A good Web site is like a shark: you either keep swimming or die. And like many Web sites, we've decided that to create the illusion that we are in fact still moving forward, we changed our name and our url. 

From now on, you can find us at iDave. Same asinine material, new location. So change your bookmark and join us, won't you?

_ In between all the tripe, sometimes the Facebook delivers an actual nugget of beauty. My friend Ryan Smithson stopped me cold with this status update Thursday morning:

“I got my first PGA TOUR pin yesterday to mark five years with the company. My grandfather, Billie, wore his Genesco company pin every day and was buried with it on his suit, 16 years ago today. I really wish I had a guidebook to how he lived his life, because I'd follow it to the letter, except for the fried bologna he loved.”

That could be the first paragraph of the Great American Novel. It instantly brought me back to my trip to Ireland this summer and the little wrinkled men with a twinkle in their eyes and Michael Collins pins dutifully pinned to their lapels.

Ryan’s status update sparked a lovely little thread of comments on his Facebook page that spoke of grandfathers, hometowns, high-school basketball, golf and the merits of fried bologna. His cousin Susan offered an equally poignant memory, about their grandfather’s funeral, which could easily be the second paragraph of what was fast becoming a crowd-sourced memoir:

“I remember it was bitterly cold. They had just put crush rock down.”

Ryan grew up in Centerville, Tennessee, “best known as the home of Minnie Pearl.” He likes to play the role of simple country boy, but it’s just an act. His complex mind never ceased to astound me when we worked together at SI.com, where we would trade random lines from ’80s comedies and he would tell country-mouse tales that you were sure he invented but probably did not.

I asked him to tell me more about his grandfather.

“He had the same Bible for decades. One day, he put it on the roof of his truck and forgot it. Obviously, it fell off. A deer hunter found it by the side of the road, and kept it.

“One year later, he returned to hunt deer, stopped in a local store and asked, ‘Where does Billie Smithson live?’ They told him, and he drove all the way out (15 miles or so) and left it on the porch with a note. That return was worth millions to the man. The Bible was all scarred up on the outside now, and Pa kinda liked it that way.”

After landing at ESPN.com in Seattle through a weird series of events, things seemed to stabilize for us. In 1998, we bought a house and had a kid, and quite possibly we thought that this could be life as we were going to know it.
 
But when life looks like easy street, there is danger at the door!
 
The Internet had started to become an actual something, Disney bought ESPN, and early in 1999, ESPN announced that it was going to move the bulk of its Web operations from quaint but distant Seattle to the main compound in Bristol, Connecticut. As much as I liked working for ESPN, we couldn't see ourselves moving to Bristol. It was at this moment of turmoil that I got a call from Mike Kahn, a well-respected sports writer formerly of the Tacoma News Tribune. He had made the move online to CBS Sportsline and was building a little West Coast bureau in Tacoma. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in running the copy desk at night to give the site a 24-hour staffing presence. 

As 1996 rolled in, I was 26, newly married and feeling like life in Peoria had run its course. We decided to move to Seattle at the end of the year. 
 
On a scouting visit in April, I managed to solicit some interviews. One was with Greg Johns, the sports editor at The Bellevue Journal-American, who potentially had a job or two coming open. We had a great conversation, which concluded with him saying, “By the way, tomorrow is my last day here, but I’ll be sure to pass along your file to whoever takes over the hiring.” 

What the what? Well, that’s an odd twist of fate, I thought. I just spent an hour trying to impress a guy who very likely would have nothing to do with filling these positions ... one of which apparently was his.

The hardest part was picking the iconic image. Joliet Jake in sunglasses and fedora? The chee-burger, chee-burger diner owner? Killer bee? Samurai hotel clerk? A drunken frat brother in a sweatshirt that says, simply, “College”? In the end, I kept coming back to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” Tom Schiller’s short film in which you play yourself as an old man. “They all thought I’d be the first to go,” you say, climbing the hill to the cemetery where the rest of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players are buried. Not one of them made it past age 38, you note, as you detail their causes of death before ultimately dancing on their graves.

Of course, it was completely backward, as much then as it is now, 30 years after you died at age 33. And, of course, it was completely genius.

Yours was not the first celebrity death I absorbed in real time. Elvis, Thurman Munson, John Lennon. By March 1982, at age 12, I knew that bright lights sometimes extinguish early. But when you died, it was the first time I felt like I had lost something of my era, something that defined my worldview, such as it was at 12. 

When I started doing these birthday wishes, one of the goals was to not dwell on deaths but on lives. But your life and death are so intertwined in the mythology: it was only seven years from when you broke ground on  “SNL” in ’75 to when they laid you in the ground in ’82. That’s a small window, but that’s what makes Brother Bluto and Joliet Jake such treasured glimpses of John Belushi. What would your career have brought if you had made it through those wild and crazy days? Look at Bill Murray and Steve Martin. Look at Robin Williams, for crysakes! I have no doubt you would have tapped into that deep well of expressiveness to become not just a gifted comedic actor but also an actor capable of amazing dramatic roles. Look at your buddy Aykroyd: he cleaned up nice and has turned in some nice parts in both genres.

Then again, maybe you would have gone the other way and continued to make frat-house classics with Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn or ended up playing a hopelessly lost Boomer-generation grandparent on some two-bit network series about life in the 21st century. Who knows.

You were the Jim Brown of comedy: seven Hall of Fame seasons and out. And yet, three decades later, even 12 year-olds know to scream “Food fight!” and to chant “To-gah! To-gah! To-gah!” There isn’t a hockey rink in North America that doesn’t play the “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!” clip when the home team is down in the third period. And who among us hasn’t annoyed some diner waitress by ordering “four fried chickens … and a Coke”?

In the end, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” had it exactly right. I feel like you just might outlive them all.  Because ... you're a dancer!

There is something Shakespearean in the way the Joe Paterno story is playing out: a beloved hero for decades, tainted by a tragic flaw at the very end of his life. And what was his tragic flaw? A loyalty to an ideal? A loyalty so overblown that he was willing to cover up for a heinous villain in order to protect his kingdom?  That death follows so soon after his downfall only compounds the ambiguity. How do you mourn somebody that you so recently castigated?

The reactions run the gamut. There are those who feel he was not at all to blame in the Sandusky scandal and therefore should be ushered into death as the same infallible leader of men he was known as in life. Then there are those who feel that protecting a molester is no different from being a molester and that Paterno’s negligence undid his entire body of work. And then there is the majority in the vast expanse between those extremes, those who can’t unravel these conflicting narratives so simply. Paterno affected hundreds if not thousands of people in a positive way, an almost immeasurable influence of good will. On the other hand, he also appeared to know that somebody was using his program as a means to harm young boys.

My guess is that his mind-set was so antiquated that he honestly believed that it was best not to cause any uproar and to move forward, the same kind of antiquated thinking that has led to so many abuse cases in so many places. Joe Paterno, 85 and living in his own protective shell, probably didn’t even know that whistle-blowing is considered the right thing to do these days.    

For these kinds of tragic flaws, at least in Shakespeare, death is usually the endgame, and it's usually by the sword — Macbeth, Hamlet, (spoiler alert) Coriolanus. But let’s not forget King Lear, who died of grief, perhaps caused by his own grievous failings. That point was made this morning on ESPN, however ham-handedly, by Todd Blackledge, a college football broadcaster and a former Penn State player, who said that a broken heart — caused by the treatment from media and the PSU trustees — literally was “as much a part” of Paterno’s death as was lung cancer. I was so stunned to hear such a childish assignment of blame that I had to watch the SportsCenter replay just to make sure I didn’t mishear him. I didn’t. He basically said the media and the PSU trustees killed Paterno.

That leap of logic aside, I do agree that Paterno’s will to live was very likely weakened by the unfolding events and the inglorious end to his career. But that’s nobody’s fault but his.

I’m not going to jeer a man upon his death, nor am I going to whitewash history out of sympathy. Let’s let Joe Paterno rest in peace. When the lights go on in the theater, it’s the audience that is left to wrestle with the complicated tragedy left behind.

Let me tell you something, you steely-eyed missile man: When you land a motherfucking plane in the Hudson motherfucking River and get all 155 people home for dinner, you deserve more than 15 minutes of fame. And that’s why you make the Hall of Happy Birthday list, Captain Sully!

The geese conspired to take out your engines, and you said, "Get those motherfucking geese off my motherfucking plane!" Air-traffic control tried to get you to fly to Teterboro, and you said: "I’m not making it to no Teterboro. We’re going in the river!" That’s decision-making. That’s experience. That’s leadership.

And the Hudson is no joke. It has crazy-rough currents, and it’s chock full of boats and debris. There are some boat captains who can barely navigate the Hudson, and you put a plane down in that soup as gentle as a hug from the Snuggle bear. Then you walked the aisle to make sure that everybody was safely out of the plane.

And don’t tell me that any captain would have done the same, because we just saw Francesco Schettino run a luxury liner aground and kill more than 20 people while he bolted for the nearest Olive Garden bar stool. Let’s put it another way: He started in the water, in a glass-calm ocean, with no geese flying into his engines, and still managed to kill people. You started in the air and landed in a valley of skyscrapers into a relatively thin, very turbulent river without as much as wrinkling anybody’s suit jacket. Hell, half those people still made their connecting flights.

I think the F.A.A. should mandate that all pilots wear Sully masks as they greet passengers. I think they should make a Captain Sully Snuggie. I think there should be a Captain Sully app (I don't know what it would do; maybe make you a cup of hot cocoa and read you a book). I think Macy’s should have children visit you at Christmas.

Hold me, Captain Sully, and tell me everything’s gonna be all right. 

_neither magnificent nor spellbinding in the traditional senses but arguably the greatest team in N.H.L. history. And in true middle-child fashion, in the lineage of these three dynasties, somehow so often overlooked in comparison with the noble, responsible eldest and the do-no-wrong, puckish youngest. 

But not here. Not on Long Island. You will never be underappreciated here.Those were the days when hockey players still played with the verve and instinct learned only from hours of unsupervised pond hockey, before kids were enrolled in year-round, highly structured programs and the game became bogged down with the neutral-zone trap. Everybody should play sports with the natural anticipation of a Mike Bossy, that instinct of a pure goal-scorer who, to paraphrase Gretzky himself, goes not to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. More important, everybody should know the humility of a Mike Bossy. A whole generation of Long Island kids, like me, learned not just how to be champions but how to act like champions.  

Think of the sliding-door theory; how things would have been different if Toronto hadn’t been so myopic as to pass you over — twice! — in the 1977 draft, probably just because you were a Quebecois. There’s a reason the Leafs haven’t won the Cup in my lifetime. Amazingly, the Rangers also passed on you twice in '77. If you'd won four Cups in the Garden? Forget it. Messier won ONE here and they still call him the Messiah.

Instead, you played in a virtual backwater, in the mallish badlands of the middle Island, in a dilapidated barn and in an era with no national cable contracts and no Internet. You were all ours. It's just unfortunate that with our Long Island accents "Bossy" rhymes with "awesome." ("Mike Bawssey? He's awesum!") 

Of course, the play that stands out was the goal to win Game 1 of the ’82 finals, when you picked off Harold Snepsts’s ill-conceived clearing pass and fired home the winner with 2 seconds left. Some might call it lucky or even a miracle, but they don’t know that you did that kind of thing pretty regularly. 

True story: I met Harold Snepsts when he was the coach of the Peoria Rivermen and I was working the Peoria newspaper. One day I was interviewing him and I said, “You know, Harold, I’m from Long Island and —” 

“The Bossy play, right!?” he shouted.

Happy birthday to a player who will never be forgotten.

_ Not sure why everybody is all over Newt Gingrich today. He has always been very clear in his belief that we should preserve the sanctity of marriage as a sacred bond between one man and one woman and another women and a third woman and, hey, who’s that?! Yes, and — damn! — her too!

You don’t need me to point out the blatant hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich’s professional and personal stances on family values. The blogosphere is rampant with it today. On Yahoo! News, Walter Shapiro admirably addresses Newt’s mercurial history and wonders if it’s even possible for him to change this late in life.

Newt’s a complex guy. Sometimes his opinions run parallel to his actions. Who among us does not practice what we screech sometimes? How many times to I tell my kids to go outside and get some goddamned exercise as I settle down in front of the game with a bucket of wings and a six-pack? So lighten up, conservative, evangelical Republican voting base: despite his infidelity and his callous mistreatment of his many, many, many wives and his desire for an open marriage — deep down, your guy still wants America to be the land of traditional family values. He just wants a little strange on the side for himself. He just happens to have a soulmate for each of his many souls.

Here is a young Newt Gingrich at his father’s inauguration as the mayor of New York in 1994:

So Francesco Schettino says he fell off the Costa Concordia and into a lifeboat. It could happen. I once fell out of math class and into a Mets game. Also, I have often fallen off the sidewalk and into a bar.

Anyway, following is exclusive footage of Captain Schettino leaving the ship:

__

_ Today I reached into my pocket and pulled out exactly three quaters, which is exactly how many you need to power up the single-serve coffee machine in the break room. Glancing down, as I sometimes do, I noticed that all three were special-edition Montana state quarters.

"Hmm," I wondered aloud, "I wonder what the odds are of that."

By the time I returned to my desk, there was a message waiting for me from my neighbor, Harvey Dickson:

"By the end of the 2008, all of the original 50 state quarters had been minted and released. The official total, according to the U.S. Mint, was 34,797,6000,000 coins. The average mintage was 695,952,000 coins per state, but ranged between Virginia's 1,594,616,000 to Oklahoma's 416,600,000.

"Montana's total was 513,240,000

"So I think the math on the odds would be 1 in 50x50x50/(percentage of Montana's share of all state quarters.)"

So he either made that up or looked it up, and frankly, I don't know which would be sicker. In any event, it puts me in the mood for this: