Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

I’m sorry this edition is later than usual. Since this is not for money and entirely a labor of love, I decided to take a breather.

That means this edition will have a few changes compared to the usual but I’m happy to still give you an edition to comb through this week!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It is Tua Tagovailoa’s health.

The Miami Dolphins officially placed their star quarterback on injured reserve after he sustained a concussion in Thursday’s game against Buffalo, meaning he’ll miss at least the next four weeks.

(I am including videos of the hits I mention. Please note they are severe and you may find them graphic or upsetting. Please be sure to skip those if that’s the case.)

Tagovailoa is 26 years old but this is the third documented concussion he has had since leaving the University of Alabama after the 2019 season.

In 2022, Tagovailoa was at the center of a concussion-related injury controversy. He re-entered a game after taking a major hit, finished that game, then played the following game, where he took another major hit and demonstrated a posture response indicative of a concussion. 

Despite the scary scenes, he returned to action three weeks later.

Now, he’s out of action after yet another major hit and concussion and the question looming over all of this is simple: should he step away from football?

Tagovailoa has said he considered retiring after those first two hits in 2022. Voices in the NFL community have been pretty receptive to the idea that he doesn’t have to tough it out.

Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel said that he told Tagovailoa that he’s “the starting quarterback of his family” as they walked off the field after the QB’s injury.

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce, who played nine seasons in the NFL, went out on a limb that coaches, especially of other teams, usually don’t go out on.

“I’ll be honest, I’d tell him to retire,” Pierce said. “It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. Played the game, I haven’t witnessed anything like I’ve seen that’s happened to him three times. Scary. You can see right away, the players’ faces on the field. You can see the sense of urgency to get Tua help. I just think that at some point, he’s going to live longer than he’s going to play football. Take care of your family.”

Based on McDaniel’s comments and the way the Dolphins waited until Tuesday to put Tagovailoa on injured reserve, this will be a slow, gradual process where the power is in Tagovailoa’s own hands to determine his future.

Anything that falls short of that will be unfair to him and his family.

I’m no pro but if you ask me, the risks aren’t worth it. Be there for your family and your loved ones.

But whatever decision he comes to, I hope it will be his own decision with as much information as he needs to make it.

My Reporting

I don’t have much this week. Recovery from the one-two punch of a COVID booster and flu shot made me opt out of covering any games. And then a few segments I built out were cut shortly before air for logistical and time reasons.

So instead, let me direct you to other people’s reporting. I have been impressed with how many local newspapers have been covering the ongoing election campaign. Their reporting can often outshine many national outlets.

I have always wanted to support a local newspaper with a subscription, especially ones that need it.

When The Washington Post is your hometown paper now and you grew up with The New York Times as the go-to for New York-area news, there’s less urgency to subscribing. Both of those papers are so big that I might not make a difference.

At the same time, I am a reader who hopes for newspapers to meet a standard with their reporting. I love my true local papers from where I grew up, the Star-Ledger and the Asbury Park Press.

But sadly, both have been gutted by their parent companies to the point where they mostly rely on national content and syndication for news. They end up having no choice but to use the local resources that they do have to make clickbait over hard news. To be fair, it’s often useful, even informative clickbait, but more for conversations around the watercooler than for understanding the issues.

That being said, the Asbury Park Press really punches above its weight in food reviews. If I lived closer, I’d subscribe.

So I landed on two places that are in the newspaper “middle class,” the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Orlando Sentinel. Both serve more as city or regional papers rather than national papers of record, but when they do cover national issues, they do it well.

The Inquirer does its share of New Jersey coverage thanks to a sizable chunk of the state being in its delivery range, and the Sentinel keeps me connected to Orlando, my fiancée’s hometown and a city where I briefly lived at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then there’s you. You can and should pick a local paper or two to subscribe to. To subscribe digitally to both papers for six months, I paid them a combined $2.

Keep an eye out on what they’re doing before you subscribe. Are they filling their homepage with clickbait or do the headlines actually tell you about what’s going on locally? 

Do your homework on their ownership. Some places have fallen under the ownership of private equity firms eager to gut their new properties for profit. Sometimes these places need support to avoid their journalists suffering that fate. And other times, those places are already gutted and too far gone.

Some papers have fallen under the ownership of political activists who use the papers as a vehicle for partisan politics with a thin layer of local news on top. 

And if all else fails, or you can’t afford it, or you want to sample a paper first, check if your local library has access to Pressreader.

It’s an app for your phone or tablet that you can log into with library card information from participating libraries. You can search for a publication and it will download a full digital edition you can read.

There’s no shortage of good reporting crying out for your support. The big national papers do that every so often but so do the local ones. Don’t forget about them as you shop around for news and information this election season.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

Score One for the Righties: For the past 25 seasons, the San Francisco Giants have played at the gorgeous AT&T Park along San Francisco Bay.

One of the ballpark’s most striking features is its towering right-field wall, with glass windows, manually operated scoreboards, and a handful of seats on top.

Clear it with a ball and you only have to make it travel a few more feet to land in the section of the Bay affectionately dubbed “McCovey Cove” in honor of Giants legend Willie McCovey. An army of boats and kayaks wait just in case they can recover a “splash hit.”

The wall includes a counter of the number of splash hits, the home runs that clear the fence and land in McCovey Cove. 

Giants legend, noted cheater and American folk hero Barry Bonds hit 35 of the 168 total splash hits and made the baseball world aware of the feat as he chased the all-time home run record.

But until Sunday’s matchup between the Giants and the San Diego Padres, no right-handed hitter had ever landed a splash hit. AT&T Park is a tough place to hit a home run out of, considering that winds off the Bay usually limit how far fly balls can travel.

Between that and the high right-field wall, reaching McCovey Cove is something exceedingly difficult for a right-handed hitter, as righties usually pull balls toward the left side of the field with their swings.

Heliot Ramos, the 25-year-old All-Star outfielder for the Giants, changed that with a 394-foot drive of a 100 mph fastball thrown by Padres reliever Robert Suarez.

Ramos told reporters he had never reached the water, including in batting practice.

“It looks impossible just by looking at the wall and the weather here,” Ramos said. “So I was like, ‘I don’t know, but I might be able to do it, for sure.’ But I was always positive that I was going to do it.”

A’ja Wilson, History Maker: The WNBA is having a surreal season. Off the court, it’s been thrust into national discussions about race, culture and gender. Outside the league, its players carried Team USA to gold at the Olympic Games. But on the court, just looking at basketball, it has been a season full of records.

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark has the record for most assists in a WNBA season. Entering Tuesday, she has racked up 329 assists, good for 8.4 per game. She also has set the record for most points in a season by a rookie.

Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese has gone from “Bayou Barbie” to “Board Barbie,” pulling down 446 rebounds this season, the most by any player in league history.

Reese is likely to lead the league in rebounds per game but a late-season injury means that she may not hold the total rebounds record for long.

That’s where Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson comes in. With a basket late in Sunday’s win over the Connecticut Sun, she became the first player ever to score 1,000 points in a WNBA season.

Entering Tuesday, she has accumulated 444 rebounds, so with just three more boards, she’ll pass Reese for both this season’s lead and the single-season record.

Add in the fact that Wilson ranks in the top five in both steals and blocks per game this season and we get to see the best overall statistical season in American pro basketball this side of Wilt Chamberlain.

Unlike the 1960s, however, there are no tape delays to deal with and we get to see this surreal season play out in full color.

Arch Manning and the #1 Texas Longhorns: The Texas Longhorns are back on top, securing the number one ranking in the AP Top 25 this week for the first time since the 2008 season.

With quarterback Quinn Ewers going down with an injury, it was on third-generation QB Arch Manning to helm the Longhorn offense. 

It is my solemn duty to inform you that the Manning family has developed what was previously believed to be impossible: a Manning who can run.

Arch’s uncle Peyton Manning may have been the greatest quarterback of all-time but he and Arch’s other uncle Eli each had the mobility of an oak tree.

The younger Manning finished Saturday’s 56-7 thrashing of the University of Texas-San Antonio by scoring five total touchdowns, including four passing touchdowns while completing nine out of twelve pass attempts. He didn’t enter the game until after Ewers left with an injury in the second quarter.

It’s unclear when Ewers will recover and who will take on the starting role when both are healthy. But if Texas’s biggest problem is choosing between a current Heisman Trophy contender and a likely future Heisman Trophy contender, they’ll be in good shape this season. 

One for the Road: As a teenager, there were few shows more entertaining than “Top Gear.” The BBC’s export to the world was part-travel documentary, part-car commercial, and most importantly, a large part that was just hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May “cocking about,” as they often described it.

These three geezers each came with a tragic flaw—Hammond, short, vain and overconfident. May, long-winded and comically boring. And Clarkson—a big alpha-male oaf with absolutely no filter.

Putting them together gave viewers over twenty years of wacky hijinks, challenges stretching the limits of the laws of physics and trips to the edge of the Earth, when factoring in both Top Gear and its successor, Amazon Prime’s “The Grand Tour.”

The trio announced that an episode released last Friday would be their swan song. The lads made one final journey, dragging decades-old cars across Zimbabwe. Their trip featured all the hallmarks of a classic Top Gear or Grand Tour episode and definitely taught me that Zimbabwe is a stunningly beautiful place.

The trio also shared in several incredibly poetic moments as they extended their trip into neighboring Botswana, where they had filmed their first travel special nearly 20 years ago.

I won’t spoil too much but they brought the whole project full-circle. I’m not ashamed to admit I was welling up. And if you loved the show, you probably will be too.

Something Good I Ate

It has been more than six years since I moved out of New York City. Every so often, I miss the food. Not the fancy restaurants or the Michelin stars, but the hidden gems. I loved a quiet bodega with a hidden gem of a sandwich or a delightful taste of some far-flung country tucked away in the outer boroughs.

But few meals feel more like home than the ones they serve at Roll n’ Roaster in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Or as it’s known in our household, da rollinroastuh.

And when you’re there, you have a lot of options to choose from, but you can’t go wrong with a roast beef with cheez, and fries with cheez.

(And yes, c-h-e-e-z, cheez. They have a sign on the wall saying “you can have cheez on anything you pleez.”)

I met da rollinroastuh over a decade ago, not long after I met Scott, now my mom’s long-term partner and the person who has played the role of father to an older kid and young adult better than any man I know. 

He is from neighboring Coney Island, and as the name of the restaurant in our house implies, he sounds like it. And thanks to him, I can’t refer to the venerable roast beef joint any other way.

Through the years, he has had many, many meals at da rollinroastuh across many, many hours of the day, as you can at a place that stays open from 11 am to 1 or 2 am depending on the night of the week. 

I have had a good handful throughout the years. It was my first meal back in the U.S. as a high schooler after I spent a month staying with my grandparents, who lived in Southeast Asia at the time.

It was a meal we enjoyed on my first trip home after vaccinations rolled out in 2021, back in one of the few moments where it looked like the pandemic might actually end.

And as pictured here, I had it in the spring of 2018, not long after I figured out that my time living in the city would be winding down.

This particular version seemed to include roast beef cooked to a doneness that can be described as “semi-alive” and fries covered in a yellow cheez goop that may legally be sellable as Play-Doh. But nevertheless, it was good.

Somehow, the laminated plastic booths, the plastic trays with the menu paper covering, and the occasional blasting of a 50’s style “Happy Birthday” crooning if it’s somebody’s special day can make anything taste good.

And I promise, every other time I’ve been there, the roast beef has been a little bit more cooked. And no matter what, you get an ooey-gooey timeless relic of old Brooklyn that will make anybody sound like a “Goodfellas” background character when they tell their own story about da rollinroastuh.

After all, you can’t say it any other way.