And with that another baseball season is over. Go Cubs go!
All five of the starting pitchers of the 2014 Detroit Tigers have now won the World Series. What could have been, Detroit.
What remains to be seen now is whether Juan Soto goes on to have as good a career as Miguel Cabrera.
Note to self. Next time you think of going on the road for two weeks that takes you through the Upper Peninsula, Bermuda and back, don’t do it! When you did the last time it kicked your ass. Laid up with the worst head cold I’ve had in years starting a second week.
It looks like the entire pitching staff of the Detroit Tigers of ten years ago is pitching in this World Series.
Boston Logan International Airport (BOS).
La Trattoria.
Just a few of the pictures I took during my fall trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Autumn is when the Upper Peninsula of Michigan shows it’s true colors. #puremichigan #michiganders #906
For some reason the posts I wrote yesterday using the iOS version of the micro.blog app did not publish. I had to go in to the web site and update the posts.
It was a beautiful day today on the shore of Lake Michigan in the U.P.
Another trip and another reminder of the stupid hoops I have to go through to get a picture I take on my Pixel 2 posted on this blog. It’s been years!
Last year I wrote about the excitement I was seeing on the Internet about an expected tablet from Google. Google did announce and start selling the Pixel Slate that later announced it would no longer make. A lot happened in just one year.
Back in the mother land.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday historians will look back at this period in U.S. history and think of it as “an aberration” during an event at Amherst College, reports the Boston Globe.
I hope she is right, but I don’t share her optimism.
One thing I found interesting in Microsoft’s announcements yesterday is the starting price for the Surface Pro 7 at $749, lower than other Surface Pros that I can remember. My guess is that model will have low end specs, which Engadet shows are an Intel Core i3, 4 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of storage. The RAM looks the least appealing.
I watched the 2019 Microsoft Surface event and I have to admit that I like what I saw of the Surface Neo and Duo. Microsoft has basically taken the concept of using two desktop computer monitors to a mobile device, the question is whether that works with large or small screens. I also wonder about their durability, but we have had foldback screens on notebook PCs for a long time now, so that shouldn’t be an issue.
I also think the Surface Pro X looks very nice, I can see it as a decent competitor to the iPad Pro, but the $999 starting price is too high. My reaction first reaction to it is that it looks like what the Google Pixel Slate should have been.
It’s ironic that despite Microsoft’s cloud first/mobile first strategy, they are developing some really nice looking hardware.
The achilles' heel of the U.S. Constitution are political parties. The model of government the U.S. Constitution established was designed to forge a republic of “United States” from southern and northern states, within the context of slavery. The Constitution was not written to address and mitigate the power of political parties and thus I see the possibility of a constitutionally enabled dictatorship.
How would a constitutionally enabled dictatorship look like? First, you neuter the electoral college. Next, you remove all power from the minority party in Congress. Next, you have 60% of the U.S. Senate made up of party of the President and more than half of the House also the same party as the President. Finally, you have all Supreme Court justices of the same party as the president. All three branches align to one party and then Congress and the Supreme Court do nothing more than rubber stamp anything the President requests and you have in place a dictatorship.
The Supreme Court is not supposed to be political but it now totally is ever since the Reagan administration.
The Congress is supposed to be the primary means of checks and balances but that too has turned into nothing more than alignment with the President since Vietnam.
The fourth estate, the press, is now corporately owned and no longer fulfills its defacto role in government given to it by the first amendment.
And finally, we seem to no longer really have U.S. Citizens, instead we are people who see themselves as Conservative or Liberal, Republican or Democrat.
You don’t need a civil war. Democracy in the U.S. will fail without a single shot fired no matter the interpretation of the second amendment.
In my opinion the standard for journalism today is The Athletic. Note first they provide a free trial. Next, most of their stories are written by professionals who know how to write, and many of them go into more depth than you will find in most publications, print or online. Finally, they have beat writers who cover my favorite professional sports teams.