In the opening match of the World T20 tournament that began today, New Zealand pulled off a great win against hosts India. New Zealand batted first and managed to score just 126/7 in their allotted 20 overs, a poor score in a format where you need to score about 160 runs if you bat first. But India suffered a spectacular batting collapse and were all out for a mere 79, giving the Kiwis a big victory.
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An hour or so ago, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio Democratic primary. I went to my usual polling place near my home and there was no line at all though people were there voting. It is hard for me to compare the turnout based on my own experience since normally I voted early in the day before going to work. This time, taking advantage of my retired status, I went in the middle of the day.
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The tale of Marco Rubio is in some ways a sad but familiar one of a man whose vaulting ambition leads him to try and grab the crown before it is his time and fails. We have the spectacle of a young man, gifted with good looks, fluency of speech, and the ability to win elections at the state and local level, who then decides that he could become president even before he has built up a record of concrete achievements. In order to do that he takes careful stock of whose support he needs and carefully cultivates everyone who can help him on his way, such as the party establishment and big money backers.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discusses the fight between Apple and the FBI about the latter’s demand that Apple weaken its encryption sufficiently to let law enforcement gain access to the data in phones. Meanwhile, other technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Snapchat are also increasing the security of their products.
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Pretty much everyone knows that Hillary Clinton put her foot in it when she praised Nancy Reagan after her death, listing as one of her accomplishments that she helped start a national conversation over AIDS. This created a serious backlash by those well aware that the Reagans, while in the White House, not only did not do anything about it until his final year in office, but that White House press briefings, when responding to questions about the issue, became chuckle-fests with innuendo and snide references to the ‘gay plague’.
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Tomorrow is the day that Ohio holds its primary election. Needless to say, I will be voting for Bernie Sanders and hope he does well. The ACLU of Ohio has put out a three-step guide to voting.
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Today March 14 is so-called ‘pi day’ where in the month/day format in the US for the date gives 3/14. The number pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) is a source of endless fascination because it is so basic and yet so ubiquitous in all areas of science and mathematics and everyday life. Here is a fascinating article by Xiaojing Ye on the search for obtaining increasingly precise values of pi. It contained many nuggets of information that were quite new to me.
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As she frets that Bernie Sanders has much greater success in appealing to younger voters than she has, Saturday Night Live reveals that Clinton has put out a new ad that tries to get them to like her.
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I had been really looking forward to seeing this film because of the strong reviews it had received, such as this one. Macbeth is my favorite of all the plays of William Shakespeare and because it had excellent actors in Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the lead roles, I expected a lot. I tend to like his tragedies and histories a lot more than his comedies and this story is a timeless morality tale of a once-honorable man whose ‘vaulting ambition’ turns him into a ruthless and disturbed monster, egged on by an even more ambitious wife and led astray by deceptive promises of success and invincibility.
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Predicting the results of American politics was once quite simple: The candidate with the most money won almost all the time. The logic behind that was that running a political campaign, especially at the congressional and presidential level, cost a lot of money because of ad buys, consultants, staff, and the like and only those who could depend upon big money backers were the ones who could afford to do so. It was only if you had big money backing that the media treated you as a credible candidate and gave you respectful coverage while those who did not have money were ignored and marginalized or even ridiculed.
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