26 December 02018 (Happy Christmas (Eve)^364!): One More Note On The Sounds Of The Season

Note to LeAnn Rimes and Kacey Musgraves: Record something new for next Christmas, and I promise to listen to it.*

All I ask in return is that you stop recording remakes of holiday novelty tunes.

LeAnn R.'s version of "I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas" is repellent on pretty much every level possible.  A song that's kind of amusing coming out of the mouth of a 9-year-old (ish) girl is just disturbing when sung by an adult woman.

Nice try.  Massive failure.

(2 January 02019 update: I learned on 27 December that Kacey M. has also rerecorded this song.  Everything I said above also applies to her version.)

As to Kacey M., she's taken "The Chipmunk Song" from a trio-plus-one-adult-overseer down to a solo tune and recast it as "Christmas Don't Be Late".  Do not be fooled.

By ditching the rodents, she cut out the conflict between Alvin and Dave, which kills much of the appeal of that song.  And again, words that sound cute from childlike voices don't work from adults.  I doubt very much that KM really wants a Hula Hoop for Christmas, yet it seemed like the most important thing in the world in this song.  In the words of Stan Freberg, humor needs to be based somewhat in reality, and this falls well short.

(This is what I get for listening to Sirius Holly yesterday while round-tripping between Kalamazoo and Allen Park, I suppose.)

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*--Kacey's got a song that's been on the bubble for AVMX for a couple of years now.  If moving it onto that list will save us from future fake funny, it'd be a small price to pay.

In my travels to Nevada last weekend, I saw what might someday soon be in store for Michigan as far as new advertising horizons.  Specifically, the legal recreational marijuana industry in Las Vegas seems to have leapt into the fray at full force.  Odd, given the myriad restrictions placed on tobacco advertising which one might think would be equally applicable here, but appear not to be*.  I'm not completely convinced that wrapping cars as billboards sends the right message, but I make no claims to any sort of marketing expertise**.

The industry out there appears to have settled on "cannabis" as the primary name for its product.  I can sort of see why: this avoids what is surely a knee-jerk negative reaction among some to the M-word.  I have to give them a bit of credit for a sensible choice here: one of the things that makes it hard for me to take the various legalization campaigns that have sprung up around the country these days seriously is their frequent use of "weed" as a preferred noun.  This extends to press coverage as well.  There may be a case to be made for legal recreational marijuana***, but that word seems to me to lack the feel of professionalism.

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*--It's vaguely possible that the future of legal THC may lie more in edibles, which might sidestep some of the existing advertising restrictions, but I have no definite evidence for that yet.
**--Okay, that's not completely accurate.  The one thing I do know is this: When recruiting students to enroll at a college, it's important that they know what state the college is located in before they leave home to go to freshman orientation on campus.  In my career, that's not always been as axiomatic as one might expect it to be.
**--Reasonable people may disagree on this point; it's not my intention to take a side.

Figuring out the tunes for this year's collection of overlooked holiday music wasn't too tough.  (There was one incident: Over at KQNG-FM, where morning man Ron Wiley doesn't ordinarily play any Christmas music until mid-December, he made an exception and aired something that was basically a mashup of lyrics from many many tunes in kind of a clever way.  Unfortunately, I didn't hear the title or artist, and the online program guide didn't include it.  Had I been able to track that one down, it'd've been here in place of...something.  As it is, I'll be on the hunt for it for next year.)

Putting the 10 songs in a coherent or approximately coherent order was the challenge.  This matters in part because I've built a memory game around the 90 songs that have been included in this ongoing experiment.  Said game works better if I have an order to each year's playlist, and I was trying to come up with an ordered lineup for this batch that made sense.  There were a couple of blocks of songs that made sense in succession, but it wasn't easy to string all 10 together in a way that felt right.

This is the best arrangement I could come up with.

1. Yabba-Dabba Yuletide, Brian Setzer Orchestra.  We begin with a holiday song that borrows the tune of the opening theme song to The Flintstones.  That makes it appropriate as a leadoff entry for this block o' tunes.  It puts the fun into the holiday season, which is important to me.  This fills the "11 months on the waiting list" position for 02018, as I first heard it last December when driving between Albion and Findlay, after AVMX-8 went live.

We now move into a run of pieces loosely organized around the December holiday calendar.

2. Ring Out Solstice Bells, Jethro Tull.  Yep, another one aimed (by me, not by the band [I assume]) at the "war on Christmas" warriors.  Since the winter solstice predates Christmas itself by a few days, the calendar watch starts here.

3. Christmas C'mon, Lindsey Stirling feat. Becky G.  Once the solstice hits, the countdown to Christmas, already in single digits, takes on new urgency--and even, perhaps, a certain impatience.  One thing about this song: Lindsey S. is a talented violinist, which comes through in the music, but I shall ever have two thoughts about electric violins:
    a. That's just a funny-looking instrument.
    b. That's still an odd choice for the cover of a calculus book.
The joke is on me, of course, as James Stewart's Calculus: Concepts and Contexts is one among his collection of some of the best-selling calculus textbooks of all time.  A crown it deserves to wear, in my opinion.  I've taught out of that book once or twice, and it seems like a good one.

4. Christmas Eve, Blackmore's Night.  The calendar ticks forward to 24 December.

5. On This Christmas Day, Moody Blues.  And rolls forward one more day, to Xmas itself.  Combined with #2, this gives kind of a classic rock feel to the first part of this list.

On now to less temporal matters, and some holiday laughter.

6. Monster's Holiday, Bobby "Boris" Pickett.  It bugs me, as a comedy aficionado, that polls or lists of the "worst songs of all time" (Christmas or otherwise) frequently heap a disproportionate amount of scorn on novelty songs, this one included.  Not everything can be "A Day In The Life", most artists shouldn't try to write something like that, and sometimes you just want a fun tune.  (As with movies, it's not necessary that every song make a person think.)  While this is no "Monster Mash" (not much is), it qualifies on that third point.

With that comedy break taken, we move now to three artists making their second appearance on these lists.  One of the three continues the comedy; the other two are certainly fun bordering on funny.

7. Cherry Cherry Christmas, Neil Diamond.  It takes a certain level of nerve to splice "Cherry Cherry" in for "Very Merry" in a holiday greeting, and then another level to write a song name-checking a couple of other ND non-Christmas songs among the lyrics.  Such nerve is exhibited very nicely here.

8. Ho Ho Ho And A Bottle of Rhum, Jimmy Buffett.  The idea of combining the traditional pirate chant with Santa's laugh is a good one, and Jimmy Buffett is the ideal singer to pull it off.  As I said on 20 November 02010 when introducing JB's "Christmas In The Caribbean" as the first song on the first one of these lists, Björk could not carry this out with anywhere near this level of authenticity.

9. Good King Kong Looked Out, P.D.Q. Bach.  P.D.Q. didn't do a lot of direct parodies, although he wrote many of what Weird Al Yankovic would later come to call "style parodies".  This one kind of straddles the line between the two.

Now, as we began with some opening credits music, we close out this set with an instrumental work that could easily be the bed over which closing credits might run.  Additionally, this song debuted in 01964, making it a worthy choice for the "overlooked by time" category that I like to include once per set.

10. Jingo Jango, Bert Kaempfert.  One of the notable things about this song is that it illustrates the minimum amount of content necessary to get a song tagged as a Christmas song.  In this case, that would be an occasional track of sleigh bells in and among the other instruments.  Other than that, this could set toes to a-tapping even in April or August.  Between JJ and the theme to the original Match Game, Bert surely cashed a lot of nice royalty checks.

Io Saturnalia!

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Something that kind of got lost in the news over the past couple of weeks is that the Great Alaska Shootout is no more.  This represents a serious loss, in my opinion.  I like the idea of 7 relatively big-name college basketball teams trekking up to Anchorage for a tournament involving the home team at Alaska-Anchorage.

This also applies/applied to the Top of the World Classic (Alaska-Fairbanks), Maui Invitational (Chaminade, until very recently), and probably one or two others.  In their place we have an array of tournaments in exotic locations with no real reason to be there.  The NCAA kind of dropped the ball when the tournament certification rules were changed in 02006.

Hence the following new rule:


There's no legitimate educational or athletic purpose for fall basketball in the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, or Puerto Rico, unless it's part of an effort to showcase and offer exposure to local teams.  I'll be flexible-ish about "local", but reason should apply.  The University of Montana cannot host a tournament in Aruba, for example.  (The University of Aruba has no intercollegiate basketball team.  Yet.)

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We've all grown accustomed to ACATT radio starting far earlier than it reasonably ought to* (profit motive disregarded here, perhaps unwisely).  WNIC flipping in single-digit November is a given these days, but their Lansing equivalent WFMK has made the switch far earlier this year than in the past.  That's new and noteworthy.

Reminds one of the days when ACATT radio started on 24 December at 3:00 PM and ran for 30 hours, and the entire playlist could be published as a full-page newspaper ad.  (This came to mind as I was compiling this year's overlooked playlist.  As vast as the I'net is, I could not find a copy of any of those ads**.  I'm not done looking, though.)

...the election, and we're still waiting for results from some very close races.

There are those out there who would use this as a lesson for the young on how "every vote really matters, and it's possible that a single vote may make a difference".

That's not how I see it.

From here, the lesson to be learned is "If there's any chance that your one vote might make a difference, expect an army of lawyers--from both sides--to line up and attempt to prevent it (and others) from counting."

Not the sort of thing that gives one a lot of faith in the whole electoral process.  To be fair, these kinds of delays in counting votes have probably been no more common recently than historically, but with the 24/7 news cycle, more people now know about them.

6 November 02018: Steering Into The Skid

Of all the reasons not to live in Mississippi*, here's another: There's a very strong likelihood that their campaign season will go into overtime after tonight if a U.S. Senator race doesn't produce a "50% + 1" winner, and might attract way too much attention in the at-this-point unlikely event that control of the Senate is at stake.

Oh, and today marks 728 days until the 02020 Presidential election, the campaign for which starts...tomorrow.  That fun fact showed up in my email this morning.

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*--No cheap shots here.  I visited Mississippi briefly last year, and found the upper left corner of the state to be very pleasant.  I don't have any firsthand data on the rest.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United states, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside."

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

What's fascinating about these paragraphs--and what a lot of commentary seems to be missing--is down near the end, around "Congress shall decide the issue".  The Vice President merely becomes Acting President (with all of the powers and duties appertaining thereunto, as we say at commencement ceremonies), not President, and there is no limit on the number of times that a President can challenge a Cabinet declaration of inability.

Every three weeks, we could be treated to the current President--who still holds the office, and probably still beds down at 1600 Pennsylvania--challenging the Cabinet's and Congress' collective judgment, and tying the legislative branch up in knots again.

Every three weeks.

Imagine the chaos of that spectacle.

This analysis is largely cribbed from Full Disclosure**, a 01978 novel by William Safire in which a President is blinded and the 25th Amendment becomes a matter of more than hyperbolic interest.  Well worth checking out even when it's not quite so immediately significant.

Okay, I'm back.

1. Today marks my 50th first day of school.  Someday, I'll figure out how to handle these.

2. Neil Simon has joined the "I'm Also Dead" club of public figures who died too soon after another celebrity to get the notice that they probably deserved in death.  That list includes Groucho Marx, Mother Teresa, and Farrah Fawcett--an illustrious crowd any way you look at it.

3. The "breaking news email" count favored John McCain over Simon by a score of 16-12.

4. Aruba was fantastic.  Bonaire, like Anguilla, deserves more time than we had to give it.

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While I think Christmas ought to be left in December, I've noticed a bit more promotion than usual this year for the July version of the holiday.  This coincided with something I thought up recently as a variation on my annual overlooked holiday tune mix: to wit, "Songs Whose Titles Suggest They Might Be Christmas Songs, But Which Aren't".

With today being the 25th, it seemed like the right time for this.  It's a short list, but that seems appropriate for a misplaced holiday.

1. La Sagrada Familia, Alan Parsons Project. Feliz Navidad, Adeste Fideles, and O Tannenbaum have inoculated America against the notion that holiday tunes need only be in English.  As the spoken introduction to this one notes, the title translates to "Holy Family", which certainly sounds like it could be some kind of Christmas tune.  Of course, the song then turns out to be pretty much entirely in English.

Oh, and it's really inspired by an unfinished cathedral in Spain, on a concept album exploring the works of said cathedral's architect, with no holiday references to speak of.  Works for me.

2. Holiday, Madonna.  An obvious choice, this one, although it took me a while to dredge it from memory.

3. Holly Holy, Neil Diamond.  This title suggests an attempt at blending the secular and religious aspects of the winter holiday season.  That's another set of dreams that will go unfulfilled.  The quest for someone who can do that artfully in a single tune continues, although I don't expect anyone to succeed anytime soon.

4. Fruitcakes, Jimmy Buffett.  Given my declared taste for comedy, I thought it good to end this virtual EP with something of a more humorous bent.  While JB's tunes may not all be funny, there's a certain generous allotment of fun to be found in his body of work, and even in July, Christmas should be enjoyable.

That said, I don't share his disdain for the notion of a 12-pound Nestle's Crunch bar for $25, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Io Julius!

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We don't get a lot of foot traffic in the neighborhood of The Markives.  As I've said before, this is probably in large part due to the lack of houses on one side of our dead-end street, which makes for a long walk back with no new doors on which to knock.

Yesterday, when I flummoxed a Jehovah's Witness, stands as an exception.  He rang the doorbell, and when I answered, he mentioned that he was wandering the landscape asking people what they thought made for a good marriage.  I responded that, since I live in Albion and Laurie lives in Kalamazoo, "distance" seems to work for us.*

He admitted that he had no good response for that.

If you're going to come to my door without an invitation, you're going to get some measure of my twisted worldview.  Be ready.

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*--The actual secret to how Laurie and I can still stand each other after 23.5 years together is "Don't shop together unless you're on vacation," which has worked very well.  I kind of doubt that he'd've had a good response to that, either.

Until the streak was broken yesterday, Laurie and I had seen each other, at least briefly, every day for 9 straight days.  That can be credited to the convenient juxtaposition of a national holiday exactly in between two weekends, if one wanted to overanalyze things.

This is especially interesting because there was neither a tropical beach nor a casino in our immediate vicinity during that nonet.

I did something very unusual on my way home from summer camp last Saturday: I stopped off in metro Flint and bought four new tires for my car.

This is not something one would have thought necessary, but as it so often does, the universe had other plans for me.  I had previously been advised that my tires would need replacing sometime before the end of this summer, and my intention was to get through camp and have a new set put on today.

Missed it by. That. Much.

I had been getting the occasional low tire pressure alert while at camp; this was from a tire that ran over a wood screw a while back and was plugged during my last oil change.  Plan A was to air it up on my way out of camp, and then to implement the aforementioned tire replacement plan.

Nope.  I returned to my cabin after the closing ceremonies on Saturday to find a very flat tire.  On one hand, I had ample offers of assistance* from parents and Scouts, including one who had completed the Automotive Mechanics merit badge earlier that week.

On the other, several people commented that there could not have been a more convenient place for a flat.  I respectfully disagree, and offer the following two obviously better locations:

• My driveway.
• My local Ford dealer.
  

Nonetheless, one accepts help with gratitude in a situation like this, and I did so.

It was off to drive home on a donut, then, as I was advised I could do safely.  That quickly lost its charm--driving at 45 mph on I-69 is a fool's errand--and so on the sight of something resembling a commercial district around Flint, it was off the freeway and in search of a tire purveyor.  Belle Tire came through for me.

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21 June 02018 (Happy birthday yesterday, and Happy solstice today!): This Just In

As I've mentioned before, I subscribe to breaking news updates from a couple dozen online news sources.  There are certain things I've learned that are only interesting to me (The newspapers in Elko, NV, and Billings, MT are owned by the same corporation, and often send out the same update within seconds of each other, for example), but today was a banner day that makes the email inbox clutter worth it.

From the aforementioned Billings, Montana Gazette, earlier today (This was both the headline and the subject in in the email):

Startled driver rolls car to avoid kangaroo in northern Montana

One would be inclined to think that kangaroos wouldn't be a road hazard up there.

One would be wrong.  Clicking through (because how could one not?), one learns that there's a kangaroo farm up that way, and apparently the critters are prone to escape by going through or under--not over--fences.

This came in while I was writing a passage about an Australian version of blackjack, which is a coincidence that makes this that much more amusing.

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The sporting press has, in general, not been terribly sympathetic to Phil Mickelson's actions on Saturday at the U.S. Open.  Leaving out the misplaced sense of reverence that some feel toward the Rules of Golf, there were a lot of heavy-handed think pieces hitting the I'net on Saturday evening and into Sunday excoriating Mickelson for having the temerity to hit a moving ball--within those Rules, remember--and suggesting rather strongly that disqualification or withdrawal were in order.

To which I say: Wrong.

As the title here indicates, I come down on the other side.  In essence, Mickelson was taking action and standing up for something he believed while those around him said much but did little.  Golf pros complaining about punitive U.S. Open course setups is an ancient tradition, but seldom does complaint lead to action.  Until this year.

In this sense, Mickelson played the role ably filled by Max Klinger on M*A*S*H.  Every character on that show complained to one extent or another about being in Korea doing what they were doing--variations on the theme of "War is bad, the food here stinks, and why can't we all just go home?"

Klinger, alone among his fellows, actively worked to get out.  He did something, repeatedly, to try to change his lot.  No one else can say that.  He did his job, and well, when called on, but he was the only character who transformed criticism into action.

As did Mickelson.  He was in the perfect place to make a stand with more than words--prominent player, out of contention, historically frustrated at the U.S. Open--and he did something.

Good on him.

I doubt that it will make much of a difference, but it's a start.

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11 June 02018 (T + 18; Happy anniversary!) The Committee Reports

The Emile Arturi Award Committee (motto: "Overthinking Since 02004") recently met to consider the case of The Middle.

The verdict: No Emile this year.  The series finale was not sufficiently clunky to deserve this notable but not-to-be-desired recognition.

Was it an artificial closure?  Yep--indeed, the plot was a close relative of the Family Ties series finale.  One minor but meaningful difference was that the show had been setting up for Axl moving to Denver an episode or two previous to the finale, so that didn't just come fully-formed out of nowhere.

It was not, however, a universal closure.  There was the whole Sue/Sean storyline, but again, that had been set up throughout a lot of the series rather than being a last-episode add-on (not unlike some of the machinations with the Frasier finale).  There was no other major character with a new story that was a significant plot point in the episode.

Artificial without universal equals a good sendoff, and not something that the Emile needs to point out.

The "flash-forward at the end" device is an acceptable element of a final episode, but if this show is revived in 10-20 years, they can't simply ignore that.  I'm not above retroactively tagging a finale with the Emile.  That said, Will & Grace has the potential to become a two-time Emile winner, which one would think would be impossible.

In the new television order, words like "finale" no longer mean what they used to.  History will judge whether or not that's a good thing.

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31 May 02018: Short Takes As A Month Winds Down

Now that the medical waiting is over for a bit, a couple of news nuggets from 269-land:

1. For a brief while last week, BGM:NBN held down the #4 ranking on Amazon's list of books about roulette, buoyed by a couple of late-spring sales.  The top 3 at the time were all e-books, which may or may not mean anything.  Looking down the chart, there seem to be a lot of books about roulette, only some of which are mathematically sound.

2. I got eleven emails about the quick cancellation of "Roseanne".  We're getting close to Stephen Hawking territory here.

ABC just gave us all a master class in what to do when a face of your brand has embarrassed your enterprise via Twitter.  To borrow a line from The American President [coincidentally], their actions were decisive, immediate, and proportional.  A model worthy of careful consideration.

3. One of the surest signs of college summer in these parts recently hit: the traffic light on Michigan Avenue separating the freshman dorm from most of the rest of campus has flipped to flashing in all directions.  This is a welcome development, and not just for its symbolism.

In November 2016, right after the Vegas Golden Knights revealed their nickname, the Westgate sports book
was offering a -50,000 proposition bet that the team would not win the Stanley Cup in its first season.
 In light of the team's playoff success, this seems a lot less a sure thing now than it did then.
Did anyone actually make this bet?

The family picture on the main page and at the bottom of this page has been updated with yesterday's better effort.

Interesting (to me) fact/stray observation: The photo is named "gango23.jpg" (as in "gang o' 23 people", that is).  When I started this online enterprise, the corresponding picture was named "gango17.jpg".

I like what The Big Bang Theory did last night with Sheldon & Amy's wedding: a not-entirely-implausible storyline, largely devoid of "comedy of errors" material, that wrapped things up without a cliffhanger to linger over the summer.

Unless you count the Easter egg that was tucked into the end of the subsequent episode of Young Sheldon.  Impressive crossover work, that.

And that wasn't even the best part of YS.  That honor goes to the use of the word "ostrobogulous", which I for one Googled as soon as I could.

That probably makes me ostrobogulous.  I'm okay with that.

Kudos to the writers for finding that word and using it correctly*.

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*--"Humorous. Used after Neuburg to designate something that is slightly risqué or indecent. Also applied arbitrarily to things which are bizarre, interesting, or unusual in some other way."  I've been called worse.

This showed up in my email last Friday, from Politico Playbook:

POLITICS RIGHT NOW: The Catholic speaker of the House tried to force the Catholic House chaplain to resign. A week later, he un-resigned and essentially accused the speaker's chief of staff of an anti-Catholic bias. The speaker's chief of staff issued a rare on-record statement denying his allegation. The speaker backed down, allowing him to stay ...

... THE PRESIDENT of the United States is in a prolonged feud with a porn star. His attorney's office and residence were raided, then it came out that his calls were being logged. A Republican candidate for the Senate in West Virginia -- a man who has been in prison for violating mine safety -- is suggesting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is rich because of his wife's Chinese family. News reports indicate the Republican candidate has, himself, expressed interest in Chinese citizenship. The Senate majority leader's wife -- a two-time Cabinet secretary who is now Transportation secretary -- is an American with a wildly successful career. ...

... A MAN WHO SERVED AS THE PRESIDENT'S DOCTOR claimed he released a health report during the campaign that the president himself dictated. He said this after his office was raided by two of Trump's employees, who were in search of his health records.

Two years ago, you couldn't have sold this as a movie; it'd've been judged too unbelievable.  Now, it's a self-writing documentary script.

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There are two things that make it easy to root for the Vegas Golden Knights in this year's NHL playoffs:

1. The Red Wings missed the playoffs entirely.
2. I didn't make that 1-500 bet (Bet $50,000 to win $100) that was on the board in Nevada for a time after the franchise was named (The Markives, 28 November 02016).

To recap the second point: A sports book in Nevada was offering a -50,000 proposition that the Golden Knights would not win the Stanley Cup in their first season.  I suggested at the time that, though I would not be making that bet, it could be "an oddly reasonable investment opportunity", paying as it did about .2% over 18 months, which was and is better than my credit union is paying on savings.

I cannot help but wonder if anyone did make that bet, and what they might be thinking as the Knights get closer to pulling off what would be a stunner to end all stunners that would cost them a small fortune.  Should the team make the Stanley Cup finals, perhaps the sporting press will look into this.

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*--Senior grades are in as of 11:49 AM EDT.  The start of college summer is close.

It's time to look in on the "breaking news emails as a measure of significance of a celebrity death" metric that I devised a couple of years back.  Since I didn't modify my list of emailed news sources* all that recently, comparing Stephen Hawking and Barbara Bush makes for a fair comparison--to the extent that my list of sources is balanced, which it might not be, being tilted rather strongly toward American news outlets.

Still, one works with the data at hand.  Those data show 15 breaking news alerts for Bush, and only 12 for Hawking.  In each case, the first news agency to break the story was from Austin, TX.  That's simultaneously odd, interesting, and not easily explained.  There were three outlets that broke Bush and not Hawking, and none that went the other way.  Houston, Columbus, and Billings, MT were the exceptions--I suppose Houston is understandable as Bush was living in that area, but I wonder about the standards in Montana.

30 March 02018 (Happy birthday again!): Young Sheldon Erratum

In view of MKL landing (with a damp thud) on my desk yesterday, I can lay claim to a certain small amount of authority about lotteries.

And with that in mind, the YS writing team dropped the ball in last night's episode.  In a scene set in Texas, approximately in the spring of 01990, Sheldon's grandmother Connie Tucker, a known gambler, declared that her purse was full of "cigarettes and scratchers".

Here's the problem: Texas didn't start selling lottery tickets of any kind until 29 May 01992.

Okay, but the show is set in eastern Texas, and there's been a storyline involving some characters trekking to Louisiana, so maybe these are imported tickets?

No.  Despite a long and somewhat controversial history with a 19th-century lottery*, Louisiana didn't get into the instant ticket business until 6 September 01991.

Arkansas?  It seems a stretch geographically.  Temporally, it's even worse.  The Arkansas Scholarship lottery didn't launch until 02009, and its first scratch-off tickets were sold on 28 September of that year.

On the other hand, we did get some foreshadowing of Sheldon's stage fright issues that popped up on TBBT, which is not nothing.

That almost made up for seeing Jason Alexander in a dress.

Almost.

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*--Mentioned in some detail in MKL.

30 March 02018 (Happy birthday!): I Try To Be An Optimist...

but there's really no easy way to put a positive spin on the phrase "It came in wet and nasty".

Which is how the box containing my first three copies* of Mathematics of Keno and Lotteries was described to me when I picked it up at the campus post office yesterday.

Accurately.  Though the breach of the box was not catastrophic, there was water damage on each copy, with significant damage to one of them.  I can understand a wet box; how one side picked up a fair amount of mud boggles the mind a little bit.

Fortunately, my live-in-on-weekends-and-Tuesday-evenings librarian had some good advice about repairing said damage.  Which explains why one copy of MKL is currently resting on my office floor under a lot of introductory physics textbooks.

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*--The paperback copies.  It is to be devoutly wished that the hardcover copies meet a better fate.

Yesterday (2/7/18 in the USA) was "e Day", commemorating the distant-second most popular irrational constant e, base of the natural logarithm and ubiquitous number in all sorts of disparate applications. e = 2.718281828459045..., which is tantalizingly almost rational-looking early on.

I've never been a fan of the cult of "Pi Day" that's sprung up around March 14, even two years back on 3/14/16 when we had two extra decimal places, so I didn't think much of this once-a-century event.  However, loyal reader Steve from Allen Park, MI alerted me to a slightly more impressive science date today:

Every element heavier than nickel—which is 75% of them—has its first three electron shells completely filled with electrons. Those first three shells hold 2, 8, and 18 electrons, respectively. So the electron shell notation for all of those elements begins 2-8-18....And today's date is 2-8-18! And out of all the generations who have ever lived, we are the ones alive to see it! I know, amazing, right?

Indeed, we are the first ones alive to fully experience this--the fully-realized version of electron shell theory postdates 8 February 01918.  This uniqueness does not extend to 2/7/01918.  Once again, it's a great time to be alive.  Of course, by 8 February 02118, this sort of knowledge will probably be taught in kindergarten.

1. I find it repellent (at least) that a judge can get away with telling a convicted defendant that she wishes the Constitution allowed cruel and unusual punishment in his case, without suffering any consequences.

2. I find it encouraging that in my social media circle, the U-M fans are in the large not taking shots at MSU as an institution over this incident.  I am sure that if this had all gone down in Ann Arbor, the Spartan partisans would have been dispensing a lot of vitriol toward their rival.

One step back, one step forward.

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Last night's episode of Young Sheldon jarred my ears.  The principal of the private school for gifted children was asked what her Ph.D. was in, and she responded "Non-commutative algebraic topology".

All well and good, except she pronounced the first word horribly wrong.  It's "non-com-mu-tat-ive" (accent on the first and third syllables) , not "non-com-mu-tate-ive" (accent on the second and fourth).

The Big Bang Theory has a science advisor, a Caltech faculty member, on set or on call to make sure that the science is accurate, and it shows when one reads the whiteboards, for example.  It may be time for YS to find one of those.  One wonders how that word made it into the shooting script without someone checking on its pronunciation.

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In the words of Sherman T. Potter:



Conveniently, this line was used at both the beginning and the end of the M*A*S*H episode "A War For All Seasons"--not unlike what I'm doing here.

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