Yesterday there was a huge parade for the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team for their come-from-behind win on Sunday of the NBA championship. It was the biggest event in the history of the city with a crowd estimated at well over a million people thronging the parade route that, because of the crush of people, took four hours to wind its way through the city and end at the downtown mall where a stage had been set up.
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The people of Cleveland are delirious today as their basketball team the Cavaliers won the NBA championship beating the Golden State Warriors 93-89. One has to have lived in this city to really appreciate the powerful emotions that are coursing through them. The city has suffered from all manner of economic difficulties in the last half century or so and like so many people in difficult economic times, they seek escapism and validation and self-worth in sports, however ephemeral that may be.
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Muhammad Ali died yesterday and the tributes are pouring in. His greatest accomplishment may have been that he persuaded so many people (including me) to become fans of a brutal activity (I cannot call it sport) that should be despised out of existence. But even more than his boxing skills, what electrified people like me around the world who detested what the US was doing to Vietnam was what he said when he refused to be drafted to fight in that horrible war.
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It happened again.

I got a notice from my university saying that there was a problem with some of the university-wide software that was resulting in some services responding very slowly or not at all, and that they were working on it and apologizing for any problems that this may be causing users. So far, so good. But then they went and added “Thank you for your patience”, something that I see frequently and also hear on recordings when you call a business and there is some waiting involved to speak to a human being.
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Most people are familiar with the phrase ‘shell game’ which denotes the shifty moving around of something so that one finds it hard to trace its location. It comes from a trick that is popular with street magicians that have been used for ages to fleece bystanders who try to bet that they know under which cup a ball has been hidden.
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The controversy over who gets to use what public bathroom continues to rage. Many of the arguments by opponents of allowing people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity rather than to the gender they were assigned at birth have been based of exaggerated fears of perceived risks.
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By now pretty much everyone must have heard about the academic who was taken off a plane and questioned by authorities because the passenger seated next to him while the plane was waiting to be cleared for takeoff had alerted the authorities that he was behaving suspiciously, concentrating on writing strange symbols on a piece of paper and rebuffing her attempts at conversation as she tried to find out what he was up to. It did not help that he was youngish, swarthy looking, and bearded.
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I have recently encountered many instances of people on the radio and on TV using the word ‘misnomer’ (which has a dictionary definition of “a name that is wrong or not proper or appropriate”) when they seem to mean ‘misconception’ or ‘misunderstanding’. This interview on NPR with an Indiana congressman provides an example of this increasingly common usage. He uses the word at the 2:33 mark in response to a question that begins at around 2:00.
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Suppose you are a dog and your human companion leaves you in the car to go to the store and is away for too long. What would you do? This dog knows exactly what to do. I also like the way the dog looks at the person filming as if to say, “Do you have a problem with this?”
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