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But first, the good news. There’s very little wrong with Buffalo’s Josh Allen-led offense after the quarterback strengthened his NFL MVP case. A week after a four-TD performance that included the statistical anomaly of him scoring two touchdowns on the same play in a 35-10 win over San Francisco, Allen became the NFL’s first player to throw and rush for three scores apiece in 44-42 loss to Los Angeles on Sunday . That Allen's latest superhuman-like effort ended in defeat is what’s troubling for the five-time defending AFC East champions (10-3) in their bid to dispel questions of finding ways to fall short in the playoffs in each of the past five years. Buffalo’s defense had few answers in stopping the Rams’ dynamic attack while allowing a season-high 457 yards. Worse still, the Bills allowed Los Angeles to go 11 of 15 on third down for a 73.3 conversion percentage — the third highest allowed by Buffalo and worst since allowing Miami's 75% conversion rate in 1986. If that’s not bad enough, the Bills lost for the first time in 39 games in which they scored at least 42 points, while becoming the NFL’s second team to lose when scoring 42 or more and not committing a turnover. Special teams didn’t help. Aside from allowing a blocked punt to be returned for a touchdown, the Bills couldn’t muster an attempt to block the Rams’ final punt from midfield with 7 seconds left because they only had nine players on the field. As coach Sean McDermott concluded after finally addressing reporters more than an hour after the game ended: “I thought we lost two of the three phases today.” He failed to mention yet another clock management misstep. Rather than have Allen spike the ball to stop the clock after a failed quarterback keeper from the Rams 1 with 62 seconds remaining, McDermott called timeout. That left Buffalo with two timeouts and essentially relying on the slim chances of recovering an onside kick after Allen scored on his next attempt. McDermott defended his decision by saying he feared too much time would elapse before the Bills aligned for another snap. And yet, it would not have matched the 45 seconds the Rams ran off on their final possession after Buffalo used its final two timeouts. Together, these are the types of miscues that have haunted the Bills in their recent playoff losses. The bright side is the loss to the Rams didn’t end the Bills’ season, though they fell two games behind Kansas City (12-1) in the race for the AFC’s top seed . And perhaps, the loss can be chalked up to a team riding a little too high off a playoff-clinching win and having to travel across the country to face a Rams team in the thick of its divisional race. If that’s so, the Bills have a chance to address their flaws — and doubters — by how they respond in what still stands as a juicy showdown at the NFC-leading Detroit Lions (12-1) on Sunday. “They’re the top dog in football right now,” Allen said, looking ahead to Detroit. “We have to have a good week, learn from this one, and put it behind us.” Scoring. The Bills topped 30 points for a team-record seventh consecutive game and ninth time this season. Buffalo entered the day ranked second in the NFL averaging 30.5 points per outing, behind Detroit (32.1). Run defense. Though the Rams averaged just 3.3 yards per carry, they stuck with it in finishing with 137 yards, helping them enjoy a 17-minute edge in time of possession. Allen. If not for him, the Bills wouldn't have been in position to nearly overcome a 17-point fourth-quarter deficit. His 424 yards (342 passing and 82 rushing) accounted for all but 21 yards of Buffalo's total offense. With so many options, perhaps the focus falls on special teams coordinator Matthew Smiley. This is the second time in 13 months special teams personnel management became an issue. Buffalo was flagged for having too many men as time expired, providing Wil Lutz a second chance to hit a decisive field goal in sealing Denver's 24-22 win last season . Starting CB Rasul Douglas was sidelined by a knee injury. ... DE Casey Toohill injured his ribs. 80-1-1 — The Bills' record when scoring 38 or more points, including a 38-38 tie with Denver in 1960. Facing Detroit represents Buffalo's final major test before closing the season with two games against New England and hosting the New York Jets. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl3D Mapping and Modeling Market Size, Share, New Opportunities, Unleashing Growth Potential, Current Trends and Future Analysis & Forecast - 2028
Mink Ventures Grants Stock OptionsThe military's tradition of tracking Santa Claus on his gravity-defying sweep across the globe will carry on this Christmas Eve, even if the U.S. government shuts down , officials said Friday. Each year, at least 100,000 kids call into the North American Aerospace Defense Command to inquire about Santa’s location. Millions more follow online — in nine languages — as St. Nick swoops along the earth's meridians. “We fully expect for Santa to take flight on Dec. 24 and NORAD will track him," the U.S.-Canadian agency said in a statement. On any other night, NORAD is scanning the heavens for potential threats , such as last year's Chinese spy balloon . But on Christmas Eve, volunteers in Colorado Springs, Colorado, are fielding questions like, “When is Santa coming to my house?” and, “Am I on the naughty or nice list?” The endeavor is supported by local and corporate sponsors, who also help shield the tradition from Washington dysfunction. Bob Sommers, 63, a civilian contractor and NORAD volunteer, told The Associated Press that there are "screams and giggles and laughter” when families call in, usually on speakerphone. Sommers often says on the call that everyone must be asleep before Santa arrives, prompting parents to say, "Do you hear what he said? We got to go to bed early." NORAD's annual tracking of Santa has endured since the Cold War , predating ugly sweater parties and Mariah Carey classics . Here's how it began and why the phones keep ringing. The origin story is Hollywood-esque It started with a child's accidental phone call in 1955. The Colorado Springs newspaper printed a Sears advertisement that encouraged children to call Santa, listing a phone number. A boy called. But he reached the Continental Air Defense Command, now NORAD, a joint U.S. and Canadian effort to spot potential enemy attacks. Tensions were growing with the Soviet Union, along with anxieties about nuclear war. Air Force Col. Harry W. Shoup picked up an emergency-only “red phone” and was greeted by a tiny voice that began to recite a Christmas wish list. “He went on a little bit, and he takes a breath, then says, ‘Hey, you’re not Santa,’” Shoup told The Associated Press in 1999. Realizing an explanation would be lost on the youngster, Shoup summoned a deep, jolly voice and replied, “Ho, ho, ho! Yes, I am Santa Claus. Have you been a good boy?” Shoup said he learned from the boy's mother that Sears mistakenly printed the top-secret number. He hung up, but the phone soon rang again with a young girl reciting her Christmas list. Fifty calls a day followed, he said. In the pre-digital age, the agency used a 60-by-80-foot (18-by-24-meter) plexiglass map of North America to track unidentified objects. A staff member jokingly drew Santa and his sleigh over the North Pole. The tradition was born. “Note to the kiddies,” began an AP story from Colorado Springs on Dec. 23, 1955. “Santa Claus Friday was assured safe passage into the United States by the Continental Air Defense Command.” In a likely reference to the Soviets, the article noted that Santa was guarded against possible attack from "those who do not believe in Christmas.” Is the origin story humbug? Some grinchy journalists have nitpicked Shoup's story, questioning whether a misprint or a misdial prompted the boy's call. In 2014, tech news site Gizmodo cited an International News Service story from Dec. 1, 1955, about a child's call to Shoup. Published in the Pasadena Independent, the article said the child reversed two digits in the Sears number. "When a childish voice asked COC commander Col. Harry Shoup, if there was a Santa Claus at the North Pole, he answered much more roughly than he should — considering the season: ‘There may be a guy called Santa Claus at the North Pole, but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction,'" Shoup said in the brief piece. In 2015, The Atlantic magazine doubted the flood of calls to the secret line, while noting that Shoup had a flair for public relations. Phone calls aside, Shoup was indeed media savvy. In 1986, he told the Scripps Howard News Service that he recognized an opportunity when a staff member drew Santa on the glass map in 1955. A lieutenant colonel promised to have it erased. But Shoup said, “You leave it right there,” and summoned public affairs. Shoup wanted to boost morale for the troops and public alike. “Why, it made the military look good — like we’re not all a bunch of snobs who don’t care about Santa Claus,” he said. Shoup died in 2009. His children told the StoryCorps podcast in 2014 that it was a misprinted Sears ad that prompted the phone calls. “And later in life he got letters from all over the world,” said Terri Van Keuren, a daughter. "People saying ‘Thank you, Colonel, for having, you know, this sense of humor.’” A rare addition to Santa's story NORAD's tradition is one of the few modern additions to the centuries-old Santa story that have endured, according to Gerry Bowler, a Canadian historian who spoke to the AP in 2010. Ad campaigns or movies try to “kidnap” Santa for commercial purposes, said Bowler, who wrote “Santa Claus: A Biography.” NORAD, by contrast, takes an essential element of Santa's story and views it through a technological lens. In a recent interview with the AP, Air Force Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham explained that NORAD radars in Alaska and Canada — known as the northern warning system — are the first to detect Santa. He leaves the North Pole and typically heads for the international dateline in the Pacific Ocean. From there he moves west, following the night. “That's when the satellite systems we use to track and identify targets of interest every single day start to kick in,” Cunningham said. “A probably little-known fact is that Rudolph’s nose that glows red emanates a lot of heat. And so those satellites track (Santa) through that heat source.” NORAD has an app and website, www.noradsanta.org , that will track Santa on Christmas Eve from 4 a.m. to midnight, mountain standard time. People can call 1-877-HI-NORAD to ask live operators about Santa’s location from 6 a.m. to midnight, mountain time. Ben Finley, The Associated Press
Bills' letdowns on defense, special teams and clock management in loss to Rams are all too familiar
‘Tis the season for a cup of cheer, the Holly Jolly Holiday Bar is here. The pop-up is now open at EP & LP in West Hollywood through Sunday, Dec. 22. The price per admission for the strictly 21 and over event starts at $23 and includes a 90-minute reservation and a welcome cocktail. Brunch is available on Saturday and Sunday at $50 per person and includes a 90-minute reservation, a main entree and a welcome cocktail. Tickets can be purchased at hollyjollybar.com . To help get into the holiday spirit, the halls will be decked with floor-to-ceiling tinsel, trimmings, ornaments, stockings, Christmas trees covered in lights and even some figurines of the big man himself, Santa Claus. Festive bargoers might enjoy a cocktail served in a Christmas-themed mug. Other drinks are decorated with candy canes or have red, green and white sprinkled rims. SEE ALSO: How the new Zero Lounge bar will serve Y2K nostalgia in Hollywood Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, this bar welcomes everyone to enjoy cocktails such as the Rum Rudolph Rum, Drummer Boy, Rockin’ Around, and Sleigh Ride, which is Mexican Hot Chocolate served with a toasted marshmallow. There are also two mocktail options: Silent Night and Let It Snow. The food options include burgers, loaded fries, turkey pot pie, and a lobster roll. For dessert, guests can enjoy the festive Loaded Brownie with chocolate sauce, sprinkles and ice cream. The Jolly Holly Holiday Bar is located at 603 N La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood. Related ArticlesCelebrity-inspired Thanksgiving recipes, plus last-minute holiday meal ideas
But first, the good news. There’s very little wrong with Buffalo’s Josh Allen-led offense after the quarterback strengthened his NFL MVP case. A week after a four-TD performance that included the statistical anomaly of him scoring two touchdowns on the same play in a 35-10 win over San Francisco, Allen became the NFL’s first player to throw and rush for three scores apiece in 44-42 loss to Los Angeles on Sunday . That Allen's latest superhuman-like effort ended in defeat is what’s troubling for the five-time defending AFC East champions (10-3) in their bid to dispel questions of finding ways to fall short in the playoffs in each of the past five years. Buffalo’s defense had few answers in stopping the Rams’ dynamic attack while allowing a season-high 457 yards. Worse still, the Bills allowed Los Angeles to go 11 of 15 on third down for a 73.3 conversion percentage — the third highest allowed by Buffalo and worst since allowing Miami's 75% conversion rate in 1986. If that’s not bad enough, the Bills lost for the first time in 39 games in which they scored at least 42 points, while becoming the NFL’s second team to lose when scoring 42 or more and not committing a turnover. Special teams didn’t help. Aside from allowing a blocked punt to be returned for a touchdown, the Bills couldn’t muster an attempt to block the Rams’ final punt from midfield with 7 seconds left because they only had nine players on the field. As coach Sean McDermott concluded after finally addressing reporters more than an hour after the game ended: “I thought we lost two of the three phases today.” He failed to mention yet another clock management misstep. Rather than have Allen spike the ball to stop the clock after a failed quarterback keeper from the Rams 1 with 62 seconds remaining, McDermott called timeout. That left Buffalo with two timeouts and essentially relying on the slim chances of recovering an onside kick after Allen scored on his next attempt. McDermott defended his decision by saying he feared too much time would elapse before the Bills aligned for another snap. And yet, it would not have matched the 45 seconds the Rams ran off on their final possession after Buffalo used its final two timeouts. Together, these are the types of miscues that have haunted the Bills in their recent playoff losses. The bright side is the loss to the Rams didn’t end the Bills’ season, though they fell two games behind Kansas City (12-1) in the race for the AFC’s top seed . And perhaps, the loss can be chalked up to a team riding a little too high off a playoff-clinching win and having to travel across the country to face a Rams team in the thick of its divisional race. If that’s so, the Bills have a chance to address their flaws — and doubters — by how they respond in what still stands as a juicy showdown at the NFC-leading Detroit Lions (12-1) on Sunday. “They’re the top dog in football right now,” Allen said, looking ahead to Detroit. “We have to have a good week, learn from this one, and put it behind us.” Scoring. The Bills topped 30 points for a team-record seventh consecutive game and ninth time this season. Buffalo entered the day ranked second in the NFL averaging 30.5 points per outing, behind Detroit (32.1). Run defense. Though the Rams averaged just 3.3 yards per carry, they stuck with it in finishing with 137 yards, helping them enjoy a 17-minute edge in time of possession. Allen. If not for him, the Bills wouldn't have been in position to nearly overcome a 17-point fourth-quarter deficit. His 424 yards (342 passing and 82 rushing) accounted for all but 21 yards of Buffalo's total offense. With so many options, perhaps the focus falls on special teams coordinator Matthew Smiley. This is the second time in 13 months special teams personnel management became an issue. Buffalo was flagged for having too many men as time expired, providing Wil Lutz a second chance to hit a decisive field goal in sealing Denver's 24-22 win last season . Starting CB Rasul Douglas was sidelined by a knee injury. ... DE Casey Toohill injured his ribs. 80-1-1 — The Bills' record when scoring 38 or more points, including a 38-38 tie with Denver in 1960. Facing Detroit represents Buffalo's final major test before closing the season with two games against New England and hosting the New York Jets. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
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POWW Deadline: Rosen Law Firm Urges AMMO, Inc. (NASDAQ: POWW) Stockholders with Large Losses to Contact the Firm for Information About Their RightsJust like its predecessor, with the entirety of planet Earth available to explore, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has a whole lot to do. 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was the first (and, so far, only) 10 I've given in a review, and the enormity of the options available in this year’s follow-up have only been tempered by the lingering problems that accompany them. Because codes weren’t available early and unexpected turbulence at takeoff made it literally impossible to play for the first 24 hours, I’m still working on my up and coming aviation career, as well as this review. For now, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has some extraordinary features to set it apart, but its impact is also falling short of how blown away I was by the last edition, and I really wanted to be blown away. Instead, I'm "merely" impressed. Right off the rip, the biggest new addition to Flight Simulator 2024 is its career mode. You pick a starting airport as your home base, get hired by a fictional aviation company, and begin progressing through your career as a pilot. It all plays out like a traditional video game skill tree: after you master the beginner missions, you open up new options, and completing them opens up further opportunities still. So you can get a tail wheel endorsement, for example, after you complete the requirements for a commercial pilots license, which then opens up options for newer planes and jobs like search and rescue, or you can get certified in rotor craft (helicopters) which leads to stuff like operating a sky crane. Which, to me personally, elicits a "hell yeah." Each new certification or endorsement also opens up different jobs you can pick from, ranging from simple stuff like flightseeing, to more complex operations like, well, anything to do with the helicopters, basically. Eventually you earn enough money and reputation to throw off the bonds of your employment and start your own aviation company. I haven't gotten that far yet, but I am moving along with my fixed wing endorsements at a pretty good pace. To what end, I haven't yet decided, but I'm looking forward to opening my own company and taking the lion's share of the profits. Those profits are used to further grow your business, and I can’t wait until I can afford my own fleet of aircraft. The first few missions in career mode are just basic flight training, meant to familiarize you with the ins and outs of flying a plane. What I found disappointing is that the flight training is pretty much identical to the tutorials from 2020. All the training missions take place at the same airfield in Sedona, Arizona as 2020 and the actual tasks are exactly the same. The only real difference is that the AI-generated instruction and on-screen advice is a little more clear about what's expected of you in any given mission. I do appreciate the default tooltips in 2024 because there are about a million different buttons that do a million different things, and I used to have to go to Google whenever I'd forget how to release my parking brake. (I don't even think I'll end up turning them off like I did in 2020, just because I'm a forgetful fellow.) After the initial training missions, you do a few flights to get enough hours in to test for your commercial pilot's license. Taking the tests costs in-game currency, but you only need to pay for it once and you can retake it as many times as you need. You also need to have enough experience and do well enough in the training missions – but if you are already an experienced pilot, you can just jump right into the test and skip the lessons. The further along you get, the more missions and mission types open up. What I thought was a little strange, however, was that they don't all open up near your home airport. I picked a small airfield in the deepest parts of eastern Maine, KMVM Machias Valley Airfield, but after my initial missions, I was being sent to Europe to complete aircraft delivery and skydive missions. It's not something that bothers me too much, but it did come across as odd, which pulled me out of the “career” illusion I had built up for myself. Lousy imagination! Otherwise, I'm actually really loving career mode. In 2020’s iteration, I would make-up little missions for myself, like delivering pizza by air from Knox County Regional Airport in Owl's Head, Maine to the remote Matinicus Island 20 miles off the coast (a real thing that happens, by the way). Having structured reasons to better familiarize myself with the aircraft and patterns in the sky is going to keep me on course, so to speak, and stealthily make me into a better sim-pilot. So far it's my favorite part of Flight Simulator 2024 and I'm looking forward to starting either my own airline or a helicopter sky crane company. Or both! I've got time. Another new addition is the challenge league. This mode is the most game-y of them all, but retains all the simulation flight models and physics I love. There are three challenges each week, as well as leaderboards, which I am a huge fan of because I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. Of the three available in the first round, my favorite is the F/A-18 rally race through the Grand Canyon. You fly Maverick's modern jet of choice through a section of the canyon, slaloming gates in a hunt for pure speed. Since it's still the same flight model under the hood, that’s not as easy as it seems – but holy crap is it fun as hell. It took me a lot of tries to get to my final score of around 1 minute 54 seconds, and that's not even a good score: it only put me in the Bronze league. But the satisfaction of seeing my time raised up above the Xbox Live Gamertag of someone who I don't know at all, but is unknowingly my arch-nemesis, is great. I'm looking forward to revisiting the challenges each week. The previous Flight Simulator had landing challenges with leaderboards, too, but as fun as those were, they didn't quite hit the dynamism of flying a fighter jet through one of the world's seven natural wonders. One of the things I liked the most about the last Flight Simulator was how it let me visit places I'd either never been before or would almost certainly never visit again. In Flight Simulator 2024, sightseeing has been placed front and center in the photo challenges mode. You visit famous landmarks and places around the world and take photos of them. The type and criteria of the photos changes with each landmark. For example, in the first photo challenge, you need to take a picture of the Great Sphinx while the sun is above its right shoulder on the equinox. Oh, and you need to do it on foot. And that's one of the biggest and coolest new features: you can land, get out of your plane, and walk around. However, it's not quite as elegant as I had hoped it would be. First of all, your walking speed is paced realistically, just like the rest of the simulator, (who would have guessed?) so if you've been playing first-person video games all your life, walking at an actual human's pace feels almost painfully slow. Secondly, the level of detail is going to depend on a whole bunch of different factors, like the power of your PC, the strength of your internet connection, and the health of the cloud servers, so your mileage can (and probably will) vary. Still, in spite of some weirdly GoldenEye-esque objects around the Great Pyramid complex, the up-close terrain itself is really detailed. The sand and desert rocks look incredibly realistic, and the ground in general now seems to look more like how ground is actually supposed to look around the world. If you taxi through tall grass at the end of a rural runway, for example, the tracks from your wheels remain even when you return later. Same thing with snow or mud. Mud will even stick to your wheels and supposedly have an effect on your aerodynamics, although I can't speak to how true that is on account of never having flown an actual plane with mud-caked tires. There are also way more animals now. Instead of static points on a map telling you "there is a giraffe here," animals now pop up in the places you'd expect them to be. I very much felt like I was actually at an airfield in Maine when a bull moose plodded its way across the airstrip as I held short of the active runway. I haven't seen any other animals myself, but I know they're there because Flight Simulator 2024 uses an open-source database of animal locations to put them where they're supposed to be – so with some luck, I can go to Africa and see some lions before long. And when you lift your head up from the ground, Flight Simulator 2024 can look much better than its predecessor across the board (with an emphasis on can ). The improvement is especially stark in a place like the Grand Canyon, which I visited many times in 2020’s Flight Simulator. Whereas before it looked very obviously like a smooth, texture-mapped computer model up close, now it looks amazingly like the real thing. I am currently running Flight Simulator 2024 on a pretty beastly PC: it has an i9-13900K processor, a Radeon RX 7900XT GPU, and 64GBs of DDR5 RAM (disclosure, the RAM was provided by Corsair). With that setup, this year’s Flight Simulator looks and runs way better. Mostly. The problem comes from the fact Flight Simulator 2024 is streamed from the cloud, and so far they haven't ironed out all the issues. In career mode, I did a flightseeing mission around Venice, Italy, and St. Mark's Basilica was a purple-checkered polygonal model with no textures whatsoever, while the rest of Venice was rendered in perfect detail. I honestly would rather have something like the world map packs of 2020’s Flight Simulator living on my SSD and only stream the boring parts. Right now, though, there's no way to do that, and the reliance on cloud streaming was something the Flight Simulator team really hammered on the importance of leading up to launch, so I'd be surprised if they switched to some kind of hybrid model at this point. And in spite of everything looking really good on my beastly PC, it's worth noting that my GPU is running at 100% capacity at the recommended settings in order to make that happen. When I turned the graphics down to the next lower preset, it only brought GPU usage down to 98%. That ain't good. In spite of what can reasonably be described as a catastrophic launch, I'm already pretty much in love with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – I'm just not blown away like I was five years ago, when I first found myself faced with the opportunity to fly to literally any place on Earth. That option remains, of course, and it's been vastly improved by some smart new features, but it doesn't have that same impact, either. As we move away from the rocky launch, I'm encountering fewer and fewer issues, which gives me the chance to focus on what I love about Flight Simulator. Usually that’s flying around aimlessly, but this time career mode is also giving me real reasons to take off, as well as a better understanding of the world of commercial aviation. I'm going to keep at it before I render my final verdict, but right now, in spite of its initial problems, I think Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty damn great, even if it hasn’t caught the lightning in a bottle that was the last Flight Simulator once again.
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