TV review: Inside Man (2022)

The four-part mini-series each lasting one hour debuted last week on Netflix. I watched it because the premise seemed interesting and it had good actors. It features Stanley Tucci as a criminologist who brutally murdered his wife and is now on death row in the US. But it turns out that he has powerful analytical skills and a superior knowledge of human psychology and this enables his to solve crimes even while in prison. The prison warden allows people to consult him on unsolved cases. A fellow death row inmate in the adjacent cell happens to have an almost perfect memory and accompanies him during these interviews to serve as a recorder. David Tennant is a vicar in the UK dealing with a troubled verger in his church. (A verger is someone who serves as a caretaker and attendant in the church, assisting the vicar in his duties.) Although the vicar and the convict never meet, their stories become intertwined because a British journalist visits Tucci to try and get him to solve the disappearance of someone the journalist knows who happens to be the mathematics tutor to Tennant’s son.
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In US elections, a draw can become a win

One of the most encouraging results of Tuesday’e elections have been the ballot measures in the various states that resulted in expanded access to abortion (even in deep-red Kentucky), voting, and legalized marijuana and increases in the minimum wage. Oregon also seems likely to pass measures to establish a right to health care and to require a permit to buy firearms and high-capacity magazines.

When it comes to elections for offices, in objective terms, the results of the mid-terms has been a draw. The results are so close that at this point, the final outcome of which party controls the House of Representative and the Senate is still up in the air though it seems likely that the Republicans will have a tiny majority in the former. Right now, there are four undecided senate races. Of those, the one in Alaska is guaranteed to return a Republican since the top two candidates Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka are both from that party. It will take some time to get the results since Alaska has a system where the top four people in the open primary go on to the general election and the winner there is decided by ranked choice voting, which takes longer to tabulate.
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No red wave for Republicans

At the time of this writing, it looks like the big issue of the election, which party get majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, remains up in the air. Republicans had been hoping for a ‘red wave’ that would easily give them control but that has not materialized. The typical situation where the party that holds the presidency loses big in the mid-term elections, did not pan out, despite Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.

Another provisional interpretation is that Joe Biden has defied the odds again. Just some years ago he was written off as a 2020 presidential candidate after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire only to rally and win the party nomination.

Now the president looks set to best his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton, who lost 54 House seats in his first term in 1994, and Barack Obama, who lost 63 seats in his first term in 2010. With the congresswomen Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton having survived in Virginia, it seems there will be no “shellacking” this time.

This is not just a Democratic phenomenon. The Republicans lost 40 seats in. 2018, the mid-terms held during the Trump presidency.
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What I will be looking for in today’s election results

Election day has finally arrived, which I am sure is a relief to all those who have been plagued for the last few weeks, if not months, with TV ads, mailings, and online fundraising pitches that describe in apocalyptic terms the disasters that will inevitably unfold if the opponents win, something that can only be averted if you send money immediately. In the past, the fear was that Republicans would implement policies that were anti-choice, xenophobic, anti-poor, anti-minorities, and anti-LGBTQ. Now the fear is that they will actually subvert future elections, an even more ominous prospect.

For me, the main item of interest is to see how many people will vote for candidates who have signed on to the insane idea that the last election was rigged and that Trump won, along with all the other accompanying QAnon conspiracies. These people have got a lot of attention and this election will be a good measure of how far this mass delusion has actually spread. There are undoubtedly many traditional Republican voters who do not believe all that nonsense. The question is whether they are disgusted enough by this attempt to subvert democracy that they abandon their party loyalty and vote against such candidates or whether their party loyalty is so strong that they are willing to overlook the very real danger of electing such dangerous people to high office.
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What’s the point of prices marked as $X.99 cents?

Elon Musk has to somehow find ways to make his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion work as a business deal as opposed to an ego trip. He has borrowed $13 billion from banks, and analysts are saying that he and the banks are going to take a financial bath on this deal because Twitter is simply not worth the price he paid unless it can drastically cut costs and greatly increase revenues. This article lists the revenues and expenses from 2012 until 2021, and since Musk has taken it private, this may be the last chance we’ll get to look at the books.

The company, launched in 2006, has shown a loss for every year since 2012 except for 2018 and 2019, with 2021 having a $221 million loss. Its revenue has grown over the years and was $5 billion for 2021, with $4.5 billion coming from advertising and 0.5 billion from other sources such as data licensing. About half of its revenue comes from outside the US.
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Changing times

Today at 2:00 am is when the US changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time which required shifting clocks back by one hour. It is also the cue for many (including me) to grumble once again about this clock adjusting process that takes place twice a year. I went around changing all eight clocks last evening and then a few minutes later, there was a brief power cut, which meant that I had to again set the time on four clocks that are plugged in.

Not every part of the US changes times like this, with some staying on Standard Time all year round.

Exceptions include Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time in Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I grew up near the equator where the amount of daylight stays pretty much the same throughout the year. and thus does not require fiddling around with clocks twice a year. But irritation with the practice is growing in the US and arguments for keeping one time throughout the year seem to becoming more frequent.
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How a US Civil War battle song became a Sri Lankan school cheer

(This is an edited and updated version of a post I wrote back in 2014.)

In the urban areas of Sri Lanka, schools tend to be mostly single-sex K-12, and among the boys’ schools there were intense sporting rivalries. During those games, boys would show their support for their teams using generic cheers that were common to many schools. These cheers originated long before my own time. One of them was used when one’s team had suffered a setback and was meant to rally one’s side to show that this was not a cause for concern. It consisted of the following words set to music.

Hurrah for the Mary! Hurrah for the lamb!
Hurrah for the [school name] boys who do not care a damn!
Now everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Each school would simply insert their own name, making the cheer available to any school.

This cheer made no sense whatsoever even by the extremely low standards of Sri Lankan school cheers. But the last line was particularly puzzling since, apart from being absurd (a lamb shouting?) it was a complete non-sequitur. I used to vaguely wonder how and where this cheer could have possibly originated but after leaving school, I forgot both the cheer and the puzzle of the last line.
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