It’s about time. Cleveland baseball team to drop the ‘Indians’ name

It is being reported that this week will see the owners finally announce that they have decided to change the name that many people found offensive.

The 2021 season will be the last that a baseball team plays as the “Indians” in Cleveland.

A team source confirmed to cleveland.com that the club will announce this week its intention to play under the same name and uniforms through 2021, but will drop the “Indians” name after the upcoming season. A new name has not yet been decided.

The New York Times was first to report on Sunday that the name change is imminent. The Times also indicated the club is considering moving forward without a replacement name. That move would mirror the situation in Washington, where the city’s NFL franchise dropped its longtime “Redskins” moniker prior to the 2020 season and is playing as the “Washington Football Team” until a new name is chosen.

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Oregon decriminalizes possession of all drugs

One of the interesting results of the election that has been somewhat overlooked is that the state of Oregon became the first in the US to decriminalize all drug possession, with 58% voting in favor of the measure. Public drug use is still illegal, however.

Possessing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs for personal use is no longer a criminal offense in Oregon.

Those drugs are still against the law, as is selling them. But possession is now a civil – not criminal – violation that may result in a fine or court-ordered therapy, not jail. Marijuana, which Oregon legalized in 2014, remains fully legal.

Oregon’s move is radical for the United States, but several European countries have decriminalized drugs to some extent.

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Some Democrats are fighting back against Republican outrageousness

We have seen the spectacle of Republicans in Congress going along with efforts to overturn the elections, the latest example being the 127 members of the House of Representatives who signed on the lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general with the US Supreme court that was summarily tossed out. Some Democrats are fed up with this behavior and have decided to fight fire with fire.
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Jill Biden and the problem of default authority

A silly person named Joseph Epstein has apparently written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (that is behind their paywall) saying that Jill Biden should not use the ‘Dr.’ when referring to herself because it is unseemly to do so. He seems to think that only those with medical degrees should refer to themselves as ‘Dr.’ To add further insult, he compared her earned 2007 PhD degree in education, which she received after submitting a dissertation on student retention in community colleges, to an honorary degree and apparently even referred to her as ‘kiddo’.
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Rugby and soccer players also have brain injuries

The evidence of damage done to the brains of American football players continues to pile up. So far, not much attention has been focused on the effects of playing on rugby and soccer players. In soccer, it is heading the ball that can cause serious jarring of the brain. In rugby, players are forbidden from certain types of tackles that use or target the head. They are also not as heavily padded and helmeted as in American football and this was thought to discourage dangerous tackles using the head as a battering ram. But they can still be subjected to jarring and bone-crushing tackles as can be seen in this video.


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Trump just keeps making things worse

The US is breaking records each day in the number of positive covid-19 test results, deaths, and hospitalizations. We have also passed another grim milestone of 300,000 deaths.

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Are people really that excited about so many sequels?

When I was young and a new hit film came out, we would joke about titles for possible sequels, trying to come up with the most incongruous ones, resulting in things such as “The Ten Commandments Rides Again” or “The Son of the Magnificent Seven”. We found these were amusing because sequels were relatively rare.

Nowadays any film that has reasonable commercial success is almost guaranteed a sequel and often many sequels and spin-offs so that it has ceased to be unusual. But I was still taken aback at the news that the Disney studies were planning ten (yes, ten!) new films each in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, which have already had so many films that I did not even bother to look up the number.
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‘The big one’ goes down in glorious flames

It is hard to identify which of the around 50 failed lawsuits filed to try and overturn the US presidential elections is the worst. But the one that most reveals the utterly cynical depths to which the Republican Party has sunk is the lawsuit that the Texas attorney general filed with the US Supreme Court that was joined by 18 other Republican state attorneys general and 127 members of the Houser of Representatives. Trump touted it as ‘the big one’, as if all the others were practice runs and that this would succeed where all the others had failed.


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Some common errors

I have been noticing some errors occurring recently with the spelling of homonyms. Here are three examples:

Writing eek when they mean eke

Writing discrete when they mean discreet

Writing complementary when they mean complimentary

I am sure there must be others that can be added to the list.

For some reason, the errors rarely go in the opposite direction, maybe because words like eek, discrete, and complementary are less likely to come up naturally.