Once more it is time to dump a bunch of links before my browser has a nervous breakdown since it’s already unstable enough.
1. Craig Calcaterra posted his reasoning behind opposing Curt Schilling as a candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame and it’s worth reading if you have any conflicted feelings about giving awards like this to garbage people. Calcaterra says it better than I could, for obvious reasons:
But we are not what we believe in our heart of hearts. We are what we do, and what he has done is to use his considerable celebrity to spread lies, conspiracy theories and hatred, the sort of which have gotten people killed in the past and will get more people killed in the future. He has not done this as some dumb, one-off comment in an interview nor has he done it ignorantly in a way that might lead one to believe he’s simply uninformed, easily swayed, or perhaps not well, mentally speaking. He is an intelligent man who has consciously pursued the agenda he has followed as a means of making himself a media star or, potentially, a political candidate. It’s odious. And it’s dangerous.
You should also subscribe to Cup of Coffee if you care about baseball because his writing is always worth reading.
2. I know that most people who read a lot of things on the web don’t need to read much more about the human impact of Covid-19. We’ve seen the pictures of victims stacked in hospital hallways and refridgerated trucks. The horror about the pandemic and its disgusting mismanagement has already had our attention and anger more than enough. What is worth taking a few minutes to read to temper that horror with humanity is the story of the impact of the second wave on a small South Dakota town and a doctor who lives there. It’s heart rending and grounded in perspective and is illustrative of the fact that everywhere is a disaster in these dark days after the virus was just supposed to magically fade away.
The paragraph about his parents who were casualties of the pandemic and the parallels between their experiences of sacrifice during WWII are encapsulated brilliantly:
A lot of people have suffered worse losses to this virus. My dad was over 100. My parents lived a good life, and they were at the end of their road. They got married 76 years ago during World War II once they’d finally saved up enough of their sugar rations to bake a proper wedding cake. They loved telling that story. Everybody was sacrificing for the war. It was a national effort. They were proud of it. The country had bigger problems, and their wedding cake could wait.
3. Meanwhile, in less human than others-land, Lindsey Graham might actually suffer some consequences for his actions. In this case, it was giving the hard sell to Georgia’s Secretary of State about eliminating as many legally valid ballots from tabulation as possible. There simply aren’t enough bad things in the world to give this man back the ill that he’s done to the world during his time in office.
4. Huh. I may be in the market for one of the new M1 machines in the not so distant future. I’m not best friends with the operating system (although my experience so far with Big Sur has been relatively smooth) but it looks like the claims are turning out to be true about the M1’s performance. I’ll be damned. I’m probably of the more cautious bent given that we’ve seen mostly benchmarks which are good for measuring performance but not necessarily use over time. I would also like more ports.
