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.
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.”
I like to think of myself as someone not easily provoked to anger. But I do have hot buttons that can be pushed and one of them is when people are rude and insulting, especially when it is without any provocation. So I was immensely impressed with the patience of Lyft driver Shawn Pepas Lettman who was at the receiving end of a racist barrage from an obnoxious customer Robert Ortiz who was outraged, simply outraged, because his request for music was not acted on.
The traffic in London is horrible so moped use is booming. Food delivery services use freelance couriers on mopeds to deliver to their clients since they can get to their destinations in a reasonable time. But this has spawned the formation of gangs that attack these couriers, steal their bikes, and then use those bikes to commit crimes. The situation is so bad that couriers are forming their own defense groups.
The BBC gave out cameras to couriers to record what their life is like and captured a series of attacks by gangs.
In these days of cut-throat athletic competition, it is nice to find a sport that retains traditional values. I am talking about snail racing. I had not been aware that there have been championships since the 1960s.
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