Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 15, 2022 • 7:00 am

Greetings on the Cat Sabbath, Saturday January 15, 2022, and it’s also a federal holiday: Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s also National Strawberry Ice Cream Day, National Bagel Day, National Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice Day, Humanitarian Day, National Hat Day, and Wikipedia Day (see below undr 2001). (I think we’re into year 5 waiting for Greg Mayer’s apocryphal article “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?”.)

News of the Day:

I’ve received my 23andMe replacement kit for free after the company couldn’t do PCR on my sample (that’s my guess). I’m about to spit in the tube and will chew on my cheeks a bit as a reader recommend to up the titer of DNA. If this one fails, I’m out $99 with nothing to show for it. Seriously, everyone has DNA, I have a Ph.D. and can follow instructions, so kits should be unlimited until you get a result!

*Holy September 1, 1939, Batman! According to the New York Times, the White House claims that Russia is doing exactly what the Nazis did to created a pretext to invade Poland:

The Biden administration accused Moscow on Friday of sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could provide President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with a pretext for ordering an invasion of parts or all of the country.

The White House did not release details of the evidence it had collected to back up its charge, though one official said it was a mix of intercepted communications and observations of the movements of people. In an email, a U.S. official wrote that “Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion, including through sabotage activities and information operations, by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.”

The Pentagon also considers this information “very credible.” It doesn’t mean, of course, that Russia is determined to invade Ukraine, but it makes the priors higher, as Putin is giving himself an option. Talks are still going on, but they also seem to be going nowhere. Let’s have another poll:

Will Russia invade Ukraine in the next two months?

View Results

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*Over in Australia, number #1 ranked men’s tennis star Novak Djokovic, in the country for the Australian Open, has had his visa revoked for the SECOND time. This morning he’ll be detained again and then will go to court on Sunday morning to appeal the decision. He says he’s had Covid, but lied about his activities before he came to Australia. The Australian Open starts Monday morning, so things better move quickly. NOBODY should get an exemption from the rules because they’re a great tennis player. LOCK HIM UP!

*The U.S. government announced that, starting next Wednesday, January 19, a federal website will open at which every American household can order up to four rapid test kits. Don’t expect them to arrive rapidly! Here’s the link, so save it:

Orders for up to four tests per household can be placed using the website COVIDtests.gov. The administration will also set up a phone number so those without access to computers or high-speed internet can place orders.

*I love reader Ken’s news items because I can post them without change, and they have links. Also, he has considerable legal expertise. Here’s his latest:

The Ohio Supreme Court (the seven members of which are elected — currently four Republicans, three Democrats) has struck down the ruthlessly gerrymandered partisan congressional map drafted by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Although Ohio’s voting history is nearly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the map would have created 12 GOP-dominated districts to the Democrats’ three.

You can read a synopsis of the case here, or access the full opinion here.
The case was decided 4-3. The majority based its decision on the Ohio constitution, so it would not appear that the losing party will have recourse to SCOTUS.
*There has been a volcanic eruption in Tonga causing a smallish tsunami (2.8-foot waves); fortunately, nobody was injured (h/t Matthew for tweet):

The eruption at 0410 GMT on Friday of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano, located about 65km (40 miles) north of Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, caused a 1.2-metre tsunami, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said.

The eruption – captured in satellite images that show a huge plume of ash, steam and gas rising from the ocean – was heard and felt as far away as in Fiji and Vanuatu, where people reported feeling the ground and buildings shake for hours.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or the extent of the damage in Tonga, but videos posted to social media showed huge waves in coastal areas, swirling around homes and buildings. Here are three tweets with videos of the eruption and tsuami:

Translation of tweet below: “Video of a large-scale volcanic eruption in Tonga … Tsunami forecast is out in Japan too (Tonga Islands).:

Some flooding:

This is an amazing compilation of photos:

*From FIRE: A computer-science professor at the University of Washington put a land acknowledgment on his syllabus that angered the administration. Those who see such acknowledgments as performative wokeness will find this amusing, for Professor Stuart Reges wrote this:

“I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

That’s not really insulting the Salish people; it insults the University, which says that you can put a land acknowledgment on your syllabus, but only a University-approved one. (UW is a public school and therefore must adhere to the First Amendment.) Nevertheless, Reges was censured; his Director, Magdalena Balazinska, told him to remove the statement because it was offensive, saying this to the press:

The statement [that Allen School Professor] Stuart Reges included in his syllabus was inappropriate, offensive and not relevant to the content of the course he teaches. The invocation of Locke’s labor theory of property dehumanizes and demeans Indigenous people and is contrary to the long-standing relationship and respect the UW has with and for the Coast Salish peoples and the federally recognized tribes within the state of Washington.

FIRE notes this:

Balazinska’s commentary compounds her violations of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate such hamfisted, transparent attempts to force professors to adopt or parrott  university viewpoints. UW cannot boost its land acknowledgment statement at the expense of its faculty’s right to free expression.

And FIRE has written the UW President a strong letter explaining whey their dictatorial practice violates the First Amendment. Will they cave, or is UW bucking for a lawsuit.

*Things to read:

a. Two articles from the new American Free Speech Union, which deserves yur support: “Sowing the wind,” a critique of an Oklahoma bill which would give every parent the right to demand removal of one “offensive” book from a school library (objecting librarians will be punished.  Also, “Knaves or fools?“, a discussion of why anti-CRT-teaching bills should not be passed by states.

b. John McWhorter’s NYT column on Sidney Poitier after his death this week. It’s largely about “black English”, and how those actors who “made it” didn’t speak that way. Poitier was one, but served as a “bridge”:

Poitier was certainly a pioneer — but in the sense that he was transitional. In a mid-20th-century America that feared and scorned Blackness and especially Black maleness that came with a hint of sexuality, the first real Black matinee idol was almost inevitably going to be someone who didn’t talk (or move) in modes more typically associated with American Black men. A more local, less global Black voice would have made (or have been assumed to have made) white audiences back then too uncomfortable for a big studio to have greenlighted Poitier’s classic films. He was, quietly but decisively, different. He was from somewhere else, even if you only thought of that subconsciously — as we do to a major degree about language in all of its facets.

But he was a bridge. He was Black, after all, and his Caribbean cadences certainly weren’t white-sounding. He helped pave the way not only for other Black actors, but also for acceptance of more varied Black speech. In the 1960s, the Black Power movement and the Black Is Beautiful movement — proud displays of Blackness in aesthetic mediums including clothing and hairstyles — became part of the Black mainstream and increasingly (if not widely) accepted by the broader society. Language norms transformed alongside, and from then on, American Black English was more acceptable in the public sphere than ever before.

I still remember during the O.J Simpson trial when Johnnie Cochrane, incensed, argued that there was no way anyone could identify a black person by the way they spoke alone.

c. Andrew Sullivan’s weekly Friday piece, with the header “The trans movement is not about rights anymore.” It’s a well-written and fair piece–unless you think that it’s “transphobia” to see some relevant differences between biological women and trans women. One bit:

The truth is: the 6-3 Bostock decision places trans people in every state under the protection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the sturdy prohibition on sex discrimination. A Trump nominee wrote the ruling.

What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.

Sullivan also criticizes Biden for his latest speech

 The appeal of Biden was that he understood the Senate, represented a moderate middle, and wouldn’t polarize the country with divisive, incendiary rhetoric, as his predecessor had. The reality of Biden is that he has lost the Senate’s trust, has been an enabler of the far left, and is now seeking to call all those who object to a Democratic wishlist of electoral reforms the modern equivalents of the KKK. The speech was disgusting. It will do nothing but further alienate the Senators he needs. It sure alienated me. It could have been written by a Vox intern on Adderall.

Remember, Sullivan voted for Biden and there’s something to what he says above about Biden’s being “an enabler of the far left.” I do like that last sentence!

*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 848,542, an increase of 1,928 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,549,236, an increase of about 8,300 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on January 15 includes:

  • 1559 – Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey, London.

A painting, with the caption “Elizabeth I in her coronation robes, patterned with Tudor roses and trimmed with ermine.”

Here’s Nast’s cartoon:

  • 1889 – The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, is incorporated in Atlanta.
  • 1892 – James Naismith publishes the rules of basketball.

Here’s “the original 1891 “Basket Ball” court in Springfield College. It used a peach basket attached to the wall.” Presumably the written rules came later.

Here’s Luxemburg, one of Chrisopher Hitchens’s heroes:

Of course you’ll want to know about this, but read the Wikipedia link:

Before:

After (caption: “Twenty one people were killed on Commercial Street in the North End when a tank of molasses ruptured and exploded. An eight foot wave of the syrupy brown liquid moved down Commercial Street at a speed of 35mph. Wreckage of the collapsed tank visible in background, center, next to light colored warehouse. Elevated railway structure visible at far left and the North End Park bathing beach to the far right.”)

  • 1936 – The first building to be completely covered in glass, built for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, is completed in Toledo, Ohio.
  • 1947 – The Black Dahlia murder: The dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles.

Here’s Short when she was alive. If you search the internet you can find photos of her bisected and mutilated corpse. The perpetrator was never found:

  • 1962 – The Derveni papyrus, Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript dating to 340 BC, is found in northern Greece.

Here are some fragments of the papyrus, which contains a Macedonian poem:

  • 1967 – The first Super Bowl is played in Los Angeles. The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10.
  • 1976 – Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is sentenced to life in prison.

As per federal law, Moore was subject to parole after serving 30 years of a life sentence. She was released in 2007 at age 77, and is still alive.

And here’s a plot (from Wikipedia, of course) of the number of Wikpedia articles over time:

  • 2019 – Theresa May’s UK government suffers the biggest government defeat in modern times, when 432 MPs voting against the proposed European Union withdrawal agreement, giving her opponents a majority of 230.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1623 – Algernon Sidney, British philosopher (probable) d. 1683)
  • 1842 – Josef Breuer, Austrian physician and psychiatrist (d. 1925)
  • 1877 – Lewis Terman, American psychologist, eugenicist, and academic (d. 1956)

“Eugenicist” has been added to a number of Wikipedia entries since 2020.

  • 1908 – Edward Teller, Hungarian-American physicist and academic (d. 2003)
  • 1909 – Gene Krupa, American drummer, composer, and actor (d. 1973)

Here’s a recording of Krupa drumming on “Sing Sing Sing” with the Goodman band at their famous Carnegie Hall concert in 1938.

Herzog was the leader of the French Annapurna I team in 1950, and he summited. However, he lost all of his toes and most of his fingers. His book, Annapurna, is a classic of mountaineering literature. The bit that recounts the snipping off of his digits, one by one, on the long trip home will make you cringe.

  • 1929 – Martin Luther King Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1968).

Tomorrow is the official holiday that marks his birthday.

  • 1941 – Captain Beefheart, American singer-songwriter, musician, and artist (d. 2010)

Those who meowed their last meow on January 15 include:

  • 1896 – Mathew Brady, American photographer and journalist (b. 1822)

Here are pictures of Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee, both taken by Brady:

(From Wikipedia): Photo Montage of Union general Ulysses S. Grant Taken June 1864 and CS General Robert E. Lee taken April 1865 (See Frassanito “Grant and Lee The Virginia Campaigns”)..
  • 1909 – Arnold Janssen, German priest and missionary (b. 1837)
  • 1916 – Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian playwright and translator (b. 1850)

His brother, a braggart named Immodest Tchaikovsky, never wrote any plays.

Both were murdered on the same day.

  • 1955 – Yves Tanguy, French-American painter (b. 1900)

Here’s Tanguy’s “My life, white and black”:

  • 1987 – Ray Bolger, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1904)
  • 1994 – Harry Nilsson, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941)

Here’s a music video of Nilsson singing “Everybody’s Talkin'”, a great song despite his other debacle, “Put the lime in the coconut” or whatever it was called.  This song became famous because it was part of the sound track of “Midnight Cowboy,” but it would have been a big hit on its own:

  • 1998 – Junior Wells, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player (b. 1934)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka catches Hili in an arrant lie!

Hili: I come in peace.
Kulka: Nobody would believe you.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Hili: Przynoszę pokój.
Kulka: Nikt ci nie uwierzy.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina R.)

From Facebook. I need one!

From Bruce:

From David:

Titania tweets only rarely these days:

From Barry: a photo of the world’s handsomest man and his staff:

From Simon, who comments: “”Interesting thread – I wasn’t aware of the Chinese expression that describes both Trump and the woke.” Theres more on the thread itself.

From Ginger K., video (photo montage, I suspect) of the Parker Solar probe going through the Sun’s corona:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. First, a great eared nightjar (Lyncornis macrotis) :

Now this is what I call a buttload of whales!

Smart kitty!

30 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 848,542, an increase of 1,928 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,549,236, an increase of about 8,300 over yesterday’s total.”

    At what point does the coronavirus disease get a new name, as in “flu H1 N1” for s specific flu strain?

    Isn’t the plot of cases now like a _cumulative_ plot of _every_ positive coronavirus test result regardless of strain? What is identified anyway – a spike?

    And these tests were never done at such a scale since 2020 – are these coronavirus infections what has been the scenario all along? SARS-CoV2 / COVID-19 is due to a single “novel” coronavirus – there are others.

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  2. Andrew Sullivan finds Biden’s voting rights speech disgusting. I just read it and did not find it disgusting at all. However, I find Sullivan’s remarks disgusting. Biden’s speech was a recognition that the aim of Republican voting restriction legislation throughout the country is to reduce the number of potential Democratic voters, particularly Black ones. In this respect it is, indeed, an attempt to resurrect Jim Crow.

    Sullivan’s assertion that Biden has lost the trust of the Senate is absurd. He hasn’t lost the trust of Democratic senators. Nor has he lost the trust of Republican senators – he never had it as would be the case with any Democratic president. No Democratic president would have been able to get enough Republican voters to overcome the filibuster. By expressing the need for voting rights legislation, Biden was hoping to persuade Sinema and Manchin to vote to change the filibuster rules. Undoubtedly, he knew this was a long shot and the effort failed, but it was worth the try. If nothing else, Biden should be credited for risking likely political embarrassment to express a moral principle. Nor can Biden’s speech be interpreted as a simple move to placate the far left of the Democratic Party. Forty Eight Democratic senators, many of them moderates that do not take changing filibuster rules lightly, concluded that the threat to democracy is real and because of this were willing to change the rules. Even Sinema and Manchin support voting rights legislation. It is just that for them the filibuster rules should not be changed, no matter what the issue is involved.

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    1. At this point the GOP has no reason to want to reduce the number of Black voters, given how fast minorities are running from Biden and the Democrats. What the GOP wants, and what the Dems should want, is to tighten back up those voting rules which were loosened for Covid reasons. The idea that people should be able to vote without proving who they are or that they live in the voting precinct is nothing but an invitation to fraud. (It should be in everyone’s interest not only to prevent fraud, but to remove the conditions which make meaningless claims of fraud possible.) Unfortunately, the Dem recognize that their only path forward is to prevent an honest poll.

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      2. The current version of the bill requires ID to vote. I find nothing controversial in the bill. Republicans nevertheless will find endless reasons to oppose it.

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      3. And you know why Black voters are running away from Biden at the moment? It’s because he hasn’t done enough on voting rights and they’re pissed about it. You think that means they’re running to the GOP? Not a chance. And you’re absolutely wrong that the GOP “has no reason to want to reduce the number of Black voters”. The GOP looked at Georgia in 2020 and they completely lost their shit. Making it easier to vote is a crisis for the GOP, and they know it; they don’t hide the fact that they need voting restrictions to win. You’re also setting up a strawman with: “The idea that people should be able to vote without proving who they are or that they live in the voting precinct is nothing but an invitation to fraud.” Whose voting without proving who they are? There was no amount of fraud that would have made any difference in 2020. A few people have been charged with duplicate votes, and guess who they voted for? Trump.

        And speaking of Trump, when Democrats wanted more funding for expanded mail-in balloting during the pandemic, he said doing so would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” And on 11/8/20, Lindsey Graham said: “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” I can cite quote after quote of Republicans saying pretty much the same thing. The GOP can’t win unless they cheat, they know it, I know it and anyone who is paying attention knows it…actually, you don’t need to pay much attention to know it, you just have to abstain from Fox and other right-wing propaganda outlets.

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    2. Well put. Your comment is a reminder that, however much we liberals might be in sympathy with some of Sully’s opinions and however much we admire his virtuosic writing, he is first and last a conservative and must be read with a healthy scepticism.

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    4. Precisely. The situation is that no Republican will support the bill no matter how many concessions are given—see calling a deer a horse above. So there is no point in trying to placate or reason with them anymore. Might as well call them what they are.
      The situation also is that there are in reality only 48 Democrats in the Senate. Sinema and Manchin are disingenuous. There is no good argument for not making an exception to the filibuster for this case.
      The sad reality is that it might already be too late. Even it the bill is finally passed, by the time all the court challenges are done and it finally ends up in the Supreme Court, who will probably gut it, it will be too late to implement for this year’s elections. The Republicans will retake at least one of the houses and undo everything anyway, while spending all their time trying to impeach Biden.
      The Republican Party is the biggest threat to the republic.

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    5. Thanks for writing this. Sullivan is a good writer, but I don’t agree with him often, and calling Biden’s speech “disgusting” is laughable. My regards for Sullivan continue to shrink.

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  3. I expected that, if Australia’s minister of immigration were to cancel Djokovic’s visa, it would be on the straightforward grounds that his medical exemption to enter the country unvaccinated was invalid, i.e., having recently had covid was not a sufficient reason to be granted said exemption, despite what Tennis Australia may have said. I thought the minister might also throw in, for good measure, the fact that Djokovic had also provided false information about his international travel prior to his arrival in Australia.

    Instead, the visa cancellation is based on the over-the-top, if not downright ludicrous (to me) possibility that Djokovic poses a risk to the health and good order of the Australian public and that his presence is counterproductive to efforts at vaccination by others in Australia.

    An article I read on this subject suggested that the medical exemption angle was “murky”, which was why the minister took this other tack. Are the criteria for the medical exemption not clear? I’m not a lawyer; in fact I have no legal expertise whatsoever, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the court will decide in Djokovic’s favour, that his visa cancellation will be overturned, and that he will be allowed to play in the Australian Open. I hope I’m wrong, as I really don’t think Djokovic should have been allowed in the country unvaccinated unless he had proof that getting the vaccine was contraindicated for health reasons, and maybe not even then.

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  4. Good luck on try #2 of your DNA test. I found it really annoying, when I went through multiple attempts, that the 23AndMe people refused to give any advice for how to maximize chances of success.

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  5. The letter from FIRE is excellent – the response will be interesting.

    And the “Ask me about my duck disguise” t-shirt is a work of genius!

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  7. I don’t know whether Putin will invade Ukraine. To the extent that European peace relies up the US, though, it seems like a good time to do it.

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  10. Calling a deer a horse could now be called calling a man a woman. Thankfully you’re not executed if you call him a man, you’re just cancelled.

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  11. “Elizabeth I in her coronation robes, patterned with Tudor roses and trimmed with ermine.”

    Doesn’t like dice games, with barons or earls
    Won’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls
    Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls
    That’s why the lady is a tramp

    — Lyrics by Lorenz Hart

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  12. 1947 – The Black Dahlia murder: The dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles.

    That case is something of an obsession for novelist James Ellroy, in large part because his mother was murdered under similar circumstances (possibly by the same killer) around a decade later, when he was a youngster. He’s written not only a novel based on the case, The Black Dahlia — part of Ellroy’s “LA Quartet” — but also a memoir about both cases, My Dark Places.

    Both murders remain unsolved.

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  13. 1941 – Captain Beefheart, American singer-songwriter, musician, and artist (d. 2010)

    Born Don Van Vliet, a childhood friend and collaborator of Frank Zappa’s.

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  14. Apropos recent events in the Wokesphere, Spiked sounds the following alarm: “Penguin Random House has aborted its plans to publish a collection of Mailer’s political writings to mark the centennial of his birth next year. Seemingly this is because a junior staffer objected to the title of ‘The White Negro‘, his 1957 essay on hipster existentialism. This ought to chill the bones of anyone concerned about freedom today. Because if a figure as towering as Mailer can be cancelled, then no one, dead or alive, is safe.” See: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/10/if-norman-mailer-can-be-cancelled-no-one-is-safe/?utm_source=The%20week%20on%20spiked&utm_campaign=e06d2b37a0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_01_14_05_36&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_7e9712ba33-e06d2b3&fbclid=IwAR2-8mbIx1_HKVm72FDRChvMMASQ4xd1BSxTbfgpiOpCVbHpGKUNwPCsw64

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  15. In the light of the New York Times comedy of errors with the Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”, I have absolutely no confidence with what they, the US government or public opinion say about Russia, Ukraine or Putin. I suspect that if there is any false flag operation in the works, Ukraine and the US are behind it. Why Russia? Moscow already has what it wants, and occupying Ukraine would just be one enormous headache.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-editor-weapons-of-mass-destruction-or-mass-distraction.html

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  16. Basketball evolved after The Rules were first published, and continues to into the modern era (shot clocks, 3 seconds in the key, the 3-point field goal….) It is difficult to imagine the modern game without dribbling — it you want to try, watch netball, played by girls and women in New Zealand. (At least it was on TV a couple of times during our visit.) Naismith envisioned “the new game” to similarly emphasize passing, owing to the risk that a ball-carrying player running at full tilt would smash into the parallel bars and other apparati stacked around the gym.

    During early trials of the game, Naismith prohibited advancing the ball by bouncing it on the floor with both hands, a dodge that his “incorrigible” players had hit upon as a way around the no-traveling rule. But he didn’t think to prohibit one-hand bouncing as he didn’t imagine anyone would be able to master the skill and still protect the ball from being stolen by an opponent. Players soon proved him wrong. Fortunately everyone agreed that the innovation vastly opened up the game while still preventing dangerous collisions. The technique was soon adopted and is of course today a fundamental skill.

    (This comes from an old edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, which I did not fact check other than to verify from Wiki that dribbling did not appear until 1896.)

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    1. Pretty sure Naismith never envisioned that someday players would take off from the foul line and shoot downwards at his peach basket.

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      1. So true! My high school team had a guy who could dunk from the key if he got a good charge in, did it all the time in practice, 6’7″ I think, so not so tall by modern standards of course. In those days, Canadian high school rules said your hand couldn’t be above the rim during the shot. During a pre-game warm-up against our arch-rivals he dunked one. The referee called a technical foul. The shooter hit the foul shot and we started the clock down 1-0, and one foul on our star player and on the team.
        I can’t imagine Duane shooting down into the hoop from a jumper. He had potential though. Too bad he liked weed more than hoops at the end.
        (I didn’t play. I was just the stats nerd. But watching games at court level from the bench? Priceless.)

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  17. “And here’s a plot (from Wikipedia, of course) of the number of Wikpedia articles over time” – the one billionth edit to the English Wikipedia was made on 13th January 2021.

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  18. Forget 23&Me. Sign up with the AllOfUs longitudinal study. It’s free, they use one of the blood samples they take for the genomic analysis, and if it’s like here, you get a $25 gift card on enrolling. And if you get your results before 23&Me, you can wave that at them.

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    1. It appears from that website that an in-person appointment is necessary, and the in-person appointment is only possible at the University of Chicago.

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