Archives for July 2024

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Here at NBC we’ll show you minor sports with little to no explanation of what any of it means.

Let’s switch to Peacock where we’ve teased that you can watch all the medal cerimonies and not miss a minute. This is true. We put the camera on something and let it roll with little or no explanation about what is going on or what is coming up. Somewhere in the time from 7am to 5pm you’ll see a medal ceremony.

Go instead to highlights and we’ll show you Coco Grauff complaining to the umos. Why is she complaining? Who knows? How about that great fnish in montain biking? Yeah, we saw a woman crossing the finish line all alone. Terrific work there crew. Switching now to cycling we’ll watch people slip on the rain covered streets. Who won? Who cares. 

Okay enough. Switch to Gold Zone. We showed you four screens of action at once. Oh, you thought you got to pick? Nah. In fact, sometimes we show you one screen, and sometmes four, and sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing then we’ll show you a black screen. Remember you paid extra for this! Now that we’ve figured out there’s a black screen up there we’ll show you what looks like a 1950s postcard of the Seine River with the catchy title of “Enjoy this view of the Seine.” Clever. Now back to four screens. We got tennis – too small to see, badmitten – too small, natch, Beach Volleyball and Equestrian. Let’s go big screen on Equestrian. This is horse prancing. Very interesting – for three or five seconds, because the drama is well, slooow. Okay, let’s switch to BMX. I forgot this was in the Olympics. This is like half pipe snowboarding but with bikes. Performed by mainly slightly pudgy twenty year olds. There are basically two moves that they do: “Don’t Do That! You’ll Break Your Neck!” and “I Told You So.” The latter is actually only done when someone crashes, which is frequent.

One BMX guy did something besides take his hands off the handle bars or spin his front wheel while in the air. He rotated the bike in a vertical plane: back wheel over front, while he wasn’t holding the bike. Pretty cool. Or was it front over back? Now back to four screens. Water polo is up in one corner. Something important is going on. Not sure what. Two teams. Oh, it’s a shoot out. Goalie versus opposing player from ten or fifteen feet away. Cool. What makes this really interesting is we are getting the audio from the BMX competition. Now a shot of a tennis match. When tennis or badmitten is in one of these little qudrents you can’t see the ball, just the players running around – who know what’s going on? Oh wait, the girls in green on the water polo section are jumping up and down. They must have won. Probably Australia. Who knows? Now to kayaking, now called something or other canoeing. But first crewing. Back to volleyball. Don’t those ladies get sunburned? I remember there was a big hoopla about them being required to wear those little two piece bathing suits and the protests over that. I can only think one thing – butt crack. Same for the gymnists. And what about those weird bathing suits for some of the men’s teams? We want to highight the men’s jungue. Maybe not. I dunno.

Okay. let me give Gold View a better try. Stand closer. Go with the flow. Oh, what’s this? A note on the bottom of the screen of the kayaking (Excuse me canoe paddling or something or other) explaining the green and red gates? Well, everyone knows you gotta go throughhe green gates going down stream and the red upstream. (Said no one, ever.) Just like in rugby, it’s important where you place the ball down in the end zone (I mean try zone). This determines where you kick the extra point from. We’re talking angle of kick. Yeah, would have been nice to have an explanation. Also, off sides and a penalty, but hey, what do you want from one of the premier sports organizations for broadcasting in the world?

Did you hear about the USA women’s rugby finish for bronze? No? Go to Peacock, click on the “Gold/Bronze women’s Rugby” icon and see … see…What is this? Finland and someone? WTF? They areno\’t in the final four. Oh this must be one of the playoff games of eight teams leading up to the four teams to the two teams, which is the final. Just advance the clicker and when you stop, wait for two minutes of commercials to find out where you are and what you are watching. There’s no little fast motion screen to show you where you are. Just drop in, wait two minutes of commercials and see where you are. Not the right place? Click agian. Wait two minutes. My tolerance was five times or ten minutes of crappy commercials and not finding the game, and we paid for this?

Hey, Comcast or Verizon or NBC or somebody I got a boffo idea. Do what they do in Cambodia. Have a channel for each sport and let the user with a remote click around. Weird huh? You can watch as much as you want of a sport then click to another one. No? You know what’s better? Yeah, force me to watch your crappy coverage. Hey, did you hear we didn’t qualify in air pistol? Did you show it? Maybe. Somewhere. Who knows? Replace them guns with AR-15s, the rifle of America, and we’ll show you. As targets have school children. Not real ones just pictures of the ones that were massacred. Too much? Bad taste?  Yeah. Okay.

Then there’s the outrage over the greek live scene of drag queens (was it drag queens?) dressed up emulating a Greek painting. Oh, the outrage. Making fun of the Last Supper. OMG. The outrage is from people who have never been to France – obviously.

Back to dressage, Mitt Romney, prep school waterboy, had a horse in this event a few years ago. What a competitor. Why isn’t pranercise a sport in the Olympics?

I gotta go. I’m waiting to see the murder ball sport with the grapefruit sized ball. What is that? Get Snoop Dog out here.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

The Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. I thought it was $7.50. Let’s do some basic math.

If you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, that’s 2000 hours.

At $7.25 an hour that works out to $14,500 a year.

Who can survive on that?

In Virginia where I live the annual cost of living is $48,249 according to SoFi.

That would mean you’d have to make $24.12 an hour to live in Virginia.

At $7.25 an hour, every year you’d fall $34,049 behind.

What do people do?

I don’t know. What I do know is that after World War II a man could get a job that would pay enough to afford a house, feed his family, and his wife didn’t have to work. This is no longer true.

I’ve heard it said that minimum wage jobs are “entry level jobs” and the assumption is that they are for high school kids trying to make a little extra money. This too is not true. The majority of minimum wage jobs are held my people trying to make a living.

“Entry Level Job” suggested that the person will move up and get a better paying job. This too is not true. You only need so many managers at a burger joint or a Walmart. The vast majority will be minimum wage jobs.

And let’s not forget what Chris Rock said of minimum wage jobs, “We’d pay you less but the government won’t let us.”

There have been studies looking at the effect of raising wages and or solving the problem of poverty..

I listened to the radio when NPR was interviewing someone speaking for the idea of having unions and increasing wages. He made several interesting points: 1) After WWII laborers benefitted nationwide from the autoworkers forming a union and receiving better wages. 2) It turns out that raising wages hurts the employer at first, a little bit in the pocket book, but the overall effect is beneficial because they don’t have as much turnover and they get better worker loyalty. Also, the community benefits because people have money to spend. 3) He pointed out that a Walmart executive stated that the reason they didn’t want unions was “they wanted to drive the bus.” ie It’s question of control.

The other report was about the man who created ChatGPT. He’s done an experiment giving people $1000 a month for three years and seeing the effect. Not shockingly, people reduced hour to spend more time with their kids. They spent the money by and large on basics like food, rent, and gas.

Project 2025 wants to do away with the minimum wage, but back on services and benefits for the poor, and create a tax program that will save the rich thousands and cost everyone else $2,600 a year.

This is the program Donald Trump says he’ll put in place.

Friday, July 25, 2024

The other day Donald called Kamala a name. A bad name? More a stupid name. The kind of thing you’d hear on the playground when you were in seventh grade. That’s all he’s got? 

Meanwhile, his running mate it has been revealed had sex with a sofa. How do we know? He wrote about it. I have to wonder if Ron Howard put that scene in his movie based on the book? You know, it’s odd that they, the rabid right, hate the Hollywood elites, but seem okay with embracing them when it’s about them. 

I have questions. Are our sofas safe? Should J. D. Vance be banned from furniture stores? What about love seats? Divans? Couches? Do we need to get plastic protectors for our furniture?

It’s no longer “The Prosecutor versus the Felon,” but “the Felon and the Sofa Fucker.” Has he been rehabilitated? Did he go to therapy? Or at least a Christian “Save the Furniture” program? Have we caught him giving a side eye to a nice plump set of cushions? Or does he not go for over stuffed and prefer sleek Danish modern?

What about IKEA? I mean you select the cushions out of bins, do they need to be wrapped in protective plastic?

Speaking of the law, I’ve been wondering, “if you commit a crime, and are found guilt of that crime, and the penalty is time in jail, don’t you go to jail?” I’m asking. It seems that the defense after being found guilty of a crime of “I didn’t do it and the judge is an idiot,” doesn’t usually fly. At least, it hasn’t yet. Neither does, “do you know who I am?”

And why are so many people who worked with the Donald not supporting him? And why are so many who did in jail, or going to jail, or accused of crimes, or unethical business practices? I don’t remember that with any other President (well Nixon a little, and a few in history like the Teapot Dome, but that’s chump change compare to what Trump and his supporting cast have done and or been accused of). Now, some say it’s that someone is out to get them, and they’re right. It’s called “The Law.” Their defense is “We didn’t do it.” and “It’s a political witch hunt.” 

It would seem strange to begin a witch hunt on a guy before he sought political office. Also, it’s not like someone is testifying against him that caused the guilty verdict. It’s that the crime was committed on paper that you can see before your eyes. One of the things that Trump doesn’t understand is a flu shot. It is reported that he seems to think that if you get the flu then you should get the shot. It also seems, though unconfirmed, that if you commit the crime out in the open that it’s not a crime. I guess the defense is, “Who would be so stupid as to commit the crime in broad daylight?” 

Answer?

Well, you know the answer.

On September 18th Donald J. Trump is due in court to be sentenced on 34 counts where the evidence is overwhelming. Typically, this sentence is four years in jail. I’m good with that.

“Oh but he was President!”

“So?”

“He’s running for President again?”

“So?”

I’ve never heard of a sentence where the judge is told, “I’m too busy and too important to go to jail” that worked.

Maybe, I’m missing something.

Oh yeah, you may get leniency if you show contrition and say you’re sorry. But what if you threaten the judge, his family, his law clerk, and everyone associated with the case? Does that help?

I don’t think so.

I’ve said this before and I’l say it again, as to the Secret Service and protecting a former President? 

Hey, they can wait in the parking lot. New York State will take good care of him for four years.

Four more years? Nah. four is enough.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Okay. Okay. Hold on. I had grave concerns about Joe Biden dropping out of the race. I thought it was a mistake. I was wrong. It seems to be a master stroke.

However, I am concerned. With Joe out there’s only one geriatric white man in the race. 

However, I received news that we had a choice. Joe Manchin was running for President.

He’s young, only 76! Compare that to dottering old fool Trump at 78.

Then my hopes were dashed. Joe Manchin says he’s not running. Really? I’m betting he’ll change his mind only to drop out again. Someone has to play Ross Perot.

Now imagine this phone call:

“Hello, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom?”

“Yes?

“We have a problem. We signed up for one thousand lines and we need more.”

“Okay, how many more do you need?”

“Forty five.”

“Forty five? That’s no problem.”

“Thousand.”

“You need forty five thousand more lines?”

“Well, forty four not counting the thousand we requested.”

“Hold on…”

That was the Zoom call with the Black Women for Kamala zoom call.

Yeah. It was a little over subscribed.

And now the contest will be “The Prosecutor Versus The Criminal.”

Donald like most criminals says it’s not his fault that it’s a mistake. Remember Tim Allen talking about being in jail? Yeah. All those guys and they were innocent. Yeah. Right.

Please note the day numbering was updated to correspond to the actual number of days Biden has been in office. Somehow the number was off recently. Management regrets the error.

Monday, July 22, 2024

I’ve got a lot better thing to do than be writing this, but … but … oh well.

Since my last writing at least two major major things have happened. Joe dropped out and Caitlin Clark and the WNBA All Stars who weren’t selected for the Olympic team beat “the best team in the world.”

Aside from that my headlines had “The Ten Worst Quotes in Wrestling History.” I guess this is surfacing because Terry Boilea ripped his tee shirt open to reveal he’s a closet Trump supporter. (Yes. Terry Bolilea is Hulk Hogan’s real name.) And, the other massive headline was something about the five most propitious horoscope signs. Big news to be sure. 

Now the headlines are about what a great guy Joe Biden is and how excited the Dems are now that Kamala is heir apparent. “The Prosecutor versus The Felon” blah blah blah.

I don’t know. Seems risky to me. But then I think a can of soup should be able to beat Donald. Hey, I’m selling Charlie Manson ear bandages just like the one Donald is sporting.

Meanwhile, a big chunk of the world stopped working because of a “fix” Crowdstrike sent out. Now a few more people have heard of them. Apparently, it was a C++ coding error. They forgot to check for a null byte. A null byte is an 8 bit integer where all the bits are set to 0. It’s a zero. typically, nulls are used in C and C++ to terminate a string of characters. If you have let’s say the words “Hi Mom” it would be stored as the six characters plus a zero byte at the end (a “space” is a character too). A zero byte is null. To find the end of the string you set a pointer  to the beginning of the string and “walk” down the string by incrementing the pointer by one until you reach a 0 or as they say “null byte.” This is pretty basic stuff, but it doesn’t mean someone can’t get twisted up in their code and forget to do it or accidentally “walk off the end of a string” and wander around in memory. Fortunately, there are a lot of null bytes in most executable code so you’ll usually hit one pretty quick. In fact, most compression programs just squeeze null bytes out of code. But the fact that there are so many and logic tests can be tricky it’s easy to miss a null byte test. Yes, it’s basic stuff, but it happens, and they can be hard to find. That’s why so much code that works is never rewritten even if it’s an ancient language. That’s why our fighter planes run on 286 chips, etc.

It’s amazing to me when I fly a big kite or I create some code that it does what I expected it to do. Well, I’ve been lucky with big kites, not so much with code. In fact, never with code the first time.

So Joe’s a great guy, wish him well, yeah Kamala. Is she up to the job? Well, we know Donald is not. He has a proven track record of do nothingness. And his speeches are rambling mind word salads. For reasons I can’t explain his supporters don’t seem to mind. He’s within three years of Biden’s age. He did nothing to improve our county when he was President and much to make it worse, and he’s promising to do real damage this next time around. 

He surrounded himself with crooks and cheats, but this time they are more organized. He’s pledging the same things the Republican Party has pledged since our middle class started sliding into poverty. Cut taxes – not for you, well maybe a little – but on the Uber rich, who support him. Destroy our alliances, piss off our allies, and carry out the most inhumane deportation program he can get away with.

Let’s hope.

Okay, the best team in the world got spanked. This raises again the specter of should they have left Caitlin Clark off Team USA? I don’t know. It seems pretty dumb to me, but I’ll tell you who they are probably regretting not asking back and that’s Arike Ogunbowale.

That woman came alive in the third quarter and lit up Team USA with huge arching three pointers. She beat Team USA. And Angel Reese was nice in her attitude and comments. I guess she’s showing her middle class Randallastown, Maryland back ground and not her “Bal-te-mo’” hood stuff people have been trying to put on her. I lived in Randallstown I should know. In fact, I was going into Baltimore from Randallstown on Liberty Road three days after Watergate when I heard the news about the break-in. I was turning by the Mondawmin Mall and I said to myself, “I don’t care what they say Nixon was involved.” That’s the day I became a Democrat and not a “it’s none of my business, who cares? “apathetic college student.