todd m. sweet

I love the Cup because it stripped away all the things about professional sports that I’ve come to despise. No sideline reporters. No JumboTron. No TV timeouts. No onslaught of replays after every half-decent play. No gimmicky team names like the “Heat” or the “Thunder.” (You know what the announcers call Germany? The Germans. I love this.) No announcers breathlessly overhyping everything or saying crazy things to get noticed. We don’t have to watch 82 mostly half-assed games to get to the playoffs. We don’t have 10 graphics on the screen at all times. We don’t have to sit there for four hours waiting for a winner because pitchers are taking 25 seconds to deliver a baseball. The World Cup just bangs it out: Two cool national anthems, two 45-minute halves, a few minutes of extra time and usually we’re done. Everything flies by. Everything means something. It’s the single best sporting event we have by these four measures: efficiency, significance, historical context and truly meaningful/memorable/exciting moments. You know … as long as you like soccer.

- Bill Simmons: World Cup’s 20 questions - ESPN

Energy companies have developed breathtaking technology to drill deeper into the seabed beneath ever deeper waters, yet they have little more than absorbent mops and floating Shop-Vacs to clean up the mess if it all goes wrong. Their disaster plan—the only technologically workable plan—is merely hoping there is no disaster, which is no plan at all.

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BOOM: Big Issues: GQ

This is the story, “of the rig workers and the Coast Guard crewmen who rescued them,” as written by Sean Flynn in GQ magazine.