Good News on X: The Rays Tied It, Two Pelicans Came Home and Your Brain Blinks 15 Times a Second

Sunday, and it finally feels like October. The front took the humidity with it, the National Weather Service in Ruskin has us mostly sunny and around 80, and the only real complaint is the wind. Meanwhile, the Rays did something in Cleveland last night that changed everybody's mood. Here's what people on X were happy about since then.

The Rays tied the ALCS, and Game 5 is at 5

Down 2-1 in the series, in 46-degree weather, a day after a rainout, Tampa Bay went into Cleveland and won Game 4, 7-3. Per the ESPN play-by-play, Jonathan Aranda had three hits and drove in two, Junior Caminero's double in the sixth put the Rays ahead for good, and Yandy Díaz finished it with a two-run homer in the ninth. Richie Palacios had three hits too. The Rays' social team had a very good night.

Well go on then, Yandy!

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) Watch on X

So it's 2-2 and a best-of-three now. Game 5 is today at 5 p.m. ET at Progressive Field on TBS and truTV, with Drew Rasmussen starting for Tampa Bay against Cleveland's Parker Messick, per ESPN. Win one more in Cleveland and the series comes back to the Trop. The team already posted the Game 6 ticket link at 11:35 last night, which is the kind of confidence I respect.

The line, per DraftKings via ESPN (pulled about 9:20 a.m. ET Sunday): the Rays are the moneyline favorite, TB -136 / CLE +113. Run line Tampa Bay -1.5 (+135), Cleveland +1.5 (-163). O/U 6.5. The Rays opened at -128 and the price has gone up since, so people noticed last night too.

The Bucs are home at 1

While you're waiting for 5 o'clock, the Buccaneers host the Pittsburgh Steelers at 1 p.m. ET at Raymond James Stadium on CBS, per ESPN. The Bucs come in 1-4, the Steelers 3-2. It's a home game in the first real fall weather of the year, and the Krewe is already up.

Raise the flags, Krewe! It's GAMEDAY!

— Tampa Bay Buccaneers (@Buccaneers) See it on X

The line, per DraftKings via ESPN (pulled about 9:20 a.m. ET): Pittsburgh is a 2.5-point favorite, PIT -2.5 (-115), TB +2.5 (-105). Moneyline PIT -142 / TB +120. O/U 38.5. That's a low total. Somebody's defense is expected to show up. The Bucs opened as the favorite, for what that's worth.

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

The Bolts came back, then went to Pig Jig

The Lightning spotted Vancouver a 2-0 lead Saturday afternoon and then didn't let the Canucks have the puck much after that. Per the ESPN box score, Nikita Kucherov scored twice in the second period to tie it, Jake Guentzel and Pontus Holmberg scored in the third, and Tampa Bay outshot Vancouver 35-14 in a 4-2 win.

CALL IT A #BOLTSWIN

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

Then the team posted the best two-step plan of the weekend: "Step 1: Bolts win at @benchmark_arena. Step 2: Backstage at @TampaPigJig." The Tampa Pig Jig ran Saturday at Julian B. Lane Park on the river, with Thomas Rhett headlining over Midland, Kameron Marlowe, Sister Hazel and Cassidy Daniels. It's a barbecue festival with a cause: the money goes to NephCure, a nonprofit working on research and treatment for the rare kidney diseases FSGS and nephrotic syndrome. The organizers were feeling it at the end of the night.

TAMPA, HOW'S THAT FOR YEAR 15?! Thomas Rhett brought the hits, you brought the energy, and together we gave Pig Jig a night to remember.

— TampaPigJig (@TampaPigJig) See it on X

The Bolts are off until Tuesday night in Vegas. They earned the brisket.

Two pelicans took a day off in Pittsburgh. Both came home.

This one's for everybody who has watched a pelican stare at their bait bucket. Saturday morning, two brown pelicans named Joey and Felicity left their habitat at the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium and went for a swim in the Allegheny River. The zoo set up a pelican hotline, asked people not to chase them and to call in sightings, and by 4 p.m. Joey was netted near Sharpsburg. Felicity followed that evening.

Two brown pelicans, Joey and Felicity, are safely back at the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium this evening with no injuries after leaving their habitat this morning.

— Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium (@PghZoo) See it on X

Per the zoo, it took boats from Pittsburgh River Rescue and Three Rivers Waterkeeper, help from the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Aviary, and more than a dozen calls from people who spotted them. Both are getting a full checkup and will go back to Kids Kingdom with their roommate, a pelican named Pierre, and their neighbors, a colony of Humboldt penguins. Down here a pelican on a piling is Tuesday. Up there it's an all-hands river operation. I like that they took it that seriously.

Your brain flips between two pictures about 15 times a second

For the science crowd: UC Berkeley neuroscientist Doris Tsao's lab posted a preprint Friday that's going around. The team, led by Janis Hesse, recorded thousands of neurons in monkeys while showing each eye a different face, so one face is seen and the other is hidden from awareness even though it's right there. They found the brain doesn't stay locked on the face you see. It alternates, roughly every 60 milliseconds, between the seen face and the hidden one, and they could rebuild both faces from the neural activity.

We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis.

— Doris Tsao (@doristsao) See it on X

The paper is up on bioRxiv and hasn't been peer reviewed yet, so call it exciting, not settled. Tsao's thread walks through it if you want the long version. Her point is that awareness may be about timing more than about one spot in the brain. Fifteen times a second explains a lot about how I read a menu.

Taylor Swift played "The Fate of Ophelia" live for the first time

At the Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles last night, Taylor Swift gave the lead single from The Life of a Showgirl its first live performance. The clip went everywhere overnight.

Taylor Swift performs "The Fate of Ophelia" live for the first time at the Academy Museum Gala.

— Variety (@Variety) Watch on X

The museum's own account spent the evening posting arrivals, including honorees Colman Domingo and Charlize Theron, who got its Icon Award and talked about her career going all the way back to Children of the Corn 3. Everybody starts somewhere.

It's National Chocolate Cupcake Day

National Day Calendar has Oct. 18 down as National Chocolate Cupcake Day. It's also National No Beard Day, which asks the bearded to go clean-shaven, and National Exascale Day, started in 2019 by the supercomputer company Cray, now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Exascale is a computer doing a billion billion calculations a second, a 1 with 18 zeros, which is why it lands on 10/18.

So my Sunday plan is the Bucs at 1, the Rays at 5, a chocolate cupcake somewhere in between, and keeping the beard. A billion billion calculations a second and the computer still can't tell me if the Rays cover.

That's the good news for Sunday. Two games, two pelicans, one cupcake. Go sit outside while it still feels like this.