There was a kerfuffle in the chess world this weekend. Chess Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen quit a tournament on Friday because the tournament officials tried to get him to change out of his jeans. He’ll be back in on Monday. The tournament decided to loosen their dress code to allow “appropriate jeans”. I find the whole…
I read an article on NPR today, U.S. homelessness jumps to another record high, amid affordable housing shortage : NPR. Apparently, there were more than 770,000 homeless people in the US in January, when the survey was done. And that’s probably an undercount. More than three quarters of a million people are living in shelters…
The Parker Solar Probe survived its trip into the sun’s corona. That is so cool. You know what’s also cool? It is traveling at 430,000 miles per hour. It is officially the fastest human made thing ever built. The heat shield can apparently withstand up to 2,500 degrees (Fahrenheit of course) while keeping the insides…
Defenestration means “the action of throwing someone out of a window”. Why do we need a word that means throwing someone out of a window? It seems weird to me. As someone who took Latin, the derivation is easy. It is “de” which means “out” and “fenestra” which means window. So, it’s a word meaning…
I had the hardest time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Part of the reason is things I’ve talked about here, like being unemployed/underemployed and fighting with the health insurance exchange (I still don’t exactly know what my health insurance is going to be on the first of January.). Part of the reason is…
I watched Mickey’s Christmas Carol last night. As you may know, I’m something of a Christmas Carol connoisseur. I read it every single year on the five days leading up to Christmas. I love seeing different adaptations of it. My favorite is The Muppet’s Christmas Carol. Mickey’s is surprisingly good, though. For those who haven’t…
Reuters had a headline today “Biden commutes sentences of 37 of 40 inmates on federal death row”. This is good news but not perfect. It’s three short. He should have commuted the sentences of all of them. The three that he did not commute are the Boston Marathon bomber, the shooter at Emanuel African Methodist…
I get at least two holiday cards every year. And I get no more than three holiday cards every year. I get one from my parents. Each year it has a picture of my kid, my niece, and my nephew. I get one from my friend, whom I wrote about in this post. That one…
A question that runs through my mind almost constantly is, “Who cares?” I think it when I read the news, when I overhear people talking, as I scroll through social media, and a bunch of other times. The reason I think “who cares” is because people are always making proclamations. Pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza….
Asking what talent is may seem silly. It’s something we can all identify. Yo Yo Ma is a talented cellist. Shohei Ohtani is a talented baseball player. Kate Atkinson is a talented writer. Everyone knows these things. But what is talent? That’s a much harder that simply identifying talent. The internet defines talent as “natural…
