Paige Spiranac Turns Up At Super Bowl LIX Opening Night Festivities, Waste Management Arrest Stats & Steak!
The public Screencaps Facebook page is now live and in the last 24 hours I have added the final piece to the puzzle with the Screencaps Instagram page
Now we're ready to roll.
Public Screencaps Facebook page — Follow it.
Public Screencaps Instagram page — Follow it.
Private Screencaps Facebook group page — Follow it.
But, I don't do social media?
That's fine, if the content does well on social, there's a good chance you'll see it right here in the column.
Was that the most boring Super Bowl Opening Night in Super Bowl Opening Night history?
Yesterday, I took a look at Super Bowl history and realized it has been 15 years since I attended my first Super Bowl week. That was in Indianapolis. Opening Night festivities were huge back then when the Mexican TV women would show up and ask questions while wearing revealing clothing.
Last night, Paige Spiranac appeared at Opening Night (scroll down to see her content) and it didn't even move the needle.
I expected to open social media this morning and see at least one piece of viral content from the Chiefs appearing in front of the media.
Nothing.
Do you remember the Mizuno glove with built-in sunglasses?
— Jay K. writes:
I saw you posted a message from a 21 year Mizuno salesman.
Last fall at the fantastic Springfield Extravaganza I came across a Mizuno outfielder’s glove with a large square green plastic insert built into the pocket. Built-in sunglasses!
I remember seeing these back in the prior millennium but hadn’t thought about them in 35 years.
The Mizuno man is too young for this but I’d love to know the inside story about this hilarious gimmick…and from your readers if it ever helped a SINGLE person catch a ball in the sun.
In the friendliest way I know how, I will add, Toledo sucks!
Kinsey:
I sent this over to Duncan, the Mizuno employee, to see if he knows anything about the vintage glove.
— Duncan responded:
A little before my time, I had no idea this was a thing! Maybe we need to bring it back? Here's some links I found, 1 for sale and 1 with a little info on the glove.
Vintage Mizuno Opti-Web Baseball Glove Mitt Unusual See Through Web MT8000 | eBay
Kinsey:
That's STILL a $70 glove on eBay.
Best gift I ever received
— Tom B. will never forget:
Best Christmas gift ever was a few years ago when my wife bought me both a Colt Government Model 1911 pistol and a Smith & Wesson M&P-15 rifle, their version of an AR-15. A huge surprise for me. Also, these may come in handy if the trade wars escalate!
Travel basketball parents fighting each other
— Darin D. shares:
This fight occurred between opposing teams at an AAU/Travel Basketball Tournament, held in Cape Girardeau, MO. This is one of the big reasons I know longer referee AAU or Travel basketball. The fight escalated again in the parking lot when one of the coaches involved threatened the other coach. The police arrested that coach. Just another day of travel basketball.
— Mike T. happened to spot this story out of Seattle from a recent high school girls basketball game:
A three-time Jeopardy champion answers more questions from Screencaps readers
— Brendan G. spent three nights answering clues from Alex Trebek. Now he walks us through how his big TV moment came about:
How many times did you take the test before you got the call?
Once. I'm aware that this is abnormal and that it makes me seem like I have a lucky horseshoe wedged in my rectum/been unfairly blessed by the jeopardy gods.
What was the audition process like?
The audition was something else... I hear it's completely different now as the audition is done entirely over videoconference. I was on the show over a decade ago, so the auditions were still done in person with all the prospective contestants in a given region of the country invited to a city within that region for the audition. I was living in D.C. at the time, and the audition was in NW D.C. (the Four Seasons if I remember correctly) in the midafternoon, so it was easy for me to attend.
The invite to the audition specifies business casual dress, and they rent a block of the conference rooms at the hotel for the audition and set up a little afternoon refreshment spread. There were ~200 prospective contestants that ran the gamut of socieconomic class, ethnicity, and age with a high prevalence of autism spectrum disorders.
It had that uncomfortable feeling of high stakes academic tests (SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT) where you're forced to be around people who are all in competition and know it, yet try to maintain this thin veneer of civility/friendliness.
I've always hated that vibe, so after the first few people approached me and started uncomfortable conversations where they attempted to feel out my level of intelligence, I just semi-hid in a corner with a cup of coffee to observe the goings-on until the audition started.
It was wild--people with clearly divergent ideas of what constituted business casual dress, people who had clearly been to multiple previous auditions and were trading gossip about which producers would be there and needed to be impressed, people putting snacks and refreshments into their backpacks to take home, and lots of high functioning autism spectrum disorder (not saying I'm above it) that anybody who's been around the higher levels of academia/academic achievement will recognize.
The crowning incident was this young guy who is actually late to the audition and bursts into the conference room after we've been led inside to start the audition. The producers try to turn him away based on the clearly defined lateness policy in the audition invitation, but he pleads with the producers that he lived in Roanoke, VA and had to finish the breakfast shift at McDonalds that morning because he needed the job.
His girlfriend picked him up from McDonalds right as the shift ended, and they drove straight to DC while he changed into his only suit in the car arriving minutes ago. The producers made an exception for him which made me happy.
The audition starts with a thank you for coming/congratulations on your high score on the contestant test. They neither reveal the cut-off score for the contestant test to be invited to the audition, nor indicate whether the score is relative or absolute. They then take polaroids of each auditionee (so they can have a picture to go with the notes they take from the audition) and immediately jump into a second 50 question test (similar level of difficulty to the online test) with pen and paper to ensure that nobody faked the online test.
The producers gather those tests up and take them into a different room to grade them (they never let you know how you did), and you're ushered outside of the conference rooms to the "holding pen" for more refreshments and awkward conversation. The producers then start calling people in 10 at a time into a different conference room where they've set up a mini-jeopardy set with a question board, podiums, and buzzers--the whole shebang.
One producer acts as host and rotates auditionees into a mock game while the other producers watch and write notes on auditionees' abilities in a live game and personalities. Every 10 questions or so the producer/host stops the game and engages in conversation with an auditionee playing the game--what do you do/where are you from/tell me about this funny/inetersting/amusing thing that happened to you (you had to give 3 funny/interesting/amusing topics for jeopardy's get to know you segment in your RSVP to the audition invitation).
It's clear what the producers respond to in the auditionees--affable, telegenic, quirky but not quite weird, funny, mildly self-deprecating. One of the producers liked that I answered "DA RAAAIIIHDAS in my best Brooklyn Al Davis voice for a question where The Raiders were the appropriate answer.
After the sports question I buzzed in and correctly answered 3 straight questions about musicals and one of the producers remarked something to the effect of did I know any other fans of the Oakland Raiders and musical theatre. I remember them loving a story from an auditionee who started collecting vintage pinball machines and had become so consumed by the hobby that they filled his apartment and he slept on the floor under a pinball machine.
After your group of auditionees finishes, the producers tell you that everyone who qualifies as a contestant (they don't tell you the qualification criteria) will be in the contestant pool for a year and you may receive an invitation to come out to LA and be on the show anytime during the next year.
If you don't hear from the show in a year, you either didn't qualify/weren't selected and are eligible to initiate the entire process again by taking the online contestant test. I got a call from the show 4 months later asking me to fly out to LA and be a contestant.
What would you have been happy with performance-wise going into the show?
Winning at least one game.
Were you upset when your run finally did end?
Of course. Pat Riley's "Disease of More" applies.
Do you feel like the show is getting easier or harder?
I feel like they keep making excuses to bring back players who lost (they're in the midst of their 'second chance' tournament at the moment, because they don't have enough contestants to fill up the Tournament of Champions now).
I don't watch the show anymore. I'm peripherally aware of what's going on in the show as they've heavily pivoted to highlights on social media like the rest of the linear TV to maintain relevance, but (IMO) the game has become less entertaining and less enjoyable since the superchamps and the analytics that the superchamps brought to the game have taken over.
While I appreciate the skill of the superchamps and can fully acknowledge that they'd beat me like a drum on a random game 9 times out of 10, they've made the game less entertaining for me. I liked conventional gameplay where you work through a category, little jokes from the writers are revealed as the category proceeds, the questions get more difficult, and there is the little break for applause when a player runs a category.
I like seeing normal schmoes like subway operators and sportswriters with normal 9 to 5s win a few games and get their 15 minutes and a little extra scratch. I liked the old 5 game limit that made you wonder how those champs would do against other really good players from that season and made you wait until the ToC to find out.
I dislike that contestants now take a year off from normal jobs to optimize betting strategy and cram trivia knowledge to gamify the game. You can call me a crank, but I've lost interest the same way I've lost interest in basketball and baseball as analytics/optimization took over the games and the 3-point shot, pitching changes, the shift, and the homerun/strikeout dichotomy became the norms (admittedly baseball has become much more watchable since the rule changes).
If you're interested, Daryl Morey (GM for the Rockets and 76ers) has done a bunch of podcasts on what human psychology desires out of games and how (ironically since he pioneered analytics/optimization within pro basketball) the analytics/optimization trend in professional sports yields short term success for him and other early adopters but paradoxically harms the game long term (with regard to fan interest/engagement) as this strategy runs counter to the innate human psychological desires within games for contrasting styles of gameplay and primacy of skill/talent with a small and fixed element of randomness.
Morey's solution is that games need to change the rules to thwart the analytics/optimization trend (as baseball has recently done) with his suggestions for basketball including lengthening the 3-point shot and making the shot worth 2.5 points.
In direct answer to your query (acknowledging that I.ve watched a handful of jeopardy episodes from start to finish in the past 7-8 years), I feel like the game is the same (the questions are no easier or harder from my perspective though there are a lot more pop culture/internet culture questions now).
I personally think that the producers realize that the superchampion phenomenon has diminishing returns and all the recent tournaments are an attempt to circumvent a superchampion after superchampion phenomenon in recent regular gameplay that is of interest to hardcore fans who love the analytics/optimization and marvel at the contestants who do it better than everybody else but turns off the casual fan.
The snippets I've seen from the second chance games are more entertaining than watching the next superchampion turn the game into a runaway by the time the first daily double of double jeopardy goes off the board. Ironically, while the tournaments seem to do a better job (from my perspective) of bringing back the competitiveness of regular gameplay, the winners of those tournaments get to go into a Masters tournament or ToC where only a couple of the most recent superchamps have a realistic shot.
I actually think that the best thing for the show would be to bring back the 5 game limit and end the era of superchampions--as unfair as that is to the superchamps who are clearly amazing and have used the current format to make life-changing money, but harm the popularity of the game over the long term.
Things I did differently than my parents
— Jim T. in San Diego shares a few thoughts:
My mom gave up her teaching career to raise the five of us. While dad was an electrical engineer at a small defense contractor out of Wright Pat and made a good living, they also put all five us through parochial school - so money was always tight.
We never - and I mean NEVER - got sweetened cereals as a kid. We had Cheerios, Wheaties, Rice Krispies and Wheat Chex. No Capt. Crunch, no Fruit Loops, no Frosted Flakes, no Alpha Bits or Apple Jacks. (Now, as with most dining room tables in the 1960s and '70s, there was a sugar bowl right in the middle by the napkin holder, so we shoveled sugar onto our unsweetened cereals ...).
When any of us would go to a sleepover at a friend's and come back with tales of Cocoa Puffs, Quake or Quisp, or Lucky Charms, the rest of us would sit and listen in wonder. My grandmother even kept Fruity Pebbles in her pantry for when grandkids came to spend the night.
So I let my kids choose their own cereals. And most years at Halloween, I go full in with a large box each of Count Chocula, Frankenberry and BooBerry.
We also almost NEVER went out to eat. Mom was not a good cook, but she tried. Cassano's or Shakey's was reserved for birthdays - and that wasn't guaranteed. McDonald's, Burger Chef, KFC? Never happened. When I had my appendix out at age 12 or so, I had to stay in the hospital for three or four days. I spent my time watching the TV opposite my bed, and there must have been a lot of McDonald's commercials because when my Mom said we could stop at any fast food place on the way home, I wanted a Big Mac. I recall that Big Mac meal tasting like heaven.
And my kids have been taken out to dinner plenty of times. With my wife and I both working full time and having sidse gigs, there are plenty of nights where one of us just runs out to Jack in the Box or the local taco takeout to get the kids fed while we're working.
The last thing I do different is my Mom didn't believe in organized sports. Her dad and two brothers had been heavy into Little League when she was growing up, and so I think her rebellion against her Dad was to keep her kids out of sports leagues.
So most of my kids have played at least in a local Boys & Girls Club rec league, and one son and the youngest daughter played in Little League or fast-pitch softball league. Somehow the kid who never played anything but sandlot games in the neighborhood even became a coach ...
The Ts have moved on to Italy and went right to the pizza
— Mike T. says this is focaccia pizza in Genoa, Italy:
http://traftonseuropeantour20242025.com/2025/02/03/1-4-2025-bergeggi-and-genoa-italy/

While they were out and about, the Ts spotted a typewriter store:

And their new Airbnb has this patio:

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And that's it for this Tuesday morning. The sun is out and we're keeping an eye on a possible freezing rain storm coming in on Thursday. That should be fun. Let's hope the electric stays on. Yes, we have gas heat.
Let's go get after it.
Email: joekinsey@gmail.com