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Manfred Myers 1:03 am on November 11, 2018  

Report: Le’Veon Bell unlikely to show up by Tuesday deadline, to sit out rest of the season

The Pittsburgh Steelers reportedly want Bell back, but Bell is willing to wait until free agency next year before he steps foot on a football field.

Le’Veon Bell has been in a holding pattern the entire 2018 season.

Every step in this process, the Steelers have been wondering what their All-Pro running back was going to do. While the Steelers knew they wouldn’t see Bell during offseason workouts, or even training camp, once Week 1 rolled around and Bell was an absentee…the real waiting began.

As players were asked incessantly about Bell’s whereabouts, week by week Bell left $855 thousand dollars on the table weekly.

Rumors were Bell would report during the team’s Week 7 bye week.

Nope.

Some thought when he bid farewell to Miami via Twitter, he was heading to the Steel City.

Well, he showed up, but just to play some pick up basketball at an LA Fitness.

It now came to the point where either Bell reports before Tuesday leading up to Week 11, or he is forced to sit out the entire season, this per the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the NFLPA and the NFL owners.

Most assume with Bell in the area, he will be showing up on Monday, or Tuesday, to get back on the field and possibly do some damage before hitting free agency next offseason.

According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, this isn’t likely to happen:

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Schefter wasn’t the only NFL insider to have some sources, possibly the same ones, say how Bell isn’t going to be showing this season.

This from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport:

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The comments Rapoport is referring to by Art Rooney II would be comments he made to the NFL Network radio station on Sirius/XM Radio prior to the team’s Week 10 game vs. the Carolina Panthers on Thursday Night Football. During the interview Rooney spoke about how the team fully expects Bell to return for the stretch run, and according to Rapoport the team wants Bell back, but Bell doesn’t reciprocate those feelings.

This could just be another rumor in this sordid timeline, or it could be the truth. Either way, fans will know soon enough whether Bell will be a part of this 2018 team, or if they will be moving forward with a backfield of James Conner, Stevan Ridley and Jaylen Samuels.

Manfred Myers 1:04 am on October 28, 2018  

Bulldogs and Babies

The English Bulldog is a loving and gentle dog that makes a great family pet. Bulldogs seem to have a sixth sense about children, they are gentle, have a very high tolerance level and make great playmates.  The bulldog will instinctively and instantly become one of the family. Many people including myself believe that they don’t consider themselves Dogs but more human like the rest of the family members. A clown, a great listener, a friend, a four legged family member. The Bulldog is a true Family Dog for children of any age, the bulldog makes the perfect pet, being Loving and Loyal to all family members.

 

A photo and video collection showing the true love between Bullies and Babies ♥

Bulldogs and Babies … a Cuteness Overload

True Friends sharing a Meal

Teddy giving Baby Kisses

A Bulldog and his favorite girl

This little baby girl loves the buldlog bark

and Gus the Bulldog is very happy to play along

Bulldogs and Babies are so much alike…they both:

• are super cute and cuddly

• love their toys

• have wrinkles and round bellies

With a Bulldog in the Family you don’t have to worry the dog will bit your baby in fact it is the other way around <img src="https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72×72/1f609.png&quot; alt="

Manfred Myers 1:33 am on September 9, 2018  

Transfer Talk: Zinedine Zidane won’t join Manchester United unless these players come in

Sid Lowe joins the FC panel to address the rumours linking Zinedine Zidane to Manchester United.

Mark Ogden explains why Jose Mourinho's job at Manchester United is likely secure despite a sense of chaos at Old Trafford in recent weeks.

The transfer window in all of Europe's big five leagues is now closed, but that doesn't stop Transfer Talk from rummaging through the remains of the summer window to scrounge up the earliest bit of gossip about who will be moving where come January.

Kroos tops Zidane's Man United wish list

Zinedine Zidane has compiled a list of transfer targets in the event that he takes over at Manchester United.

Toni Kroos, one of Zidane's former midfield maestros at Real Madrid, is amongst his primary targets,…

Manfred Myers 1:07 am on August 26, 2018  

News, Nuggets & Longreads 25 August 2018: Bibles, the Blue Bell, Mr Bigot

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that seized our attention in the past week, from skittle alley rats to Jesus.

Well, most of the past week, as we wrote this on Friday morning and scheduled it to post at the usual time. And it’s a bit lighter than usual, too, perhaps because August is when everyone disappears on holiday.

First, for VinePair Cat Wolinski investigates how American churches are using the appeal of craft beer to engage in their communities:

“We’re not trying to force a message on people,” Spencer Nix, CEO and co-founder of Reformation Brewing, says. “We’re trying to live out our values and our vision.”

Jeff Heck, CEO and co-founder of Monday Night Brewing, agrees. “Our posture going into a neighborhood is not like, ‘We’re going to be the savior of this neighborhood.’ Instead, we’re coming in and we’re trying to ask the question, ‘What does the neighborhood need?’”

John Pybus

We visited The Blue Bell in York for the first time earlier this year and added it immediately to our mental list of Proper Pubs – distinctive, worn-in, intimate and warm. Now for York Mix Nick Love brings news of a threat to its existence, or at least its character:

[The] charismatic landlord John Pybus, who’s made the Blue Bell such a success, is facing an uncertain future… He has been served a Section 25 notice by the pub’s owners to end his tenancy and force him to leave his business and his home… He’s become collateral damage of a widespread strategy by the UK’s largest pub companies (pubcos) to resist and indeed to legally circumvent new pub laws that were introduced to try and make the industry more equitable.

Michael Collins

From Martyn Cornell comes one of those posts that uses beer as the sugar to help a dose of history go down: did Irish revolutionary Michael Collins drink a pint of Deasy’s porter on the day in 1922 when he died?

One source says that Collins actually “loathed the sight of porter”. However, he certainly did drink Deasy’s most famous beer on occasions. When he came home to Cork from Frongoch prison camp in North Wales in December 1916, after the British government released the surviving prisoners taken at the end of the Easter Rising, “the Big Fellow” spent three weeks, in his own words, “drinking Clonakilty wrastler [sic] on a Frongoch stomach,” before returning to Dublin. But Collins’s preferred drink actually appears to have been whiskey: “’a ball of malt’ was his usual,” according to one biographer, and another named Jameson’s as his favourite.

Pub sign advertising a tasting tray of Irish beers.

One of our favourite new blogs, An Seisiún, this week told the story of what happens when a pub’s owners insist on offering things the pub doesn’t want anything to do with:

The biggest question of all however: would my social anxiety and acute sense of embarassment allow me to go up to the bar and ask for a f***ing tasting tray of f***ing Smithwicks of all things? In what can only be called the biggest victory against my shyness since the first time I asked someone out for a date, I did just that. And just like then, it couldn’t have went worse.

Vintage photo of a man and woman sitting in the sun with a pint of beer.

Kirsty Walker at Lady Sinks the Booze has gathered some memories of family holidays, many centred around pubs and beer:

In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.

The march at Stone, 3 November, 1973.
The march at Stone, 3 November, 1973, with Christopher Hutt at dead centre.

Roger Protz has dug out a copy of his very first beer book, the fascinating Pulling a Fast One from 1978, and used it as the starting point for

an extended reflection on the changes in British beer 40 years have brought:

Of course, beer choice is demonstrably better today as a result of the rise of the craft beer movement. But let’s not kid ourselves. The global brewers and their pubco pals dominate the market and charge wickedly high prices for their products.

Finally, here’s an interesting nugget from Twitter which suggests the direction AB-InBev’s craft beer adventures might be taking: breweries, distributors, media in every region, all interlinked and cross-promoting.

News, Nuggets & Longreads 25 August 2018: Bibles, the Blue Bell, Mr Bigot originally posted at Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog

Manfred Myers 1:15 am on August 19, 2018  

Xavier Grimble undergoes surgery on thumb/wrist putting more stress on Steelers TEs

The Pittsburgh Steelers are now ridiculously thin at the tight end position.

If you think about all the tight ends the Pittsburgh Steelers have gone through since fan favorite Heath Miller retired, it is quite the list.

The team drafted Jesse James, who remains on the roster, they added players like Ladarius Green, Xavier Grimble and now Vance McDonald. All in an attempt to find someone who could be the rock Miller was for the Steelers throughout his career.

Though they’ve tried, James is the only player who has been consistently available for the black-and-gold since Miller’s days at Heinz Field came to a close.

Coming into the 2018 season, it looked as if the Steelers’ tight end depth chart was essentially set. Jesse James, Vance McDonald and Xavier Grimble. However, after McDonald went down with a foot injury the first week of training camp, and hasn’t returned since, Grimble now finds himself out of the lineup for the near future.

This per Jeremy Fowler of ESPN:

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The surgery, combined with McDonald’s injury, severely handicaps the team’s depth for the final two weeks of the preseason. The team signed Bucky Hodges just over a week ago, and other than Pharoah McKever and Christian Scotland-Williamson, who has never played a game in the NFL as a former rugby player, the team might have to look for some tight end help sooner, rather than later.

While the Steelers going into a preseason game with James, McKever, Hodges and Scotland-Williamson doesn’t seem that bad, thinking of that being the depth for a regular season game is a recipe for disaster.

There is hope both Grimble and McDonald will return in time for the games that matter, but if they aren’t ready there is a good chance the talk about a tight end focused offense would go on the back burner until the depth returns at the position.

Manfred Myers 1:20 am on June 3, 2018  

Saturday Tweets: Weeds, Bees and General Crankiness

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Manfred Myers 2:21 am on May 13, 2018  

Transfer Talk: Man United join Neymar chase, Rooney says goodbye

The ESPN FC crew gives their take on what PSG should do with their troubled superstar Neymar this summer, with rumours of Real Madrid knocking on the door.

The summer window opens soon and Transfer Talk has the latest rumours.

Man United chasing Neymar

It seems that Manchester United are ready to make another effort to sign Neymar.

According to the Mirror, the Old Trafford club are prepared to rival Real Madrid for the Brazilian forward's signature, should he decide to leave Paris Saint-Germain just one year after joining the French club from Barcelona.

Neymar, who is back in France as he works his way back to fitness ahead of the World Cup, would…

Manfred Myers 1:13 am on May 6, 2018  

Saturday Tweets: Lyme Disease, Unuselessness and a Plum Mystery

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