Life Hacks, All Under $20

I recently made some cheap purchases that made my life disproportionately better.  They might improve your lives too.

Cheap, easy coffee

For over 25 years, the only way I've made coffee at home is with a Melitta pour over cone.  The process is simple and the results are delicious.  Put a #2 paper filter in the cone, put coffee grinds in the filter, put the cone on top of a coffee mug, pour hot water over the coffee grounds, put the cone in the sink, drink the coffee, throw the grinds in the garbage once they cool.  I paid $4.99 for each of my two cones in 2006 or 2007 and they still work great.  The only tricky part is you have to periodically lift the cone to see if the mug is full, else it might overflow.

Until recently!  We went on vacation and forgot to bring our cones so zwoman ordered two from Amazon for $7.84 apiece and when they arrived we were surprised by their new design.  It now has two holes along the base so you can see the level of the coffee in the cup without lifting the cone.  Brilliant!

If your K-cup machine breaks, or if you're sending a youngster out into the world and they need some housewares, get one of these.

Keep your outdated charging cords

I assume that everyone's home has a drawer like this.

Ok, maybe you don't have a cat brush or a fabric shaver (although you should) or an old AppleTV remote but you probably have a bunch of charging cables and blocks.  And if you have Apple products (not looking at you Squeaky) you probably have cables that don't work with all of your devices or all of your blocks.  In my case, my iPhone requires a USB-c charger while my iPad, keyboard and mouse need a Lightning charger.  Those Lightning devices are old so I have a lot of Lightning cables that accrued over time, including a few very long ones that weren't cheap.  For $7.19 you can get a pack of four little dongles that turn your Lightning cable into a USB-c cable.  They even come with little silicon tethers so they're always with the cable!  Similarly, for $6.98 you can get four dongles and tethers that turn your USB-c cable into a Lightning cable.  You can use all your cables to charge everything for about fourteen bucks.  And when you're traveling with your new iPhone and your old iPad you only need to bring one charger.

Keep all your old peripherals

I recently started a new job and they issued me a laptop with only three guzzintas, an HDMI port and two USB-c ports.  The power cord uses one of those USBs so when I'm working from home my peripheral connectivity is limited.  For $16.95 you can get a 7-in-1 USB hub that provides another HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-c port, and SD/TF slots (which you'll probably never use).  Now I can use two monitors and my old camera and speaker/mic, all at the same time.  Even if you already have a big baller hub at home, this one is nice for travel, especially if you've got one of those big baller travel monitor extenders (I bet Danimal rolls thusly given his big baller balls).  

For $38.96 you can make your life a lot easier and/or give someone a helpful gift.  Enjoy!

Next Step, Profit

Unbeknownst to us, although the Teej might've felt a disturbance in the force, researchers at the University of Zurich have been quietly working on one of our enduring challenges. That being solving the problem of how, exactly, to extract riches from underwear. 

My friends, we may have a breakthrough.

The summary of a recent Science News article tells the whole story:

More than 1,000 volunteers buried cotton underwear across Switzerland to help scientists measure how active different soils are. The faster the fabric disappeared, the more biological activity was taking place underground. Gardens showed the fastest decomposition, while lawns had the least, revealing how strongly land management can shape soil life.

Researchers enlisted the help of those 1,000 volunteers for a study entitled "Proof by Underpants". (As if Trey and Matt weren't involved.) Each volunteer buried two pairs of cotton underpants at sites around Switzerland. Two months later, the volunteers dug up the underpants, photographed them, and sent the images to the research team in Zurich.

The results were interesting scientifically. Turns out that private gardens are the most active biological sites, as measured by the decomposition of the underpants. Agricultural fields and meadows were next, with lawns the least active. 

Now comes the slightly harder part. We have findings that are a signpost towards the future. All we have to do is:

• Collect underpants
• ? (but it somehow involves soils)
• Profit

I think you all know the next step.

The First Time... Ever I Saw Your Face... and Heard Your Jokes

It's pretty cool to see these fresh faces get their shot at the mountaintop. Carson. This is it. 

Nervous. Fidgety. Almost each of them stammers or stumbles at least once. 

And each of these people crushed it.  

You all are in for a treat tonight, and I think you all sound like you're in the right mood for it, because this is a young comedian, this is their first time on the Tonight Show with us, and they're very funny. 

They've come all the way from ____ to be with us, so won't you please give a warm welcome for...

Drew Carey, from Cleveland, OH - 11/8/91

Steven Wright, from Boston, MA - 8/6/82

Garry Shandling, from Tucson, AZ - 3/18/81

Ellen DeGeneres, from Metairie, LA - 11/28/86

Freddie Prinze, from New York, NY - 12/06/73

A Good Boi* at Twilight

*Eight times out of ten 

He barks too much. He likes people more than other dogs, but not that many people. He doesn’t go for walks as much as outdoor sniff sessions. He’s a quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget, but he’s our quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget. As he approaches his 17th birthday, he’s slowed considerably and is less steady on his paws. His movements are more deliberate. He doesn’t see or hear as well as he used to. He pees and poops more frequently. He exhibits brief bursts of energy, followed by lengthy stretches in recline – all traits he shares with his hooman dad. 

I decided to write about him while he’s still with us because I’m not sure I’ll be able to after he’s gone. Yeah, I’m gonna be a wreck. 

Truth is, I was skeptical about owning a dog. I like dogs, and plenty of friends had and have dogs that I enjoyed. But I never owned a dog growing up, and working as a newspaper guy, with its long days and odd hours and periodic road trips, didn’t seem to lend itself to the care and feeding of a dog. 

My wife returned from a road trip to visit family and had bonded with a cousin’s dog, a lively little Yorkshire terrier, and said she would like to have a dog again. She grew up with a cocker spaniel she loved and thought the companionship would be a nice addition to our little duo. With some hesitation I said, sure, let’s give it a go. 

We settled on something in the poodle-mix family; my wife has a mild allergy to animal dander, and poodles and their various cross breeds have hair, not fur, so they don’t shed. Several months later, we saw an ad in the paper that a nearby family had a litter of cock-a-poo puppies (cocker spaniel-poodle mix) available. When we visited the family and were wondering how to choose, the guy suggested that I sit on the floor cross-legged near the puppies and see if any of them react. Sure enough, one little fellow about the size of a cornhole bag crawled toward me and climbed into my lap. 

Four weeks later, in early Dec. 2009, we brought Nappy home (brief aside: Nappy was my nickname in high school and college; I had a curly Afro and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” was all over the airwaves at the time – “Looking back on when I was a little nappy-headed boy …”; my wife learned of my nickname from friends and insisted our dog be Nappy Jr.). He was an active, bouncy puppy who grew into a 22-pound, crotch-seeking missile. When one of us returned home, he bounded toward us and launched upward so that he collided with our bits, his tail spinning like a helicopter blade. There’s no question that he loves both of us, but very quickly he became “my dog.” 

Almost from day one, he followed me everywhere. I had to change the way I walked around the house when he was little, a kind of shuffle rather than picking up my feet because he was often so close that I frequently clipped him or stepped on him. I do roughly 99.6 percent of the feeding, walking, peeing and pooping duties. He’s disrupted my sleep pattern for years, either by flopping on top of me in bed overnight or mewling at us at 5 or 6 a.m. that he needs to go outside. 

Some quick calculations estimate that I’ve made approximately 43,000 trips outside with him and picked up about 7,750 pounds of poop. Between food, toys and vet bills, my wife jokes that we’ve spent the equivalent of two years of college on him, and he’s no closer to a degree than the day we got him. Sometimes, you just write the checks and don’t think twice. 

I concluded that any shortcomings in his behavior or training were my fault, not his. We’ve never boarded him because he’s our guy and we want him with us and because he seems to have a neurotic streak that caused us to worry that he might gnaw off a paw if he went days without seeing us. We’ve taken only car trips to places with dog-friendly accommodations since we’ve had him. I haven’t been on a plane since the middle of 2009. I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Dogs are a marvel, a blessing. They’re always happy to see us and love us unconditionally. They ask nothing more than belly rubs and ball-playing sessions and car rides with the windows open. Our little fellow is winding down. I can see it, I can feel it. I’ll be a mess when it happens and it will leave a huge hole in my heart, but I’m grateful for every day we had with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, at least one of us has to pee.

Emergency Masked Rapper Filler

Lonnnng weekend for your boy. Harrisonburg and back on Friday with our exchange student to check out the Green Valley Book Fair, show her Buc-ee's for the first time (a monument to American excess), and visit James Madison University. Followed that up with a round-trip 12-hour drive to/from Columbus, OH on Saturday and Sunday sandwiched around a fantastic wedding of a friend's daughter (and a mini-summit with Danimal). Topped it off with a cookout with Marls and fam and a few too many beers. Marls might've overserved himself on Johnny Walker Gold, as well.

So you can see why I might've slacked on my content creation duties. Not sure what excuse the rest of you mopes have (The Teej flew to South Korea, so he's good.).

Quick filler it is, then. Tom Hardy is a talented dude, but he often plays to a type. He's also long been a fan of old-school American hip-hop. Turns out his talents go beyond playing a tough guy with a penchant for a quip. 

Hardy recently joined the hip-hop supergroup Czarface (which incudes rap duo 7L & Esoteric and Wu-Tang Clan member Inspectah Deck) on their new album "Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer". In this case, Hardy and Frankie Pulitzer are one and the same.

Hip-hop heads will have a more informed opinion than I, but to me, this sounds like credible flow that takes us back a couple of decades, stylistically. Hardy/Pulitzer is the dude in the mask. Enjoy, and let me know if I've got it right.

Lewis Hamilton knows where all the coolest barns are

Lewis Hamilton is perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver ever.  His list of racing achievements is preposterously impressive.  After repping Mercedes for 19 years, he moved to Ferrari in 2025, giving him access to preposterously impressive cars.  And it appears that he knows where all the most preposterously impressive barns are.

Hamilton recently posted his barn find Ferrari F40 on Instagram and I almost passed out.  Much like the street-parked F40 I wrote about previously, there should be no such thing as a barn find F40.  But this guy found one.  And he has access to all the finest mechanics at Maranello to restore it.  Officine Classiche y'all!

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I'm jealous on many levels.  But I can't hate!  Look at how much he loves the car, you can practically see him morph into a 10-year-old as he looks at it, sits in it, rubs the badge.  He's in love.

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Call me if you know a barn with something even half this fantastic stored in it.

Food is Dumb. Or Is It?

We've seen some things around here, my friends, gustatorially speaking. We've eaten the KFC Double Down. We've chowed our way around multiple state fairs. We've tried (and enjoyed) pizza-flavored vodka.

The G:TB Taste Team has been handed another challenge, should we choose to accept it. 

Pringles are great, though not part of my regular rotation these days. Don't eat a lot of chips of any provenance, really. And I do love a dill pickle - I eat at least one a day. I can take or leave vodka.

All of which makes me mildly curious about Sugarlands Distilling's new Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Vodka.

Here's the product description from InternetWines.com, where you can purchase a 750 mL bottle for $21.99 (or could, before it sold out):

"Sugarlands Distilling took the briny bite of Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Crisps and turned it into a spirit that's tart, savory, and unapologetically bold. Think sharp vinegar, crisp dill, and a salty potato twist all in a pour that packs a serious punch.

Pop the top, pour a shot and let the flavor speak for itself. Perfect for picklebacks, martinis, or any cocktail that needs a little snap. Embrace the brine."

I can see the concept here. Little brininess adds something to a lot of different drinks. Color me curious.

An Argument for and Against AI

Over the past several years, I've worked in two businesses that leverage AI in one form or another to solve customer challenges. I'm keenly interested in the debate over the technology's utility, impact, and future, and I'm more informed than most on the topic. Some people that think AI is a technological panacea that'll usher the species into a lasting era of bliss. Others believe AI will be cause the end of humanity. And at the moment, it's wildly overhyped by people who have an vested interest in the technology's success, which is a real problem.

The truth, as is so often the case, lies in the middle. AI is a tool. It can be very useful. It can also lead to some very mediocre if not downright stupid outcomes. 

Case in point, the rest of this blog, in which I'll illustrate the useful and the mid over the course of one recent interaction with Claude.

I was curious about whether I could use AI to help plan a road trip. In this case, a month-long tour of the country centered around seeing musicians I like in smallish venues in smallish cities/towns. I started my exploration by offering Claude the following prompt:

"i am a big fan of singer-songerwriter musical acts, like rhett miller, andrew duhon, jeff tweedy, jay farrar, cat power, carbon leaf, brandi carlile, tyler childers, noah kahan, waxahatchee, avett brothers, haim, etc. i'd like to take the month of november and tour the united states and listen to live music."

please create an itinerary for my that starts and ends in northern virginia that allows me to see artists live in mid-sized or small cities across america. make sure i spend at least two nights in each location and get to see at least one live performance. the venues should be small to mid-sized, as well."

It took me four or five iterations and refinements to get to an itinerary that I liked. After I'd reached that point, I asked Claude to, "synopsize this entire series of prompts and responses as a blog post, using the tone of voice of gheorghe: the blog (https://gheorghe77.blogspot.com/). make the itinerary the last thing in the post."

What follows is Claude/Gheorghe's response - my reactions will follow in italics:

So I've got this problem, and the problem is that I like exactly one genre of music with the burning intensity of a thousand suns, and that genre is "sad and/or earnest people with acoustic guitars," and the sub-problem is that the specific practitioners of this genre I love most — your Rhett Millers, your Tyler Childerses, your Waxahatchees, your Carbon Leafs (Leaves? the Carbon Leaf discography?) — do not, as a rule, play the Xfinity Center. They play rooms that hold four hundred people and smell vaguely like spilled Yuengling. Which is exactly how I like it, but it does mean that "catching a show" requires actual research, unlike, say, Taylor Swift, whose tour schedule you could find by asking a golden retriever.

Okay, so this is...decent. Not sure why Claude thinks I only like one genre of music. The voice is an amalgamation of Gheorghies. I definitely spy some OBX Daveish stylings in the mix.

Naturally, since I am both lazy and a person living in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I asked an AI to plan me a month-long, coast-spanning music pilgrimage instead of doing it myself like some kind of caveman with a road atlas. What followed was four entire drafts of a road trip, escalating in ambition and geographic absurdity, and I feel like you should get to enjoy the ride too, because honestly it was a journey (pun very much intended, I regret nothing).

Again, solid. A little try-hard, if I'm being honest. I hope we don't sound like that.

**Round one: November, start/end in Northern Virginia.** Reasonable ask, I thought. Big loop through Richmond, Asheville, Athens, Nashville, New Orleans, Austin, Memphis, Louisville, Knoxville, back home. Charming. Comprehensive. Almost entirely make-believe, as it turned out, because — and this is a very "living in the future" kind of problem to have — none of my guys had actually announced November tour dates yet. Not one. The robot did its diligence, came back, and basically said "I built you a lovely map of vibes but the actual bands part is aspirational." Respect for the honesty, mild personal humiliation for me.

The quotations around things that don't require quotations are starting to pile up. Some em dashes in there, but that's actually on brand.

**Round two: same request, but October instead**, because October is closer and therefore bands might have gotten around to telling anyone where they're playing. This is where things got good. Turns out Jason Isbell is doing a three-night stand at the Ryman. Turns out Old Crow Medicine Show is rolling through small-town Pennsylvania. Turns out Jeff Tweedy is doing a solo lap through Ohio with his kid's band opening. Carbon Leaf — a Virginia band, mind you — is out in Kansas City and Chicago being Virginian at people. Real dates. Real, bookable, small-venue shows. I felt like a guy who'd been handed an actual treasure map instead of a napkin drawing.

"Real dates. Real, bookable, small-venue shows." is an AI tell - one of the first in the text thus far.

**Round three: forget the loop, start on the West Coast and work back home.** This is where the trip stopped being "a nice drive" and started being "a bit."  It turned out Iron & Wine — not on my original list, but close enough in spirit that I'm retroactively adopting him — is doing a whole honest-to-god coast-to-coast October tour, Seattle to South Carolina, and I basically hitched my itinerary to his tour bus like a barnacle. Which was efficient! It was also, in retrospect, a little much — I looked at the finished draft and realized I'd built a road trip that was 70% one guy's calendar. Bold move for a project explicitly premised on my loving lots of different artists.

The analysis part of this segment was pretty dumb, if we're being honest. And again with the extraneous quotations.

**Round four, the correction: no more than two shows per artist, please.** This is the "actually think about what you're doing" round, and it's the one that stuck. Rebuilt the whole thing with real variety — Carbon Leaf, Andrew Duhon, Iron & Wine, Shovels & Rope — capped at two apiece, no single act allowed to hog the whole trip like it's their solo project. There were still a couple of honest gaps (sorry, Asheville) where nobody's calendar cooperated.

Fine. No complaints.

**Round five: "I'll fly for anything over 400 miles," I said,** like some kind of aristocrat, and this single sentence fixed everything. Suddenly the Isbell/Ryman residency — previously geographically impossible without a week of pure interstate suffering — fit right into the middle of the trip. Memphis, which had been sitting there as a sad empty stop with no band attached, got adopted by an Iron & Wine date that the flights made reachable. Turns out the solution to "my itinerary doesn't make sense" was, the whole time, "money," which, yeah, tracks.

So here's where we landed. Five artists, capped at two shows each, three flights for the genuinely brutal legs, and a route that goes from a Virginia band playing a Seattle dive bar clear across the country back to actual Virginia. I did not confirm any of this personally, so don't yell at me if Carbon Leaf cancels — yell at the robot, or better yet, yell at Ticketmaster, the true villain in every version of this story.

Closing stronger that we opened, for sure.

---

Five artists, no repeats beyond two apiece, one month, roughly forty thousand emotional dollars in gas and airfare. Wager accordingly.

The last bit doesn't make a ton of sense. Forty thousand should be a number, not text. I don't know what emotional dollars are. Meh.

To sum up, I think the final product - the itinerary - is quite good, and something that would've taken me or any other human a long, frustrating time. That's a good use of the technology. The writing is okay, and if you weren't picky about your words, you might be okay with it. That's lame if you're looking for a shortcut for a term paper or a training manual, and it's dangerous - at least professionally - if you're putting together a legal brief or an op-ed. Or targeting attacks on Iranian schools.

I happen to be picky about my words, as I suspect most of us are, so this isn't good enough for me. It lacks a bit of heart, even as Claude tried to emulate our tone. And there are bits of off-sounding language that sours the whole thing for me as a reader. In the end, I think AI's ability to fake human writing is a technological marvel, but it's not nearly the most interesting nor I think enduring capability AI has. That comes from its ability to synthesize and make sense of massive amounts of information, draw inferences, and generate logical data quickly, and reasonably accurately. 

Frankly, that's good enough to be really compelling. Shame the foofs that have a stake in AI's success can't just focus on that instead of moonshot claims about rendering human work redundant.

The Best of Us

There are a million different things we could say about Dolly Parton. We could emphasize her kindness, her humanitarian efforts (she fucking helped fund the development of the Moderna COVID vaccine!*), her authenticity, her acting, her self-awareness, her loyalty to her husband and her roots, her genuine affection, her ability to laugh at herself and with others, her damn near singular manner of embracing her sexuality on her terms and not the culture's - especially given the era she came to prominence in, her songwriting, her...all of it. Absolutely one of a kind, and the universal outpouring of love for her in the wake of her passing will not be matched in my lifetime.

(* Apologies for cursing, ma'am.)

And there are a million different pieces that have and will be written about the indelible mark she left on our world. I'd rather spend time reading those than trying to find a new angle. 

One of the most interesting things I've seen since she left us this week is directly connected to the thing we knew her for first. The number and diversity of the artists that have honored her with their live performances over the past few days is remarkable. She touched performers from Eminem to Brandi Carlile and so many beyond that, famous and not. Here are just a very few of the musicians that made time to remember one of one:

I mean, Pitbull loved Dolly!

Jack White's been performing Jolene for years. Here he was the night after she passed.

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The everlovin' Bands of His Majesty's Royal Marines, for goodness' sake.

The Avett Brothers were probably a good bet.

@avettbros The Avett Brothers perform a mashup of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and “Pretty Girl from Annapolis” at their show last night. 🦋 #dollyparton #dolly #avettbrothers #livemusic #cover ♬ original sound - The Avett Brothers

But I don't that anyone other than Dooger would've guess Amyl and the Sniffers loved her.

Amyl and the Sniffers pay tribute to Dolly Parton at their show in Dublin: "I f**king love Dolly Parton so much" 🤘

🤳: danleith_comedy pic.twitter.com/BrujVYltXS

— Far Out Magazine (@FarOutMag) August 26, 2026

Gheorghasbord

Truly a wide range of cultural flotsam that's tickled my fancy and/or given me cause for consideration over the past week or so. From sports to music to current political events, as always, we span the globe to keep you entertained.

I mentioned the kerfuffle the Sullivan brothers of the MLS Philadelphia Union got into against Inter Miami a few days ago. I told you to find the video. I know you, so I'm sure you didn't. So here it is. You'll see Quinn Sullivan (the older of the brothers at 22) get disrespected by Miami defender Ian Fray (Fray put his nuts on Sullivan's head) and respond with a textbook bodyslam. Cavan Sullivan (potentially the best 16 year-old male player the U.S. has ever developed) rushes to his brother's aid and squares up with Miami's much-taller Yannick Bright. Holds his own, too.

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There's actually a G:TB connection here, tenuous though it may be. Quinn Sullivan has dated a girl who grew up in my neighborhood for several years. My wife and I are good friends with her mom. She played at Radford and did a year as a graduate transfer at the University of New Hampshire. Where she met and became friends with...Yannick Bright. Small world, y'all.

Also, remember the name Cavan Sullivan. He's contributing significantly to Philly's attack this season, with six goals and nine assists in 25 matches across all competitions. Despite the fact that he's 5'7" and 150 pounds, he's tough and strong and unafraid to mix it up with older and stronger men. He's been under contract with Manchester City since he was 14, and will almost certainly head to Europe when he's old enough for the appropriate visa. Says here he'll be a USMNT mainstay for the next 15 years.

Speaking of balls, which we were, at least obliquely, check out this scene from a recent Kacey Musgraves concert:

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And veering wildly from the ridiculous to the profound, I commend to your attention New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. The Virginia Beach-born, UVA-educated (nobody's perfect) is one of the clearest thinkers and writers about the current American moment. He writes a great deal about the politics of race and culture, but he's good on a wide range of topics. This video essay offers typically-thoughtful advice to the Democratic Party should it find itself in the majority in Congress after November's midterm elections. I sure hope the party leadership is listening.

NFL Grind, With International Flair

The Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy starter kit, otherwise known as the NFL regular season, fast approaches, so let’s visit The Shield’s efforts to simultaneously grow the game and to protect the disposable bipeds, excuse me, the valued human beings that fuel the American sports colossus. 

Commish Roger Goodell recently told a German media outlet that “at some point there will be NFL teams outside the USA. I have no doubt that this will happen one day.” The NFL has played international games for decades and will continue this season with nine games outside the border, beginning with L.A. Rams-San Francisco on Sept. 10 in Melbourne, Australia. Three games are scheduled for London, and there will be games in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Madrid, Munich and Mexico City. 

Now, when Goodell says “outside the USA,” he doesn’t mean Mexico City and Montreal, he’s thinking Europe. He previously said that he believes London can be home to two franchises. Indeed, the city has hosted 42 games since 2007. The games have been well-received, with last year’s Rams-Jacksonville Jaguars game at Wembley Stadium drawing 86,000 fans and two games at Tottenham Hotspur’s comparatively smaller joint attracting more than 61,000. 

There are beaucoup issues with planting an NFL team flag across the pond. Start with the two biggest questions: Where would they play? And why would one assume that civic interest in occasional NFL games means that it’s sustainable over entire seasons and many years, particularly in places with no historical ties to American football? The NFL stages international games in big soccer stadiums, borrowing the facilities when they aren’t being used or when the home club is on the road. That arrangement is untenable for an entire season, so any transplanted or expansion NFL franchise will need, and probably demand, a dedicated stadium and training facility. 

NFL owners’ practice of extorting sweetheart deals that benefit them is unlikely to go over well on foreign soil (“We’re on the hook for how much? For a stadium that’ll be used nine or ten times a year? Sounds like bollocks to me, mate.”). Logistics concerns are real for a potential foreign franchise. Could a team based outside the U.S. retain players or attract free agents? What about the tax structure overseas? How would that impact player salaries and compensation? Flights across the Atlantic become onerous. There’s a five-hour time difference between London and the East Coast, eight hours – a full sleep cycle – between the U.K. and the West Coast. That kind of regular disruption would be an extra stressor to players and certainly affect performance. 

Speaking of added stress, all this talk of international franchises comes on the heels of adding a 17th game, with an 18th game all but assured within the next few years and little more than lip service about the effects on players’ health. Goodell and NFL brass routinely yammer about how player safety is a top priority, but their actions often say otherwise. Yes, the league now penalizes targeting and headhunting and has outlawed certain kinds of blocks deemed dangerous. Kickoffs have been tweaked and re-tweaked to reduce the battering-ram collisions on those plays. Concussions and head trauma are now taken more seriously, but remember that the league had to be dragged into that position after denying a connection between the game’s violence and brain issues for years. It took some high-profile deaths and diagnoses, along with dogged individual medical researchers, to finally get the league to acknowledge the problem. 

Rest and recovery are vital for player health, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the schedule. Twenty-four of the 32 teams have at least one stretch where they play two games within four or five days. Twenty-two teams have at least one stretch where they’ll play three games in 12 days. Eleven teams have multiple stretches in which they play 3-in-12. Denver and Green Bay have three stretches in which they play three games in 12 days, while Chicago has two 3-in-12 stretches and one in which it plays three games in 13 days. A slew of games at the end of the season are designated as TBA for dates and times, owing to attractive matchups and potential playoff bearings, but that will also affect recovery and quality of play. It all but guarantees that injuries will have an outsized impact and that many teams won’t play close to their best at the end of the season. 

One logical fix is to lengthen the season, not to add more games but more byes and off time and to get closer to the one-game-per-week routine that would give players a fighting chance to stay healthy or to recover and contribute. But instead, we get the inevitable march toward 18 games, Patriots owner Robert Kraft floating the idea of 16 international games per year with every team participating and the accompanying flights and disruption, and a schedule that puts greater emphasis on exposure and not player health and safety. Wager accordingly.

Yet More Definitive Footy Takes

You got the kit takes, and on the first day of the 2026-27 Premier League season (Holders Arsenal host newcomers Coventry City at 3:00, live on USA), you get another definitive analysis. I offer you the GTB vibes-based Premier League predicted order of finish.

First, a few opinions from the experts:

Opta is a analytical outfit that uses data to model predicted outcomes. Here's their take.

Three of NBC's pundits offer their opinion.

Finally, the BBC weighs in here.

I crunched the numbers to see how our vibes compared with the experts, and a few things stood out.

In this view, the higher the number, the better the expected finish. 20 for first, 19 for second, down to 1 for 20th and last. 

We are more bullish than the experts about Liverpool, Leeds, Sunderland, and Fulham (not saying much - the experts are not high on the Cottagers) and generally more bearish about Man City (we're right on this one, hear me now and believe me later), Forest, and Newcastle. And now we've got a way to track our gut. Game on!

GTB's Definitive Review of the 2026-27 EPL Kits

At the time of posting, we're fewer than 36 hours away from the start of a new Premier League season. One of the league's traditional preseason activities (in addition to exhibition games/money grabs in places far from the UK and Chelsea overpaying for middling talent) is the release of new kit designs. Which, come to think of it, is also a money grab.

ESPN has helpfully catalogued and ranked all of this season's new looks so you can judge their relative attractiveness (or lack thereof) for yourselves. But we're here to serve, so if you don't have that much time, allow us to tell you what's Good, Meh, and Ugly.

The Good

Sunderland were surprisingly frisky last season after being promoted from the Championship. The Black Cats took some major scalps early in the campaign, and wound up in 7th place, good for a Europa League spot. They celebrated by dropping a pair of sweet kits:

ESPN ranks their away kit as the very best of the new season's offerings. I like it, too.

But don't sleep on the update to their classic home togs, which are an homage to the club's 1937 FA Cup winners, and feature a ton of vintage details:

Coventry make their first return to the Premier League since the 2000-01 season. They were in the fourth division as recently as 2014. They're headed back up wearing a sweet home getup:

Crystal Palace has punched above its weight the past few seasons, winning the FA Cup and the UEFA Conference League. They've always had a sharp kit featuring diagonal red and blue stripes, and they've modernized it a bit this year:

Some observers don't like Brighton's away kits, claiming they're too bland. Those people are wrong. These are really clean:

The Meh

Adidas has done this thing recently where they leave a cap in the three stripes markings that run down the sleeves, probably to fit in more sponsorship logos. Let us go on record as disliking it - see Fulham's fairly unambitious home kit as an example of the form:

Chelsea is a mess in a lot of ways (though I expect them to be pretty competitive on the pitch under new manager Xabi Alonso). Their home kit design seems to be a complete afterthought.

A bunch of clubs, including the aforementioned Fulham, are basically running back the same home kits they've used for a while now. So don't expect anything interesting from Arsenal, Spurs, Manchester United, Bournemouth, and several others.

Everton is a blue club, just like Chelsea, and they didn't break any new ground, either, but I do like the little splash of yellow on the collar.

The Ugly

With due respect to our man Marls, Newcastle's home kit is a nice try, but a bizarre execution:

Hull City is newly promoted. Let's hope they play better than they design kits.

I generally like Leeds United's kits, but someone should've thought about how this season's home kit would look when the sponsor's logo was applied:

And finally, for good reason, Spurs seem to understand that their home kit is fairly standard, so they went for it with their away togs. They should not have done so.

Check out the rest at the ESPN link. There are some decent kits out there and some other fairly boring efforts. Tell us how we did.