Mike Ward

The last time Jordan Staal was in a Stanley Cup Final:

Roy Jones Jr. knocking out Virgil Hill with a body shot in Ring Magazine's 1998 KOTY.

The Princess Bride (1987) never ages. It’s witty, romantic, and endlessly quotable. Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin performed their entire sword duel themselves after months of training, turning it into one of the most memorable fights in cinema history.

Bloodsport (1988) having a low critic score never matched the movie’s actual legacy. Van Damme doing full splits, the Kumite fights, Bolo Yeung stealing scenes every five minutes. That movie absolutely knew what people came to see.

Offbeat Pittsburgh: How artist Baron Batch turned Pittsburgh into his canvas (Via TribLive) triblive.com/local/offbeat-…

By 1935 the Babe was a shadow of his former self. Yet, he launched 3 home runs in his final game, including hitting one completely out of Forbes Field. A true legend of the game.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

I think 1984 was probably the best year ever for movies. Footloose, The Karate Kid, The Never Ending Story, Sixteen Candles, Ghostbusters, Terminator, Indiana Jones Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, The Last Starfighter, Nightmare on Elm Street, Red Dawn ... epic year

Boring Company’s goal is to solve traffic in cities and one day build Hyperloop high-speed transit between city centers

Imagine walking out in front of 72,000 people, with millions watching around the world, then sitting at the piano and performing one of the greatest songs ever written with pure confidence and passion. Freddie Mercury truly was the ultimate rock star ❤️🎹

Apocalypto (2006) ends in such a brutally cold way. Jaguar Paw survives everything the film throws at him, only for Spanish ships to suddenly appear on the horizon and remind you an even bigger catastrophe is just beginning. Chills.

Sylvester Stallone & Carl Weathers choreographing the 1976 Rocky fight scene. No stunt doubles. No CGI. Just raw power, sweat, and two legends throwing leather in a Philly gym.This is where movie history was made. one perfectly timed punch at a time.🥊

🎶Eddie Murphy released ‘Party All The Time’ 41 years ago, May 23, 1985

.@VP Vance has chosen former Trump U.S. Attorney @ScottBradyPA to serve as Executive Director of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Scott is leading the charge to fight fraudsters stealing from YOU and endangering the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. 🇺🇸

Suspect dead after opening fire near White House security checkpoint, Secret S... via @pittsburghpg post-gazette.com/news/nation/20…

To nail this scene in Tombstone (1993), Michael Biehn trained for two months with legendary gun coach Thell Reed, though Doc Holliday doesn’t look impressed.

Down to their last strike... HOLY PITT! 😳

Mark Cuban explains how he pulled off one of Wall Street’s greatest trades “When Yahoo offered us $5.7B in stock, I couldn’t sell it for six months” “So what I did was I took every penny that I had and shorted the internet index as protection, basically taking insurance out in case the internet bubble popped” “When I was allowed to sell it, because I couldn’t sell it all at once, it would just crater the market, so I did something called a hedge” “What the hedge is, you can sell options. So I sold call options, which gave somebody else the right to buy my shares at a higher price in the future” “I took that money and used it to buy puts, which protected me in case the price of my stock went down” “When it popped, I actually made more money. It was called one of the top 10 trades in Wall Street history”

Brad Pitt spent a full year preparing for this scene. Two to three hours in the gym daily, then two more hours of sword work on top of that. He gained 30 pounds of muscle. And the reason every second of training shows on screen comes down to one decision most people don't know about. Sword Master Richard Ryan designed a completely different fighting style for every principal character in the film. Achilles fights like a predator. Short explosive bursts, closing distance in a blink, always attacking. Hector fights like a soldier. Measured footwork, shield discipline, conserving energy because he's used to surviving long battles, not ending them in seconds. The choreography tells you who wins before a single blow lands. There's a specific moment where Achilles uses the same leaping overhead strike that killed Boagrius in the opening scene. Hector gets his shield up just barely in time. That beat communicates everything: Hector is the best conventional fighter alive, and it still isn't enough. The gap between elite and supernatural, shown in half a second of choreography. No stunt doubles. Both actors performed the entire duel themselves. Simon Crane, the stunt coordinator from Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan, built the sequence so meticulously that editor Peter Honess barely had to cut. You can track every spear, blade, and shield in every frame. In 2004, when most action movies were already drowning fight scenes in shaky cam and fast edits, Troy went the opposite direction and let you watch. Pitt tore his actual Achilles tendon during production. The guy playing Achilles got taken out by his Achilles. Sometimes the universe writes better material than the screenwriter. Twenty-one years later and nothing in the sword-and-sandal genre has topped it. The budget was $175 million. The training was a year. The fight is four minutes. Every dollar and every hour landed on screen.

This is the best preserved medieval street in Europe. Recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, The Shambles in York, England has had shops trading on it for nearly a thousand years. It's older than the Crusades.