Wilbur

So I "watched" the Magic-Spurs game this afternoon while I was puttering around in the garage, prompted by the discussion about Wemby's 1-rebound game. Some days, it is clear that a 20-year-old kid is going to play like a kid. Unlike Kareem or Bird, who came into the league at 23-ish after three or four years of serious college competition, he is just young and inexperienced, and sometimes that shows up in a game. And he is still not yet grown into a man's frame, and he runs like his feet hurt, and some nights you are the windshield, and other nights you are the bug. For me, you can only start comparing the effect VW has on his team to KAJ or LB or Bob McAdoo, etc. once he is also 23 years old. I compared his play to Wagner, and it very much reminded me of our high school boy's team last season. Monty William's son, a freshman, was a big, talented kid who practices hard and has a lot of potential. But he was still a freshman, and the analog to VW. There were games last season where the smart move was to put the ball in the hands of the senior who was smaller, less athletic, and more experienced, because for the senior, the game wasn't moving at an overwhelming speed. In this analogy, Wagner was the senior, and although he is smaller and has a lower ceiling than Wemby, he has reached and become comfortable in his full adult size, and the game is not requiring him to consider options before he takes action. There is every reason to believe that Monty's son, and VW, will achieve more in the future than the senior last year / Wagner. But not this year, because the young guys are still have to look, to see, and to process before they take action. It is just a matter of experience. And the Spurs aren't really holding VW in the paint, so when the ball goes up, he could be anywhere on the court. Other players are just reacting to the ball faster, and they are often closer to the rim - thus the single rebound.

How is Ted Cruz a Republican? This kind of horseshit, specifically special treatment for the political elites, is exactly the kind of thing the Republican Party should stand up AGAINST, not sponsor and tack onto other, useful bills. My grandfather would puke.

I can see one obvious problem with the Blue Cards for dissent, though, and it is culture mismatches. What a Scots or English player can say to a countryman ref without any significant notice will draw a card in the States. Similarly, Spanish-language dialect differences mean that an off-hand remark in Mexican Spanish made to a Uruguayan ref will have the same effect. Language usage is different enough that the refs will need to be cognizant of those differences and negotiate between usage and dissent. Not every ref is all that intelligent. Maybe this has changed a little bit over the past years with more cultural interchange, but back in the dark ages when I came back to the States for college, my roommate picked up a yellow in the first ten minutes of the first game of the season. I was completely mystified, and only at half-time did I discover that effin' and jeffin' with the officials was considered dissent. Soccer in the USA during the 1980s was a barren wilderness of knowledge and culture, let me tell you.

Anybody voting for book burners wasn't paying attention in Civics, History, West Civ, Government, or Economics. Probably slept through all their English classes, too.

That was quite a game. South Africa played hard, but they never seemed to be as talented in front of goal as some of the other sides who went out previously, yet squandered their talent with oddly passive play (Senegal!). VAR got both possible penalty calls right, too. Both the Egyptian pen you mentioned, then the extra-time second half red against Egypt that wasn't a pen.

I always tell my girls that, "Triumphalism is unattractive", and if we were all perfect people, winners and losers would all shake hands and head out for dinner together after a match. However, sometimes there are games that have a deeper meaning or value, psychologically, to a team. Perhaps you have lost the championship game three seasons in a row, and then you finally win. Or perhaps the other team has been bullying your team's players online. Or perhaps you have been practicing a certain technique, and the players finally put it out there on the field or court. When you win those games, you ought to be able to celebrate without others doing a lot of complaining. I wish the Tricky Reds had won, but Arteta's celebration is completely understandable. Nobody should be talking trash about it.

"...VAR has looked at it seven or eight times now." Neville: "Well, they can stop looking at it." Laughter throughout the room at my house.

The African Cup of Nations is always scintillating stuff, but every so often the outcomes are undone by dodgy refereeing. In the second half of the Ivory Coast / Senegal match, the ref completely ignored a stonewall penalty that should have resulted in Senegal taking a 2-0 lead. Straight tackle from behind in the box by the last man in the Ivory Coast defense, no call, play on. VAR sits on their hands. Astounding scenes. I am sure the English FA is checking on how much it will cost to hire these guys after the tourney is complete. Then later in the half he booked an Ivory Coast striker for diving on another completely obvious penalty going the other way. The VAR officials were actually awake for this one, however, and so after some faffing around, the ref booked the keeper instead, and Ivory Coast leveled the scores from the spot, before going on to win in a shoot-out after one of the Senegalese defenders put his penalty shot off the left upright. I am pretty sure than Senegal did enough to win that game in normal time, but they go home after an officiating shocker and perhaps a little too much defending rather playing their attacking game. Nevertheless, the games are just tremendous, end-to-end stuff. For a neutral football fan, these are just such good matches to watch.

Ben just put out a video that demonstrates your thesis on the step-function improvement over the last month.

I want to give a big boost to a Librivox recording of The Fall of Troy, the post-Homeric epic by Quintus Smyrneaus, as read by Titurel from a translation by Arthur Sanders Way. So the epic poem The Iliad by Homer is definitely epic, but in truth only covers a month or so in the ninth year of the siege of Troy. It is the story of the Rage of Achilles, and the consequences thereof, but it doesn't really tell us the tale of how the Trojan War ends. Quintus Smyrneaus spent the time and energy to write an epic poem to solve that problem called the Posthomerica, from which we get The Fall of Troy. He gathered up all the stories, pieces and parts, and cast them into an epic poetry modeled on the Homeric cycles to do so. Ever wondered how many horrible ways edged weapons can be used to slay and maim an enemy? This should satisfy your inquiry. Ever wondered if there was a story that used even more similes than Homer? Again, here you go. You will be surprised at how much of Edith Hamilton's Mythology actually derives from Smyrna rather than Homer's original plot. Meanwhile the translation by Way is one that I find to be heavily influenced by the speech patterns of Old English. Homeric speech patterns are very interesting, and they inform modern English today. And when someone with a strong background in epics like Beowulf and the Doomsday book sets a pastiche of Homer into English, the result is truly musical, flowing smoothly and powerfully off the tongue. And finally, everyone knows that Librivox readers produce works of wildly varying quality. That being said, whoever this Titurel guy is, his single contribution to Librivox is this work, and it is A PERFORMANCE. Damn, son, you were not messing around when you recorded this one. If every Librivox reader summoned up the spirit to create a single work of this quality, Audible would go out of business. Go ahead, listen to a chapter. Holy smokes. There are only a few books recorded on Librivox that I can give my unalloyed recommendation, and this is definitely at the top of that list. Download a copy and listen to it yourself.

How about anthropomorphic owls? Guardians of Ga'Hoole - Wikipedia

Keep after it, if not with The Hobbit right now. Reading with your kids is the greatest thing a parent can do, both for you and for them.

Is it a prequel to Oppenheimer?

BFC, the recent matchup between VW and Chet prompted the following excellent breakdown from Ben: And the rapid-fire game summary for your delectation as well. These guys are both just tremendous talents. OKC has an actual team to go with Chet, but otherwise they are a delight to watch. They are both the realization of every basketball-mad 13-year-old's dreams.

Yikes, that is gruesome. It also makes you appreciate guys like Bruce Dickinson, Rob Halford, and Ronnie James Dio, who could / can still sing well into their later years.

Maybe he can get a loan. He has a lot of valuable assets, after all, including a penthouse suite that is seventeen acres large and contains an international airport.

Let's remember Motorola in the days before Ed Zander and Sanjay Jha sold off all the parts to other companies:

I cannot overstate how fortunate we are to be able to watch current-day NBA games. Not only has the league finally recovered and developed deep quality, a process that took a decade or more after the Expansion Period, but now those players have so much to offer, and the style of play makes them integral to the success of their teams. Even rookies, and even players 8, 9 and 10 on the bench are significant contributors. This is such a delight to watch.

I constantly wonder what the Russians possibly hope to accomplish with the constant stream of untruths, but particularly irrelevant and easily proven untruths. IL-76 possibly carrying Ukrainian POWs down in Russia - Airliners.net In this case, it is announcing that the aircraft contained Ukrainian POWs, when pictures of the crash site clearly show a lack of personal effects, and the list itself contains POWs exchanged earlier this year. So easy to disprove, so why even bother to put in the effort to create such a lie?

We did the three-night Director's Extended Edition Lord of the Rings festival at Harkins this last weekend. I won't need to see any additional close-ups of Frodo in slow motion for a while. But anyways, it gave me three repeated viewings of the following trailers, on a 135-foot screen with the Dolby Atmos sound system. Argyle - looks very funny Kong vs Godzilla - looks deeply stupid Furiosa - looks far better than the internet trailer, like they have fixed the CGI issues Heros of the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes of the Earth - meh, do we need another of these? Oh, yeah, Dune - this is an impressively boring trailer. Dull colors, uninteresting through-line, nothing to draw me to watch it. The font of the title is cool, though.

Ron DeSantis just had too big boots to fill.

Stimulated by my recent read of Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Lure of the Basilisk, I proceeded on to the second of his four books describing the adventures of Garth the Overman, The Seven Altars of Dûsarra. This is maybe the third novel-length story LWE wrote or published, and he finds his feet in this one as a strongly competent acolyte of Fritz Leiber and Robert Howard. He writes a story where the protagonist has agency and takes the logical action within his world and circumstances, and we understand his motivations and logic for those choices he makes. The world-building is spare but effective - we know where the hero is, and we understand the challenges he faces, most of which are physical confrontations with the physical world or dangerous beings. We don't have to worry about unreliable narrators or strange psychological states. The cover of the first edition accurately depicts the world we enter in these books. Quick summary: The King in Yellow charges Garth to journey to Dûsarra and bring back the first thing he finds sitting on each of the seven altars of the Dark Gods. Garth isn't interested in it, but circumstances force him to do so, and being an Overman, he takes his hairy ass and warbeast to Dûsarra and proceeds to openly rob or take as a gift the contents off the altars of five or six of the Lords of Dus. Most of these gods are truly evil, and their priests are likewise so, while some are only scary, rather than evil. Let's just say that I derive a strong sense of glee in the way that Garth develops his relationships with the priests of the particularly vile sort. For a simple, relatively short fantasy novel, I find this one to be deeply satisfying. Reading it as a kid made me happy, and even as an adult it is still gratifying. Garth's logical, inhuman viewpoint is sort of like if Spock was seven feet tall, had two thumbs on each hand, possessed himself of many competencies, and enjoyed strenuous physical action, all while being polite to those who were polite to him. LWE also deals with the practical effects of adventuring: unlike LOTR, characters in these books sweat and complain about their soggy underwear, wear out their boots and have to go shopping, lose their weapons during melees, receive inconvenient wounds, etc. etc. And just as in The Lure of the Basilisk, Garth uses his brain to overcome these sort of practical problems with satisfying, real-world solutions. Good stuff.

It is one of those lack-of-action actions from VAR that make you wonder if the VAR official was in the lavatory for a quick call of nature at the time? Because surely otherwise the whole reason for the existence of the function is to MAKE THAT CALL to the official and have them look at that play. They are being paid to sit there and watch the match, and to fail in this basic function is inexcusable.

Another bizarro performance from VAR for that studs-up challenge on Luis Diaz' shin/knee in the first half at Bournemouth. No whistle, not even a free kick, no VAR feedback - silence.

Sure seems like going to war is not nearly as fun as the propaganda machine told him it would be.