10 Thoughts for December 23, 2014.

1. Football: I didn't need another reason to cheer for Oregon, but now that Jameis Winston has gotten away with rape, with the help of his three roommates, here's to hoping that good guys finish first, and that the Ducks embarrass Winston and FSU on national TV.
2. Football: Looking over the NFL standings, 2 out of 3 teams currently pegged for the playoffs, hold a 11-4 record or better. There's so much parity on the face of it, it's rather scary. But then if you take a look at the team stats, something remarkable can be discerned. Last year Denver (#1 offense) had a crazy, high-powered offense averaging 457 yard per game, while Seattle (#1 defense) allowed just 277 ypg -- we know how that ended up in the Super Bowl. This year, the top offensive team, New Orleans, won't make the playoffs, but they're averaging 416 ypg, while Seattle is once again the top defense, and, unbelievably, averaging 269 ypg -- even better than last year. Yep, I'm feeling pretty good on the Seahawks' chances.
3. Football: Because there is no such thing as too many great plays, if you missed that Seattle-Arizona game, you must catch up to some incredible plays that leave you laughing and/or jaw-dropped. First up, Russell Wilson's amazing run for a touchdown by stiff arm and shake-n-bake. Then, an amazing Beast Mode 79-yard run that shook the foundations of the Arizona stadium. Here's a different view of that same run -- listen and feel that crowd in Arizona go nuts! In Arizona, are you kidding!?!
4. Football: Okay, just one last point here about Seattle. Half of that Seahawks staff has ties with USC. Chad Morton, Jamie Yanchar, Brian Schneider, Chris Carlisle, Kris Richard, Rocky Seto, Ken Norton Jr., Carl Smith, Dave Canales, Nate Carroll and Pat Ruel. I think that should say a lot about just how good USC could have been, despite the sanctions, if Carroll had stuck around. 
5. Politics: Elizabeth Warren will be the next POTUS, or at least the Democratic nominee, I believe. She is not afraid to get angry nor is she afraid of explaining things in plain language. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Elizabeth Warren have officially entered the ring, but they are polling 1 and 3 respectively among Democrats.
6. Geopolitics: NK's internet outage was blamed on data overload, by NK officials, and I think it's probably true. So here's the joke: In attempting to post more Sony data to Pastebin, NK hackers overloaded their own, meager network by accident. ;) j/k
7. Geopolitics: You shouldn't believe the BS that many media hacks are passing off as personal knowledge about what both the US and NK can and can't do, wouldn't and would do, in cyber warfare. BS: NK doesn't have the capability to launch a cyber attack; the proof of NK's chops is in a devastating attack on SK banks and their ATMs a few years ago. BS: US was involved in a DDoS attack on NK; the same people who created Stuxnet would not be so stupid as to launch a run of the mill DDoS attack on the already extremely limited internet infrastructure of NK. If you read or hear anyone actually saying that NK can't launch a devastating cyber attack, or that the US was involved with a simple DDoS attack, it's your signal that the person doesn't know what they're talking about in the least, and you should ignore them. Maybe one of these days I'll compile a list of stupid media hack arguments, and break them down.
8. Obits: Far from the world we know, up where the clear winds blow. RIP, Joe Cocker.
9. Tech: You often come across adds touting the comparable price of Windows laptops with larger screens, to Chromebooks. It's a ruse. Those laptop screens are using the same or worse pixel counts, and in turn, have much lower pixel densities than Chromebooks. And, those Windows laptops invariably use traditional 500GB spinning hard drives, compared to the SSDs (or rather, a special type of flash memory) used in all Chromebooks. Even if a Windows laptop had an SSD, the boot up times are vastly different, but Windows with 500GB standard hard drives are about 10x slower to boot up. If you were to try to match up spec for spec, the Windows machines will have to come out higher in price unless Microsoft is giving away free software. Take into account the battery life, and it's no comparison.
10. Music: 160+ tracks of ballads -- that's my latest Google Music playlist build. I'd share it with you, but unfortunately, Google Music only allows me to share single tracks, not entire playlists. It spans several decades, but most heavily focused on the 80s and 90s. From Sade's "No Ordinary Love", to EWF's "After the Love Has Gone", to Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply" and The Stylistics' "You Are Everything", those 163 tracks add up to nearly 12 hours of ballads. I wanted to add more, but I haven't yet finished ripping all of my CDs. My official count of tracks uploaded into Google Music is 11,672; Google has a hard upload ceiling limit of 20,000.