Almost friday...
RAVENS QUARTERBACK SOLUTION IS THE GUY WHO GOT BENCHED FOR GARDNER MINSHEW
Lamar Jackson came back from a three-week ankle absence on Sunday, threw one pass, and hurt his right thumb. The thumb needs surgery, Jackson is on injured reserve, and Baltimore lost 36-10 to Buffalo. Backup Tyler Huntley went down with a toe injury in the same game. The Ravens are 4-4, have lost three straight, and sit last in the AFC North. So they called Arizona about Jacoby Brissett, who is available for a reason. On Sunday he went 10 of 23 for 119 yards with an interception before Mike LaFleur yanked him down 17-3 for Gardner Minshew, who promptly won the thing 33-30 in overtime. Monday, LaFleur named Minshew the starter and slid Brissett to third string behind rookie Carson Beck. Brissett asked for a trade on that same phone call, which is the correct response to being told a third-rounder is now ahead of you. Baltimore will be his seventh team. He is 23-50 as a starter and has been sacked 62 times over his last 20 games, tied for the most in the league, so he should feel right at home behind this offensive line. The deal is not expected to close until the weekend, which means undrafted rookie Joe Fagnano starts Thursday against Jacksonville. Brissett will be the fourth quarterback to throw a pass for the Ravens in 2026.
WALL STREET ADDS A TRILLION DOLLARS OVERNIGHT
Democrats won the House and the Senate on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple were on pace to add close to $1 trillion in market value in a single day, because investors decided a hostile Congress might finally stop these companies from spending every dollar they own on buildings full of GPUs. Amazon rose as much as 8.3%, Microsoft 7%, Alphabet 5.9%, Meta 3.6%. Apple, which has mostly skipped the AI spending race, jumped more than 6%. Read that again. Five of the biggest companies on earth got rewarded for the possibility of being told no. Amazon, Alphabet and Meta have all pushed free cash flow negative, which means they are borrowing to keep the buildout going. Robert Pavlik of Dakota Wealth Management told Bloomberg that "the brakes are being applied to their spending, not by the companies, but by the government." That is a grown man describing a hostage situation as good news. Voters were blunter than the market. There were 41 local data center measures across 10 states, and the industry went 1 for 41, the lone win coming in Harwood, North Dakota. Ohio alone had 21 of them. Nvidia and Tesla fell, the neocloud names got hit, and the Dow finished up nearly 1,600 points for its biggest gain of the year.
Which Came First?
Beat your memory to the punch.
Chicken or the Egg
LIV GOLF BURNED $5 BILLION AND COULDN'T TALK 40 GUYS INTO SHOWING UP
BC Partners was the rescue. The London firm agreed to put $300 million into LIV Golf 2.0 with one condition attached: enough good players actually commit to 2027. Around 30 pledged in, another 10 kept thinking it over, the negotiations dragged, and the firm walked. Its CEO, Ted Goldthorpe, had said just last month that everything was on track. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund poured more than $5 billion into this since 2022, reportedly $100 million a month during this past year, then announced in April it was out after the 2026 season. LIV filed Chapter 11 on September 8 in New Jersey, listing liabilities of $500 million to $1 billion against assets of $100 million to $500 million. Jon Rahm, Sergio Garcia, Tyrrell Hatton, Ian Poulter and Louis Oosthuizen are gone. Brooks Koepka went back to the PGA Tour. Bryson DeChambeau is about the last marquee name still holding the door. The league did find $15.6 million for executive retention payments this year, and Greg Norman left in September 2025 with more than $9.4 million. This week LIV Golf New Jersey filed a change of address from a New York office to a commercial property in Claymont, Delaware. Rory McIlroy, pro golf's loudest LIV critic for four years, said the league "took players; they took sponsors; they turned professional golf into an arms race." Thursday's hearing could start the liquidation.
SCIENTISTS FIND 115-MILLION-YEAR-OLD DINOSAUR BLOOD
A team led by Curtin University in Australia went through the limb bone of Aratasaurus museunacionali, a theropod that died in Brazil about 115 million years ago, and reported finding mineralized red blood cells with heme still inside them. Heme is the iron-bearing piece of hemoglobin, the thing that moves oxygen around. The paper ran in PNAS this week, and lead author Kliti Grice called it a landmark discovery, which is the correct thing to say when you believe you are holding the oldest blood on record. The preservation story is great. The animal died, sank into mud with very little oxygen, and got blanketed by a mat of microbes that essentially did free taxidermy for 115 million years. Then the rest of paleontology showed up with notes. Mary Schweitzer, who found soft tissue in dinosaur bone decades ago, pointed out that bird and reptile red blood cells keep their nuclei and should bulge, while these things are concave and smaller than expected. Her read: "I just am not convinced that these are red blood cells." Another researcher floated that the round shapes could be blobs of manganese oxide. At least 14 studies have already tried to describe red blood cells in very old fossils, so this fight has a long undefeated champion, and it's doubt. Also, before anyone starts a theme park: no DNA. Grice told Reuters this is not a vial of dinosaur blood.
FLORIDA TEEN'S 24-HOUR WALMART CHALLENGE LASTED ABOUT AN HOUR
Isaac Hurley, 18, strolled into the Walmart on South McCall Road in Englewood around 10:15 p.m. on January 13 with a business plan: hide past closing, stay 24 hours, livestream it on TikTok, collect money from the views. Deputies responded just after 11 p.m. and found him in the dog bed section. The 24-hour challenge ran roughly one hour. The structural problem with a stealth mission is broadcasting it. A 911 caller told deputies a guy was streaming from inside the Walmart for a 24-hour challenge and was hiding in the dog bed section. That is not detective work. That is a man filing his own police report with a ring light. Investigators later pulled up a video of him announcing the plan and asking for likes and shares. He was charged with burglary of an occupied structure and petit theft, the theft being a phone charger he pulled out of its packaging while inside. He bonded out at $1,500. Sheriff Bill Prummell, who has watched this genre evolve, listed off the kicking-in-doors challenge and the property destruction era before landing on this one, noting that young people are "putting themselves in bad situations and paying the price for it."
 | |||||
| One famous person. Seven guesses. Follow the clues. | |||||
|