Wednesday, October 16, 2024

News and Updates

1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.

2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.

3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”

4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.

5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.

6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.

7. I have two long term projects that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.

8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.

9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.

10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.

7 comments:

  1. 1. I’ve pretty much given up on (insert sport of choice here). I occasionally watch highlights of long-ago plays on YouTube because I can still appreciate individual talent however I find I no longer have the energy (let alone any actual desire) to sit through an entire game. Or, follow any particular team through the season. Seems too much like work, and I’m retired now.

    2. (See #1 above.)

    3. (See #1 above.)

    4. I no longer have a lawn, either. 😜

    5. I’m reasonably certain that if I were to submit my DNA for testing, it would show that I’m a Human Being of mostly European Ancestry. However, based solely on available evidence, I do have some doubts.

    6. Valuable Prize Just Announced: A mostly dysfunctional healthcare system.

    7. This is completely unrelated, but I’m currently trying to sell my vintage custom Washburn D25 twelve-string guitar through the local want ads. I’ve attracted the attention of two scammers that I’m stringing along - got them bidding against each other - in the last eighteen hours they have run the price up $1800 above my already unreasonable asking price. I’m experiencing great difficulty waiting till they send me the fraudulent Cashier’s Checks so I can: “refund the overpayment” to their “shipping agents’ to pay for “shipping”. 😈 Entertaining as hell. Yes, it is.

    8. I, for one, as evidenced herein, could also benefit from the services of a competent editor.

    10. It was 27° F (uncalculated° C) here Friday morning. Elko Mountain on the other side of the Interstate had a light dusting of snow reaching halfway to the valley floor that lasted until afternoon, when the high reached 61°F (uncalculated° C). Dropped all the way down to 34° F (uncalculated° C) this morning, high was 69°F (uncalculated° C). Forecasted to be back in the 80s Monday. (I have absolutely no interest in calculating that °C, either.) Sigh.

    Lucy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Another reason to hate the new comment page: I apparently failed to close the italics bracket at the end of "Announced:". The old page would not have allowed me to publish until that was closed.

    If possible, please be a competent editor and fix that for me, please.

    Lucy

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, the new comment feature is no more willing to let me edit comments than the old one so I suppose we'll just live with the italics. It kind of makes the place more festive, really. Something like that. :)

    1-3. I find these days that Random Sporting Events are pretty much all I have the energy for anymore. The great thing about sports is that they're all pretty much meaningless. You turn on a game (or perhaps even go to one!) and pick a team to cheer for (Go you people wearing my preferred laundry! Win!) and then either they do or they don't and the next morning the sun rises and the republic isn't any worse off than it was, at least not because of that. It's mindless fun and such things are in short supply of late.

    4. Our lawn would take me about 10 minutes to mow except that it is increasingly full of obstacles - raised bed gardens, temporary enclosures for the rabbits, and so on - and this adds both time and energy to a task I already don't like. One of my life goals, sadly unlikely to be realized at this late stage of my career, is to become affluent enough to pay other people to maintain my property for me, up to and including household projects.

    6. Play stupid games...

    7. Scammers deserve to be toyed with and baited. Enjoy!

    10. Last week: frost. Today: 82F. I'm going to miss winters.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, Let me see if I can turn the italics off with a solo close code.

    I think the scammers figured out that I was trolling them. Not a peep out of them since Saturday!

    Winters? I'm going to miss water. Looking at our water year we are 40% below average. We need at least 5 consecutive above-average precipitation years to get the water table back to where it was 20 years ago. I have seven neighbors who are pulling sand out of their wells and rely on bottled water for all of their drinking and culinary purposes.

    Lucy

    ReplyDelete

  5. Well, that would be a 'Nope'. Didn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, what da'know? I slipped a solo close code in on that last one and it worked! Will ceases never wonder?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Computers are just black boxes where the internet is stored as far as I can tell, so I will take your word for it. :) We live in an age of wonders, and we'll just add one more to the pile!

    Yeah, there's going to be a lot of hard realities faced in the near future. If you like near-future dystopian sci-fi, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife covers the impending water crisis pretty realistically in some ways. It was a depressing (but well written and worthwhile) book to read. Even in Wisconsin we've had a very dry time of it recently. Nothing like where you are, but dry enough.

    I suppose you've had all the fun you're going to get out of those scammers. No doubt the next batch will be popping up soon. There's a never-ending supply of those weeds.

    ReplyDelete

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