Last time I updated you on my fantasy football league, about a month ago, my team, Imaginary Touchdown, was on top of the world/league:

Since then, the tide was turned. I haven't worked the free-agent and waiver wire aggressively enough, and my bench was been weak. The slowdown from Wes Welker and the Baltimore defense hasn't helped:

Can Imaginary Touchdown turn itself around in these final weeks and make the playoffs? As my eighth-grade math teacher Mrs. Scango used to say (and I can't remember why she said it), stay tuned, sports fans.

I tweeted this, but I want to add it here as well: Life's "50 Photos that Brought the War Home." The photo gallery leaves you thinking on the process of a photo gaining wide cultural meaning or becoming iconic in a way. Makes you wonder if/how that happens in a distributed future.

Sometimes at the end of a Monday, you have to find the song to sing to yourself. Not the encouraged album version, but the end of Monday take, the one that confesses the day went wrong and hopes Tuesday will be better. What you feel beats emptiness, you remind yourself.

A month and a half ago, friend Andrew, new acquaintance Lori and I were sitting in a bar near work, talking about the great outdoors and our group-coupon adventures. We were actually dining at the bar on one such deal. At another point in the conversation, we discussed our relative inexperience with guns. Days later, when LivingSocial offered "Shotgun Instruction and Private BBQ Lunch," Andrew emailed us the deal within minutes. We took a bit to decide, and then we signed up.

While Andrew had to drop out for schedule reasons, Lori and I found ourselves early Saturday at Prince George's Trap and Skeet Center.

After safety instructions and gun explanation, we locked and loaded.

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You heard me right. Washington now has a meatballs restaurant. It's called "Meatballs." Colleagues Sondra, Lauren and I visited for lunch last week, after its opening. We left impressed and full of meatballs.

The place was packed when we arrived around 12:30, but tables grew easier to find over the hour. Music by the door was ear-splittingly loud.

But the volume was better further into the restaurant, and the menu distracted us from all else. For this first visit, I went the simple route: classic meatballs, inside sliders, with marinara and mozzarella slices added on. The pricing was odd: half the posted price for two sliders. Why not offer four sliders at regular price? I would have eaten four.

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A lowly sea creature lofted to culinary heights, a lowly vegetable that gets a fancy name, a drink made of common ingredients in a shapely, light-catching glass. Sitting at the Tacklebox bar with plastic utensils, you are both the 99% and the 1%, simple yet fortunate to be there.

It's past 3:30 in the morning. I need to be up in four hours, and I can't sleep. Today was six meetings, an amazing field trip, two digital-talking get-togethers, then collapsing onto my couch at home and making the critical mistake of falling asleep on the spot. I have a big presentation in the morning, so being awake now is bad. But making the best of it… I'm rereading a recent St. Petersburg Times article about a young artist who struggles with mania. I can't imagine what daily life is like with the illness, but the adapting he takes on — channeling the cycles of energy into something positive and ultimately relaxing for him — is inspiring. If he can do it, those of us just sleeping wrong can surely try the same.

Hunter Payne stares into cold bands of water falling into a rust-stained tub.

"Why am I doing this to myself?" the 21-year-old asks.

"Because it'll be totally freaking worth it," he answers and steps in. The mania that pushed him far into the night comes back in a rush of ideas:

Play tennis on top of a zeppelin over Kansas. Have a wine party while parachuting. Dress 20 friends in animal costumes and hang out in the Lowry Park Zoo parking lot. Draw underwater.

Right there between wage and moxie, baby. Because it's 2011. I can confirm Arlington turnout was light. But democracy was in full effect.

Before blogging anything on Joe Frazier's death, I waited to see if USA Today would post its '09 interview with him. Erik Brady talked to Frazier about Muhammad Ali, for a story in a special-edition Ali tribute tabloid.

The edition was the best cover-to-cover publication I saw at USAT, ink or digital. The Frazier article was the most hard-hitting of the lot, sure to catch a reader with his or her gloves down and draw some blood.

The publication's content only ran in print at the time — a concept that was smart and profitable use of already-controlled newsstand footage, no digital criticism from me on this one. But I was disappointed not be able to share the Frazier piece. The article showed the storytelling the org was capable of when it stepped out of the usual narrative boxes.

With Frazier's death, and with the special edition far behind us, USAT posted the story this morning. I've copied the lede below. Click, read the rest. Scene subsequently moves to a car, the street and a ring. I reread the story now and feel all of the same emotions I felt the first time. Brady drops you in life's last round. There is sympathy. There is disgust, violence and confusion, all or none of which may be justified.

I'm an easy mark for a good boxing read (and have yet to see boxing movies I haven't loved), but I think you'll devour this story as well.

PHILADELPHIA —Joe Frazier's one-bedroom apartment, a couple of blocks from City Hall, feels a mite crowded today.

That's Joe on the couch, his longtime girlfriend in the kitchen and his son Marvis on the computer. Arrayed in front of Joe are a reporter, a photographer and his assistant, a videographer and her assistant, plus Joe's public relations man. That's nine people in one half of his 900-square-foot suite.

Oh, and one more. Don't forget Muhammad Ali, the elephant in the room. It seems like Ali is always there — not physically, of course, but his prodigious personality remains an eternally outsized presence in Frazier's life, even here in his temporarily cramped living room.

You can see Ali in a painting above the couch, frozen in time as a wicked Frazier punch sends him reeling. You can hear him in the ebb and flow of conversation, as Frazier occasionally imitates Ali's familiar voice. You can even feel him, haunting Frazier across all of the years and the miles and the shared history.

All right, enough with the dude mischief and pretending to play musical instruments. Time to tie that knot and have a party. Jeff and Mollie got their lines right. Not one of the wedding party, myself included, tripped and fell mid-ceremony. The limo driver only scraped a couple rocks. The speeches hit quality notes. Eye Street represented. I cut a few moves (not pictured). The happy couple headed out to watch college football.

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