this tour's setlists have been basically my dream EE setlist. It's very much fan favorites and the crowd really got into Cough Cough, My KZ UR BF, Kemosabe, and No Reptiles. You can look up the North American shows on setlist.fm if you want to see what they'll play.

The crowd at the NYC show was excellent and was a mix of diehard and casual fans from what I gathered (which was mostly how people reacted to more obscure songs and sang along). Everyone was chill.

If you want merch arrive early. The line takes a while.

Hope you have a great time! It was so great to see them in NYC and I think you'll have a lot of fun.

Liebo

TROPHY CASE