Jon Marthaler bakes up a batch of delicious links just for you. Other times, you can find him here and here. Quickly, before we get to the links, though, let us share the gist of an e-mail we received last night from the powers that be at the Star Tribune:

Today we made a change in the way comments function on blog posts that should be good news to users. Instead of showing five comments at the end of a post and pages of comments after that, all comments now fall at the bottom of a blog post, in one long stream. It's much more similar to what our users were accustomed to in the old Wordpress environment, and one that makes discussions and debate simpler.

So: hopefully that's good news! Now, Jon -- how about those links?

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Happy Saturday in the State of Hockey ... where our two best-known teams managed zero points and one goal last night. Not a banner day.

On the bright side, Michael "The Greatest" Russo passes along some good news: the comments are about to start working better around here. Hopefully you will now only be one click away from the genius of Stu and Clarence Swamptown, rather than the four or five clicks (and 45-60 seconds) that stood in your way before. Bravo to the Star Tribune for finally seeing the light, and putting things somewhat back to the way they used to be.

A few links for today:

*I'll keep linking to stadium truthers (this one is from Vikes Geek) as often as I can. As much as the league and the Vikings seem to want us to believe otherwise, the NFL is not Lake Wobegon; not every team can be above average in revenue. One team will always, always be last in the league in local revenue. Given that the Vikings have controllable costs (a hard salary cap) and a gigantic TV contract buttressing their revenues (just over $96 million per team this year), I'm having a hard time feeling bad for them.

*As for the Twins: Stu sets the entire off-season agenda in one fell swoop. And Erin at Plunking Gomez is actually - gasp - defending Nick Punto.

*Quick, simple TV ratings news: hockey ratings are up. NASCAR ratings, on the other hand, are in the tank and not getting better. Did all of America move from North Carolina to Massachusetts while nobody was looking?

*And finally, proof positive that getting a paper published in a leading journal doesn't necessarily mean that it contains even the merest whiff of common sense. A report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed claims that colleges charge less for women's basketball tickets than men's basketball tickets. So far, you're still on board, right? Makes sense, right? Well, according to the authors, this is a sign of institutional discrimination -- that Division I universities far and wide are engaged in a heinous conspiracy to hold down women's basketball, not that more people want to watch men's basketball and thus will pay more. Nope; gotta be a far-reaching, bald-faced conspiracy.

Really, it's nice to know that there are still those out there in academia that are willing to climb aboard Space Shuttle Insanity and fly that thing head-on into the harsh, unforgiving surface of Planet Crazypants. Aim for the Lackofsense Crater, and hang on tight!

That'll do it for me. Enjoy your Saturday -- and hope for some goals, tonight, if you have some spare time for wishing.