Good News on X: Rain Bought the Rays a Day, a Star Turned Green and It's Pasta Day

Saturday, and the good news came with a rain delay. Literally. Cleveland's weather gave the Rays an extra night of sleep, the Lightning have a matinee, Manatee County is about to have more pickleball courts than some towns have stop signs, and a star 280 light-years away turned out to be the color of a lime popsicle. Coffee's on. Here's what people on X were happy about since last night.

Cleveland's rain gave the Rays a day

Friday's ALCS Game 4 never happened. It started in a delay, and a little after 9 p.m. the Guardians made it official: tonight's game has been postponed. So Game 4 is tonight at 8 p.m. ET in Cleveland on TBS and truTV, per ESPN, and Game 5 moved to Sunday at 5 p.m., still in Cleveland. Cleveland leads the series 2-1.

The upside is that Nick Martinez still gets the ball for Tampa Bay, and the Rays were happy about that before anybody knew about the rain.

Nick's the pick #ForTampaBay | #Postseason

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) See it on X

The line, per DraftKings via ESPN (pulled about 9:25 a.m. ET Saturday): Cleveland is a slight moneyline favorite, CLE -112 / TB -108. Run line Tampa Bay -1.5 (+165), Cleveland +1.5 (-202). O/U 6.5. It's a coin flip with a little Cleveland on it.

If the Rays win one of the two in Cleveland, the series comes home to the Trop for Games 6 and 7. The team says drinks are buy-one-get-one from when the gates open until an hour before first pitch on Monday and Tuesday, beer, wine and the non-alcoholic stuff too. That's two good reasons to win tonight.

Odds are information, not advice. 21+ only. If gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER.

The Bolts have a 4 o'clock

The Lightning host the Vancouver Canucks this afternoon at 4 p.m. at Benchmark International Arena, per ESPN, streaming on ESPN+. Tampa Bay comes in 5-2-0 and 4-0-0 at home, fresh off Thursday's overtime win. Vancouver is 2-6-1. The team's social folks are already in weekend mode.

Saturdays are better with the Bolts

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) See it on X

The line, per DraftKings via ESPN (pulled about 9:25 a.m. ET): Tampa Bay -1.5 puck line (-162), Vancouver +1.5 (+136). Moneyline TB -395 / VAN +310. O/U 6.5. Hockey at 4 and baseball at 8 is a pretty good Saturday plan.

Lakewood Ranch is getting a pool the Olympics would use

Manatee County posted a first look this morning at the Athletics & Aquatics Center at Premier Sports Campus North, and it's a lot. Per the county, there's an Olympic-size competition pool, a second pool for lessons and aquatic activities, and 24 pickleball courts, with 14 of them covered.

Manatee County, get ready to make a splash! A new hub for pickleball and swimming is coming to Premier Sports Campus North.

— Manatee County Government (@ManateeGov) Watch on X

The county's facility page fills in the rest. It's at 16350 Rangeland Parkway. The big pool is a geothermal Myrtha stretch pool, 52 meters long and 8 feet at the deep end. There's a 25-yard warm-up and therapy pool, 10 outdoor lighted courts on top of the 14 covered ones (those have fans, bless whoever thought of that), a standalone hitting wall, a pro shop and a walking trail. Memberships at G.T. Bray and John H. Marble work there too. It's still marked coming soon, and the county hasn't put a public opening date on that page yet.

Twenty-four pickleball courts. I'd like to formally apologize to every tennis player in East Manatee in advance.

Astronomers found the first green star

Stars come in red, orange, yellow, white and blue. Green was supposed to be impossible. Then a University of Warwick team went looking. In a study published Oct. 15, led by Dr. Mark Hollands, they worked out what white dwarfs, the tiny dense leftovers of dead stars, would look like up close. Most of them came out the colors you'd expect. One, WD J1330+6435, about 280 light-years away, came out chartreuse green.

The reason is that it swallowed pieces of its own planetary system. That rocky debris put sodium in its atmosphere, and the sodium soaks up the orange part of its light. The green is what's left. Per Warwick, no other star, living or dead, has ever been credibly reported as green. Hollands' line is the one everybody's quoting: "Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction." The team also found white dwarfs that would look pink, cyan and purple. The full paper is in RAS Techniques and Instruments if you like charts.

It went everywhere overnight after CNN posted it. Fair. A lime-colored star is the most Florida thing space has ever done.

DeepSeek dropped a faster model overnight

For the tech crowd: DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 early this morning. The company says it scores better on benchmarks, finishes tasks faster and writes shorter answers than the last version, and it's live on its website, app and API.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is here! Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version.

— DeepSeek (@deepseek_ai) See it on X

The weights are open, too. It's up on Hugging Face for anybody who wants to run it themselves. The demo thread shows it building games and 3D models from scratch. I asked my toaster to build a game once. It made toast. Progress.

Monday, anybody can play the new WoW for free

Gamers, block off a little time Monday. Blizzard says anyone can jump into World of Warcraft: Forever on Oct. 19 for an official server stress test, no beta invite required.

Anyone can hop into WoW: Forever for a limited time on Oct 19 for our official server Stress Test! No Beta access needed.

— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) See it on X

The job is literally to log in and pile onto the servers to see if they hold up. It's the one time showing up with 50 friends and breaking something is the whole point.

It's National Pasta Day. Also Sweetest Day.

National Day Calendar has Oct. 17 down as National Pasta Day, and October is National Pizza Month, so carbs are having a very good month. Today is also National Sweetest Day, which falls on the third Saturday in October and has been nudging people to do small nice things for more than 100 years. And it's National Whole Hog Barbecue Day, which lines up with the North Carolina State Fair.

My plan for this rainy Saturday: a big bowl of something with noodles, Bolts at 4, Rays at 8, and sharing the garlic bread with somebody. That counts as Sweetest Day. I checked.

That's the good news for Saturday. Hockey this afternoon, baseball tonight, a pool you can't swim in yet and a green star you'll never see without a very big telescope. Stay dry.

— Sandy