Here’s a clear shot from the daily Ice Machine, with crystal blue linkage of stories that will refresh you before you start your day:

• Don’t forget that our SPORTSbyBROOKS, Big Tilde, and In the Weeds stories (as well as Treehouse Fort shows) appear on the right of this page every weekday.  Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed as well.  We don’t mind.  Not at all.
• Ask us why we don’t listen to much sports talk radio and we’ll reply that Ricky Williams’ mom spent 90 minutes on Internet sports talk radio this week.  Look, we *do* sports talk radio on the Internet and we want you to gently roll us out to pasture if we spend 90 minutes with anyone’s mom on the radio.  Even our own.
• An incredibly sweet story about Steve Garvey.  We’ll always grant you that Steve Garvey can be charming, especially to young women.
• Watch out, ESPN and Yahoo! Sports: you’ve got a competitor coming.
• This one’s mostly to piss off Sussman: Dan Dakich will get $175,000 to not coach a Big Ten team next season, on top of Kelvim Sampson’s $750,000.
• Must own items of 2008: The Andy Kaufman-Jerry Lawler action figures.  Great videos there for those of you under 30, but here’s another one:

And the Question of the Day as suggested by Nationals Journal and following our words on the subject recently: What are the rules on what jinxes a no-hitter?  In Nationals Journal’s case, does a blog post on the matter constitute a jinx?  After all, we did one, but we were careful to not use the Special Words.  This is wildly unimportant but fascinating to us, which makes it an ideal Friday question.