USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
This is how narratives form in this era for quarterbacks. One thing happens, and it becomes the entire picture of who a player was and is. Very wild. Lazy.
If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.
The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.
A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.
Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."
One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.
If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you.
The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.
Calipari was elite at UMass.
Calipari was elite at Memphis.
Calipari was elite at Kentucky.
Calipari just won an SEC Championship…
AT ARKANSAS.
This dude is absolutely ridiculous.
The Vikings are signing CB James Pierre to a 2-year, $8.5M contract, per @CameronWolfe
Pierre in 2025:
- 88.9 coverage grade
- 45.7% completion rate allowed
- 28.6% forced incompletion rate
Harrison Smith career stats
1180 tackles
106 passes defensed
51 career tackles for loss
39 interceptions
21.5 sacks
13 forced fumbles
10 fumble recovery’s
First ballot #22
Hell of a career
#Vikings S Harrison Smith just came off the field in Minnesota to a rousing ovation.
14 years — all with the #Vikings.
Over 200 starts.
One of the more underappreciated players in the league.
This is well deserved.
Former Vikings Xavier Rhodes, Anthony Harris, Andrew Sendejo, Mistral Raymond, Jamarca Sanford, and Anthony Barr all rocking No. 22 jerseys for what could be Harrison Smith’s final game.