This story has received widespread coverage but I felt that I had to comment on it because these kinds of things infuriate me. Last year, I read the heartwarming story of a homeless man who gave his last $20 to a woman whose car had run out of gas. The woman and her boyfriend posted this story online and started a GoFundMe page to raise money for the homeless man and received over $400,000.
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Ohio has developed a reputation for producing grisly serial killers and psychopaths. Jeffrey Dahmer is perhaps the poster child for but there are so many competitors for that dubious honor. I don’t usually comment on such things but two years ago in April 2016, there was a particularly bizarre case. That was the systematic execution style murder of eight members of a family in four different homes. Seven of them had been shot in their beds. The case remained unsolved but just yesterday authorities finally announced arrests and the information that was released was startling.
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this french bulldog playing with a balloon is the most wholesome thing on the internet today😊 pic.twitter.com/9wvypOZafS
— Ian Laking (@IHLaking) November 8, 2018
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.
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.
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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