After Lewis Hamilton got a bit of home track advantage at the British Grand Prix and cashed in with a win, the battle of the Mercedes teammates goes to Nico’s other home track. With both drivers scoring wins at their home races (Nico in Monaco and Lewis in Britain), the pattern would hold that Rosberg would win the German Grand Prix.
However, the Formula One Power Rankings likes to buck the trend. That includes the Mercedes teammates winning pattern.
World Cup month is finally over and the whole world can move on so we can forget about the billions of dollars wasted by the Brazilian government… Well, that’s until we talk about the billions of dollars wasted by the Brazilian government on the 2016 Summer Olympics. And just wait until we have to deal with the Qatar World Cup of 2022.
Anyway, there’s a lot more to today’s links than the World Cup. But let’s keep with a quasi-soccer theme with Irina Shayk.
Canadian government staffers have been deleting Canadian government staffers from Wikipedia. Gee, what are they hiding and who are they hiding it for? (Vice)
The FCC has been so inundated with comments about the future of net neutrality that it’s repeatedly crashed their website and forced them to extend the comment period. (PC Magazine)
NASA thinks that we’ll find other life in the universe inside the next 20 years. That would be pretty cool. (CBS)
Heading into Saturday night’s IndyCar 300 lap race at Iowa Speedway, Andretti Autosport had won four straight and five of seven races at the track. The other two races were won by Chip Ganassi Racing. For most of the race, it looked like CGR’s Tony Kanaan would end Andretti dominance but a great strategy call and a hard charge at the end made it five in a row for AA with Ryan Hunter-Reay taking the checkered flag.
Once again, the constructors of the Formula One World Championship stayed at the track after a Grand Prix for an in-season test. For the final in-season test, Formula One stayed home for a couple of days for some running at Silverstone. It was the final time during the season that the teams would get track time outside of race weekends so who would be quickest?
Since today is the World Cup final, I thought that this would be a good time to bust out a bit of a duel to start this linkdump. On the left is German model Alena Blohm. On the right is Florencia Fabiano. No, it’s not a Man Lab Showdown. It’s just a little end of the World Cup treat.
Anyway, lots of links to get to today. Along with the obligatory World Cup links, we start with links about Canada.
Stephen Harper’s government has spent this term running into opposition at every turn. At most turns, he’s lost the battle. (Toronto Star)
Gang culture isn’t something one would associate with Canada and certainly not Winnipeg. However, gangs have led to Winnipeg being Canada’s murder capital. (Vice)
Is Mayor Rob Ford associating with accused drug dealer Sandro Lisi again? (The Globe and Mail)
Time to go ape$h!t as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hit the theatres this weekend. Based on the feedback so far, it is definitely a huge step up from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Worth checking out then! It also helps that you can spot Keri Russell in the film.
After the jump, discussing about the motion capture performance, Fast and Furious 7 has wrapped filming, catch a movie teaser trailer that is 72 minutes long, George R.R. Martin has something to say to people that doubt his abilities, and watch Neil Young cover Fancy. Continue reading
It’s been a long time since we last did an entry in our long ongoing series that we called the best of the interweb. (Well, the interweb that is outside of The Lowdown Blog.) For this return, I thought we should go back to one of our old favourite sites for more of the best stories from My Life is Average. I like this site because it’s a bit more relatable to everyone’s average lives and some of the stories on the website are the sort of thing that regularly happen to people. That doesn’t mean that these stories aren’t funny.
I know that it’s been a few weeks since the Battlefield Hardline beta has wrapped up but I think I’ve documented (either here or on The Lowdown) how busy I was during the month of June. Now that I’ve finally got a little bit of free time, I’m going to start pumping out reviews and other long-form pieces with a bit more frequency.
So let’s start with the beta for Battlefield Hardline. It was launched with great fanfare at the end of EA’s E3 keynote and was so popular that the Battlefield website crashed as people tried to get into the Beta. With all that hype, it would be hard for BF Hardline to live up to it. And, wouldn’t you know it, Hardline didn’t live up to the hype.
Well, that was a soccer game yesterday. I was expecting to be talking about a Brazil final with Argentina but that’s definitely not happening now. So I guess we’ll see who will be the second team in the World Cup final later today.
In the meantime, there’s lots more happening in the world than a bit of soccer. But let’s start this off by cheering up the Brazilians with Lais Ribeiro.
Warren G. Harding is often considered one of America’s worst Presidents. If not for a cover-up of a lengthy affair, Harding may never have won the Presidency. (New York Times)
Major Canadian law firm Heenan Blaikie collapsed earlier this year. Here’s a look at what went happened. (Canadian Lawyer)
The BBC is taking the first step to clean up the news. They’ve banned giving equal time to climate change deniers. It’s just the facts from now on. (Salon)
When he was dropped from Formula One by McLaren, many people thought that Juan Pablo Montoya was done in motorsports. His prime was behind him and he was going from the pinnacle of motorsports to stock cars, a discipline that he never run before in his life. Naturally, that run wasn’t as successful as his time in CART or F1.
After his NASCAR contract expired at the end of last season, it looked as though Montoya was going to spend the rest of his careers in sportscars. Instead, Roger Penske snapped up the long-time Ganassi driver to run in IndyCar and what an inspired move it was. It started something of a career resurgence for Montoya capped off (thus far) with a win in the Pocono 500.
The Lowdown 