Well, the former president has finally been held responsible for something. In a way, this particular case is a perfect encapsulation of his lifetime of shady dealings.
There was a tawdry affair with an adult entertainer, political campaign shenanigans, questionable (at best) financial practices…..even a bit of a circus atmosphere around the whole matter.
As to what happens next, well, I’ve got some ideas.
The Sentence
It’s that time of year again. TV networks and streaming services roll out their libraries of horror movies to throw a “Friday Night Frights” or “Nights of Horror” thing at you.
Should you want to try something different – or perhaps you don’t have enough time for a full-length movie – there are plenty of short (typically less than 30 minutes) horror films out there online.
ALTER and CryptTV are YouTube channels devoted exclusively to horror. Short of the Week and Omeleto are for general short films, but they both have a category for horror.
DUST is a channel for science fiction shorts, but since the two genres frequently overlap, they’ll occasionally drift into horror. For example, here’s “Laboratory Conditions” by Jocelyn Stamat (and starring Marisa Tomei and Minnie Driver):
Since one can easily get tired of blood, gore, and ghosts, it’s nice to find a horror-comedy every now and then. Like Dylan Chase’s “A Night in Camp Heebie-Jeebie”:
And sometimes you’ll come across something that on the face of it looks like a typical horror tale because the elements are all there, but it quickly goes somewhere completely different. To wit, “Summon a Fiend” by Eleanor Cho…..
Pleasant dreams!!!
A new baseball season is upon us, and there are a lot of changes in store.
Rather than the basic “if everything goes right for my team, and wrong for everyone else, my team just might make the playoffs” discussion, almost all the talk has been about the many rule changes that MLB has instituted.
The pitch clock and other ones covering the “pace of play” have gotten the most attention, and as we’ve seen in Spring Training, are working out as intended. Teams have adjusted to them, as well as the rules regarding defensive shifts and stolen bases.
But there are a few others that have largely flown under the radar.
For a set of exhibition games, it’s a lot of fun. Teams and players from all over the world showing off their skills, at a time when fans in the US are starved for real games. Thanks to fairly loose rules, MLB players can join the team from a nation where they have some connection. So Lars Nootbaar of the St. Louis Cardinals can suit up for Japan….
Speaking of suiting up, you have to love some of the uniforms. Continue reading
It probably started with chess.
The fairly simple rule set and even simpler board made it rather obvious that computer programs would be written that could challenge humans. Eventually computing power grew to the point where a computer program could equal or even surpass the best human players. Those are more of “expert systems” than true AIs, since they can do one thing very well, but not create anything new.
Then there were some simple “psychologist” programs, that picked up on words you typed and returned some standard responses that got you to elaborate on what you’d written. Nothing really advanced, but it got people talking and thinking about artificial intelligence.
Music was probably next. Mathematically analyze the works of a composer, and have a program “write” a piece in their style. An amusing little experiment, and nothing that could threaten any contemporary composer.
For years, artificial intelligence was a novelty; something discussed in theory by computer scientists and the like.
But now, things are changing at a dramatic pace.
The “Whatever They’re Calling it This Year” Committee at the Hall of Fame has selected Fred McGriff for induction.
There’s a very good chance you’ve not heard of him and are wondering what the heck he did that makes him so great. Turns out there are two things that hurt his candidacy – both of which were pretty much beyond his control.
The first was the 1994-95 Strike. It happened right in the middle of his career, when he was at his most productive. Some seventy games were erased from the schedule. Given McGriff’s pace those two years (34 home runs in 113 games in 1994, 27 home runs in 144 games in 1995), it’s a good bet he’d have slugged another ten home runs in those games. As it is, he finished his career with 493 home runs. Those extras would have put him over the “milestone” number of 500.
It interesting and useful in McGriff’s case to see who is in the “500 Club”, and see who is NOT in the Hall of Fame. There’s Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, who are not yet eligible. Gary Sheffield is still on the ballot (though he hasn’t managed to get more than 50% of the vote). That leaves Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, and Manny Ramirez as the ones on the outside. What is a common thread connecting those players? Right! PED allegations, and serious ones at that. McGriff has never been accused of taking PEDs.
For the record, McGriff has more home runs than Hall of Fame sluggers like Willie Stargell, Vladimir Guerrero, and Chipper Jones.
The other thing that hurt his candidacy was related to the Strike. Afterwards, there was a serious – if not stated outright – effort by MLB to win back the fans. It seems they settled on playing up home runs. The ball may have been “juiced”, ballparks were designed to increase the frequency of home runs, and both MLB and the media “looked the other way” when players started taking PEDs. McGriff stayed clean and continued to hit the long ball, but he couldn’t compete with the likes of Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa. And as his career wound down in the early 2000’s, he bounced around from team to team while Bonds and Alex Rodriguez were racking up the home runs, so no one was going to give his “quest for 500” much attention.
You can argue that since he never won any major award, rarely led the league in any hitting category, and only made five All Star teams, he shouldn’t really be a Hall of Famer. But there’s still plenty of room in Cooperstown for the players who show a quiet, sustained excellence.
Things haven’t been that great the past couple of weeks.
Although the January 6 Committee has begun its public hearings, making it abundantly clear just how big a SORE LOSER the previous president was, there are still far too many people who believe the lies he’s spewing and see nothing wrong with the coup and insurrection. And even as more and more details come out, there’s still the dreadful possibility that not a single one of the plotters will ever face any punishment for it.
Then, the highest court in the land, the one that is supposed to be above partisanship and consider all of Law as its purview, revealed conclusively that it has been taken over by partisan hacks who decided – without any basis in law or sense or rationality – to simply ignore any laws that weren’t at least around one hundred and fifty years old. Evidently nothing of any real importance happened after 1860. To make it worse, the issues of vital national interest were tossed back to the individual states with a casual “You guys figure it out.”
Meanwhile, the majority of the news media seems to be doing its darndest to preserve some sort of “impartiality” and “fairness” throughout all this. Even though one of the largest news networks in the country is the de facto propaganda arm for one of the political parties. Look, when someone in the kitchen is putting garbage in the soup, you’re supposed to tell everyone DO NOT EAT THE SOUP. Just saying “I recommend the salad” isn’t good enough.
To top it all off, most people aren’t able (for whatever reason) to see past their next paycheck and realize what is happening – and going to happen – to their country. There are enough short-term crises happening at the individual scale, and they need a quick fix to those matters right now, and if President Biden can’t make it all nice within the next week, well…..
So that’s why I’m not really excited for Independence Day this year.
The January 6 Hearings are underway. Everyone is expecting some sort of “bombshell” to drop; something brand new that has never been revealed before.
As if it would matter.
If you’ve been paying attention – and cared – you’d know everything you need to know about what happened starting with the day Joe Biden was named the winner of the 2020 Election.
The General Public has pretty much already settled into two camps on the Insurrection; the hearings aren’t going to change anything noticeable there.
Where their effect really needs to be seen and felt is in the national news media. One political party has been taken over by a faction that condoned and allowed if not actively supported the Insurrection, and it is not violating any principle of “fairness” to point this out. Nor is it “biased” reporting to state that the faction is still present and active within the Party, and is working to turn the country into a theocratic, neofascist dictatorship.
Enough of the nonsense about “How inflation will hurt the Dems in the mid-terms”, and more of “How the Cult of Trump is destroying the United States”.
One cannot help but notice that as Putin’s war in Ukraine drags on, the price of gasoline has gone through the roof. A combination of post-COVID economic adjustments and sanctions on the Russian regime has driven the price to a comparative level not seen since the oil embargo of the 1970s.
Needless to say, there are a lot of complaints and questions:
“Why can’t the president do anything about this?”
“Why does it always seem like the price goes up even before any sanctions / disasters / whatever could possibly have an effect?”
“Why is there so much variation in prices from one station to the next?”
The first question is a general gripe that reveals a poor understanding of economics and presidential power; the last two contain hints as to the reason behind the dramatic price increase. Continue reading
The opening phase is over. The invaders’ initial assault has run out of momentum, and the defenders have rallied their people – both at home and around the world – to their side.
Now we’re in the next phase, where the combat becomes a long, dirty, and ugly slog.
And it’s not going to get better for some time.
Pure Blather 