I normally do not watch commercial TV but for the past six weeks, I have been watching season 3 of The Good Place on NBC rather than waiting for about a year to watch all the episodes commercial-free on Netflix. As expected I have found the commercials to be annoying though I understand the business model that requires TV networks to use them to pay for the programming. I just wish the commercial breaks were not so frequent. Maybe fewer but longer breaks, say one at the beginning of a half-hour episode, one in the middle, and one at the end.
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The second game in the 12-game contest between champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana is currently underway in London. The first game was a marathon seven-hour game with 115 moves that ended in a draw, with analysts feeling that Carlsen had a chance of winning while playing black but blundered late in the game.

You can watch the second game via a livestream below along with commentary by two analysts. The actual board is in the small box with the large board being used by the analysts who seem, along with Carlsen, to have been taken by surprise by the 10th move by Caruana who is playing black. There is also a live blog of the game

It has been a long time since I played chess seriously, or at all for that matter. I am not sure of the rules of these championships. Given the power of computers now, are the players during their breaks allowed to consult computers and friends or are they kept isolated from all contact with the outside world? I would expect the latter but just don’t know.

Surely, in a head-to-head contest, a cat should easily defeat a rat? But that is not what the video below shows. This is not natural.

(Via Carla Sinclair)

There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

I will be leaving today to spend a few days visiting my grandson (and also my daughter and son-in-law of course, but I have my priorities) so blogging may be somewhat sporadic. But playing with him will be a nice distraction from all the pre-election political nonsense.

I just noticed that sometime on October 23, this blog had passed the nine million unique page views mark.

Thanks to all who come and read and comment.

BuzzFeed News reports that Lawrence Krauss will retire from Arizona State University in May 2019, following the many charges against him for inappropriate sexual contact that the university investigated and found some of them credible. The dean of his school had earlier called for him to be fired, which made his future at the institution untenable.
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I have expressed before my dislike of the fact that cheating in baseball by tricking the umpires is not only not punished, but the players and media gloat over their success in duping on on-field officials. That strikes me as disgraceful. Another thing I dislike is not cheating but involves the fact that spectators can, in some instances, interfere with the action. This can happen because spectators can sit right behind the wall that designates the boundary. So if a ball is hit over the wall, you can have a situation where the fielder leaps to catch it before, or even after, it reaches the wall, while spectators, rather than moving away and giving the fielder room to make the play, also try to catch the ball and interfere.
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An Air India pilot displays an incredible level of insouciance.

Boeing 737 flies into brick wall – and just keeps going

An Air India pilot flew a Boeing 737 through a brick wall Friday. Incredibly, that marked the beginning of its journey and not the end.

The jet not only clobbered the top of a five-foot perimeter wall but also destroyed a small landing guide tower as it climbed out of Tiruchirappalli International Airport in Tamil Nadu, India, shortly after midnight, the Times of India reported.

With 130 passengers on board, it was bound from the southern tip of India to Dubai across the ocean. And despite the audible and obvious collision, the pilot apparently saw no reason not to continue on.
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Close to my home is a French cuisine restaurant called Edwins where I have eaten a couple of times. What is different about this restaurant is that all the workers are ex-convicts, some of whom were convicted of serious crimes. Shannon Carrier visited Cleveland and found Edwins through recommendations on Yelp and describes her experience eating there. She also talked with the owner Brandon Chrostowski, who as a young man was jailed for drug possession and evading arrest but thinks that because he was white, he got off more easily with a probation sentence.
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One of the weirdest trends is where people pay enormous amounts of money for clothes items that look well-worn or are discards. We know that people are willing to pay more for so-called ‘distressed’ jeans that have holes in the knees to suggest that they are well worn when in fact the holes are created by the manufacturer. Rusty Blazenhoff writes about a more extreme example of this, where an Italian luxury brand company named Golden Goose charges $530 for a pair of sneakers that are worn down and held together by tape.

TThis is an example of ‘poverty chic’, something that rich people indulge in. It is well known that people who are struggling financially or are poor are the ones who try to dress as well as they can, to hide that fact from casual acquaintances. It is people who are rich who can afford to adopt the scruffy look because everyone knows they are rich. If anyone does mistake them for being poor, it is a source of humor to them. It is a form of condescension, a way of saying, “Look at me. I am so rich that I can dress like this.”