Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

At about 00:47, it becomes The Nature Conservancy meets Facebook in 2018, as imagined by David Fincher.

(Hat tip: reflectionof.me)

Nine months after the week Barca won at Real Madrid and Chelsea to help secure the most dramatic and successful season in European club soccer history...birth rates across Catalonia are up 50 percent, reports The New York Times Goal blog.

Watch Iniesta's goal at Stamford Bridge above in five different languages, and then tell me you don't feel just a little warmer.

For a guy who's given up on Brett Favre, I sure am trawling for schadenfreude about him now. Maybe I will start blogging GBP after all, Mike Cade.

Anyway, MacGregor references the Fates, seven-layer salad (no capitalization, Jeff - it's not patented), Sisyphus, Tithonus and Quixote -- and neatly skeweres Urban Meyer, hiding behind the curtain of his own vanity -- in the course of framing the Favre phenomenon as something like Nietzsche's eternal return. A piece built on a simple idea, but still brilliant. Money quotes:

In Hell, Brett Favre is doomed for all eternity to short that throw.

And I am consigned, century upon century upon century, to watch him do it. And then condemned -- forever -- to read and write about it.

We all get what we deserve, apparently.

and

Anyway, by comparison [to Meyer's hypocrisy], Brett Favre is as reliable as a German bicycle and his blindered devotion to his own ambition is appalling but refreshingly honest.

Thus does our NFL industrial complex have its narratives inscribed for the Super Bowl fortnight. The Saints will play for the 9th Ward and Bourbon Street and redemption, for le bon temps and love and loss, and the Colts and Peyton Manning will play for vindication or validation or in spiritual service of the Midwestern recession or rectitude or something.

Whatever. It doesn't matter.

The cliché could just as easily have been the Jets' four-decade resurrection, or Favre's un-aging grace. The stories don't even register in the face of all that spectacle.

Come the great moment two weeks from now, some of you will be happy and some of you will be sad.

This, thanks in some unknowable measure to Brett Favre, and to his myopic selfishness and his awful ambitions, his single-mindedness and his stubborn arrogance, his passion and his fortitude. Think of him then, we owe him that, in the moment of your joy or sorrow, his armor clanking and on the run, as old and foolish and beautiful as Quixote.

I didn't say it made any sense. But it is nice for somebody else to call bullshit on the Whole Thing -- not just Favre, but Favre as the metaphor and simulacrum for the perpetual motion machine of hysteria and amnesia and false drama that is sports today. Even if the next click just takes you right back to Rick Reilly.

(Image: Google search volume for the term "Brett Favre" by state, 2008-09. Graphic credit: DavidErickson/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

My colleague and Packer-fan-in-arms Michael Cade is through with Brett Favre, disgusted, after a long love affair. It's a nice piece. If you haven't been a Packer fan your entire life, it's hard to imagine how some of us feel about what's happened this year. Hatred, bitterness, disbelief, shame, despair -- all of these; more. There are almost no parallels in sports -- Luis Figo going from Barcelona to Real Madrid, maybe. We need a huge composite German adjective of Fassbinderian desire and soul-sickness to even start talking about this.

But not lost enough to relearn an essential truth: Nothing is ever one thing. Each thing is dozens, thousands, millions of things. Everything discrete is really a cascade of interactions, and it is exceedingly difficult to assign clear casualty to any one of them. (Can you explain where Obama lost the American people? I mean, you can offer an explanation, but can you really explain it?)

Steroid use contributed to baseball players hitting record numbers of home runs in the 1990s and early 2000s. Except they didn't, at least not in the way we think of, the A to B way that makes it surpassingly easy to condemn those who took steroids, except that we don't really know who took steroids, how many, how pervasive it was, and whether the use of steroids was any more important than a thousand other factors, like the changing size of baseball parks or the continued dilution of pitching talent (siphoned off by other sports) or the changing sizes of strike zones. There's just no way of knowing, because...it's complicated. Posnanski dissects this wonderfully. If you know anything about baseball, this piece is like a really good merlot, one with an incredible finish. If you don't know anything about baseball, it will still leave you with the question: How will we ever know anything? Outside of the next question, that is.

But, does all this mean that taking steroids wasn't wrong? Or wasn't that wrong? I think that depends on what you watch sports for, and what you assume when you watch sports, things I increasingly question for myself. The reason the Tiger Woods scandal hit many of us hard was that we assumed that Tiger's excellence confirmed all the things we'd been told about him -- about his dedication, his work ethic, his fierce focus, etc. -- and confirmed them for him, not just his golf. We bought into the idea that superior performance is on some level about morality and moral fiber, not about practice and a narrow kind of genius and possibly beta blockers, too. If you watch sports to have that myth ratified -- and even when I know it is a myth, even when I rehearse that insight to myself, it is still so hard to grasp -- then steroids were wrong. If you watch sports to see the limits of "unaided" human performance, then they were wrong, too. But if you watch sports to see amazing things, to just be amazed by a physical act outside of any moral context, maybe not so wrong. Except when the amazing things that someone produces on steroids are amazing in comparison to things that happened when people were just on uppers. Except that Posnanski reminds us that...it wasn't just the steroids. Or rather, that steroids were just another factor, like moving the outfield fences in 15 feet. Did anyone think that was cheating?

I have to admit I don't know what to think now, and that that's not so bad.

Make free content sell the value of paid content. But even in these free pages, find a way to let free readers know there’s more to be had, not just elsewhere, but even on those free pages. For example, at WSJ.com, comments can be organized to show only those by paid subscribers, thus eliminating a lot of the idiots who post annoyingly partisan comments or intentionally confrontational stuff. Some people would pay to become a commenter whose comments aren’t automatically marginalized. Others would pay to read only those who are willing to pay that price. Too elitist for you? Um. You’re The New York Times.