Those are 3 photographs I took in the arcade at New York, New York in Las Vegas last week. Today, I'm reading the Wikipedia article on what is also called the claw crane, the skill crane, or the teddy picker:
The success rate of winning a prize is dependent on several factors including operator settings, player skill, type of machine, and the prizes available (size, density, and distribution). A prize may be lost due to player inexperience, player error in manipulating the claw, the weakness of the claw, or the specific crane configuration...
Modern claw machines are fully computerized and are remotely programmable by the owner (via a hand-held device). Settings and features commonly available include:
Claw strength and aperture
Motion speed, in any direction (that is, the claw can be made to drop slowly but come up quickly, or move right faster than it moves forward)
Pick-up strength and retain strength can be specified separately, as well as the delay between pick-up and return.
Payout percentage: Cranes equipped with this setting have onboard programming which cause the claw's grip parameters to be continually adjusted to achieve a pre-set payout percentage, usually specified with respect to the value of the prizes inside
Fail limit: If the machine dispenses too many prizes in a given time period, it stops accepting coins and is out of order...
The machine declares itself "out of order" if people win too much!
Seatown Lemon Haze grown by Western Cultured... has an overwhelmingly sweet and lemony aroma, like a lemon-lime soda on a sunny day. The pretty nugs have a vibrant green hue and a coating of white crystals. The plant's aromas keep exhaling around you as you pull it out of its bag and grind it up. It had a light and smooth smoke to it, didn't make me cough, and delivered a powerful, heady, mind-racing high. That's something I enjoy about these really citrusy strains—they make my mind run in circles. It's not for everyone, especially not the paranoia-prone. Barely half a bowl gave me the energy to stay up for a few hours editing and sorting photos and listening to the new War on Drugs album.
But wait. There's something very different from wine writing. With wine it's always only about how the substance appeals to the senses — taste, smell, and the feeling in your mouth — as you are drinking it. There's never anything about how it feels in your bloodstream and how it affects your mind.
Seatown Lemon Haze is not for everyone, especially not the paranoia-prone. And writing about marijuana is not for everyone, especially the bullshit-sensitive.
"But, look, if somebody’s got Paul Newman in The Verdict, I’d jump. But there aren’t that many like that. Acting used to be how I paid the rent, but I sold a tequila company for a billion fucking dollars. I don’t need money."
Only one person on the face of the earth can say that. George Clooney.
Meanwhile, his new movie "Suburbicon" is a real stinker.
Suburbicon might as well be populated exclusively by Klansmen; not a voice is raised in the [black family's] favor.... Taking a wild guess, I get the feeling that, in Clooney’s opinion, the United States, in the epoch of Eisenhower, had a problem with racism. Jeez, who knew? The film’s indignation is clearly fuelled by the rancor that has persisted into the epoch of Trump, but there’s a hitch. So repelled is Clooney by the response of white suburbia to African-Americans, and so keen is he to insure that we share his outrage at what they endured, that he quite forgets to be interested in them. We learn next to nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Mayers (their first names are a mystery), nor do we listen to their conversations. The wife is charged twenty dollars for a carton of milk by the manager of a supermarket, and she hangs up her washing outside with a bevy of protesters banging drums and crowing, only feet away, but, while her dignity in the face of such taunts is noble, that’s all we know of her. It’s purely in relation to white contempt, in other words, that she is granted dramatic presence. To say that she and her husband are a backdrop would be going too far, but the black plot and the white plot scarcely touch. Is that what Clooney intended?
"... and has placed her survival in the hands of 'medical intuitives' who tell her to eat vegan foods, open her chakras, and visualize tying ribbons around her liver—I am not making this up. If she keeps this up, she’s going to die, and my brother will face terrible mourning again. His daughter (a medical technician) and I are appalled, but unfortunately, the girlfriend has the right to make her own (terrible) decisions."
"... calling it a 'blatant military aggression by the Iranian regime which may amount to an act of war.'... Analysts said it was unclear how far Saudi Arabia would be willing to go in the escalating confrontation. The kingdom is in the midst of an unprecedented purge of its upper ranks, with dozens of senior figures arrested at the weekend, as 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman consolidates his hold on power. Prince Mohammed, who is also defence minister, is seen as a key supporter of the intervention in Yemen...."
"Both of them walked their little dogs at about a mile and a half circle, a nice little dog trot. I'd see them out walking, maybe they might stop and speak with each other."
Police are saying nothing about the motive for the attack, but we do know that Paul was tackled from behind with "high velocity severe force." We can probably infer that the attacker — Rene Boucher — came onto Paul's property with an intent to attack him and surprised him and that it was not some kind of argument that arose and escalated in a face-to-face encounter.
Another thing we know is "Boucher is an anesthesiologist and a pain specialist." I'd want to look into whether Boucher had a drug problem.
"But as her celebrity grew, so too did a revolt within her own City Hall. She now faces City Council members accusing her of corruption, a court battle over Flint’s long-term water source and, on Tuesday, a recall election that could snuff out her four-year term at the halfway point. Ms. Weaver, who is black and the first woman to hold her post, blames racism, sexism and petty politics for the recall.... But Ms. Weaver’s opponents — 17 names will appear on the ballot along with hers — dismiss her as a political amateur who has run Flint like a fief, failed to engage with the City Council and further eroded the public’s already battered faith in government. The candidate who receives the most votes on Tuesday will serve out the remainder of the term. 'The mayor is trying to turn this into a racial campaign, and it has nothing to do with me being white and her being an African-American female,' said Scott Kincaid, a longtime city councilman and labor-union employee who is widely considered the main challenger in the recall. 'It has to do with her inability to govern the City of Flint.'"
Seems like playing the race-and-sex card and being the incumbent is enough to win when all you need to do is get the most votes out of a field of 18 candidates.
"The speedometer crossed 95 mph while the driver narrated everything to law enforcement. 'I was on the phone with dispatch the entire time,' he said. 'I gave them the direction we were going, on what road and everything, and that the vehicle was in sight and that I was getting closer and closer to him.' Kelley’s vehicle, however, broke from the roadway and crashed into a ditch about 11 miles north of the church. Langerdorff pulled his own truck within 25 yards. 'The gentleman that was with me got out, rested his rifle on my hood and kept it aimed at him, telling him to get out get out. There was no movement, there was none of that. I just know his brake lights were going on and off, so he might have been unconscious from the crash or something like that, I’m not sure,' he said."
Her usual demeanor — which I've enjoyed over the years — is slowed down, calm, and slightly jolly. The difference is striking and had me wondering what her colleagues have been saying to her and how much she's afraid that her book will not succeed in shifting blame for what happened to the Democratic Party onto others:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Passionate Democrats who say they feel betrayed by all this. Any regrets?
BRAZILE: Do I regret taking on a job the second time in my life as chair of the party, cleaning up everyone's mess, taking all of the incoming, being unable to spend funds that I raised? Do I regret being on the road 100 percent of the time, being hacked by the Russians, being -- being harassed, getting death threats? Do I regret any of that? George, was worse than Hurricane Katrina in terms of the emotional toll. But do I regret stranding up for what is right, helping Hillary Clinton, helping the Democratic Party? And let me just say this, as somebody who went through the hacking experience, being able to tell the truth about what happened with the Russians, the attack on our government do I regret any of that? No. I wish I could have done more, George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But do you think this helps for the book to come out?
BRAZILE: Well, George, I mean this is a lesson of 2016. If I released it next year, they would say, Donna, you're impacting our 2018. If I released it the following -- Donna, you're impacting. George, for those who are telling the me to shut up, they told Hillary that a couple of months ago. You know what I tell them, go to hell. I'm going to tell my story. I'm going the tell my story, George. Because this is a story of a young girl who started in American politics at the age of 9, who continues to fight each and every week of her life. I went down to Virginia last week, to kick off the canvassing campaign. Nobody paid me to do that. Nobody -- I'm not on the payroll, George. I care about my country. I care about our democracy. And I say go the hell because, why am I supposed to be the only person that is unable to tell my story?
ADDED: As I was doing the tags for this post I wanted to use "Democratic Party in Trumpland" (which is my standard tag for the predicament of the Democratic Party after the 2016 elections), and I realized I wasn't sure if Brazile ever talked about Trump. She's doing a lot of blaming, but she's blaming Democrats. She's kind of messing up their game of blaming Trump for everything. I searched the transcript and found it devoid of mentions of Trump, except in this one passage, after Stephanopoulos asks her whether, during the campaign, she felt "under threat." She said:
Every day, especially when Donald Trump -- especially when Donald Trump would go out there and tweet. You know, look, I have worked on campaigns all my adult life. I have been called some of the the worst things in America. But when Donald Trump would go out there and attack me, I got the threats were just unbearable. My house right now is -- I got every different kind of security device. I had to get my home swept. I had to get the DNC swept twice. It was horrible.
Then Stephanopoulos reminded her that Trump's tweeting now is promoting her book saying it's "the real story" that "Crooked Hillary" was the one doing the "collusion." Brazile said:
Well, Donald Trump likes to distract. I mean, what Donald Trump should be focusing on right now is protecting our country from being hacked again.... Donald Trump loves to distract us and divide us. I'm not playing his game.
She's giving him material he can use in his game, so I guess "not playing his game" is doing what she sees fit within the Democratic Party and not listening to warnings from her own people that what she's saying will help Trump.
"... prompting Cambridge officials to remove them and a Harvard Law School Dean to denounce the signs as 'provocations intended to divide us,'" Harvard Crimson reports.
The stickers appeared to be part of a campaign started on the forum website 4chan, which called upon followers to put up posters with the message in their area on Halloween night. The author of the original post on the site wrote that they hoped the “credibility of far left campuses and media gets nuked” as a result of the incident, adding that they could help achieve a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”
What "incident"? I guess it's "the incident" of whatever reaction the stickers provoke (rather than the putting up of the stickers). Just don't react and there's no incident. But there's an anodyne reaction: The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity. So that's very close to no reaction. This is really a nonstory as long as we don't talk about it, but Harvard Crimson wrote it up, and I got sent here from Instapundit and TaxProf Blog, so now I'm feeling as though this is bloggable, especially since I got into the rathole of the comments at the Crimson.
There's this, from Haardvark:
Brilliant -- the very same folks who may claim the stickers to be offensive (by interpreting them to mean "it's NOT okay to be anything else") are forced to reconcile their outrage with their "Black Lives Matter" =/= "No other lives matter" position.
And then there's this kind of thing, by Thrifty:
Whoop-de-doo. Obviously there's a sense in which it's "okay to be white"—every person has a right to exist and be respected, including people categorized as "white". Less obviously (at least to white people like me), there's a sense in which the familiar cultural artifact called "whiteness" can be harmful, by making it easier to limit this right to exist and be respected to some people but not others, and, although it's a stretch, "being white" could be interpreted as "deliberately perpetrating or perpetuating this harmful system," which is not "okay". 4chan knows the first sense is obvious while the second is only widely recognized in academia, and is hoping to perpetrate a transparent fallacy of equivocation by getting us to point out the second and sound like we're attacking the first. Like most of this part of the internet's efforts to push memes, this one is thankfully hamstrung by its own idiocy and will die out soon.
Which made Lukas Oman say:
You use a lot of words but you say essentially nothing. First, define "whiteness" for those of us who opted to take STEM courses and are naive to the concept.
Thrifty steps up, but not in a strong enough way to make me want to bulk up this post with a quote, and it makes (((kingschitz))) say "Your word salad is a target rich opportunity" and "you’ve transformed all discussion into racial shaming." And Lukas Oman comes back to say a few things, including:
The concepts of whiteness, white fragility, racial microaggression, and even "equality", as it is defined now, are complicated constructs with more twists and turns and holes than the surface of a nanoporous ingot. And dude, you don't even go here.
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a Wimpy Kid, Oprah, and Leonardo da Vinci (because those 3 characters never stop fascinating us).
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