The home team wasn't going to win every game in the NBA playoffs, anyway. The defiant and defensive-minded Chicago Bulls also might've been the easiest to predict as the first visitors to get a postseason victory after higher seeds went 8-0 in Game 1s over the weekend.

Maybe it's a genuine sentiment. Maybe it's clouded by bitterness stemming from his one (failed) season in Washington. Regardless, former Redskins quarterback Donovan McNabb is not a fan of the zone read option.

If you're still wondering why Capitals general manager George McPhee signed defenseman John Erskine to a two-year, $3.925 million contract extension earlier this year, games like Tuesday's win over Winnipeg are your answer.

The Wizards found out last week they will have the eighth-best odds (3.5 percent) to win next month's draft lottery after losing a tiebreaker with the Detroit Pistons. While they could leapfrog to the first, second or third pick, in an unlikely scenario they could fall as far as 11th.

On the court, Louisville's Russ Smith is known for his impetuousness. But in remaining with the Cardinals for his senior year, Smith has made a measured decision that undoubtedly pleases and surprises coach Rick Pitino. After the Cardinals won the national championship, Smith's dad declared his son ready for the NBA Draft. Isn't completing his eligibility the last thing to expect from a guy nicknamed Russdiculous?

Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund played equal parts in redefining the hierarchy of European soccer. But Bayern Munich won't let its rival play on a level field back in Germany.

The Redskins will have a chance to draft LSU corner Tyrann Mathieu. Two years ago, that would have been an exciting possibility. Now? After missing last season because he was kicked off the team, reportedly for multiple positive drug tests? It's far from a no-brainer and, really, it depends on your philosophy.

The Angels took pitcher C.J. Wilson and outfielder Josh Hamilton from the Texas Rangers each of the last two winters. But those poachings don't seem to have hurt their A.L. West rivals. Instead, Texas was off to a 14-7 start entering play on Thursday and has already swiped four of six games from Los Angeles this season.

1. So here we are again. Last year the Capitals and the New York Rangers were tied 2-2 in a best-of-seven Stanley Cup playoff series and Washington was moments away from securing Game 5. Instead, a late Joel Ward penalty led to a game-tying goal by Brad Richards with just seconds remaining. Madison Square Garden exploded and Washington wilted in a devastating overtime loss. The Caps survived Game 6 at home, but ultimately were dispatched in a bitter Game 7 loss in New York.

The scene is all too familiar now. The long and tortured Stanley Cup playoff history of the Capitals means little to the current generation of players. None of them were born or raised here, after all.

BRETTON WOODS, New Hampshire — Former Vice President Mike Pence met with local New Hampshire politicians during his crisscrossing of the Granite State on Wednesday as speculations mount over his 2024 ambitions.

A Jersey City councilwoman refused to step down from office Wednesday night amid outcry over an alleged hit-and-run last month.

Former Idaho state Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years behind bars for raping a 19-year-old intern.

A judge ordered Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin to leave his Otero County commissioner post effective immediately.

Run GenZ advises young Republican candidates on everything from website building to fundraising plans.

(The Center Square) – Whether a county can have more control over renewable energy projects like wind farms is under consideration by Illinois lawmakers in the final hours of lame-duck session.

A former top aide to the mayor of Washington D.C. sexually harassed a female employee, according to an internal probe.

More than a dozen people sustained injuries in an incident involving a Greyhound bus in Georgia, which local authorities said flipped on its side when one of the vehicle's tires blew out.

(The Center Square) — A legislative task force "to study the dissolution or absorption of fiscally distressed municipalities" set the tone in its first meeting with a vote to change its name.

The public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, on Monday opened on a two-hour delay. This was a borderline call, considering there was no snow or ice on the streets at 6 a.m., and so it’s no surprise that the largest neighboring school systems — Washington, D.C., and Fairfax County, Virginia — opened on time.

A federal judge weighing Amtrak's bid to seize the historic Washington Union Station wondered whether those plans are consistent with Congress's intent under a 1981 law that requires the station to be managed with "maximum reliance" on the private sector, given the railroad service's desire to have sole domain over the property.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is holding a hearing examining the General Service Administration's site selection for the FBI's new headquarters.

On Tuesday, Metro General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke proposed a budget for the next fiscal year that includes massive layoffs and dozens of service cuts as the agency faces a $750 million deficit.

Commuters in Newark, New Jersey, were subject to delays Thursday morning after a bull got loose on the tracks of Newark Penn Station.

An alliance of top automakers urged President Joe Biden to reconsider rules that would prop up electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered ones.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's acting head Ann Carlson will resign on Dec. 26.

KinectAir, an on-demand private air travel company, is now booking budget-friendly private planes.

California will ticket a driver for violating the rules of the road, but for driverless vehicles, there is reportedly no mechanism to ticket the person responsible because of a loophole in some jurisdictions.

An Alaska Airlines flight was forced to return to Portland, Oregon, on Friday, after a window on the Boeing blew off midflight.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to be temporarily grounded on Saturday.

The monthly archive for October has been saved. By the end of this month we'll know a lot more than we know now.

We now understand that the Republicans derive their power through division, setting groups against each other. We think the Democrats are the opposite, they are inclusive, everyone is welcome there. But that's not true. This NPR piece touches on it, gingerly, because it's the third rail in non-Republican politics. Because it's one of the divisions that's maintained by people who are mostly Democrats. If you want to know if you're part of the problem, measure your own feelings when you find out what it's about. And then listen, carefully to the words. It might be hard to hear because I think most people who do this don't think they do, or they're justified in doing it. They don't want to look here. But the pragmatic reason to focus on this is that in future elections, assuming we have them, if we can make an effort to not do this, we could get enough Republican votes to switch to make real change possible. They might even become our most vocal supporters. Winning in politics is done by focusing on common interests over division.

Meanwhile, it's amazing that both CNN and MSNBC have gotten serious about covering the reality of Trump 2.0 after being very unserious for the last year. It's as if after rejecting Joe Biden, months later they realized they rejected the wrong guy.

Unfortunately the only place you can read this Dan Conover piece is on Facebook about the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy. He says something I had not seen elsewhere. "We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two 'unique nationals' standing in American print journalism. Institutions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it." I'd add that all other journalism usually follows their lead, but that may be finally changing.

The most depressing thing last night for me was reading that a longtime friend voted for the worst candidate they've ever voted for because the other one was worse. They wouldn’t say who they actually voted for. This is what we’ll be left with as a country when all this is done.

I gave another $100 to Harris to compensate, and of course voted straight Democratic on Thursday. Unlike my friend I was proud to vote for her. The alternative, after what we lived through between 2017 and 2021, to choose to go through that again, hard to imagine the horror.

And of course that’s assuming he voted for Harris.

I kept waiting for Kamala to say what we're not going back to is Trump. We've paid our dues. He's had enough of our attention.

Government should do its work quietly, making things better for the people and that's all, and until there's a crisis that demands our attention, stays out of the way.

Must-read: “It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.”

People may question my credentials as a language designer. I've designed a very innovative system that unfortunately the academics don't think is worth studying. It's utterly ridiculous. Who says you can only learn from systems developed at big companies or universities. I cover a lot of ground, it's true -- no one gave me permission to create Frontier, but I didn't feel I needed permission. Or funding for that matter. I think what happened is Apple positioned us as less significant than their system scripting language, and people just accepted that, when Frontier is a far superior system. Anyway, the ideas are there anyway, and you're welcome to learn from them.

See also: Rules for standards-makers. Language design and protocol design are the same thing.

Programming language design should follow the half of Postel's Principle that says be "conservative in what you send." There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you're doing. Tools can be developed that make it even easier to do things the only way they work. New programming languages if they really are necessary should strive to simplify the programming model, there should be less things for the developer to worry about, the more easily new ideas can be developed, the less attention you have to pay to how you'll do something over what it does. I actually don't support the other half of Postel, in everything but user interface where I do support it. I don't think in general software interfaces should be liberal with what they understand because that defeats the first half. They sort of zero each other out.

Cory Doctorow: "I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will." It's a good practice, and while I completely support it, I am part of several communities that could remove me without recourse. I do it because I value the people in the community, and feel that life is too short to wait for everyone to get it right.

Doctorow was writing about Bluesky, and once again, on Bluesky a discussion starts on what it would take for Bluesky to attract developers, and each time I am told that they have done enough, and I go away thinking that their pitch is a scam, and they're building value in a user base that they will sell. They certainly could do it, and for all we know the founders may have already sold some of their stock in the latest investment round which valued the company at $x billion. (I did a search to find the evaluation but it appears to have not been announced.)

I gave them a roadmap, again, of how to demonstrate that they're open, and finally concluded that the only way to really do it is to "provide a download that you can install on any popular operating system to get an instant blue sky network, running on its own without any help from anyone else. Then you can claim to be really open and until then there will be a lot of confusion." (And I was generous at that. More accurately, people with experience in tech will be certain this is yet another deal where the founders get rich, where the users are the product and have read too much into their promise of being open.)

I'm still on Bluesky but I expect them to be another Twitter, which btw had an open API too, and it's pretty good, but they never offered the option of people running their own twitters. That would have been good protection against a Musk buying them out and turning us into pawns in his plan for world domination. Do we really want to help someone else build one of those?

In early 2017 I observed that Twitter had just been used to route around journalism and elect a president. This value wasn't on their balance sheet as an asset. I felt its stock was vastly underpriced. Exactly as it turned out when Musk bought it. Everyone still thinks he paid too much, at this moment it could possibly gain him control of part of the US government's $6 trillion per year budget early next year, and if they start selling the assets of the government he could be in the best position to buy them at pennies on the dollar, or take a percentage of each saleAt this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.. He could probably start borrowing against it the day after the election is called for Trump.

In the title I ask if a Musk could buy Bluesky, it's possible they have a way to prevent that in the design of their corporation, that's why it's a question. But if the price were right maybe the founders would sell out even if they didn't have to.

Heard on Facebook: Next week has been exhausting. Yes.

About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people will do by talking with a few hundred. So they read each others' work, and try not to be too far off the consensus. It's at best an art, at worst they're just press releases designed to get the ad money to flow in certain directions. Don't overlook that the money is flowing to the same businesses that are choosing which polls to report on. Most of what the news orgs report on, it makes it into a sport like the NBA or MLB, but there at least there's objective news to report on, you know -- the score of each game, how many runs were scored, who got injured, fired, traded. In politics, there is no objective news, and if there were, the journalists we have don't report it. There's a lot of inputs that are connected to the outputs, conflicts of interest everywhere. Even so, the top item on Memeorandum is about a poll in Iowa that says Harris is ahead. Iowa was never thought to be in play. Yes, I too am addicted. Endlessly fascinated. Maybe we'll survive next week after all? Hope.

My opinion: At this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.

After the election if we still have freedom of speech, we should reboot news around the simple idea of news written by experts. They must know the basic rules of journalism, imho that's much easier than the know-nothing journalist posing as everyman with a view from nowhere, trying to understand what they're writing about. They don't have any basis to judge, we give them far too much power. That system is rooted in a time when publishing was expensive but that hasn't been true for thirty years. the old system has run its course. This election, either way, is a lesson in how that system, if it ever worked, doesn't work today. The next news system will be sources going direct to interested readers.

Jay Rosen and I did a series of podcasts in the early teens called Rebooting the News. This was the basic premise. I believe more than ever that this is the best path for news going forward.

They did this at Wired for a while. I was invited to be a columnist when my main qualification was that I was an accomplished software developer. I think that's the way to go. Experts sharing their perspectives on current events.

Before Twitter existed, in 2002, I proposed to the NYT that they offer a blog to anyone who is quoted in a NYT article. If they had done this, the NYT would be what Twitter became, and it wouldn't now be owned by Elon Musk, for the benefit of humanity. I wish they had done it. It would have been a real moneymaker. And good for the flow of knowledge.

Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power. And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.

lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn't use FeedLand wouldn't know how to find them. So I decided to make it easier. On lists.opml.org I've got a link to the lists of podcasts I'm subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don't update the list very often, fwiw. And I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I'd love to see what you do.

PS: I bet Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter.

Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020 and 2021. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. And it's a good time to make more changes.

My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.