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.

Film review: The Social Dilemma (2020)

This documentary exposes how the social media algorithms work to keep people hooked to spend vast amounts of time on the sites by identifying their wants and sending them down addictive rabbit holes. It features mostly people from within most of these companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and the like) who became disaffected with the effect these companies and their practices were having on society and saw them as destructive and have now left the companies and are speaking out.

But the filmmakers also added a wrinkle. They have actors portray a family whose members are social media users, focusing on two children who are addicted to it. They show a room in which there is an avatar of the son with three identical people looking at all the data about him and what he is doing and pushing things on him to keep him glued to his phone. In reality of course, there are no people doing this, only algorithms. But there is something much more creepy in the image of actual people who know every thing about us and what buttons to push to get a specific reaction and are monitoring our every waking moment to try and find ways to get us to spend more time on their sites and then selling that engagement to advertisers. Although algorithms may feel less creepy than if humans were doing this, they are far, far more thorough than humans could ever be.
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And the legal circus goes on …

I thought that the days just dragged before the election but expected that once Trump lost, the elation over the fact that we would soon be spared the sight and sound of him would make the days just zip by. But the days seem to be dragging by even more slowly as Trump stays in the news by continuing to claim that he actually won and was cheated and mounting ridiculous lawsuits. I can’t believe we still have to go through another 41 days of this.

Seth Meyers takes a closer look at the ongoing futility of the legal challenges brought by Trump and his allies.

Before the pandemic, when his show was televised in the studio, Meyers always appeared in suit and tie. When he was broadcasting from home, he switched to casual. Now he has gone back to the studio but is still dressed casually. Is this going to be one of the permanent changes due to the pandemic, that since we’ve seen people in their homes, that relaxed atmosphere is going to be continued?

These are sick, sick people

I am opposed to the death penalty, seeing it as an utterly barbaric practice that no society that considers itself civilized should countenance. In the US, some states allow it, while others do not. The federal government does allow it but it has been very rarely carried out. But Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr seem to have a relish for it, so much so that they are rushing to carry out executions before they leave office, presumably because Joe Biden, who opposes the death penalty, might not carry them out.
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How many steps a day do you need?

I spend most of my days in a sedentary fashion, seated at the computer or reading. This is not good for one’s health generally but sitting for long times especially runs the risk of deep vein thrombosis.

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) occurs when a blood clot (thrombus) forms in one or more of the deep veins in your body, usually in your legs. Deep vein thrombosis can cause leg pain or swelling, but also can occur with no symptoms.
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Deep vein thrombosis can be very serious because blood clots in your veins can break loose, travel through your bloodstream and lodge in your lungs, blocking blood flow (pulmonary embolism).

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Pat Robertson has a cunning plan…

I am sure that all of you have been wondering what televangelist Pat Robertson’s thoughts are on the election now that his hero Trump is on the way out. He says that he knows what can be done to keep Trump in office and that if Trump asks him, he will tell him. It can’t hurt since the Rudy Giuliani-Sidney Powell legal clown circus is not going anywhere.
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