What do you expect a Spoonerism-addicted, OCD-addled person to do with the name of the grocery chain, Smart And Final?! Apparently, we do have these stores in Arizona not that I have ever seen one in the four years we have lived here. It is also my understanding that the chain is emphasizing online purchases.
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Speaking of grocery stores, yesterday my wonderful wife and I shopped at a Trader Joe’s for the first time in many years. We used to shop at one when we lived in the mid-Atlantic, but when a Wegmans opened just three miles farther away we stopped shopping at Trader Joe’s.
We were out of the house and had just finished lunch when the idea of going to Trader Joe’s just came to me, primarily–I guess–because it is rumored that one will be part of a new, yet to be built shopping center less than 10 miles from where we live and it wasn’t far from where we had lunch. I had forgotten the excellent prices and service. Even though the one we used yesterday is almost 20 miles from our house, we will return and not 8-10 years from now.
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With actual clicks on post links in notification emails having dwindled down to nearly zero I have to publish this again:
PLEASE click on the tiny “Read on blog” link or the post title itself in the email notifying you of a new post. Thanks.
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“Nothing is perfect on the human stage.”
“Perfect solutions to our difficulties are not to be looked for in an imperfect world.”
“The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelled shorter: ‘Paralysis.’”
– Winston Churchill
I was forcefully reminded of my imperfection yesterday when I couldn’t find my wallet. We had returned from the aforementioned trip for lunch and Trader Joe’s (four uses of that name) when I went to the bedroom to empty my pockets as I always do upon returning home. I realized that my wallet was not in any of my pants pockets, although I always put it in the same one.
I FREAKED out and began imagining all of the calls I would have to make to cancel credit cards and to get a new driver’s license. My wonderful wife remained calm and insisted it would be found. As best as I could remember, the last time I had used my wallet was after breakfast to pay for gas for the Elantra and to buy lottery tickets. Turns out that was incorrect…when we returned home from our breakfast/gas trip I had gone online to purchase a new brand of protein bar that was among the highest rated in a Forbes article. (I have an online subscription to Forbes.)
I looked in the Elantra twice, but couldn’t imagine it could be anywhere else. Well…my wife found my wallet on my office desk where I had left it after buying the protein bars. This is the second time this year that I have misplaced my wallet, the first being when I took it out of my pocket to pay for something at a drive-thru and left it in the passenger seat of my F-Type instead of putting it back in my pocket.
I am still seething at the enormous diminution of my mental acuity and memory. Not long after my wife found the wallet, a cheap one I purchased at Target not that long ago, I threw it to the ground in the family room and stomped on it many times. It is an old-fashioned, leather tri-fold wallet, very cumbersome and, ironically, with too much room so it gets stuffed full of crap I don’t need. My new wallet is made of aluminum and has just two parts plus a money clip. It should arrive today.
I was not going to check my blood glucose level the rest of the day. Wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) has taught me my glucose level has two kryptonites: breakfast cereal, which I have stopped eating, and stress. Can’t do anything about stress, apparently, because my memory is not going to return to what it was. However, I did check later and my worst fears were confirmed: a huge spike in blood glucose during the period of panic when I thought I had lost my wallet.
It took me quite some time to calm down. In fact, I am still not quite right this morning. During one of my two trips to the ER in September, the doctor in charge of my case told me that wearing a CGM is not for everyone and that if it is causing much anxiety then maybe I shouldn’t wear it. Can ignorance actually be bliss on occasion?
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I guess this is going to be a very long post…
This piece is titled, “As a dissident former leftist, I can explain why Trump won.” Here is a sentence that is perhaps, intentionally or unintentionally, a summary of the piece:
“Millions of people who never in a million years thought that they’d cast a vote for President-elect Donald Trump did so as a vote against elitism and smugness and an entire class of over-educated, hysterical coastal elites who think they get to tell us all what to think and how to live — and punish us with cancellation if we disagree.”
NO ONE has a monopoly on truth, wisdom and good judgment and neither does ANY ideology. Smug, self-righteous and arrogant is not a way to live one’s life. Yes, I have written these words many times before. I believe it behooves all of us to practice a little more “Live And Let Live” and stop believing that your way is the ONLY way.
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From this Why Evolution Is True (WEIT) post titled, “Defying cries of ‘transphobia,’ the Washington Post calls for debate on whether trans women should participate in women’s sports:”
“The good news is that the Washington Post, defying the inevitable cries that the paper is “transphobic”, is calling for a “respectful debate on trans women in sports”. This is, of course, because of the increasing number of biological men who identify as women (I prefer that jawbreaker to “trans women” because the latter plays into the misleading mantra that “trans women are women”), and because men who have gone through male puberty before transitioning have an inherent physical advantage over biological women. Even the UN now agrees on that, and gives data below on how many women have lost sports medals to transitioned biological men…
In athletic competition, male puberty confers significant advantages. While those biological differences vary by skill and sport, a 2023 paper by medical researchers in the United States and Italy noted that “it is well established that the best males always outperform the best females when the sport relies on muscle power, muscle endurance, or aerobic power.” The hormone therapy that many trans women take reduces some of those advantages over time, but research into how much those advantages can be mitigated, and over what time frame, is still ongoing. Other advantages, such as height, are fixed by the end of puberty. This poses obvious fairness and safety questions.”
Sorry, but those born unambiguously male and who go through puberty should NOT be allowed to participate against biological women in sports. Yes, I know: common sense is far too uncommon.
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According to this WEIT post, Harvard–Harvard–has banned “study-in” protests in university libraries. Take one guess what type of “people” are having these protests.
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One of the topics of this post was the “return” of the Chevrolet El Camino. At least one reader (Stumack) offered a comment that the picture shown was nothing more than a fantasy photoshop of a Hyundai Santa Cruz.
This recent piece from Slashgear contains this passage:
“Chevrolet has yet to come out and formally announce the El Camino’s comeback, and numerous of the videos [sic] purporting to be about the 2025 El Camino are generated using artificial intelligence.”
While I am not an El Camino fan, I know many who are and the report that the vehicle would be brought be back using an Internal Combustion Engine before any electrified drivetrain, if the latter would even be used at all, made the reported return heartening to me. Tell me again why AI will be a savior…
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This recent Hagerty article is titled, “7 Cars That Lost the Most Coin This Summer.” The piece begins, “We updated the Hagerty Price Guide last month and “soft” is a word that keeps coming up.”
The problem with the article, in my opinion, is that all of the cars listed were very expensive to begin with. For example:
This is an Aston Martin DB6 Vantage Coupe, which were produced from 1965 to 1970. Hagerty asserts that the average value of one of these in #2 condition, which–I believe–is excellent not concours, declined by about $59,000 or 11 percent. That means, of course, the previous value was $536,000.
I know some very wealthy people collect cars, but most people reading Hagerty are not in the upper one percent or upper one-tenth of one percent in net worth. Oh, one of my favorite Matchbox cars was a DB6. Don’t ask why I no longer have my Matchbox collection…
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I watched a lot of college football on Saturday, but very little of the NFL variety yesterday as my wonderful wife and I spent much of the day out of the house and I spent much of the day losing my mind, as already noted. One thing I dislike about football coverage is the excessive discussion of the importance of turnovers in the outcome of a football game. (A turnover is when one team loses possession of the ball without punting, scoring or failing to convert on a fourth down.)
Yes, turnover margin correlates highly with game outcomes, but turnover margin is dependent, to a large degree, on luck and I don’t mean Andrew. In my football book that The Wall Street Journal called without a doubt the best book of its kind ever written, I wrote that an NFL team with a positive turnover margin for the season has a negative margin more than 40 percent of the time in the following season and vice versa. Not being able to replicate something implies a high degree of luck.
A recent ESPN article about projecting the rest of the NFL season mentioned one team that was having bad luck in recovering fumbles. Here is an interesting tidbit from the piece:
“History tells us fumble recovery rates almost always regress toward 50% from year to year. As an example, if we just take the 90 teams from 1991 through 2022 that recovered between 40% and 43% of their fumbles and see what they did the following season, their recovery rate the following season was 49.9699%. That’s about as close to 50% as it gets.”
So, recovering a fumble is a coin flip and regresses toward 50%. I have used the example that if one conducted a coin-flipping tournament with multiple people, someone would have to win but would you bet on that person to win the next tournament?
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Again, here are “Pelated Rosts” according to me. PLEASE feel free to click on any or all of the links to these posts. Thanks.
#FartAndSminal
#WinstonChurchill