Thoughts on the blog comments policy

Readers may recall that at one time I was becoming frustrated with the tone of the comments in this blog, with few people endlessly and acrimoniously sniping at each other over trivial things, treating them with disdain, being needlessly sarcastic, acting superior, and generally creating an unpleasant atmosphere for everyone.

So I introduced some harsh measures such as a limit on the number of comments that could be made to a single post and what I would not tolerate. You can see that policy here. As a consequence, a very few people were either banned or received private messages from me that they were skirting the line.

I must say that the blog comments have become so much better. People are actually talking to one another, responding positively and collegially to others even they disagree, and contributing very useful information that I find enlightening. Sometimes people ask questions and others respond thoughtfully with answers instead of being dismissive. The comments on this post are a good example of what I am talking about because in them I learned a lot about naval logistics.

It is just what I hoped the comments section should be like and a rarity in the world of the internet. I find the comments section to be very pleasurable to read now and hope others do to.

So thanks everyone!

Garfield Sobers, cricketing legend, dies at age 89

In any sports, one can always engage in endless debates as to who was the greatest ever player in some capacity. But in cricket it is universally acknowledge that Garfield Sobers was the greatest all-rounder the game has even known, and it was announced today that he had died.

Sir Garry Sobers, an undisputed cricketing great and widely regarded as the sport’s greatest all-rounder, has died aged 89.
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The late Richie Benaud, a revered broadcaster and former Australia captain, described Sobers as “the greatest all-round cricketer the world has seen”. He wrote: “Sobers was a brilliant batsman, splendid fielder, particularly close to the wicket, and a bowler of extraordinary skill, whether bowling with the new ball, providing orthodox left-arm spin or over-the-wrist spin.”

Cricket, as in many sports, has players who excel in one particular facet of the game. In cricket, the three areas are batting, fast bowling (where the bowler uses sheer speed to get the batter out), and slow bowling, where the bowler spins the ball using fingers or the wrist in order to get the ball to change directions after bouncing, and thus fool the batter. An all-rounder is someone who can both bat and bowl well. Most all-rounders are those who are primarily batting specialists who can bowl reasonably well, or primarily bowlers who can bat reasonably well. But Sobers was someone who could bat, bowl fast, and bowl slow at the highest levels. He could also field very well.
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The skill of headline writers

I scan a lot of news sites and in the process come across items that are not newsworthy in the sense of being important but are amusing and quirky. But there are some items that keep appearing in the headlines so frequently and so prominently that they signify something important but that I never click on.

One of these is the dispute involving Harry and Megan Windsor and his family. Such intrafamily conflicts can be very unpleasant and I do not wish them on anyone but I do not really need breathless commentary on that particular soap opera. The other is the impending wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. While I am pleased for any happy couple taking such a decisive step, the details of this event have zero interest for me.

But given how these things constantly appear on the newsfeeds, clearly a lot of people must be interested in them. And it testifies to the skill of news headline writers that even though I don’t follow up on the links, I still know something about these two things just from the headlines.

Good grief! How can people do this?

Most of us take some steps to look our best selves, especially if we are going out in public. Usually those are limited to how we dress and some minimal efforts at grooming. But as with so many things, there are those who take this to an extreme, leading to a phenomenon known as ‘looksmaxxing’, one of the recent trends that have had the suffix ‘maxxing’ added to it to give the cachet of sounding cool and hip.

Perhaps the most viral example of maxxing is looksmaxxing, a cultural phenomenon that originated in the incel (a.k.a. involuntary celibate) community, encouraging boys and young men to take intense, often dangerous, measures to enhance their physical appearance. That includes undergoing intrusive surgeries, using steroids to bulk up, or using a hammer to smash your facial bones in hopes of accentuating one’s jawline. Looksmaxxing promises one sole goal: that by being exceedingly and unattainably hot, men can achieve the utmost confidence, social clout and sexual success.

The article goes on to describe other forms of maxxing, all involving taking some ordinary activity to the extreme, including food, with things like protein and fiber being targeted for maxxing.

On TikTok and Instagram, the protein hysteria reached a fever pitch. Influencers showed off their high-protein diets filled with protein powders, eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese, poultry and red meat. Some also pushed for eating more high-protein snacks, ranging from meat sticks and cold cuts to homemade chicken chips made from seasoned, ground meat. Everyone was hellbent on maxing out on the macro.
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That’s all to say that our food was never intended to be maxxed. Certain nutrients and so-called superfoods were never meant to be heavily prioritized at the expense of other beneficial ingredients. Regardless of how severe the spectrum is, maxxing implies that more is always better. It’s in the name. But that’s not what healthy eating is all about. Per the World Health Organization, a healthy diet is made up of four basic principles: adequacy, balance, moderation and diversity. Maxxing, for the most part, fails to satisfy three of those principles — adequacy, balance and diversity.

It also raises the question of how much food maxxing is necessary in the future to undo the damage of previous maxxing trends. First, it’s protein. Then, fiber, which many U.S. adults aren’t eating enough of already. What’s next? Carb-maxxing to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates in our diets? Or perhaps, raw greens-maxxing?

As the age-old adage goes, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” It feels especially pertinent in a new era of maxx eating.

It seems to me that people are disregarding the health of their future selves by emphasizing short-term gains and ignoring the possibility of serious long-term damage to their bodies. We will not know the real consequences of such actions until these people age and by then it may be too late to repair any damage. We can place some of the blame on so-called influencers who boast that they have become successful by doing all these things and selling products that they claim they used to achieve that look, whether that is true or not.

Can we please stop using this film cliche?

During the filming of a new action film, lead actors Jonathan Majors and JC Kilcoyne tumbled backwards through a glass window after one of them was ‘shot’.

The incident was captured on video obtained by Deadline, which is embedded below. Multiple sources confirm to Deadline that the accident occurred after the window was replaced with an unsecured sheet of tempered glass to be purposefully shattered in a later stunt that did not involve any actors.

Since the tempered glass was only sitting loosely in the window, both the actors and the sheet of glass fell about six feet to the ground. Kilcoyne required stitches “all over his hands” after the incident, sources with knowledge of the incident say.

This trope of someone getting shot and falling backwards and breaking through a glass window is a cliche beloved of action film directors. As I have written before, a bullet does not have enough momentum to do more that cause a human to move back more than an inch or so, let alone be flung back and break through a window. In this case, a single bullet did that to two people.
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Blog comments policy

I usually post my blog comments policy at the beginning of the month for the benefit of new readers. Rather than posting the whole thing again, here is a link to the last time I posted it.

I enjoy reading the comments and it has become more pleasurable now. One of the things that used to annoy me were those commenters who seemed to feel the need to show themselves to be clever at the expense of others, usually by making needlessly sarcastic and denigrating comments.

It is also the case that long time commenters get the know each other and sometimes they will use that knowledge to snipe at another commenter based on their history, just to score a debating point even though it had nothing to do with the current post. It is somewhat like people in long-term relationships who know each other well and will dredge up past statements to try and ‘win’ an argument.

Thankfully, that is not happening anymore.

Explosive growth of legal gambling in America

When I was around 13 years of age, our neighbors had five children, three of whom were close in age to me. They would invite me to play card games at their place and we played for money. It was not high stakes in any absolute sense but it was for me since all I had was just the little pocket money that my parents gave me. So I did have thrill (if you want to call it that) of fearing a real loss. It was exciting to gamble and I was quickly getting drawn in and looked forward to playing after school. But I would end up losing consistently. After a while, while I could not prove it, I became convinced that the siblings were cheating by colluding against me. They were Indians and would sometimes speak and sing in Hindi, a language that is not spoken in Sri Lanka and that I did not know, and I think that they were communicating with each other. Anyway, I got tired of losing in an unfair game and stopped playing with them after a while. It was my first taste of how the gambling system is usually rigged against you and I lost my taste for it and never got attracted to it again.

Gambling in sports in the US has an ugly history with players accused of adjusting their play in order to make money by getting particular results. This led to federal laws that banned it and for the longest time it was restricted to just in-person gambling in the state of Nevada, primarily Las Vegas. Professional sports leagues vigorously opposed any attempts to legalize it nationwide, arguing that it would lead to the death of sports due to suspicions of cheating. But in 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, saying that the constitution did not allow for this federal power and that it was up to the states to decide whether they wanted to allow gambling or not, and then it was off to the races, as states vied to attract gamblers.
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