This is a one-time post to pull together resources, links, and info on a topic I’ve followed for a long time. Let’s start with a brief quiz. Check out the two photos below. One, of chronic congestion on freeways in my Southern California homeland. The other, of familiar modern “gardening” practices. Which do you think is overall a greater contributor to certain kinds of air pollution, carcinogenic emissions, lung disease, and hearing loss, in our nation’s most populous state?

In this Substack, I am going to prove that God exists, and I am going to prove it beyond a mere shadow of doubt. The God of Whom I refer is not Allah or Osiris or Ganesha or any of the other gods of various cultures across the planet, but the One True God, the Lord God of Hebrew and Christian scripture. Are you ready? Some of you probably aren’t, but if “some of you” includes you, I encourage you to read on just to prove to yourself that you are open-minded, which nearly everyone claims to being.

I am leaving pro wrestling content creation. Allow me my moment of indulgence to wrap everything up. Pro wrestling was never going to be a career for me. I love wrestling, but my love for the squared circle is completely dwarfed by my passion for education. There is no feeling like the realization that you have impacted a child in a positive way; I’d trade Ryusuke Taguchi’s entire career for just one of those moments.

Technically the one-year anniversary of my first HIBOU post was December 3, but who’s counting? Me, as it turns out. On December 3, I counted up the essays I’d written (skipping the repetitive Weekly RAP posts over the summer) and realized with utter delight that the final tally gave me a most excellent excuse to use a Hamilton meme: Look, I know there’s no real comparison between Hamilton’s writing and mine—Hamilton’s essays took six months to help midwife our system of government while my essays took twelve months to spelunk mindset in writing—but just let me have this moment to pretend I spent the year writing like I was running out of time, all right?

There are few things I like more about NBA basketball than when a player gets so hot that it seems as though they can't miss a shot, no matter where they are shooting from. The legendary video game NBA Jam captured this beautifully, for those that remember. A “heat check” is when a hot player takes what would normally be a shot that's borderline absurd because they are feeling so good and confident in their ability that they feel like they can “push it” a little.