*Bit late on getting these posted. They appeared first at RandBall, your home for thinly-disguised anti-technology rants… *

I’ve posted a lot of anti-Vikings stadium arguments here, over the years, but I’d like to start off this week by posting the first good pro-stadium argument I’ve heard. It comes to us from fellow RandBaller Clarence Swamptown: “There are a number of goverment services I pay for and use. There are many more that I happily pay for but will never use in my lifetime. There is also a TON of waste. I’ve worked for nearly every level of government possible – from the smallest township to the unwieldy feds. Please trust me when I tell you that there is a ton of waste. I’m not smart enough to know how to change that. And I don’t have any definitive idea if the new Vikings’ stadium would be an economic stimulus or a billionaire handout. Both sides have a case. But I do know that a new Vikings’ stadium is something I would use, either directly or indirectly. Even if it is waste, at least it’s some waste that a rube like me can enjoy. Yeah, it’s selfish. So sue me. In conclusion, Dany Heatley is a [horrible insult redacted].” Well, you can’t say fairer than that.

On with the links:

*Christian Peterson at the VikesCentric blog goes inside the numbers – or, at least, the player grades – and finds out that not only is Phil Loadholt not useless, he’s actually been one of the best run-blockers in the NFL so far this year. (About pass blocking, we will say no more.)

*Loved this story from SB Nation about Frank Matrisciano, who’s a trainer at the University of Memphis but is better known as Hell’s Trainer. Former Stanford basketball player Dan Grunfeld, who trained with Matrisciano in college, tells his story.

*Spencer Hall explains why both Brett Favre and Tim Tebow are magnets for stupid. Key quote: “No player in the history of the NFL attracted as much pure, uncut stupid as Brett Favre, a figure whose appeal for stupid people exceeded all previous attractors.”

*Matt Birk – you remember Matt Birk, don’t you? – got fined $5,000 for, of all things, not wearing a microphone. Birk makes a bunch of money and I’m sure nobody feels bad for him, but let’s take a step back here: Holy crap, Matt Birk got fined a half-year of mortgage payments for not wearing a microphone even though HE IS A CENTER. Sometimes, the NFL is really, really confusing.

*And finally: let’s all extend our hearty congratulations to the city of Vancouver. Well done, Canucks fans!

That’s enough for this week. Enjoy your Saturday, which may actually feel like October this week, rather than mid-July. If your house is anything like mind, you’ve got about two feet of leaves in the backyard that blew off the trees last week without even turning colors, so you might want to get after those.

There’s not much Twins news to cover these days. All of the non-playoff teams pretty much lay low until the World Series is over, and the Twins are as non-playoff as a team can get.

With this in mind, today’s Twinkie Town post is entirely fictional. And Nick Punto is back, which is always fun; I have missed the chance to make Nick Punto jokes.

Checked in on the ESPN.com home page on Sunday afternoon, with the NFL in full swing for the day. As you might expect, the main above-the-fold area of the page was all NFL scores and the top three stories on the right sidebar were NFL-related. This is to be expected; the NFL is the biggest thing going in American sports and it’s be foolish of ESPN to not throw as many resources as it can at the sport. The page is also chock full of the baseball playoffs and of college football, and since those two compete for #2 in a lot of different ways, that’s no surprise either.

That said, the NHL just began over the weekend, too. With the NBA possibly locked out for the year, the NHL is presumably the biggest thing going for a winter sport, and I expected to find something hockey-related to read.

• The following sports were covered in the “Headlines” sidebar, besides the big three mentioned above: NASCAR, tennis (the Japan Open), golf (the Korea Open), Formula One
• The following sports were covered in the main story rotation, beneath the above-the-fold main section, besides the big three: NASCAR
• The following sports were covered in a main, page-wide section, slightly below the fold (again, besides the big three): Ultimate fighting, high school football, skateboarding
• The following sports appeared in the “Must Read” headlines section, near the bottom of the page: soccer, women’s basketball, men’s college basketball, women’s college basketball, rugby.

And finally… in that Must Read section, buried between soccer and the WNBA Finals… a hockey story. About Sidney Crosby. Who’s out with concussion symptoms and has been for most of the year.

Thanks to the ESPN.com home page, I can tell you won a third-tier tennis tournament and an Asian Tour golf event. I can tell you who clinched the Formula One world title and whether England won or lost at the Rugby World Cup. I know the name of one of skateboarding’s up-and-coming stars, how the Stanford Cardinal women’s basketball team is shaping up for the year, and who won the latest UFC championship fight.

I cannot, however, say definitively whether the NHL regular season has begun or not.

*I’ve got evidence that Mr. Rand does read the Weekend Links before publishing them; every once in awhile, some inflammatory language or something bordering on libel is deleted before publication. This week, I made a factual mistake. Rand could have fixed it. Instead, he inserted a note making fun of me. This is part of the reason RandBall’s always a fun place – Rand always goes for the joke. *

We here at the Weekend Links love our less-covered sports teams, so congratulations must go out to the Minnesota Lynx for dominating en route to their first WNBA Championship. It’s an awesome thing for an area that’s been starved of any good news on the sports pages lately, and it’s the first local title since Gopher hockey in 2003 and the first pro title since the now-defunct Thunder won the now-defunct A-League in 1999 the Saints won the Northern League in 2004. [Ed. note: You can see in the published version that Rand calls me out for getting this wrong. It’s always nice having an editor that’s out to make you look good.]. We’ll take any opportunity to celebrate.

*On with the links:

*We start off with soccer, as ESPN’s Leander Schaerlackens looks at the growth of fan groups in MLS. Soccer has for years tried to sell itself as a family game – Junior plays soccer, so let’s get Mom and Sis and go to a game! – but is finally, at the MLS level, realizing that the fan that’s going to drive these franchises is young, urban, and (mostly) male. Soccer is a game that, let’s be honest, has some slow stretches, and what these clubs are figuring out is that they need something to drive the atmosphere. Nobody comes back if the sounds are of Mom and Dad sitting on their hands, or (worse) of Thunderstix and screaming and those god-awful horns that used to be de rigueur. That’s what you get when you go for families. This kind of thing from the (Portland) Timbers Army is really what you need.

*This is as good of a time as any to remind you that if you’re young, urban, and male (or otherwise), head up to Blaine tonight and make some noise for the Stars in the playoffs. As Rand mentioned in his Q&A with CEO Djorn Buchholz, the game’s at 7:30, but you really want to be there at 5:00, when Surly Brewing will be handing out free beer at the tailgate. You’ll be hanging out with the Dark Clouds, the Stars fan group. They are really good guys (mostly guys), and they’re the ones who provide the atmosphere at the National Sports Center, and while it’s nothing like the thousands-strong Timbers Army, you cannot begin to imagine how quiet it’d be without them. This will sound stupid, but I can’t imagine who’d want to go to a Stars game if they weren’t there.

*We move next to the Twins, as Parker Hageman says what the team really needs is guys who’ll hit line drives to center at Target Field. You might scoff at this, but it’s the simplest way to explain the drop-off of Danny Valencia, who made the change to pull the ball more and ended up hitting 65 points lower as a result. Also in Twins news, John Bonnes has another look at the Twins’ likely payroll next year, with the note – there’s really no reason it should need to go down next year. That’ll give the Twins some money to spend, which could help.

*And finally: I don’t have a lot of experience with rugby. I’ve seen a handful of games now, and I’ve heard much of the legends of how much rugby players like to party, and I had a professor in grad school who played rugby and who liked to tell stories of how much Pacific Island players like to fight. I don’t know much, but I’ll say this – this story, in which Deadspin’s rugby correspondents have to rescue a sozzled American girl from an Wellington drunk tank despite being credentialed media, seems like it’s pretty much par for the course for all rugby stories.

That’s enough for this week. I need to go get the air conditioner turned back on. Seriously, it cannot possibly be this warm outside.

The other day I was talking to somebody who knows about my Twinkie Town schedule. He pointed out that I have 20 Mondays between now and the beginning of spring training. That’s 20 Mondays that I have to come up with something, anything, to write about on Twinkie Town. That’s a lot of space to fill.

This week, I filled that space with about two paragraphs of writing, mostly about how it’s going to be a long winter and so fulminating about the Twins’ incompetence is sort of pointless.

19 Mondays to go.

One of the longer editions of the weekend links you’ll find. I blame the fact that I wrote it after attending my first Ortonville football game in nine or ten years. I felt like this necessitated a long paragraph to start with, and things just escalated from there. At any rate, these first appeared at RandBall, your home for wild ranting at Kenny Onatolu.

I miss outstate Minnesota, sometimes. Last night, I ate a hamburger the size of a boxing glove at a restaurant that was holding a Friday night meat raffle, then watched a high-school football game at a field best described as “lumpy.” The homecoming court rode around the field in a pickup truck at halftime. The PA announcer made sure to make up alma maters (and possibly the names) of the refereeing crew before the game. (Unless one of them really did go to the University of Westminster, which I find implausible.) The announcer also occasionally forgot he wasn’t doing play-by-play on the radio, and started describing live the play that we could all see from where we were standing, five feet from the sideline. I’ve been to high school football in the Twin Cities, and it’s fun and all, but I’m not sure it really compares.

*Onto the links:

*Patrick Donnelly at the StarTrib’s newish Vikes Centric blog thinks that it’s not quite time for the Ponder era to start. I’ve talked to several people around the state, and using this tiny sample and extrapolating it to all of Minnesota, I can confidently say that all of Minnesota wants McNabb benched, and at least half of the state wouldn’t mind if he was publicly flogged for his early-season errors. Still, though, I kind of agree with Donnelly.

*Spencer Hall writes a letter from an anonymous (as if there were any other kind) lineman. Let us all spare a thought for the linemen of the world, who do the work without the credit, and who look askance at any chair that hasn’t yet been battle-tested.

*Spencer also took a trip to West Virginia. I’m sorry, but West Virginia belongs in the SEC, and if I were president this kind of thing would be priority number one. Any fanbase that drinks moonshine at a tailgate just fits with the rest of the SEC lunatics.

*Twins links to wrap up the year: Parker Hageman gives us the full scouting report on Chris Parmelee (short version: he’s not going to be as good as he was this September), and also bemoans the lack of infield defense for the Twins, who were terrible this year in that facet of the game. Sit down and watch Trevor Plouffe play shortstop for awhile, and eventually you’ll want him to leave the franchise and not come back, because he is awful.

*And finally: The Economist tries to figure out what the second-most popular sport in the world is. Eventually, they propose that the ability to explain a sport’s most arcane rules is what defines a true fan, so I want everyone to study up on the balk rule and the rules about when the clock stops in football, just in case there’s a test.

That’ll do it for me; this high school football thing really takes it out of a guy. It’s no wonder Rand takes methamphetamines from September through November every fall.* (*This statement is not strictly true.)

Monday night, I was supposed to write a recap of the Twins game for Twinkie Town. I’ve done this on Mondays throughout the year, and in the back of my mind, I’ve always thought, “One of these weeks I should just do a running diary instead of writing a recap.”

This Monday was the last Monday of the season, so I had to take my chance. It turned out at almost 2,800 words, and you can clearly see that I got more depressed as the game wore on. By the end I was just about ready to break down and sob. Or hit Trevor Plouffe with a bat.

Still, the Twins were ripe for jokes, and that’s always something.

As I type this, the Twins are leading Kansas City 7-2, which is probably fun. That said, Monday morning I put up a post detailing 11 ways to end 2011 with a little bit of fun, which was half serious and half not.

Either way, by this time tomorrow, it’ll be just about all over for 2011.

*This week in the weekend links, we discuss refereeing, college hockey, and soccer. I should really just start writing about nothing but the Vikings, in the hopes of getting page views. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for never leaving the city limits of Minneapolis under any circumstances. *

I usually like to throw some Twins news into these links, but frankly, it’s finally become too depressing. No link that I can share, no joke that I can make, no fiction that I can invent can possibly describe the Twins’ season better than two players missing a game because they crashed into each other on the highway. As far as I’m concerned, this goes right to the top of Twins injury lore, up there with the time Marty Cordova injured himself with a tanning bed, and the time that Billy Martin punched out Dave Boswell and the pitcher required 20 stitches. Forget about maybe losing 100 games; this team can’t even drive to the airport without something going wrong.

On with the links:

*The refereeing in last week’s Florida-Tennessee game was rather, shall we say, spotty. Spencer Hall goes inside the mind of the field judge to find out why.

*Noah Davis at The Run of Play writes an essay about Landon Donovan, a guy who’s moved from “frustrating” to “fascinating” in my head. I’ve watched him through three World Cups now, and I’ve called him every name in the book along the way, and I’d rate him as probably the best player the United States has ever produced, and I’m not sure I could meet him in person without both insulting him and trying to hug him in the first thirty seconds of this fictional meeting. I think Davis may see this same contradiction.

Over at the Western College Hockey Blog, Chris is asking the tough conference realignment questions. Most of them revolve around questions like “Is the WCHA going to be a minor league?” and “Why does WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod still have a job?”

And finally: as this video clip from EA Sports FIFA 12 proves, realism in video games might have gone too far. (BONUS JOKE FOR ENGLISH SOCCER FANS: It’s nice that EA Sports finally introduced the “Falling All Over Themselves” module for Arsenal, isn’t it?)

That’ll do it for me. Please hang around and enjoy the day of college football. If you’re a member of the National Guard, be ready; LSU plays at West Virginia tonight, and if that one turns close and both sets of fans turn angry, America’s militias may need to be called into duty.

Today’s Twinkie Town post is one of my favorites, ever.

In the interest of staying topical, I usually make jokes about current events, and so what I write ends up being sort of broad satire – poking fun at people, really. Generally, the broader the target, the more people like the post, and that’s fine. There’s something for everyone and if I’m trying to be humorous then my job is done.

Today’s post, titled “What Your Favorite Twin Says About You,” isn’t satire. It’s not truthful and in no way does it hold up a mirror to the Twins organization, and a lot of it doesn’t even make sense. But it makes me laugh. I can’t explain the jokes and I can’t explain why I laugh, but I do.

If you want something more traditional, today’s game thread has a short essay about Yankees hurler A. J. Burnett, and the recap of the Twins’ loss is one long joke about this being a spring-training lineup. But I like the first one better.