Cancer

I have not been following this massive fiasco, but I'm really hoping this happens. I am not a fan of either of those two institutions, but the mindless moneygrubbing avarice that led the rest of the conference to cut out in unseemly haste -- and my near-lifetime hate for intercollegiate athletics as a university faculty member in a real academic discipline -- wants the other scumbuckets to lose everything.

Aaah, the first pathological family dynamic flare-up of the holiday season. And it's not even either of our families. It's enough to give my eyeballs motion sickness.

Side effects.

Another factor in my hanging on into last summer was ... it made inordinate sense to stay double-covered on health insurance.

Hey, lots of us like pitchers' duels.

My decision to wait to retire until I turned 67 meant I had more pieces of paper needed to affirm that yes, I had not just slacked off on doing the paperwork (or more correctly, I had slacked off on doing it, but in a way that was explicitly permitted.)

Well, now that summer is gone, I change my answer from the other times I was asked that. (Back then, my retirement felt a lot like my non-retirement, since I wasn't teaching most summers.) However, one thing remains true: my attention is dominated by unwelcome things unrelated to any job or retirement state. Still (considering the annoying inconsistency of the local NFL franchise) it is pleasant not to have to grade papers -- especially labs -- which I often did with football on TV to provide distraction from my ineffectiveness as a teacher. A passing annoyance is ... dealing with Medicare for the first time. Not helped by my being the first of my circle of friends to reach retirement, so I am walking point through that jungle. Social Security was a snap, once I was told all the forms I had to fill out (and I was told them one at a time, so I ended up doing them serially rather than in parallel); happily the physical SSA office is a ten minute walk from my house so needing to go there was not a problem at all, and almost uniquely in this town, that office has air conditioning, a real plus in August when the highs were in the 90s.

Second Jim Lee, Cary Bates, Erik Larsen.

When I did get it, we did succeed in having the other two people in the house NOT get it, which is something. My cross-section for catching it now is much diminished, since with retirement I no longer am in rooms with dozens of other people -- mostly young adults -- for multiple hours a day, five days a week.

Next time create your own language and write in that. Hey, it worked for JRRT.

I dunno. I don't remember the no-middle-ground feeling from a decade-minus ago, as the Squawks came down from their two SB appearances.

This is fascinating reading, and does some highlighting of the mechanics of the powerful destabilization of society and politics enabled by manipulation of social media.

... as this year's Nobel Prize for mRNA work gets another endorsement.

AFAICT, literally every fanbase I've glanced at has shown signs of attention deficit disorder this year. Here in Seattle the team is doing better than I expected, despite having an OL that has been nothing but an injury-ridden velcro ripaway patchwork all season. Geno Smith is a mediocre quarterback ... which puts him well above what lots of teams have, and which ought not be a real surprise considering what he brought in coming into last season. The last draft class seems to be panning out well; no All-Pro-From-Day-One guys, but things seem good. The HC/GM combo has known weaknesses but ... it's not one of a number of train wrecks strewn across the league, and we are going to have to wait for the Paul Allen Estate thing to play itself out before a significant change occurs. But the media-driven situation where there's nothing inbetween the Promised Land and the Apocalypse just seems to reflect the media-driven politics situation. I've had to stop reading football commentary this fall like I stopped reading political commentary a decade back.

Ms. Ann Onymus doesn't cut it.

"Infinite improbability drive"

Chaos ball. Embrace it.

For a mix of reasons varying from real-world duties to just flat not feeling it, I went idle for for four or five days and have accepted that I'm just not going to make 50k in this month. But, I'm not abandoning the project, and we'll just have to see what I manage to get done. This evening I'm composing text, and at 1100 words in tonight's segment.

Sadly, I cannot nominate Bobby London, because AFAICT Dirty Duck has never appeared in his own comic book, only in strips in National Lampoon and Playboy.

Needs more bad smell than that. Say, a normal human's digestive tract, and a pepperoni-onion-double-jalapeno pizza.