Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[kenberg]

re: I can't fully explain it, but I just seem to like the north

 

Have you ever been to Norway?

 

No I haven't. If you live in Minnesota Norway comes to you.

[kenberg]

I recall hearing Garrison Keillor remarking that he visited Norway to get back to his roots.

He visited a restaurant with a friend and during the meal some food became stuck in his throat causing him to choke and cough violently.

The couple at the next table complimented him on his accent.

 

Thinking back to the way he told the story, Ken's writing now makes much more sense.

 

Well, if it helps it helps!

 

Mentioning Norway was one of those casual thoughts. Possum asked about my preference for the Pacific, I realized that really I preferred the northern shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific and then I thought well maybe Norwegian genes play a role. If so, probably not much. Roots? I think it is useful for kids to know about the lives of their parents and maybe a bit about grandparents but that's about as far back as my root interests go.

 

I'll work on why a story by Garrison Keeler helps you make sense of what I write. Or it can be a mystery. Hey, I always make sense!

 

Maybe I will go to Norway. Looks beautiful. But not to find my roots. I am pretty sure I would like it there.

 

One more thought about roots. I am reading Apples Never Fall All 400+ pages of it. A very interesting novel.

 

 

[PassedOut]

Well, if it helps it helps!

 

Mentioning Norway was one of those casual thoughts. Possum asked about my preference for the Pacific, I realized that really I preferred the northern shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific and then I thought well maybe Norwegian genes play a role. If so, probably not much. Roots? I think it is useful for kids to know about the lives of their parents and maybe a bit about grandparents but that's about as far back as my root interests go.

 

I'll work on why a story by Garrison Keeler helps you make sense of what I write. Or it can be a mystery. Hey, I always make sense!

 

Maybe I will go to Norway. Looks beautiful. But not to find my roots. I am pretty sure I would like it there.

 

One more thought about roots. I am reading Apples Never Fall All 400+ pages of it. A very interesting novel.

I do recommend a visit to Norway!

 

My mom's dad came to the US (Minnesota, of course) at age 19 and at 30 married my grandmother (she was 20), whose folks had emigrated to a farming community near Alexandria MN. I remember my grandfather telling me that Molde, Norway is the most beautiful city in the world. I know for a fact that he had not been to every city in the world, but I agree that Molde certainly must be very high on that list! And the whole country has beautiful scenery.

 

If you do visit, be sure to take one of the Hurtigruten cruises down the coast--especially fun around the summer solstice!

[kenberg]

I do recommend a visit to Norway!

 

My mom's dad came to the US (Minnesota, of course) at age 19 and at 30 married my grandmother (she was 20), whose folks had emigrated to a farming community near Alexandria MN. I remember my grandfather telling me that Molde, Norway is the most beautiful city in the world. I know for a fact that he had not been to every city in the world, but I agree that Molde certainly must be very high on that list! And the whole country has beautiful scenery.

 

If you do visit, be sure to take one of the Hurtigruten cruises down the coast--especially fun around the summer solstice!

 

We will give this some thought. Until the covid problem recedes, both Becky and I are reluctant to get on a plane. I looked up Alexandria MN. When we start traveling again, for distances where we get on a plane, our first trip is likely to be to Minnesota. We have friends back there (going back to the early 1950s for me, friends through marriage for Becky). I don't promise to include Alexandria but then again why not? The Wik says the record high temperature there is 104, the record low is -38. The latter surprises no one the former often does. Becky and I once got off the plane in Minneapolis when it was 100 degrees, requiring at least some changes to our plans.

 

Anyway, Norway is definitely on the radar. But I have been thinking of England. They more or less speak the same language, easy to get around and so on. But I'm still young, I can cope with language issues. We are very ready to go somewhere. We both like Paris, who doesn't? But maybe Norway. First Minnesota. Thanks for the notes about Molde and the Hurtigruten cruise.

[PassedOut]

We will give this some thought. Until the covid problem recedes, both Becky and I are reluctant to get on a plane. I looked up Alexandria MN. When we start traveling again, for distances where we get on a plane, our first trip is likely to be to Minnesota. We have friends back there (going back to the early 1950s for me, friends through marriage for Becky). I don't promise to include Alexandria but then again why not? The Wik says the record high temperature there is 104, the record low is -38. The latter surprises no one the former often does. Becky and I once got off the plane in Minneapolis when it was 100 degrees, requiring at least some changes to our plans.

 

Anyway, Norway is definitely on the radar. But I have been thinking of England. They more or less speak the same language, easy to get around and so on. But I'm still young, I can cope with language issues. We are very ready to go somewhere. We both like Paris, who doesn't? But maybe Norway. First Minnesota. Thanks for the notes about Molde and the Hurtigruten cruise.

Before going to Norway, I always practice some Norwegian phrases, but it seems that almost everyone there speaks English and likes to practice. Another feature is that the Norwegian public transportation system is first rate. The train ride from Oslo to Trondheim, for example, is comfortable with great scenic views, and Trondheim has some impressive historical sights.

 

(No, I'm not getting paid to extol Norway--I just like it there!)

 

There are other great places to visit around the world too, and I wish more Americans would travel abroad to get a better perspective on what other people have been able to accomplish -- even after terrible wars.

[johnu]

There are other great places to visit around the world too, and I wish more Americans would travel abroad to get a better perspective on what other people have been able to accomplish -- even after terrible wars.

I'm beginning to lose hope.

 

As George W Bush once said, "Is our children learning?"

 

[pilowsky]

If you really want to blend in and avoid pickpockets make sure you wear shorts, sneakers, white ankle socks, an Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.

People will immediately ask for a directions to the local Macdonald's.

 

 

 

 

[kenberg]

I'm beginning to lose hope.

 

As George W Bush once said, "Is our children learning?"

 

 

Not knowing which countries border the US and not knowing Utah is a state is a bit bizarre, true enough, but we don't have to go very deep before I get hazy about an answer. In Sleepless in Seattle the Meg Ryan character, Annie, asks her soon to be dumped fiance where Duluth is and he thinks it is in North Dakota. They live in Baltimore, so really no reason they should know where Duluth is. I grew up in Minnesota and visited Duluth for the first time in 1954 on a road trip that I took with my friend Roger after I bought my first car. An exciting time, I even recall that I saw The Caine Mutiny while we were staying in Duluth.

 

The point being that I remember places where I have been or that mean something to me. Of course I did know that Mexico was on the southern border of the US even before I went there, but Becky and I were on a small open-air boat on the river between Mexico and Guatemala checking out Mayan sites, and so I now know that Guatemala is just to the south of Mexico instead of knowing that it is Guatemala or maybe Honduras or one of those Central American countries.

 

As to capital cities, Becky knows the capitals of all fifty states, she was required to learn them. I know the capitals of some of them. Here the point is that a lot depends on what a school requires. I would have learned the capitals if I had been required to, since that would probably have been pre-adolescence when I did what I was told to do, but no one said I had to so I didn't. Becky also knows the capitals of all South American countries. I don't.

To carry that a little further: West Side Story (1961) came out when Becky was 13, approaching 14. In the fall, her class read Romeo and Juliet and they were then told to see WSS and compare the plot development with R and J. Nobody ever told me to read Romeo and Juliet so I haven't.

 

Yeah, young people spend too much time with video games, at least the boys do. I got that. So what to do? A point I have made before: Today the best public schools are far better than mine was (class of 1956). The bad ones are far worse. As with so many things the extremes are more extreme than they were in the past. What we are to do about this is a very good question.

[pilowsky]

Yeah, young people spend too much time with video games, at least the boys do.

 

To say nothing of the effect of parents glued to their 'devices' instead of interacting with their children.

Turns out the word for this behaviour of using a mobile phone during a social interaction is "phubbing".

Father phubbers and mother phubbers (I'm not making this up) have children that are more likely to be depressed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34952115/

[Winstonm]

I get despondent trying to watch television as we are inundated by the ads of Republican candidates each trying to outTrump each other. I don’t grock.

 

Signed: Stranger in a Strange Land

[pilowsky]

I get despondent trying to watch television as we are inundated by the ads of Republican candidates each trying to outTrump each other. I don't grock.

 

Signed: Stranger in a Strange Land

 

Television is like smoking.

You don't have to.

You won't die or get sick if you stop.

That's why it's so hard to lose weight.

[y66]

Fun read: The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

[Winstonm]

Every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven.

Too bad my water is billed in dollars per gallon.

[Cyberyeti]

The pet peeve thread seems to have been buried for some time so rather than resurrect it, I'll post this here.

 

I posted in there about my favourite MMO (City of heroes) being closed down in 2012 due to the devs (US) and publisher (Korea) falling out, and various successor games being worked on by ex players.

 

Some of the successor games are now in alpha or beta.

 

What was happening behind the scenes was actually weirder than that. One of the devs leaked the original code to a player and a secret private server existed for 7 years or so without anybody getting wind of it. Eventually somebody did leak it AND put the code out there so anybody who wanted to could run their own server. There are now many such servers, and it appears the publisher can't be bothered to play whack-a-mole so has made it known that as long as nobody makes any money off their IP, they won't do anything about it. There are now several server clusters with active devs adding content in different ways, and a hard core of thousands of happy players.

[y66]

Andy Murray winning 3rd set against Berrettini? Wow. Can he win two more?

[y66]

On Saturday afternoon, the day after a night unlike any other, the U.S. Open felt like it had a hangover.

 

Balls were flying. There were thrilling matches that went to deciding-set tiebreakers, as Andrey Rublev of Russia prevailed over Denis Shapovalov of Canada and Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic got the better of Garbine Muguruza. But the name Serena was still on so many tongues the day after the greatest player of the modern era lost her final match in a dramatic and heartbreaking three-set battle that saw her save five match points before calling it career.

 

Where were you when it happened? Were you watching? Could you believe it?

 

All sports move on, though, and tennis is no different. It moved on from Borg-McEnroe and Evert-Navratilova, and Steffi Graf and Sampras-Agassi. Eventually it will move on from Djokovic-Federer-Nadal.

 

It’s probably fitting then that the feature match on Arthur Ashe Stadium Sunday afternoon — perhaps the hangover will have passed by then — will include Coco Gauff, the gifted and athletic American teenager who is poised to become a major star. Already she is a favorite of tennis fans in the U.S. and elsewhere, an outspoken and ambitious Gen Z-er ready to take the next step. Gauff is a Serena disciple who, as a girl, played a young version of Williams in a commercial. She knocked on the star’s trailer to earn her first meeting with her idol.

 

Gauff will take on Zhang Shuai of China, a 33-year-old tour veteran who will have to play against both Gauff and the thousands of fans sure to pack the stadium in the middle of Labor Day weekend.

 

After Gauff and Zhang, there is a finals-worthy matchup between Daniil Medvedev of Russia, the defending champion, and Nick Kyrgios of Australia, the Wimbledon finalist that the retired champion Goran Ivanisevic, who coaches Novak Djokovic, has described as a “tennis genius.”

 

Like everyone else in the tournament Medvedev and Kyrgios have existed well under the radar the past week as the Serena Show played out. Medvedev played his last two matches well past midnight following Williams’s three-setters in Ashe.

 

The radar will miss them no more. There are only 16 players left in each of the singles tournaments. The so-called “second week” of the tournament has commenced.

 

Friday night will forever be a part of tennis history, but the sport is moving on. There is no other way.

[y66]

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/the-partys-over-boris-johnson-conservative-party/

 

One way to think of Truss is to recall Larkin’s bleak lines about how your parents “fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” Politically speaking, Truss’s parents are the last two Tory leaders, May and Johnson, and she has inherited many of the faults of both and few of the strengths of either. She lacks May’s integrity but has her strangely robotic persona—Truss speaks in the manner of an actor who has entirely forgotten her lines and is being fed them through an invisible earpiece. And though she is not, like Johnson, lazy (she is, if anything, manic), and lacks his charisma, she has his unprincipled opportunism, carelessness about truth, and habit of blaming everyone else for his own mistakes. Truss was a wild liberal before she became a reactionary. She strongly supported Remain in the Brexit referendum of 2016, before she became an arch-Brexiteer. In her leadership campaign, she suggested cutting the salaries of public servants who live outside of London, then flatly denied doing so and blamed the media for quoting her own press release. Ideas and truths matter to her only as servants to her ambition.

 

Truss will take the Tories further down the only path that is open to them, that of anarcho-authoritarianism. Like Johnson, she projects herself as a rebel against authority: “I hated being told what to do and that has driven my political philosophy.” She put forward the legislation that allows British government ministers to break international law by tearing up the Northern Ireland protocol. She has indicated her willingness to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.

 

This outlawry is underpinned by the language of piracy. A chapter in Britannia Unchained, a 2012 book cowritten by Truss and other rising Conservative politicians, is titled “Buccaneers” and quotes Steve Jobs approvingly: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” It concedes, with evident reluctance, that “law and order” are “on the whole beneficial.” But it hankers after an ideal of “capitalism as chaos,” the magic that happens “when nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed.” Hence the claim by Truss’s supporter David Frost, who led negotiations of the Brexit deal with the EU and is widely expected to have an important role in a Truss administration, that “what needs to be done [by the new prime minister] will be turbulent and disruptive.”

 

This promise of disruption is all that remains of Brexit. It can function now only as a fantasy of liberation, not from Brussels but from all restraint on the making of money. Truss’s language evokes a Britain whose only real problem is that its natural exuberance has been constrained by regulation. Hence the recurrence in her rhetoric of “unchain,” “unleash,” “unshackle.” But, as in current US conservatism, these images of freedom must go hand in hand with their opposite. When she is not talking of unshackling everything, Truss is promising to “crack down” on everything. The chains that are to be taken off the moneymakers will be clamped on much of civil society.

[pilowsky]

. A sport that could be adapted to Bridge with very little difficulty - tag-team wrestling Bridge perhaps?

[y66]

Aaron Judge hits 56th, 57th homers in 10th multi-HR game of season

He is four back from Roger Maris’ American League (and Yankees) single-season record of 61 set in 1961.

73 is the record in my book. no matter what people want to say about that era of baseball, for me, they [bonds and McGuire] went out there and hit 73 homers and 70 homers, and that to me is what the record is. The AL record is 61, so that is one I can kind of try to go after. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it’s been a fun year so far.

[Winstonm]

Aaron Judge hits 56th, 57th homers in 10th multi-HR game of season

I heard you knock in’ at my cellar door

Baby, please, can I have some more

Oh, oh, the damage done

[y66]

From Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace (Aug. 20, 2006):

 

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

 

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

 

Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It’s just that that’s not all he is. There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace — all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.

 

Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it’s not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead — all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Update: Subtlety, touch, and finesse were definitely not dead in the finals of the 2022 US Open.

[Cyberyeti]

With Roger Federer retiring last night, I feel I should mention another sporting retirement that will have garnered far less attention (at least in the US).

 

Womens cricket has advanced massively since Jhulan Goswami first played for India in 2002. Today she played her 203rd and final one day international, being bowled first ball by a bowler who wasn't even born when she played her first international.

 

She still as I type has a chance to have a say as a bowler (her much stronger suit), but she retires as a legend of the game just shy of her 40th birthday with atm 253 wickets in ODIs, 60 more than anybody else.

[Winstonm]

Give it up for Albert Pujols who last night hit career home runs number 699 and 700, only the 4th player in history to hit 700 or more home runs.

[Winstonm]

Give it up for Albert Pujols who last night hit career home runs number 699 and 700, only the 4th player in history to hit 700 or more home runs.

[Winstonm]

Give it up for Albert Pujols who last night hit career home runs number 699 and 700, only the 4th player in history to hit 700 or more home runs.