Listen to this excerpt from an email I got, from the president of Heebie U:
Just wanted to send a quick word to let you know how helpful I found the letter you wrote for the Board of Regents. I know it's never an easy letter to write and you were certainly given a larger challenge than usual. That said, and taking nothing away from your colleagues, I think it's the best faculty-to-Board letter I've seen since coming to Heebie U. You really captured the essence of a lot of critical and complex issues in a very effective way.
I'm the BEST at letter-writing EVER? little old MOI? Well! Harrumph! If you insist!
Go heebie! Speak carefully-worded truth to power!
Our big WTF thing here today is that our local* paper endorsed a way far right nutball, over a very well qualified lawyer, for our seat on the Public Service Commission. Editor quit, wave of subscriptions cancelled, the whole drill.
Fielder's critics are troubled by her affiliation with this group and others, such as the Coalition of Western Property Owners that invited members of the Bundy family to speak in Paradise a couple of years ago. Her staunch support for transferring management of federal land to the states is certainly unpopular, and recently, she helped spread baseless rumors about Antifa supposedly traveling to Missoula to foment violence around the Black Lives Matter protests.
This is from the editorial endorsing her! In a city that is going to go Biden more than 60%.
* Not locally owned.
Not our Halford, but interesting all the same:
Speaking of LA I missed this from a couple of weeks back: Anthony Davis Jr. being familiar with all internet Unfogged traditions.
After his shot dropped to beat the buzzer, win the game and lift the Los Angeles Lakers to within two victories of their first NBA Finals appearance since 2010, Anthony Davis shouted out one word that said it all: "Kobe!"
(Admittedly it was the 105th point of the game not the 100th.) I saw it referenced in a writeup of the Lakers winning the championship. (A gratifying win for Lebron.)
"Voted" yesterday (i.e dropped off mail-in ballots at the County office building). Poll worker training on Wednesday. Laws and procedures changed with new voting machines. Fortunately it will be a relatively inconsequential election with light turnout.
I hate the Lakers, but I think I hate LeBron-haters more.
6: I just got my ballot. I'm torn about whether I want to drop it off in the box or just go to town hall for early Voting. Like 18,000 votes were disqualified last time, so I wonder whether in person is better. I haven't figured out how to vote on one of the ballot questions and don't know where to go to get information.
I'm yes on 1, yes on 2. I assume 1 is the question you're unsure of since ranked choice voting seems like an obvious improvement?
You can track your ballot after you drop it off to make sure it's accepted. The only thing that won't tell you that in-person would is if you made some mistake filling out the bubbles such that the machine can't read it.
9: Yes, I'm definitely pro 2 - especially after Auchincloss beat Mermell when I think she would have won under a ranked-choice system. I have a Yes on 2 sign that I'm going ot put in my window. I voted for the Right to Repair Law, and I know that a lot of the same group that were against that are against 1 as well which leads me to be Yes on 1. But I don't understand the privacy implications, so I'm unsure. Is there independent analysis anywhere?
Personally, I'd really like to be able to limit the dealers access to some of those data and to require explicit consent. Of course, nobody is pushing for that.
I agree so hard with 7.
I really haven't managed to notice any sports ball since the pandemic.
endorsing 7 and 11. The fans of the second-best basketball player of all time tend to be particularly annoying here, though not as annoying as the fans of the football team that hasn't been good for precisely 35 years.
It doesn't bother me that people think Jordan is better, there's a reasonable argument to be made either way. What I hate is people who think Jordan is obviously better, especially if they think counting rings is the reason. And what I hate with the burning fire of a thousand suns is people who think that Kobe belongs anywhere near this discussion.
Our 7 day positive rate is still hovering around 2.5%. I guess that's good considering that many of the bars around here have been pretty crowded/loud for at least a month now.
1: Congratulations. You should order a coffee mug like the "World's Best Dad" ones that reads "World's Best Faculty-to-Board Letter Writer".
14: Phew. I thought Tom was only talking about me.
I think I've come around to the view that I am as much a LeBron fan as I am a Cavs fan. I customarily despise the Lakers, but I was pulling for them this year. LeBron is pretty much everything you want in a Sports God.
I was wondering if it's fair that LeBron James' argument for being the greatest of all time is bolstered by his skill as a de facto general manager in convincing Anthony Davis to play with him.
To be the greatest at basketball, you need to lose hundreds of thousands betting on your golf game.
16.2: Yes, I'm sort of the same -- LeBron's return to Cleveland won me over, and now it seems like I will always root for him.
1: Congratulations, heebie! You are the true GOAT.
Anthony Davis looks exactly like Frank N Furter to me.
Anyway, I'm happy for LeBron and I'm happy for Nadal. May the correct people continue to win, for at least another 22 days.
Happy Thanksgiving to Canadians and the like.
22: My MIL is alone for it this year. Her other son, the grandkids, and daughter-in -law (SIL- bitch) were all there for about 5 months from the start of the pandemic, but the kids are back in school now in Ottawa, so they don't feel it's safe for them to go visit.
It would take us 5 weeks to go, quarantine, visit, return and quarantine.
I was a basketball-obsessed teen in Chicagoland during the Bulls' runs and, like all the rest of the people in that group, worshipped Jordan, but at this point I have to say Jordan and Lebron are merely different, and I wouldn't try to rank either above the other. (Though I might put Kareem in that tier as well, with an even bigger caveat about not being able to compare across positions.)
And the point about Kobe is so true. It's one of the things that's made my age and aging so clear to me: if you grew up with Jordan, you recognized Kobe as a very good imitator, but not more than that. But then I watch interviews with today's players, and realize they grew up with Kobe, and only know Jordan from grainy youtube clips (pre Last Dance, anyway).
Watched that recently. Boys enjoyed it.
I can't remember if he played well in that one.
10- I think the stuff about how stalkers are going to use location data to hunt people is bullshit. The ballot measure doesn't cover location services, just mechanical diagnostics. There's maybe some concerns about cyberattacks if more people have access to the system but my general opinion is that closed systems are a bigger risk because the owners have incentive to cover up insecurities or breaches. At least if more competing businesses have access you're more likely to have vulnerabilities reported and fixed.
29: I'm really more worried about the insurance company knowing that I'm too hard on the brakes sometimes than I am about location data.
28: Michael Jordan's pretty good, but he's no Bugs Bunny.
Yeah, the thing about Kobe is he was much better at being "Jordanesque" than he was at being great at basketball (with of course the caveat that he was very good at basketball for a long time). But being the best imitation of the best doesn't make you second best or even very close.
Basketball players tend to overrate their peers who are very good at difficult but not terribly useful things, especially long 2s in isolation.
A thing about Space Jam and other kid movies from the 90s that I never saw until watching with my kids: WTF is up with the cocaine-induced acceleration of random interludes, rather than just cutting away and showing people in the next location? It's stylistically grating and kid movies 1995-2005 LOVE doing it.
It's like the comic effect of The Chipmunks or inhaling helium, applied to motion, and then driving that joke into the ground any time you want to skip ahead a few moments in the scene.
I think Kareem's the greatest, but my dad says he doesn't work hard enough on defense.
MY 87-YEAR-OLD MOTHER-IN-LAW WHOM WE MOVED FROM HER ASSISTED-LIVING SITUATION IN MASSACHUSETTS TO THE QUARANTINE HUT IN THE BACKYARD IS STILL FREE FROM CORONAVIRUS!!!!!!!!
29. I also voted for it but I am worried about how "open" the apps will be.
36: Yay!
LeBron has really won me over. I wasn't rooting for the Lakers (I was really hoping that the Raptors could repeat, though it seemed unlikely, and would have rooted for either the Bucks or Clippers over the Lakers), but can really appreciate what he's done.
The extremely well researched case for Kareem in the GOAT conversation: https://backpicks.com/2017/12/11/the-backpicks-goat-the-40-best-careers-in-nba-history/
That was written in 2017 though. It looks likeif you include LeBron's additional seasons he'd have LeBron at number 1. (Or at the very least will have him there after another season or two.)
My MIL is alone for it this year.
Oh, that sounds so sad. The mental-emotional-psychological toll of this goddamn pandemic...
Me, I'm feeling absurdly pleased with myself (and yes: I do realize that this is absurd, but please humour me...) because I finally made a pie (a pumpkin pie, for Thanksgiving) with a pie crust that was not merely "er, okay, I guess," or "well [it's 4 pm, and I have to take the bird out of the oven in 20 minutes, and then make the gravy, and also warm up the rolls, and also steam the broccoli...], this will just have to do." I finally (after years of failure) made a really good pie crust, is what I mean. My COVID-19 triumph, I suppose.
So, not exactly a real life check in. But I had a dream the other night that I took a trip to Hawaii with my family and while we were waiting for drinks at a beachside bar, I overheard someone mention Heebie. And lo! There was a whole meetup afoot. And I snuck away from my family for a bit to join y'all for a potluck dinner. And everyone wrote down their contact info, including Elizabeth Warren (who asked me to review a letter that she'd printed on the reverse side of a crossword puzzle to conserve paper).
Weren't the answers to the puzzle already on the other side.
Warren was Moby all along? I knew it.
43: Yes, and it was her first Thanksgiving without her husband too. A year ago, he was just starting to show signs of being quite sick.
I just had an embarrassing incident at work. It's Wednesday, my one day a week at the office. At the office we are all required to wear masks except when alone in our closed office. I just was printing and unthinkingly, walked out of the office without a mask to get the documents. An attorney walked by and said, "Hello peep!"
and I suddenly realized my face was bare and covered it up with my hands.
Also, your zipper was down.
668 new cases on 4,928 tests. Don't need algebra to know this is bad.
And the Dakotas are still ahead of your state.
Maybe algebra is required to figure out what that means.
The variation between Montana counties is still pretty interesting. Flathead has twice as many active cases as we do -- we have the university, but they have a bunch of Christian transplants. Cascade (home of Great Falls) just had a big jump, and is out ahead of us on active cases, despite a smaller population. They have maybe double the Indigenous population we do, and they also have the Air Force. Blackfeet Nation, and Fort Peck (Assiniboine & Sioux is their formal name, despite neither being the correct endonym) getting hit hard.
Also, the Flathead tourist season seems to be still going -- I still get a tweet every morning that certain parking lots in Glacier are full. Even when clouds completely obscure the mountains.
What it means if another six months of my mom being one unlucky nurse away from dying alone.
Oh, Moby, that's grim. At least I can see mine. We had maybe four months when it was impossible, but her home now has a routine where everyone is tested once a week, and all the carers too, while we are allowed to meet in the garden and now in a special room in the home, if this is prearranged and everyone is masked. Also, she's now in a room where I can shout through the window and we have managed to get the echo show / alexa device working for mutual communication.
There is talk of designating carers as key workers, so they/we can get tested regularly. That would of course also be great.
But the strain on you is hard to imagine.
I suppose if she does get sick, we can pull her out and set up a home hospice.
Anyway, they are testing all the time and the staff do get tested weekly. But the degree of community spread is high and rising. The staff have lives and kids.
Our COVID tests both came back negative, so that's a relief. We're still going to test again in a few days just to be sure, but we timed the initial tests for the best detection after the potential exposure so it's pretty unlikely these are false negatives.