I KILLED THE PRESIDENT OF PARAGUAY WITH A FORK.  HOW HAVE YOU BEEN?  On this back to work Monday, you can be thankful that your answer to "what did you do over vacation" is not "attempted to overthrow the government of the Gambia."

CANCER SUCKS, TRULY:  R.I.P. Stuart Scott, 49, one of the men who made ESPN what it is, and brought a fan's enthusiasm to the anchor chair. Ugh.

added: Dan Fienberg:

If you look at Scott's legacy on "SportsCenter," his was a shift of tone every bit as much as a shift of vernacular. With Berman leading the way, there was never a lack of populist enthusiasm at the "SportsCenter" desk, but the erudite irony that Olbermann and Patrick brought to the table, a style no doubt influenced by David Letterman in late night, was already in the process of shifting to ironic detachment as various subsequent anchors put their spin on making the show theirs. Scott was not detached. He was passionate. He was excited. He ended sentences with vocal exclamation points.  Personally, I'm not sure that "SportsCenter" could have survived an ongoing descent into sport-driven sarcasm. Scott curbed that trend and shifted the way fans talked about sports. 

And this can't be said enough: The way ESPN talks about sports remains the way America talks about sports and Scott is a big part of the reason for that.

HATERS GONNA HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE:  Eater.com presents the 15 most scathing restaurant reviews of 2014. Here's one from one-time ALOTT5MA Fave (yes, we still have that title) Jay Rayner:

I’ve said it many times: I have no problem spending big money on meals out. I’ve paid more than £282 of my own dosh for lunch. It just needs to be utterly memorable, the stuff of recollections whispered breathily late at night. It can’t be a pallid fart of mediocrity, priced for some dodgy clientele that’s ripped off the gross national product of a small impoverished nation and is now domiciled in London for tax reasons. That’s what your money gets you at Quattro Passi: clumsy cooking, trying to make itself look grown up and clever, generally by the application of flaky precious metals, like King Midas has suffered psoriasis over your dinner. Yes, really. We’ll get there.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PAY PHONE AT BEST BUY?  Buzzfeed determines that it would've been impossible for Ryan Atwood to reach Marissa Cooper before midnight, as memorably depicted on The O.C.  

NO DICE:  538 looks at the immensely popular Cold War board game Twilight Struggle. 

ALOTT5MA FRIDAY GRAMMAR RODEO TUESDAY YEAR-END CHRIS TRAEGER FAREWELL EDITION:  Notable smart person Steven Pinker talks a lot about grammar with The Atlantic:

Porch: What do you think about the flagrant misuse of the word “literally”? Does it literally make your head explode? 

Pinker: [Laughs.] It’s understandable why people do it. We are always in search of superlatives, of ways of impressing upon our hearer that something that happened is noteworthy or even extraordinary. And the words we use to signal that eventually lose their meaning. 

Porch: Like “awesome.” 

Pinker: “Awesome” is a recent example. In the UK, “brilliant” is used for the most banal observations. Before that, words like “terrific,” meaning inspiring terror, “wonderful,” inspiring wonder, “fabulous,” worthy of fable. We see the fossils of dead superlatives that our ancestors overused the way we overuse “awesome.” “Literally” is a victim of a similar type of inflation. The figurative use doesn’t mean the language is deteriorating. Hyperbole has probably been around as long as language has been around.... 

Porch: Does the comma go inside the closed quotation mark or outside?

Pinker: If I ruled the world, it would go outside.

DIVIDENDS WILL BE PAID IN CUSTARD:  Shake Shack has filed for an initial public offering.