Laslo Panaflex

the future's all yours, you lousy bicycle.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Sam's Club eliminated a greeter's position after he spent 12 years at the door. He was 86. Two months into retirement he got bored and applied at Chick-fil-A, the one chain that pays people full time to do the exact job Sam's Club deleted.

That chain, closed every Sunday, averages $9.3 million per restaurant. A McDonald's open seven days averages about $3.7 million.

The role is called dining host. No register, no fryer. Walk the dining room, clean tables, talk to people. Spreadsheet logic says it's the first line item you cut, and Walmart ran that exact spreadsheet in 2019 when it phased out store greeters.

Chick-fil-A ran the opposite math. Fast food margins live on frequency, how many times the same customer returns per month. A cashier can serve you. A dining host with time can make you feel missed when you skip a week.

Mr. Gil proved the model. He caught a cold, missed two days, and the owner got flooded with hundreds of customers asking where he was. Hundreds of people had a personal relationship with a fast food dining room. No ad budget buys that kind of retention.

Sam's Club looked at an 86-year-old greeter and saw a cost. Chick-fil-A looked at the same man and built the highest-grossing restaurant model in America around what he does.

[Crazy Moments @Crazymoments01]

She's been at our shelter since 2013. Eleven years. Every person who met her said she was wonderful. Every person walked past her kennel and chose a younger dog. She stopped coming to the front of her kennel a few years ago. Stopped performing. Made a quiet peace with being where she was." Last Tuesday a veteran came in. He said — "I need a calm dog. I'm still learning how to be still myself." I showed him three dogs. He was putting his jacket on to leave. He stopped outside kennel seven. Luna looked at him from her bed. Didn't perform. Didn't come to the front. Just looked at him the way she looks at people when she decides they're worth seeing. He said — "Can I sit with her?" He sat on the concrete floor at her level. Not the bench. The floor. That was 11am. At 3pm I looked in. He was still there. Her white muzzle was in his hand. Their breathing had synchronized. At 3:15 he came to the front desk and said — "I'd like to take her home. I think we need each other." I excused myself to the back room and sat on an overturned bucket and cried for a long time. He texted me yesterday — "First time I've slept through the night in three years. I think she was saving that for me." She was. Eleven years of saving it. For one Tuesday. For him. Drop a ❤️ for Luna. Share this for every senior dog still waiting for their Tuesday. They're saving everything they have for the right person to walk through that door.

[Heath @LeastHesFunny_]

Alec Baldwin’s Instagram “tribute” to his Red October Co Star Sam Neill, where he spends almost 3 minutes talking about his own filmography & every other actor in October who isn’t Sam Neill might be the most unintentionally funny thing I’ve ever watched

[♠️ @ClipxxSZN]

Ex–p*rn star Mia Khalifa, talking on Call Her Daddy, claims she doesn’t understand why, after she stopped making advlt films and tried to make a living by getting a job it wasn’t easy for her, as she is asked in most interviews whether she did p*rn before.

“I know the only reason they are asking is because 90% of male job interviewers know me from my p*rn videos and are so quick to judge.”

["Lou"ReedTyranny @nakedfoul]

Love it when Shaffer locks in like this, a rare and powerful thing

[Warren Sharp @SharpFootball]

if every Argentine got a yellow card when they dove they’d have no one left to play in this game

[Vanessa @VanessaChaseOG]

Being Retarded PSA (1986)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

700 million people watched this man get headbutted in the chest. It was only the fourth most important thing he did that night.

Marco Materazzi conceded the penalty, scored the equalizer, provoked the most famous red card in sports history, and buried his shootout kick. A backup defender decided the 2006 World Cup final four separate times.

He was not supposed to be on the pitch at all. He started the tournament on the bench and only got into the lineup when Alessandro Nesta pulled up injured 17 minutes into Italy's third group game. Then he got red-carded in the round of 16 against Australia. He was one suspension away from missing the final entirely.

In Berlin he fouled Malouda in the 7th minute, handing Zidane the penalty he converted with a Panenka off the underside of the crossbar. Twelve minutes later he outjumped Patrick Vieira on a Pirlo corner and headed in the equalizer. Italy had conceded exactly one goal all tournament before that penalty, and it was an own goal.

Then the 110th minute. Zidane, already voted the tournament's best player before the final finished, put his head into Materazzi's chest and walked past the World Cup trophy on his way off the pitch. A 19-year career ended right there, with penalties 10 minutes away and France losing their surest taker.

Materazzi stepped up second in the shootout, got booed by the entire French end, and hit it low past Barthez, who guessed the right corner and still couldn't reach it. Italy converted all five. Trezeguet, the man whose golden goal beat Italy in the Euro 2000 final, hit the crossbar.

Zidane got the statue, the documentaries, the anniversary posts. The man he headbutted got a winner's medal and the strangest stat line in final history: gave away a goal, scored a goal, ended a legend, and never missed his kick.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

I just submitted an op-ed on this to Washington Post, discussing how technology cannot substitute human accountability. We must have transparency, or all the new rules and reviews create more opportunities for interference. With all due respect to one of the best referees in history I have to confront this assessment. It was technically BEFORE the goal in absolute time but not IMMEDIATELY before. It's quite a stretch of the normal logic to directly connect an accident near the goal area of one team to the action on the opposite side of the field. And since there was no arbiter's whistle to stop the game (wrong decision, agreed!), this violation cannot justify the decision to disallow the goal. And regarding the second incident in question, you are again correct stating that there was no violation of the rules against Salah, but this conclusion is reached after careful examination of the video footage from various angles. The referee during the game could not instantly verify it and considering the similarities of these two cases HAD to go to the monitor to confirm the assessment. By not doing so he simply reiterated our understanding that the game is being run by anonymous partisans behind the screens.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A guy bought plane WiFi to follow Argentina vs Egypt, and 187 strangers at 35,000 feet ended up listening to one of the wildest comebacks in World Cup history through a single laptop speaker.

Here's what came through that speaker.

Egypt led on Yasser Ibrahim's 15th minute header. Mostafa Shobeir saved a Messi penalty, then denied Mac Allister and Alvarez before halftime. Zico made it 2-0 in the 67th. With 11 minutes left, the reigning champions were going home.

Then Romero headed in Messi's cross in the 79th. Messi rifled the equalizer in the 83rd. Enzo Fernandez won it in stoppage time. Three goals in 13 minutes, each one audible in that cabin as a wave of gasps before the commentary caught up.

A live match is the only broadcast left that refuses to wait for you. You can pause a movie, restart a podcast, save an article. A game in the 89th minute exists exactly once, which is why grown men will stand in an airplane aisle straining to hear a laptop.

Some stadiums hold 80,000 people. This one held 187 and was moving at 500 miles an hour.

[What’s Wright? with Nick Wright @WhatsWrightShow]

“You’re supposed to be the greatest player in the history of the country… it’s a total catastrophe. And I’m not going to pretend it’s not.”

@getnickwright is beyond disappointed in Christian Pulisic’s World Cup and mentality toward it

[Unfiltered Soccer @UnfilteredSoccr]

Landon's message to Christian Pulisic:

"This is an opportunity to help and to change your life forever. One of the biggest problems - I speak to people who are at U.S. Soccer. I speak to his sponsors. I speak to his teammates. I speak to the staff and the coaches. People are fed up with the way things are handled around him. And it's not necessarily him, but it's his agents, his family, his hangers-on, the people who are influencing. People are fed up with it. They treat people poorly. They do things poorly. It's always a 'no' whenever you wanna ask, 'Can we do an interview?' It's always a, 'No, you can't get near him.' He doesn't say 'hi' to the commentators who do all the games all the time when they walk by. All the other guys come over and shake hands and say, 'Hello.' There's just this sense about him that you can't get near him. And I actually don't think it's from him. I think it's from I think it's from the people around him."

[Дмитрий Шнякин @shhhnyak]

Бельгийцы продолжают беспощадно троллить американцев после знаменитой Победы Справедливости:) И вот эта бельгийская красотка сделала мне утро! 😂