Gathered

-- The football coach at the University of North Carolina worries that moves to make football safer for players, so they can engage in leisure activities like thinking after they turn 55, will cripple the game. Even more troublesome, he says that if the game goes, so will the country. Lighten up, Francis.

-- Although it's not the occasional strip Existential Comics, Sherman's Lagoon offers a pretty good example of why you can't prove a negative.

-- There's a World Emoji Day? Flying cars and space travel in the future, my ass.

-- Because they don't take up too much of my brain, I read a lot of suspense thrillers and spy novels on the treadmill. The former often revolve around an investigator pursuing an impossibly brilliant serial killer, perhaps in order to save a victim -- most often female -- who isn't dead yet. I know, that sounds like Criminal Minds, but the show is crap and I don't watch it. I've been veering away from the dead girl thrillers, though, because they have even less variety than a CM episode and for some reason a lot of authors think they have to toss in a couple of pages telling us about the girl who's going to be killed and maybe even the terrifying pursuit and murder itself. Sadism, counter-intuitively, isn't very inventive. Alice Bolin write a book about the phenomenon as it relates to TV, and talks about it with writer Hope Reese at Longreads. I don't know how much I follow along with Bolin's politics, but I agree with her that this is a laaaaazy trope you could wish supposedly creative people would stop relying on.