We missed a week for the weekend links because of Labor Day, but it’s back today. Along with college football. Man, I like college football. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for scolding about the misuse of Twitter hashtags:

Happy Saturday! Let’s get straight into a few links for your reading pleasure, before you head down to TCF Bank Stadium for a 2:30 kickoff, otherwise known as the kickoff time that God intended when He invented college football:

*We start this week with a five-year-old story that you may have seen before. In 2006, David Foster Wallace wrote a profile of Roger Federer at Wimbledon for Play Magazine. It was, perhaps understandably, immediately one of the more famous pieces of sportswriting of modern times.. I have to confess that I didn’t read it at the time, because what do I care about tennis? But Friday it was republished at Grantland and I read it and friends, it contains the single best paragraph I’ve ever read. I won’t say which one because I want you to read the whole thing.

*The Rugby World Cup is underway in New Zealand, which you probably haven’t noticed because a total of three games are on TV. (Unless you get Universal Sports, which as far as I can tell, no one does.) Anyway, Deadspin has a couple of correspondents there, and their dispatches seem to be focused on what appears to a rugby novice like me to be the two co-most-important things about rugby: playing rugby, and drinking while talking about rugby.

*I’m never too sure what’s going on in Spencer Hall’s college football season-opening post. I don’t ask too many questions. I think Spencer may be a genius.

*As hard as we’ve wished, the Twins season isn’t over yet. Nick Nelson is trying to look on the bright side, such as it is. And John Bonnes thinks he knows a place he can upgrade the team, fast – at catcher. (Note that this is much less anti-Mauer than you think.)

That’ll do it for me. Enjoy the sun and the weekend – they’ll both be gone before you know it.

I did some more Twins Venn Diagrams over at Twinkie Town.

I’m told that Volume Two was meaner than Volume One. My only explanation for this is that the Twins were worse this time. And that Tsuyoshi Nishioka has robbed me of the ability to be nice about the Twins.

I also reviewed Joe Mauer’s new Anytime Fitness commercial, which is best summed up by this line: “What deep, dark secret is Joe Mauer hiding that he feels the need to do commercials in which he makes a teddy bear wave to people?”

Mr. Rand went on vacation for most of August, so it’s been awhile since I’ve done some weekend links. Consequently I had a huge bolus of links, waiting to be – actually, let’s not finish that metaphor. It’s not going to end anywhere good. At any rate, I’m back; these links appeared, as always, at RandBall, your home for vacations like a French government employee.

Hello once again, people of weekend RandBall. It’s been quite a long time since we’ve spoken, hasn’t it? Still doing well, I trust? Your mom and dad doing okay? Good. I’m glad to hear it. I hope you’re well rested, because I’ve got about a month’s worth of links to get through, and I might as well just dump them into a giant list. Here we go:

• Let’s lead with our strongest cards: a pair of goofy Twins posts from Stu. He’s written an inside account of Kevin Slowey’s return to the big club. He’s also memorialized the inimitable Tom Kelly by compiling an exhaustive list of the sometime Twins color guy’s baseball lingo.
• I’m glad that the Vikes Geek read about the curious behavior of two Ramsey County Commissioners – and took it upon himself to call them out. No matter which side of the stadium debate you’re on, you have to admit, the two commissioners must have raised a few eyebrows.
• Via the Hardball Talk blog at NBC Sports, here’s an article from NPR about subsidies for sports stadiums. Key quote, from someone who helped get the Rams a stadium in St. Louis: “The city was poorly represented – the city is always poorly represented…. We put in all of these ridiculous things, and the city didn’t have the sense to say no to any of them.”
• I’m not sure I can completely explain this musing on the nature of fandom by the great soccer blog The Run of Play. It’s an imaginary Socratic dialog between two 1980s Brazilian soccer players, one of whom was named Socrates – actually, forget it. Explaining it isn’t going to help. It’s a musing on the nature of fandom and I loved it and let’s just leave it there.
• John Bonnes covers a slight ray of hope for the Twins: they should have some money to spend this offseason.
• That said, don’t read Parker Hageman’s analysis of JJ Hardy’s resurgence unless you like kicking furniture.
• Jesse at Twinkie Town analyzes prospect Kyle Gibson’s arm injury. The Twins have sent him for rest. Given that this is a Twins arm injury, this is code for “we’ve delayed his inevitable surgery by six months, for no good reason whatsoever.”
• And finally: this nine-minute film about an under-7 soccer team from outside Barcelona is, honestly, one of the best things I’ve ever seen. The team has never scored a goal, they get beat by dozens of goals every game… and yet players, coaches, and parents are all clearly having a wonderful time. You don’t have to go far to find something about youth sports that makes you angry. This video, though – there’s really no way to watch it without an enormous smile on your face.

That’s enough for this month. I’ll be back again next Saturday with a normal-sized post. Assuming Rand doesn’t take another month off.

Monday at Twinkie Town, I decided it was time to start making fun of Tsuyoshi Nishioka. I cannot think of anyone more deserving; he truly has been the biggest bust of an acquisition the Twins have had since Tommy Herr.

I suppose I could have written about all of the numbers and statistics that would prove that Nishioka has been one of the worst players in baseball this year. But it’s more fun to just write something in which Nishioka is incompetent at more than just baseball.

I was on ESPN Aberdeen (that’s South Dakota, obviously) earlier today, talking Twins baseball with hosts M.K. Welch and Vaughn Kary. We discussed Jim Thome’s 600th home run, the Delmon Young trade, Joe Mauer’s blandness, and the Denard Span trade that fell through.

At least for the time being, the audio is right here.

Welcome to my new narcissistically-named site!

I’ve put up a post over at TNABACG, the old blog, explaining what’s going on here. If you’re confused and you haven’t read it yet, you might want to start there. It explains why I’ve gotten rid of my old hard-to-explain blog name, in favor of my only-slightly-difficult-to-pronounce last name.

Feel free to poke around a bit, but things are basically the same. You can still comment pretty much anonymously, for the members of my family and friends with doctorates that really seem to enjoy that sort of thing. Over in the right sidebar, there’s links to the RSS feed and my Twitter feed and other such things. At the bottom of every post, I even have those cool little buttons that allow you to share posts on social media. (You’ll have to tell me whether they work. I’m afraid to click them.)

As for the content, I’ll still post the same sort of thing I always did, by which I mean links to stuff I’ve written elsewhere on the internet. Beyond that – hey, the site’s named after me now. It’s quite clearly a personal blog, and so now when I write about things that are interesting only to me, I’m not going to feel guilty. Posts about sports that are unpopular in America for all!

Anyway, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Well, this certainly turned into a wild day. Jim Thome blasted home runs 599 and 600 in Detroit. Delmon Young got traded to the opposite dugout. And I wrote a memo from an alternate-universe Bill Smith. And as if making fun of Smith and Delmon wasn’t enough, I also took a few shots at Francisco Liriano.

It’s pretty rare that I write four posts in a day that I think are worthy of reading, but today turned into one of those days.

The Twins are not doing so well, so I’m falling back on my favorite dead horse: teasing** Joe Mauer** for being boring. (I’m a real jerk.) According to the Target Field scoreboard, his greatest fear is “disappointing his parents,” which is an answer that’s almost unfathomably designed to make my mom get mad at me for making jokes about Mauer.

Nevertheless, that’s what I did.

The MLB non-waiver trading deadline was Sunday, and there were plenty of rumors involving Twins center fielder Denard Span. Most of the rumors had him going to Washington, with the Twins apparently demanding closer Drew Storen in return. The entire trade was up in the air and didn’t happen, and by Monday, we found out that the Twins were demanding players besides Storen for Span, while the Nationals were demanding players besides Span for Storen.

With this in mind, I wrote down a transcript of a discussion from an alternate universe, in which Twins GM Bill Smith and Nationals GM Mike Rizzo haggle over a used car, unsuccessfully.

You have to admit, it’s probably closer to the truth than anything else.

This week, the weekend links were written from Ortonville. You can really see the Western Minnesota flavor, can’t you? No? Hmm, it’s not coming through. Anyway, these appeared as usual at RandBall, your home for baseball road trips of all qualities.

It’s Saturday! Rand’s on the Great Baseball Road Trip, I’m on the Average Non-Baseball Road Trip, so let’s just go straight into the links:

*We begin this week with the baseball trade deadline, which is on the mind of all Twins fans this week as we all try to figure out whether the team should buy, sell, stay put, or try to leave Tsuyoshi Nishioka behind on their current road trip. John “Twins Geek” Bonnes thinks the Twins should consider trading Denard Span for Nationals reliever Drew Storen. I agree 0%, but his reasoning is interesting. Nick Nelson, on the other hand, thinks that the Twins should stay put, and if they make a comeback then great. (I agree 100% with this one.)

*Nelson also thinks that the Twins should quit being so patient with the awful Nishioka, something else I agree with. And while we’re at it, Parker Hageman breaks down Michael Cuddyer’s pitching, yet another skill in the arsenal of the guy who’s been the team MVP this year.

*I’ve argued with many people about the paying-college-athletes debate, and so I won’t go into it any further here. Nevertheless, let me point out that America’s greatest sportswriter, Joe Posnanski, agrees with me.

*And finally: Canis Hoopus commenter KGMN went through and put together video clips of his top 68 plays of the Timberwolves season. Be warned that loading all 68 videos will likely make your computer and internet connection groan in pain for awhile, so be careful.

There’s also some Derrick Williams and Ricky Rubio extras in there, which should get you excited for 2012-2013. The season’s only 15 short months away!

That’s enough for me; enjoy your weekend. It’s supposed to be hot, but slightly less hot, and so maybe we can enjoy summer instead of being burned alive, for once.