After procrastinating for some time, I downloaded the new Mavericks (aka, v. 10.9) of the Mac operating system. In general, the transition seems to have been smooth but there has been an odd quirk with respect to mail in that I am now being flooded with porn spam.
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I am not an early adopter of new technology. I tend to wait until I am sure that I really need or want it and often the new technology, like the mountain with Mohammed, comes to me without my seeking it, by becoming the default.
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Dr. John Michael Lonergan spent time in prison in Ohio for tax evasion, mail fraud, and healthcare fraud in Ohio and lost his license to practice medicine in 2005. But the forgiving people of Oklahoma decided in 2012 to let him practice in their state ‘under state supervision’ and in March 2013, the state medical board released him from the supervision and he was free to do what he wanted.
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Lawrence Mitchell, the dean of the law school at my university, has finally resigned from the deanship while continuing to be a tenured professor. He had been on a leave of absence while a lawsuit against him moved forward. The lawsuit had been brought by associate dean Raymond Ku who charged that Mitchell had retaliated against him for reporting numerous allegations of sexual misconduct involving students and faculty. (I know many of the law school faculty but have never met Mitchell who came here only in 2011. But I know and like Ku who has been here for some time. But not being in the law school, I have no inside knowledge on the merits of the charges.)
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Over at the Washington Monthly Mark Kleiman plugs the virtues of a new organization called Shatterproof that he thinks offers a promising way of helping people overcome alcohol and other drug addictions. That’s fine. What bothers me is this:
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The Cleveland Indians baseball team uses for promotional materials the image of the execrable Chief Wahoo that I said should have been removed a long time ago. But on Sunday the ,em>Plain Dealer, a big booster of the local sports teams, came out with an editorial saying it was time for it to go. They pointed out that the team has very slowly reduced its prominence and it was time to take the final step. This was the first time they had taken a stand on this issue, which itself tells you about how sensitive this topic is in this area, and it was clear that they were wading very gingerly into the fray, trying to find a gentle way to give the fans a way to change their minds.
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I was reading an article about Lyndon Johnson the other day and was surprised to learn that he was only 60 when he left office in 1969 and 64 when he died, four years later. I had always thought of Johnson as a really old guy, like Ronald Reagan.
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It must be quite nerve-wracking for an adolescent to tell her parents that she is gay. 15-year old Laurel decided that it would be easiest to tell her parents with a cake and an accompanying note. Neetzan Zimmerman tells us what the cake and the message were and what the response of the parents was.
As a lover of puns, I enjoyed Laurel’s approach.
My experience with the vast world of both gaming and virtual worlds is almost zero. I have played some basic computer games (the most sophisticated being Halo) and am terrible at them. My thumb dexterity is low and my approach is too cerebral and not instinctive enough. By the time I decide what to shoot at and what weapon to use, other players have easily killed me. I have come to the conclusion that the main effect in my playing these games is to enable my children to run up their scores.
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The collapse of the real estate bubble exacerbated a problem that some older mid-western cities like Cleveland faced in that decreasing population had left many homes empty. Since the real estate bubble resulted in the ownership of many homes being held by shell companies that were hard to trace, these building feel into disrepair and became eyesores since no one was being held responsible for their upkeep. This led to the problem of urban blight and some cities have tried to solve it by demolishing the buildings.
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