Happy belated Fourth of July to our American readers, and Happy July 4, 2012 to the rest of the world! As many of you know, this past March I relocated to Washington, DC after nine years in San Francisco. While I do love San Francisco, I went to college in DC and always enjoyed my time here, so I'm excited to be back. This year marked my first Fourth of July in DC, having always been gone during my college summers. I rolled down to the National Mall for the fireworks, and was duly impressed. How did you spend your Fourth?
Given that the Fourth is a midweek holiday this year, a lot of folks seem to be using this as an excuse to take the whole week off. There's nothing wrong with that, but it results in days like yesterday that were incredibly quiet on the news and general football writing front. Given that, I'll try and get a little more creative in some of the links. Many will be non-49ers news, but I figured they provide a little something to enjoy on a given day. Also, for at least a couple days, I'm experimenting with a slightly later time for the Nuggets. This isn't permanent, so don't fret.
Please feel free to use this as an open link dump throughout the day. While we have other posts going into specific topics, this can act as an open thread for a variety of content. We still keep politics and religion out of the conversation, but if you see a link to a random interesting story, even if it is not sports-related, feel free to dump it in here. It's that time of year.
This is now a couple days old, but I honestly think this is the best story you'll read today, and one of the best you'll read this week. Chad Johnson (formerly Chad Ocho Cinco, but I believe he changed his name back), got married yesterday. The day before the wedding he got a tweet from a grieving widow who had lost her husband a couple weeks prior. She tweeted him just asking for his prayers during a tough time. Johnson responded by getting her set up with a ticket to come to his wedding so she could have a good time and try and enjoy herself for one day. It's one day and obviously it will take a lot to get over the loss of a loved one, but this is a pretty cool thing for Johnson to do.
Mike Sando took a look at some recent rule changes that will allow stadiums to get louder and do more to fire up their fans. This could make road trips a little more interesting. It can already be tough in a loud environment, so we'll see if this results in an increase in false starts.
Ryan Van Bibber put together a ranking of every set of safeties across the NFL. We'll take a closer look later today or tomorrow, but for now, RVB ranked the 49ers seventh behind the Steelers, Seahawks, Cardinals, Bills, Chiefs and Ravens.
The folks at 49ers.com continue to provide a variety of content. They put together a Q&A with tight end Konrad Reuland, and then began training camp previews looking at the quarterback position.
Being a Sheep
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