A leader who everyone knows is on his way out, but is still in charge for some reason? That’s the A’s front office for you!
Drop some links off, if you would. Bonus points if they are announcements of the acquisition of a middle infielder, a top reliever, or an environmental impact report.
link (The Athletic… subscription required)
I always think of Robbie Ray as a former athletic, I look it up most every time and I think I find out I am wrong. I am not looking it up now, but he sign a one year $8M with the jays, which is the team he was on surprisingly
Long interview with Luhnow from a couple of weeks ago.
It is self-serving, but an interesting read.
Some Rule 5 speculation from Melissa Lockard in The Athletic:
Likely Protected: Greg Deichmann
Maybe Protected: Buddy Reed (PTBNL from the Profar trade), Parker Dunshee, Brian Howard, Jordan Diaz, Wandisson Charles, Miguel Romero
Not Protected: Lazaro Armenteros and some other flopped international signings.
Hopefully Trump fired Esper out of spite, and not because he wants DoD in hands of someone more willing to send troops into US streets.
Or bomb Iran
Why does this make me feel worse about this?
The post-election tantrum being thrown right now by all but a handful of elected Republicans is something I don’t know if we’ve seen since 1860. I was willing to give them a little time to move down the Kubler-Ross scale, but they seem to be moving in the wrong direction at the moment.
Neat
Would you expect anything else?
Do we have any realistic chance in those runoffs? I saw something that claimed Ossoff beat Perdue head-to-head in most polls, but given the skews of most recent polls and the actual results from Tuesday, along with the conventional wisdom that special elections have lower and more conservative turnout, it seems like these will be R+5% or so.
I’d say a chance, but a small one. Winning it would require Trump’s low propensity voters to stay home, which is why Mitch is determined to keep them jacked up on aggrievedness.
I’m wishcasting that Stacey Abrams and the awesome Georgia voter turnout operation will carry the day.
I am hoping my money is what’s needed
And speaking of the Senate, according to sfgate Alex Padilla is the leading candidate for Harris’ seat, but Barbara Lee is in the running as well.
Barbara Lee would be fantastic and she, obviously, speaks for me, but she doesn’t seem like a place holder (nor does Padilla). I have my doubts that Anyone other than a placeholder will get the spot
At age 74 Barbara Lee seems more placeholder-y than not to me.
Sure, but I haven’t heard her make any retirement noises.
I think he should stick feinstein in that spot. tell her to take it or he is unleashing all the SF Mayor secrets that he knows
that or tell her he is appointing Jello if she doesn’t
My buddy Phil got a Plymouth Satellite, the car Jerry Brown chose for frugality in his first CA Gov term, and has assembled a 24 Hours of Lemons team called the Suede Denim Secret Police to rebuild and run it, which via intermediary Jello says he might show up and drive.
And when does harris quit, If it were me, I’d wait till I was vested but that means one more year
barr’s scaring me.
Yeah me too, that and the Nunes aide to the NSA.
feels like duck lining upping.
Yeah, there is no way military brass does anything, yeah?
I can see all police, fed/local/sheriff, joining the fight, but not the army
I’m not crazy?
Not at the start, but by the time you go from locals then militarized feds like DHS and CBP to National Guard then lines are murkier.
It all supposes a massive cycle of escalating provocations and responses which is not likely. I hope.
not that anything is beneath them
nothing is beneath them and they don’t want *any body* beneath them either!
It’s important to be vigilant — these are very bad people who have lost any sense of restraint — but I suspect this is just another bit of shit being thrown against the wall for the criminal in chief’s benefit that will amount to nothing.
What today does lay bare, however, is just how far gone most of the Republican Party is. While they’re not going to succeed in stealing this election (and I’m pretty they are not going to do a coup either), I don’t know how we are supposed to keep having a democracy with these people who clearly do not believe in it.
thanks. solid ledge talk-down.
This about sums it up
They’re all in favor of a democratic one-party state.
I wish I was that confident. Attempted theft by court, fuckery with electors, and street mobs are not just abstract worries but actual tactics happening now and sure to get much worse in the coming weeks. Even a 10% chance that it works is terrifying.
I’m with FSU. Leaving this here, just in case.
Full disclosure: as a Philadelphia native son of lifelong Phillies fans I tend to assume that the worst most definitely can happen.
My spouse is also close to becoming a Luxembourg citizen, so that’s my escape plan.
welp.
I’M BACK UP ON THE LEDGE.
and because my grandpa fucked up and gave his nativity paperwork to some middling museum archive so i can’t claim my rightful italian/EU citizenship, i would gladly go to NZ.
full disclosure: gramps was a fascist.
i have his 2nd wedding band. it’s steel or some base metal, inscribed inside with ORO ALLA PATRIA XXIV (gold to the fatherland). this is from when he donated his original wedding band to mussolini and in return got the same weight in said base metal to reclaim the XXIV carat gold, should the fascists some day win.
Agree that it is happening, and it is terrifying. It is also exhausting.
What makes me confident is that we have survived the main danger points — the voting and the counting — with Biden comfortably ahead in multiple tipping-point states. Their legal claims range from transparent bullshit (they have nothing close to admissible evidence of any irregularities) to so radical that they would invalidate just about every election in every state (mail voting unconstitutional) and preposterously untimely (even this Supreme Court isn’t going to retroactively toss millions of votes based on a challenge to the voting method brought after the votes were cast and counted).
I guess their strategy, to the extent they have one, seems to be scratching and clawing their way to blocking enough states from certifying the election for long enough to either justify republican state legislators sending alternate slates or sending no slates and throwing it to the House. Given where things stand (the voting and the counting bit), that would be tantamount to ending the United States a democratic republic. Were this Bush v. Gore close, they could and would pull it off. But it isn’t, so I don’t think they can.
The consequences of their trying it are terrible for the country going forward, pushing us further down the road toward democratic collapse, frankly. So while I an confident that Joe Biden will be president on January 20, I am very worried about where things are headed over the medium term. We are stuck with this version of the Republican party for a long time, and they are showing that they are perfectly willing to eat away at our democratic institutions until there is nothing meaningful left, Trump or no Trump.
was this before or after the pompeo smirk?
Before. Ugh.
Agree with all of this.
Even Republican judges are giving them no traction with the lawsuits, and even Republican state legislators are making it clear that they are not about to appoint alternate electors. That shit is all futile. But the fact that they are still trying, even when it is that futile, is itself a terrible sign.
And of course, the fact that they will (likely) still have the Senate come January just means that none of this will ever stop.
Two other things I meant to say:
1. A big part of what they are trying to do is just keep the appearance up that the ball is still in play. The network calls and the foreign leader calls and the congratulations from at least a few Republicans (Romney, Murkowski, the Bushes) are important to quashing that. People falling into the mindset that he is going to somehow stay in office helps him maintain the fiction that he needs to keep the bullshit flowing. I’m not inclined to do that work for him.
2. Barr, dangerous as he is, has proven much better at kneecapping legitimate investigations (Iran-Contra, Mueller) than pushing illegitimate ones (that Durham nonsense, the supposed ballots found in a ditch or whatever). It will be doubly hard to cook up crap at this point, with the prosecutors in the Justice Department knowing he’ll be gone in two months and they have their whole careers ahead of them.
Relevant to #2
The whole thing strikes me as a cynical attempt to keep their base fired up for the Georgia senate run-offs. And then it will be inevitably followed by a cynical attempt to keep their base fired up for the mid-term elections. And the pretty soon the idea that the 2020 election was stolen will be a permanent part of party dogma.
we’re speculating on GA but that project doesn’t require packing the top of several agencies with lackeys that only have 2.5 months of usefulness.
yeah, that. coverup.
thought the thread would show. how do you make the thread show?
I hope the fact that there will be a new president with pardon powers in the office in two months might be an incentive enough for a whistle-blower or fifty.
thread keeps growing.
I’ve never seen Glorious Mundy and Aaron Rupar in the same room together.
I could never sit through every Trump speech like that guy does.
LOL, OK
They’ve represented Big Tobacco, the bin Laden family, and even Art Modell. But now they’re starting to have qualms.
On the subject of the bullshit-nature of these suits, I present this bonkers twitter thread on what they are trying in Arizona. I don’t understand how these lawyers aren’t getting sanctioned to hell.
Pretty much.
This guy is amazing.
Perfect
Man, I saw Willie Brown on TV yesterday and he looks awful. Not having to make himself up for the public every day is taking a toll.
“baseball person”
http://loser.com
“the forces of evil in a bozo nightmare,” makes beck prescient AF.
I also voted last week. Some observations.
1. I voted on a Sunday, as all normal people do. I didn’t have to take a day off to vote.
2. Yes, I consider Sunday to be the last day of the week, not the first one. Again, as all normal people do.
3. It was the election for the Stuttgart Mayor, the highest level I’m allowed to take part in, being that I’m not a German citizen.
4. I voted in person, and I had to wait about one minute.
5. Everybody I saw wore a mask.
6. Nobody I saw brandished a weapon.
7. We had the results by 8:30 PM
8. The candidate of the far-right demagogues (AfD, something like German version of the 2020 US Republicans) won 2.2% of the votes
9. A fellow anti-science idiot won 2.6%. And that was it. The rest were normal independents or representatives of democratic parties.
10. As nobody won the majority, there will be a run-off. All candidates, even new ones can present themselves, this time the plurality will suffice.
10 is pretty weird.
I guess the idea behind it is to give candidates time to forge alliances and lean a bit in the direction of the candidate who will sit out the vote in their favor. The leading vote-getter is from the right-wing party, but the greens, in various forms, official and independent, took over 50%. If they can come together, their sole candidate will win it in the second round. But they have to find some incentive in stepping out, so it gives some weight to having their specific agenda addressed.
Not to paint a too rosy picture of the state of German public enlightenment, one of my tennis teammates referred to Angela Merkel as Angela Hitler/Honecker in the group chat today, angry at COVID-19 restrictions, I guess. But, hey at least it’s 2-5 percent, not 50.
You’re comparing election results from Stuttgart, a large multicultural cosmopolitan area, to the US as a whole. Houston or Phoenix or Philly would be a more apt comparison for mask wearing, weapons brandishing, or demagogue supporting. You still win of course, just not in quite as embarrassing a landslide.
Very far point. There were regions in Eastern Germany where AfD got up to 30%, and conversely I am aware that metro areas paint a very different picture than the US as a whole.
Also, I didn’t have to “register to vote”. Government already know where I live.
4/5/6/8/9 are not as different as you may think from this part of the country.
Aren’t they? I just checked Philadelphia – if I understood correctly. it was still ~20% for Trump.
Sorry, I misread “this part of the country” as “parts of this country”. Yeah San Francisco was even more in line with here.
is voting in germany mandatory or voluntary (for citizens)?
Voluntary. There was about 46% turnout on this one
thanks.
i ended up looking it up to see if patterns. woulda sworn there was a nordic country or two that had compulsory voting. guess not.
found out also why i’m not in trouble in argentina (compulsory) even though i have never ever voted.
Interesting. Didn’t know about Peru & Uruguay. Do you know about sanctions there?
it’s a fine. ~U$50 first time. ~U$100 after.
ps. this infograph is dumb by exactly 1 color. would be immediately digestible if no sanctions were an even lighter pink.
“Employee is expected to be aware of the bullpen mounds while tracking foul balls”
-sf giants employee handbook probably
“Great news kid, you’re going to the show. Terms and conditions apply, click here to accept.”
Nice. I’m liking that the Masters is on a weekend when I can give it my undivided attention. It’s usually competing with excitement over the start of baseball season.
Dumb question from a golf dummy: Was he trying to do that?
No. A ball skipping off a pond is a known possibility, but not one you’d try on purpose. Most likely he wanted to hit a low liner to land on the front edge, to see how it would roll on the green, gathering intel for Thursday when it counts.
Turns out you can’t play a round in November with the full field and have enough daylight.
Watching on the DVR…the visual effect on the familiar course is interesting, seeing open space where there are usually “patrons”. Golf is the sport that works for me without a crowd though; I couldn’t get fully into baseball with cutouts, and football, *particularly* at the college level, seems ridiculous as a studio sport.
Et tu, Boris?
His congratulatory message with “Trump” visible underneath “Biden” was a masterpiece of incompetence.
ZiPS
Hard to argue with any of that, though I’d hope to get a little more out of the catching position than they project. The core of a good team whose pitching craps the bed in the playoffs is still there if they can make a couple decent acquisitions in middle infield and the bullpen.
Also want to note that Khris Davis’ No. 1 comp is someone named Ripper Collins.
Stroman and Gausman both took their QOs. Not a market to be turning down 19M guaranteed with an injury history.
it’s probably not that alex rogriguez but i wonder if they picked the name because of familiarity.
Damn that’s some insidious shit. Local investigative journalism FTW.
and if they just set up a headshot nothing would have been known
From this NYT article:
(emphasis mine)
Can someone help me understand this? If next administration can’t remove him, how did he get the job in the first place? Supposedly, there was an Obama appointee there at some point, right? What constraints are there to appoint people to this and similar position? Is Senate involved?
litt quit at the end of obama’s term (as is the norm).
but we’re in the post-norm world.
we coulda had frasier.
we’re in the tortellis.
Civil service supervisors that are trumpers agreed to hire him in a different track.
I don’t know, but I imagine there is a 6 month probation period for fed jobs like CA state jobs. Seems like he can be removed, or pushed out relatively easily
Yeah I would be surprised if it were that easy to permanently embed a crony like that during the lame duck. But I’ve been surprised by a lot of things over the last four years.
Side note: FKing lawyers, man. I remember learning in my professional responsibility class about all the reforms to the profession post-Watergate. Seems like we need to go through another round of that.
It is amusing to read about how all the lawyers in these election lawsuits are basically refusing to claim in court that their cases have any real merit, though of course it would be better if they refused to file the meritless cases in the first place.
Totally. The thing is, filing facially meritless suits should subject them to sanctions anyway under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the state-law equivalents. I’m sure judges are reluctant to use that hammer in political cases, and the other side might not want to move for that remedy when they just want to get a quick dismissal and move on, but at some point this abuse has to be punished.
In my line of work, I do from time to time file “client control” motions. They are pretty easy to spot and I’ll waive reply if asked. Typically the judges than me and deny the request and move on. Sometimes they make a show of yelling at me to aid in my client control (maybe they are mad at me, I doubt it though).
But this shit is a whole nother level. they are attaching reams of affidavits and saying “there is no evidence” out loud on the record to the judge. I am not a sanctions guy, but man, this is tiresome.
FKing yalies
lol
Gaetzy and Tiffany, sitting in a tree
I feel ill.
something about his face reminds me of squeezing the top of my action-grip GI joe’s head to make funny faces.
Kung fu grip!
riiiiiight!
chuckle
Shoutout to North Macedonia for qualifying for the Euros.
Further shoutout to North Macedonia for beating Germany in Germany in a World Cup Qualifier!
Great Days In History: 50 years ago today, November 12, 1970.
1. Happy 50th Birthday, Tonya Harding!
2. The day the Oregon Highway Division dynamited the dead whale.
and she was born in Portland.
Uhg, imagine if it was you and sometime in the late 80s you go to the library to look at the microfilm for your towns newspaper the day after your birthday, and you get above the fold pictures of a dead whale or a dead whale being blown up.
in researching, the LA times archives skips 1970. Naturally
newspapers dot com wants me to subscribe, but the thumbnail of the day after I was born, apparently the canoga park mail carriers went on strike and UC regents OK’d a violence “prevention” policy
Mine is pretty much all Cold War and the Space Race.
I have a Patty Hearst bail hearing.
2 such events on the same day? That should be an OR state holiday!
Idea: Have all Democratic electors wear a wire for the next month to see if we can catch Trump trying to bribe them.
Offer them $1M to provide evidence!
for the CRASS heads.
I had never heard that story about Falklands war classified info. That is bonkers.
yeah! had to read that part twice.
i was laughing from imagining steve doing silvio doing michael, and suddenly it gets serious and complicated and i’m all WAT??
Like all my crass experiences, I am trying to get through the writing, but keep having to stop
I stand with Geordi
don’t sleep on the whistleblower pod. it’s fun. because it’s not about politics.
Referees? Train conductors?
you forgot wolves.
NBA ref scandal.
i’m done with 3. does the host seem a little dumb. like not understanding how humans act?
i probably like it because i’m pretty dumb myself.
i’m ready to move to delaware county. apparently the publishing professionals really make bank there, they’re very respected, and have a special job title. they call ’em bookmakers.
he does ask really dumb questions sometimes but i think it’s just rhetorical device to move the story. it is a payne lindsey production after all.
maybe you’ll like this one more. i haven’t started it so can’t vouch.
Both of those have this incredulous “why would they do that?” thought line that I find silly. People bet because they can.
They are both ok, just not as investigative as I hope, I find myself wanting more specific questions to be asked and the narrating ignoring the most obvious answers
We’re going undefeated this year!
Ha ha ha Pac-12. Good grief.
What a FKing embarrassing mess.
Looking out for the best interests of student-athletes, as always.
Hundreds of thousands of college students are about to go home and infect grandma over Thanksgiving dinner. So yeah, percolating the infection rates up on campus right before that is criminally negligent.
My returning student, who is super COVID-safe by college standards, ain’t seeing grandma any closer than 12 feet, and only outdoors and masked. And I am still worried.
I saw somewhere that a lot of schools are sending students back for Thanksgiving and they’re not going back, but finishing the semester remotely. Is that what UCSB is doing?
Well, the students don’t have to be there in person to begin with, But no, no formal long break through January. That makes a lot of sense.
This is what University of Cincinnati is doing. They are also offering free testing for students next week, to make the trip home a little safer. We’ll see if they actually have capacity to meet demand though.
The scheduling of this game is consistent with the Conference’s commitment to
provide opportunities through maximum scheduling flexibilityget that Fox money somehow.Now we have the rare Sunday morning conflict between the Cal game and the final round of the Masters.
Anticlimactic, DJ much the best in the world right now. Fans, sure, but what I really missed were the challenging conditions, those soft greens made it just a birdie/eagle contest.
is that like the smoking section on the TWA DC10?
Tomorrow’s Wazzu @ Furd game is cancelled (positive tests in Pullman). The Pac-12 has cancelled 6 of 18 games scheduled through this weekend, although Cal’s hastily-scheduled and dreadfully-played game against UCLA on Sunday morning made one of those up. So 5/18 games have been lost which is 27.8%. Overall in FBS this week, as of now 17/62 games have been postponed or cancelled (27.4%).
Welcome to the Biden era!
I’m OK with this final act of atonement, so long as his head is on a spike atop said bridge.
From Ken Rosenthal on Angels GM hire:
Hard to believe Forst would have considered that anyway. Lateral move, to an organization lacking stability, while his Oakland path may be clearer than ever with Billy’s likely exit. The A’s did allow LAA to contact Billy Owens IIRC.
Related: How about Kim Ng in FLA?! I’m excited if only for the sure entertainment value of Aubrey Huff’s reaction.
Alright, finally Kim Ng gets the job.
Yeah, Jeets!
{shudders}
he first complained about all the mentions, and bragged about living rent free in libs heads and then an hour later he said congratulations, it’s a good hire.
I’m super excited about Kim Ng, I just wish I had any affinity at all for the Marlins. I wish she’d been hired by a team I could give a shit about.
My power is out, they say it’ll be all night. Gave me time to read this long interview about baseballs. Drag and COR and yarn and the pill and stuff.
https://defector.com/an-astrophysicist-explains-the-challenges-of-de-juicing-the-baseball/
Fremont’s own
Was talking to a DA yesterday. She said that she had been planning to go to soCal for thanksgiving until the latest lockdown announcement.
My parents live in OC, we have gone there 12 of the last 14 years for either Christmas or thanksgiving. It never occurred to my parents, my sister or me that we might be able to get together this year. Nobody even brought it up to make sure none of us wanted to do it.
Is my experience atypical?
I’m 48 and have lived more than half of my life abroad, yet I haven’t been in Zagreb on All Saints four times in my life. It was very clear to me we wouldn’t go this year. Ditto Christmas in Spain. For last 20+ years we always went, save for the two times Virginia’s parents came to Stuttgart. Also, it was never on agenda this year, by any of the parties. So, at least from my perspective – no.
We usually host local family and friends for thanksgiving, and decided months ago that we wouldn’t have people over this year. And a double hell no if it had involved anyone traveling.
But I’m not at all surprised that other people were considering it, or even still are. The next couple months are going to be really bad.
My extended family had been trying to put together a distancedish meal until I put the kibosh on it a couple days ago. Not worth it.
We’ve been dying to go see our grandkids in MA all year and were talking through ways to do it, maybe between the holidays or something, but we’ve finally decided to not drive ourselves crazy spinning in circles trying to come up with some safe way to do it and justify it. Just thinking about it all the time has been making me crazier than anything else. I think when I finally just made myself realize no, it’s not going to happen this year, it was the most relief I’ve had in a long time, sad as it may be.
Very true. Letting it go feels weirdly good. Just think about the fun times you’ll have with them this summer when we are vaccinated.
also, gonna miss solstice a lot.
Thanks for saying that, we are going to miss it too. I fondly remember your beat poetry text to me after your wild bike ride home in the rain after one. There were some early years when I was just getting it going (early 90s) when we did a small beach bonfire, and I may go back to something like that for this year.
ha! forgot about that ride.
i strongly dislike my parents. well, my mom. but my dad is a lackey. i stopped going to xmas a few years ago, which i would do as a sacrifice so i could see my sister and niece. so that was not in play this year.
since my marriage ended i’ve been going to orphans’ t-giving here in oakland and that is fun. i started carving the turkey the 2nd time (because the 1st time it got wrecked) and that became my job. also, bringing a pitcher of boulevardier. it’s usw a group of 14–20 ppl. i fucking love that dinner. starts early, goes late, we all pass out drunk on the ground and next day watch a movie from pretty much that same spot on the ground. this year it’s off. though i believe a subgroup of 6 of them have podded up and will probably do dinner.
GF’s step mom “offered” to fly from montana to have t-giving so we don’t have to eat alone. i put a stop to that.
GF’s real family (and this one hurts because they are fun. the family cocktail is a bottomless fistful of vodka over ice.) is having xmas dinner together and we’re both invited. i’m not going. and she’ll have to quarantine afterward before i feel safe enough to see her again if she does — they are reckless old people who haven’t stopped seeing their yacht club buddies. but i don’t think she’ll go because her best friend is due on the 26th and heather offered to help with the baby’s special-needs toddler brother.
i think real life we’ll make a huge lasagna and a side of stuffing for t-giving and either we’re doing xmas with the baby’s family if they are up for it, or just alone, which i’m rooting for so i can make prime rib and yorkshire pudding.
The family we’ve shared TG with for like 20 years in a row won’t be joining us. We will still have a dinner with the two pods which comprise our family, at separate tables out in the backyard.
Upside: only three meat eaters in attendance and none of us like turkey so I’m making big thick steaks instead. Seared on cast iron then finished in oven.
The last time I had any family living within reasonable distance for a Thanksgiving was around 1990 (Dad, his wife and his parents were all in the Medford OR area). Once they moved further away, initially Vancouver WA and then Florida, family Thanksgivings ceased to exist. When I still lived in the Bay Area I made a tradition of going out to Point Reyes on Thanksgiving Day and enjoying that place in near-total solitude.
Upcoming travel plan: Poipu in about 3 weeks is still on for now. I have to drive down to the Bay Area on Sunday morning and get a Covid test about midday in San Francisco (here). First day of the “Hawai’i” vacation is actually Monday in the Bay Area…and if the weather’s OK, Point Reyes would probably be a pretty good social distancing choice. Should have the test result for upload by Monday night and the flight is out of Oakland on Tuesday morning.
So no quarantine once you get there? I haven’t been following hawaii, is it doing OK?
They have taken advantage of their moat, at considerable cost to their economy. Starting October 15 there’s no quarantine in Hawai’i if you have a negative result within 72 hours of departure from the mainland, from one of Hawai’i’s approved mainland test providers. That’s the hard part; some of the providers are vague about the time frame for getting a result back so there’s a possibility of getting on the plane with results still out there and hoping your Negative shows up as the plane is taxiing from the runway to the gate. That San Francisco test is the one that is clearest about the 36-hour result, and even if they miss that it’s more than 48 hours between test and plane landing so there’s some room for error.
The Poipu condo is an Outrigger rather than a VRBO so the cancellation time frame is only 24 hours, not the typical VRBO 30 days thing. So I can let that ride until the week after Thanksgiving before making a final decision.
We’ve been hiking Pt Reyes a lot this year, and on weekdays the trails have been delightfully wide open. Drake’s Estero was especially nice recently…saw some seals who had figured out how to herd fish in narrow areas as the tide went out. Some areas near Bear Valley Visitors Center are closed for fire damage. There’s some road repairs which can cause periodic delays, but the park is good with webpage updates,
My wife and I haven’t traveled for Thanksgiving since we moved to Cincinnati, so we’re not going to start this year. We are still trying to keep some possibilities open for Christmas. Plan A would be to drive out to see her parents in Massachusetts, but that is looking very unlikely. Plan B would be for her brother and nephew to drive from Philadelphia out to Cincinnati. But new cases in the midwest are really really bad right now. Who knows if we will even have functioning hospitals by late December.
Coming from a small family that always lived away from the extended family, and being divorced from Mrs Aces and her larger family I haven’t thought for a second that there would be a “family gathering”. Add to it Papa Aces passing this year and it was no doubt.
But ex-Mrs Aces and I have already had discussions about how to let the youngest Ace spend time back home with her. Legally he be going up for a week or 2 between now and year end, but we both are not sure what if anything we will do. We are all careful and not worried as much about catching anything directly. But like any virus it isnt you, it’s the person who came in contact with a person who came in contact…
This summer he went back up to Fresno for a month. Careful as could be. But then we found out halfway through that a braindead member of my in-laws had a SO who tested positive. They then proceeded to go to my MIL’s (late 70s, heart conditions, etc..) and spend days with her unmasked and ungloved. So the youngest ace got to spend the last part of his vacation quarantined and with his dad 4 hrs away freaking the FK out.
We’ve always done Thanksgiving here with the Marin-laws and assorted waifs and strays, and Xmas alternating between Marin and Delaware. All of those have been off for months.
Last spring’s meet-up in Hawaii with the Australian contingent got deferred a year, but it’s not clear they’ll be able to do it even next spring.
I haven’t had either Christmas or Thanksgiving with my family in years, so it’s never even been a Covid thought for me.
However, my grandpa turns 100 on December 22 and we had to cancel the big family party that had long been in the works. That one stings. He lives in Kansas City, and I realize that it is quite likely I’ll never see him again. However he’s sharp as a tack and I can talk to him on the phone, so I consider myself quite lucky!
Geoge washington was would agree
Score one for the originalists.
he wasn’t all would.
just the teeth.
way to save me from the orphan word
Respect to Ian Eagle for the “That’s good Bass!” call after Tyler Bass made a long FG.
Motherfking Kyler Murray.
If just one of the three Buffalo DBs had thought to hold Hopkins down instead of playing the ball they’d have won. PI never gets called on Hail Marys.
I’ve certainly seen it called (against the Bills).
1. Fair. Change never to rarely.
2. A PI flag would still be better outcome.
This is a pet peeve of mine, why don’t coordinators teach a Hail Mary defense where a DB is told not to play the ball, swipe at the WR’s arms instead.
THE A’S CAN GET TO THE ALCS!
(Official sources called this pennant differently)
omfg wtf is this shit
Melissa Lockard did a Top 30 A’s prospect list for The Athletic.
Her Top 5 are Soderstrom, Puason, Puk, Allen, and Davidson. As an indication of how quickly things get shallow after that, Sheldon Neuse is #7.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state just lit up his party in the Post.
Why would anyone ever again believe that the GOP is the party of freedom and democracy?
It’s the party of freedom from democracy.
i believe you mean georiga.
and given the choice, it’ll take marchf.
For Big Game week I suggest an evil-off between Scott Atlas and John Yoo.
Two men enter one man leaves, eh, scott?
Yes please.
It’s just really hard to beat Stanford in these kinds of things.
That certainly sounds bad. Also many hospitals are asking the State for waivers of the standard nurse-to-patient ratios. In other words, require them to treat more patients simultaneously, thus lowering the quality of care for all patients, while at the same time not prioritizing the nurses for the limited first round of vaccine doses.
Word to the wise: do everything you possibly can to avoid needing acute trauma care. Don’t drive, don’t trip and fall, don’t stand on a ladder, because if you have to go to an ICU right now you’re going to get worse care, with elevated risk of COVID exposure.
Very happy to see Nurse U.’s picture this morning.
The next six months, knowing that effective vaccines exist but waiting for manufacturing and distribution to get them to the rest of us, are going to be weird. Light at the end of a very long tunnel.
yes, it was cool
Rupert Murdoch got his vaccination today too – they even kept the center open late especially for him and him alone.
Shouldn’t be surprised, but FK the FKers.
Ian McKellen and Prue Leith got theirs too. Maybe England is prioritizing its olds.
Blame it on the algorithm.
The list of alleged abuse by the Wichita State basketball coach is crazy. Punched a player, choked an assistant, assaulted a student who parked in his spot, made cruel, racist statements to multiple players. And he got almost $8 million to resign.
As a fan of an AAC basketball team, I say good FKing riddance to that guy. He was obviously an ass even before all this news came out.
I mean, its just a fine and possibly a period of probation, so no big deal, but is this the least surprising thing?
But he still got paid some of the campaign donations, right?
He was asking for $20K/day.
Reading that is something
Maybe Trump thinks he can win the election on ineffective assistance of counsel.
“Veteran Republicans, meanwhile, expressed unease and apprehension Wednesday about a mission tying Giuliani, Trump and Bannon together, calling it embarrassing and ill-fated. “Giuliani is turning this into a clown car…”
this jenna ellis name keeps popping up.
indeed.
i don’t know, ed. i just don’t know.
Real subtle
And here’s the other Republican on the board (warning, even more obvious racism).
God DAMN
Meanwhile, they already caved.
Jesus Christ!
How apropos that Motor City should be the stage for the coup d’evil.
hey-o
I hereby rescind my bet on the 2019 Astro’s to win it all and transfer the initial $2500 bet to the Nationals.
I’m guessing Brazilians will be particularly relishing the Spain-Germany result.
ECU v COL was also eye-catching.
in fifa rankings there was a 6 demolishing a 14. ok. but then a 60 demolishing a 10.
What?! Croatia is #9? And was actually #8, ahead of Argentina?! Crazy.
yeah when i opened it to see where SPA and GER would be, i thought it’d be talking about two top 10 teams.
a few less-than-traditional standings on the table but it looks about right.
Well, at least its now and not in 2018 when I thought signing him and trading Semien for parts was a good idea
I take this as a good sign: Biden’s new senior advisor Cedric Richmond, until now a House member from Louisiana, is such a dual threat on the diamond that he’s considered the Babe Ruth of the Congressional baseball league.
Oh.
Just hand us a few of the ballots and some envelopes, and we’ll analyze them and run a zips projection on whether Mr. Trump is prez for life.
Same idea works for the truncated 2020 Census. Just extrapolate the uncounted using the demographics of, say, Spokane WA.
funny thing is, for the census, they have been arguing the opposite.
it me.
I’m not the most avid Warriors fan but I’m feeling really bad for Klay Thompson. Nearly all the way back from an ACL then (apparently) the Achilles goes? Bad break for a nice guy.
Love the guy, so sad to hear that
Yeah, it really sucks for him. Sure was a downer for the team on draft day.
Rudi’s rant about the press refusing to cover the fraud that they refuse to provide evidence for is … special.
The Aurora Borealis, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen?
Yes.
May I see it?
No
rudy certainly looks like a steamed ham.*
via GIPHY
Give them an evidentiary hearing, please:
Yes I’d like to hear more of Sidney’s thoughts.
Appointed by Obama, but a long-time GOP official in PA.
Looking forward to the Alito dissent from denial of cert speculating on all the great evidence they sadly never got to present.
Will it get to Supreme Court?
My guess is that the Supreme Court will decline to take it after the Third Circuit quickly affirms dismissal. Not only is the case ludicrous, it should also be moot after Penn certifies the count in a day or two. Trump’s appointees aren’t going to torch their reputations on this garbage.
Third Circuit, through the pen of Trump’s own nominee, gives him the back of the hand. Can’t wait to read the cert petition!
Heh
So she just wandered in off the street into the presser at RNC HQ on Thursday? Actually, that would explain some things …
i wouldn’t read too much into it. they’re just trying to skip out on paying her.
look i wasn’t wrong.
so if you feel bad she’s doing this for free, go ahead and contribute to her untiring works of defense. (make checks payable directly to her. and you think i’m kidding.)
I mean, this person is a lawyer?
Bro it says esq right there. Article VII, checkmate.
Are any of you chess-loving FKers watching The Queen’s Gambit? I’m enjoying it, and I know just enough to get the references to the classic players but I forget any openings that I ever learned. Any of you have opinions on how they’re handling the various strategies referenced?
I watched a few episodes and it seems very sound on the openings, strategy and everything chess related. I forgot who it was, but they had some expert advisors, which is really refreshing after seeing boards set up wrong in the past.
On the note, do any of you play online?
Good to know, thanks. And no, I don’t play online but this is kind of giving me the itch to see if I can dig out any of my old chess books and re-learn a little.
I’ve been on chess.com for a couple of years now. I mostly do puzzles and play blitz, with an occasional bullet mixed in. I don’t have concentration span for anything longer. I’m not good at either (ELO ~1500), but if someone wants to play a game or two, let me know.
I’m on chess.com and I think lichess.org. I basically only do puzzles these days, but would be into playing at some point. I’m not very good.
mpetro?
I’m on lichess.org and I’m terrible
Exactly our kind of player – come over to chess.com, it’s free :-)
I created a club on chess.com – you can all join here. Then we can perhaps make a FK tournament one day
I just joined the site and the club.
Used to play a lot (up to England U16 squad level) but haven’t in years.
Does that mean you played for England??
I was in the squad but never made the team.
Still pretty FKing impressive!
I got shushed by Nigel Short’s mother once …
If you’d been a woman, Nigel would have shushed you himself!
She used to sit just behind him watching over his shoulder for the entire game, which was pretty off-putting for both players.
Searching for option to give ptbnl 30 seconds on the clock while the rest of us have 5 minutes
I just hit the link and chess.com says they have over 85K new members today – is that normal?
No idea – they host several million games each day, though
In general, what time and day of the week would work for you all? Hopefully we can grow this to at least 8-10 players. So, perhaps a Swiss tournament with 6-7 rounds, or if we are fewer a round-robin. I’d say we either play 5 minutes or 3/2, so we should be able to get in in in around an hour.
My copy of MCO is so old I have to call it Medieval Chess Openings.
{rimshot}
Speaking of “Beth Harmon”, you can now play “her” on chess.com in different ages of her development. They have bots that try to resemble her level of play when she was 8, 9, 10, 15, 17, 20 and 22. I managed to beat her at first four but I’m failing miserably against the 17-year old version.
We watched ep 1, enjoyed it and will continue, but have now been derailed by the new season of The Crown. About which:
1. Baffling choice not to recreate the Charles-Diana wedding. Great TV theater. Nurse Upgrade is outraged.
2. I would not have thought it possible for anything to make me view Margaret Thatcher sympathetically. But the portrayal of the royal family’s snobbery and meanness managed to pull it off!
devoured it. it’s a bit pat and tidy but very fun.
nyt had a nice realism check.
but here, listen to her blow my mind.
I loved it. I don’t understand ANY of the chess since I don’t play but still find the matches exciting. One of my clients is the Berkeley Chess School and they work really hard at increasing their girl and women players so I hope this helps. I love Jolene and they could do a whole spinoff show about her and I’d be thrilled.
It’s very good at capturing the feel of tournaments, especially older tournaments. Not sure how intentional it was, but the girl who played her in the first episode even did a good job of capturing how genius kids just unnervingly stare at you during the game.
There are actually lots of unnerving things about playing genius kids, and I’ve played a lot of them. I played the top 8 year old in the country a few years ago, and his handwriting recording the moves looked like he was just beginning the process of learning to draw the letters and numbers. Another one went to the tournament director and complained that my clock was cheating. But almost all of them give you a blood-curdling stare, including/primarily when it is their move!
I just finished watching it, and really enjoyed it. For the most part the chess was handled well, except for a couple of things:
In all the tournaments, the players were moving waaaaay to fast. Sure, there are obvious moves, or planned combinations, where moves are pretty quick, but most of the time there’s a long pause between moves. There’s a reason games go on for hours, and they really skipped over the long periods of thought and the psychology of that on both sides of the table.
In the early tournaments the players were making implausibly silly mistakes (these were still State Open and above). Sure, players lose to forks, pins, skewers, and the like through clever combinations, or when in time trouble, but not through the kind of carelessness or stupidity that was often portrayed.
In the later tournaments, adjournment (at least in my experience) was always at a time control and under the direction of the tournament director … a player can’t just unilaterally announce that they want to adjourn.
I was blown away that they ever adjourned at all. Even before chess engines, it seems unfair to give players an opportunity to analyze the position with a team mid-game.
Eventually (like after 6+ hours) you have to give the players a rest. But that’s part of why it is at a prescribed time, not at the whim of one of the players.
The interesting thing is that they’re analyzing slightly different positions, since only one of the players knows what the sealed move is. In very complex positions with lots of possibilities that probably favors the player who knows, whereas in simpler positions or where there’s only really one option it favors the player with all night to analyze a very good guess at the position.
Having looked up the rules rather, than relying on my memory of competitions in my teens, it seems like the player does get to decide when to adjourn subject to forfeiting the remainder of the time allotted in that session. So there is strong incentive to adjourn at the time control, but it’s not required. It also means that, close to the control where that sacrifice isn’t too significant, adjourning by sealing a move to which there is only one reasonable response can confer a significant advantage.
I just finished watching it and liked it. They have a small blunder in the last episode, in that the position on the board outside of the hotel does not match the one on the board they are playing (wrong colored bishop for Harmon).
Also, what’s with the “Knight to Queen-Bishop 3″. Did you guys really use that? “Well, no, we can’t get feet and ounces into chess, but we can make it unnecessarily complicated by refusing to use perfectly understandable one-letter-notations”
Yeah, that was the notation system in all the old books. I remember being surprised (in a good way) when I first encountered modern notation.
Thanks – I’ve never seen it. And my great uncle had some really old books
It was the standard in my youth, though on its way out … MCO was the first book I bought that was in algebraic notation.
Every article about chance of state legislatures seating alternate slates of electors calls it “extremely unlikely.” I’ve read that 50 times in last two weeks, maybe 100. It’s not assuaging the gnawing fear.
My understanding is that it is effectively impossible for that to work because the Democrats control the House of Representatives and the governors mansions in enough of the states where this could theoretically be tried (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania).
I guess then Trump would try to get the Supreme Court to rule the ECA unconstitutional, but even this Court is not going to do that.
That does seem to be the overwhelming consensus of scholars and reasonable persons everywhere. And I’m sure much of my angst is PTSD from a year in which unlikely cataclysms keep actually coming to pass. I nevertheless doomscroll onward.
Also, does anyone really think Trump would be around in 2024 to try for the Grover Cleveland? Surely he’ll be dead from any number of causes well before then.
Are convicted felons allowed to run?
Eugene Debs ran from federal prison.
did he have a red truck?
I’ve already started seeing the predicted articles about how Biden thinks prosecuting Trump would be bad for the country.
I haven’t seen those articles, but it shouldn’t be Biden’s call. He should nominate a good Attorney General and then let the chips fall where they may. Not to mention that the more immediate legal peril Trump faces is probably from the State of New York anyway.
Biden hopes to avoid divisive Trump investigations, preferring unity
Yeah, good luck with that. Although it does also say he will leave it to the Justice department.
And yes, it does seem that at least an indictment in NYS is highly probable.
Hrmph. Well, that at least isn’t inconsistent with the ideal (to me) approach of a depoliticized, normal public corruption investigation by the professionals in the Justice Department. I kind of want Biden to be saying something like that, to take the stink of politics away from any ultimate indictment. But I’m also realistic enough to know that if he is consistently sending the message that he doesn’t want a bunch of investigations, there won’t be a bunch of investigations.
Hello
The mini-tradition of playing an afternoon opener at the Coliseum is over, or at least interrupted in 2021.
Still waiting for the first time the Astros have to face a full stadium of fans expressing deep revulsion. I doubt we’ll be allowed to congregate in such numbers by 4/1/21. But the day is coming, Astros. It’s coming.
Nice thread from Ed Norton
Fangraph reviews Hudson’s HOF case
CONTENT ALERT:
can someone explain this?
Roll on you embarrassment
Of course “embarrassment” is all relative.
It wasn’t a bad showing considering 3/5 of the starting offensive line got KO’d by that, and one of the survivors, the starting center, was on crutches before halftime.
Cal now faces its second consecutive short week (Sunday-Saturday-Friday) while Furd will come into the Big Game, assuming it’s played which is hardly certain, on 12 days rest. It’s a shitshow, but when you’ve become that reliant on the money from Fox and ESPN, what else would you expect.
“It’s actually not awful!” High praise for the incoming Secretary of State’s indie dad rock band, which claims it has had ‘”contributions from Alex Chilton and [Hüsker Dü drummer] Grant Hart.”‘ The reader is left sadly uniformed whether Blinken rocks harder than Beto.
Listening to the two songs on Spotify I would totally buy it if you told me I saw him open for Freedy Johnson at Bottom of the Hill in 1994.
Shout out to the vinyl guide podcast interview with jello biafra leading me to this guy who I support for Surgeon General and musically
GSA Karen’s petulant statement only makes me more convinced she’s a Trumpist hack to the core. Also note the failure to actual state her ascertainment as required.
Turns out people who complain how much government sucks are pretty fucking terrible at their jobs.
Also claiming to be following precedent is pretty tenuous in unprecedented circumstances.