"... $53,999, the highest non-winning total in show history..."

Did you watch yesterday's phenomenal "Jeopardy!" episode?

Described here at ESPN.

We've been enjoying the fantastic James Holzhauer, and yesterday, he had a worthy competitor, Alan Levin. I'm glad James won, but it was great to watch Alan almost get him.

Over at WaPo, Charles Lane writes "Jeopardy!’s James Holzhauer is a menace":

... Holzhauer’s streak reflects the same grim, data-driven approach to competition that has spoiled (among other sports) baseball, where it has given us the “shift,” “wins above replacement,” “swing trajectories” and other statistically valid but unholy innovations.

Like the number crunchers who now rule the national pastime, Holzhauer substitutes cold, calculating odds maximization for spontaneous play. His idea is to select, and respond correctly to, harder, big-dollar clues on the show’s 30-square gameboard first. Then, flush with cash, he searches the finite set of hiding places for the “Daily Double” clue, which permits players to set their own prize for a correct response — and makes a huge bet. Responding correctly, Holzhauer often builds an insurmountable lead before the show is half over.

Dazed and demoralized opponents offer weakening resistance as his winnings snowball....

Lane's essay went up yesterday just after Levin made his thrilling challenge, but obviously was written before. Bad luck for Lane! Ha ha.

[T]his professional gambler from Las Vegas does not so much play the game as beat the system. What’s entertaining about that? And beyond a certain point, what’s admirable?...

Of course, Holzhauer’s strategy could not work without his freaky-good knowledge of trivia, just as baseball’s shift requires a pitcher skilled at inducing batters to hit into it. The old rules, though, would have contained his talent within humane channels....

If you enjoy watching nine batters in a row strike out until the 10th hits a homer, you’re going to love post-Holzhauer “Jeopardy!”

Are you buying the baseball analogy? I like baseball well enough, but I have no opinion on whether the "grim, data-driven approach to competition... has spoiled... baseball." If it has, then is what Holzhauer is doing the same kind of grim spoilage? It seems to me that Holzhauer has plainly demonstrated a strategy to rack up much higher numbers, and it's exciting and available to other players. It requires taking a big risk early on, but you only get in a position to take that risk if you pick up a few of those $1000s in single Jeopardy and then hit the Daily Double. Yesterday, it didn't work because the show was wily enough to put the Daily Double at the $1000 level and it was the first square chosen. And Levin made some Jamesesque moves and nearly beat him. Is that like "data-driven" baseball?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says:

Actual base running in Jeopardy would be good. A ball would come in somehow.

I answer:

A model for a TV game show with a running component was "Name that Tune." They'd play a tune and the contestants had to name it, but instead of hitting buzzer to get the chance to give the right answer, you had to run across the stage and pull a cord.

I found a full "Name that Tune" show on YouTube. You can see the contestants in ridiculous action here (scroll to 6:00 to see the actual running):

"President Trump on Monday ordered new restrictions on asylum seekers at the Mexican border — including application fees and work permit restraints — and directed that cases in the already clogged immigration courts be settled within 180 days."

The NYT reports.

In a memo sent to Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, and Attorney General William P. Barr.... Mr. Trump gave administration officials 90 days to draw up regulations that would carry out his orders.... The memo did not make clear how the plans would be carried out in immigration courts. More than 800,000 cases are pending, with an average wait time of almost two years...

Fewer migrants try to cross the border now than in the early 2000s. But the demographics have shifted: Most are now families from Central America rather than single Mexicans who could be quickly deported. The sheer number of families has overwhelmed the system, and because of rules that prohibit holding children in detention for more than 20 days, some families are released into communities along the border....

At the current pace of about 100,000 migrants each month, officials estimate more than a million people will have tried to cross the border within a year....

"Reporters and editors pretend to believe that the First Amendment is somehow in danger from the Trump administration, but..."

"Their real complaint is that the president has used his own right of free speech to expose their mendacity. 'I don’t want to dwell on the president,' [Oliver Knox, President of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said in his speech at the group's 'gloomy' gala.] 'This is not his dinner. It’s ours, and it should stay ours. But I do want to say this. In nearly 23 years as a reporter, I’ve been physically assaulted by Republicans and Democrats, spat on, shoved, had crap thrown at me. I’ve been told I will never work in Washington again by both major parties.' Apparently being physically assaulted, spat on, shoved, threatened, etc. didn’t scare Knox. But Trump does? 'And yet I still separate my career to before February 2017 and what came after,' he continued. 'And February 2017 is when the president called us the enemy of the people. A few days later my son asked me, "Is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?" At the end of a family trip to Mexico he mused if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.' So we are to understand that journalists’ 'fears' are based on the musings of small children?"

From "THE PRESS HAS LEARNED NOTHING" by John Hinderaker at Power Line.

"John Singleton, whose powerful debut film, 'Boyz N the Hood,' earned him an Oscar nomination for best director, the first for an African-American, died on Monday in Los Angeles."

"He was 51.... Mr. Singleton had been admitted to the hospital on April 17, reportedly after having a stroke. His family said he had a history of hypertension.... He was 22 when he began shooting 'Boyz,' which follows Tre (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his friends Ricky (Morris Chestnut) and Doughboy (Ice Cube) as they try to avoid gangs and drugs. When Ricky is shot and killed by a gang member, Doughboy, his half brother, seeks revenge, but Tre backs away from retribution. Mr. Singleton had graduated from film school less than a year earlier. He later conceded that when he made 'Boyz N the Hood' he did not yet know how to direct a film. 'As the movie was going along, I was learning how to direct,' he said after a 25th-anniversary screening of the film in Manhattan in 2016. 'As it becomes more intense and comes on to the third act, the camerawork is more and more fluid, because I’m getting better and better — and taking more chances.'"

From the NYT obituary.

The highest-rated comment quotes this — “Mr. Singleton directed a variety of films over the next 20 years, but none had the impact of 'Boyz.'"

Here’s the thing, like everything in America, the lens through which you are looking colors everything. All of Johns films made a huge impact, but just not to white audiences. I have a niece named Justice, after the Justice in Poetic Justice. Rosewood was so traumatic for me that I’ve only seen it twice, in pieces. I know people who can quote you the script of Baby Boy almost line by line. And I know the soundtrack to the movie Higher Learning front to back.

John, you have been and will always be embedded in the fabric of Black American life. You may be gone, but you will not be forgotten. You will be missed! Rest In Peace.

At the Monday Cafe...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Woodstock cancelled because of "concerns about the capacity of the festival, site readiness and permitting issues."

Billboard reports.

This year's event would have commemorated the original Woodstock, which happened despite a lack of readiness. But you can't redo the chaos part of it all. You can't plan chaos. If you're planning and it looks like chaos, you have to say no.

From the UPI report of August 16, 1969, "Thousands flee Woodstock chaos, mud":

WHITE LAKE -- Tens of thousands of young music fans today began abandoning the muddy chaos of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Advertised as three days of "peace and music," the fair in this Catskill community has turned into a massive traffic jam in a giant mud puddle that has resulted in the death of one youth and the hospitalization of scores of others, many of them suffering adverse drug reactions.

Hillary does her Donald Trump voice.

I've picked out the key 13 seconds so you don't have to slog through 5 minutes.

I got that at "Hillary Clinton mocks Trump with dramatic Mueller report reading of president's 'I'm f***ed' line, and suggests people raise money to send AG William Barr back to law school" (The Daily Mail). I recommend not trying to figure out the overall gist of what's going on there. Some comedy concept... excruciating comedy concept.

"I draw a lot, that’s really the beginning of it all. I draw in bed, usually watching a Charlie Chan movie."

"The drawings are very small. I’ll put them on a copier and blow them up to get a general picture of what they’ll look like at a certain scale. And then I start building the models at full scale, at six inches max. I can envision things, to a degree, three-dimensionally. I’m not saying I have visions, but some little idea will come popping into my head. It might be based on something I’ve seen, and subconsciously it finds its way onto paper."

From "An Artist Who Makes Irreverent, and Pocket-Size, Sculptures/Ron Nagle helped pave the way for clay artists to be taken seriously — but he still has a sense of humor. Ahead of a new solo show, he discusses his work, his dog and his TV habits" (NYT Style Magazine). Nagle's new exhibit is called "Getting to No." The NYT describes his sculptures as "otherworldly... pastel stucco planes... glossy half-moon shapes, suggesting animal tails, chewed-up wads of gum, bare tree limbs, erect genitalia or excrement...." We're also told "he’s credited for writing iconic songs on albums by Jefferson Airplane, Sammy Hagar and Barbra Streisand."

What Jefferson Airplane song is by Ron Nagle? I looked it up. It's "Please Come Back" (on the album "Flight Log"). I couldn't find "Please Come Back" on YouTube. Sorry. Not to be confused with "Coming Back to Me" (one of the very best Jefferson Airplane songs).

Anyway, it's funny for a man of today, in the warm spotlight of a NYT style piece, to freely and unnecessarily associate himself with Charlie Chan, the 1930s/40s fictional character who is "the subject of controversy," as Wikipedia puts it:

What's this bird?

Seen last week on the hike to Realization Point (near Boulder, Colorado).



On the hike, I talked to a man who was looking for the specific point called "Realization," and I wasn't sure exactly where it was. Then I ran into a man who was sitting on a rock waiting for his brother who'd gone ahead, fixated on finding Realization Point. I said, "Sometimes the best realization is that there is no point." The rock-sitting brother seemed to like that notion.

"Coverage of Trump’s latest rally shows how major media outlets normalize his worst excesses."

Aaron Rupar writes about the Green Bay rally at Vox:

The president falsely accused Democrats of supporting infanticide, called the FBI and Justice Department leaders he’s purged from government “scum,” referred to the assembled media as “sick people,” and even admitted his proposal to punish blue states by relocating undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities was “actually my sick idea.”...

The New York Times did attempt to fact-check Trump’s lie about Democrats and abortion — Trump accused Democrats of supporting doctors who “wrap the baby beautifully” before they get together with the mother and “determine whether or not they will execute the baby” — but in so doing, the outlet demonstrated it doesn’t really have a vocabulary to adequately deal with Trump.

Instead of calling Trump’s lie a lie, the Times used the euphemism “revived an inaccurate refrain” in a tweet that was widely mocked. The accompanying article goes out of its way to avoid accusing Trump of lying, instead describing him as “reviv[ing] on Saturday night what is fast becoming a standard, and inaccurate, refrain about doctors ‘executing babies.’”...

The irony is that on Saturday night, as always, the media was one of Trump’s foremost targets of abuse — yet the very outlets Trump demeans continue to bend over backward to cover him in the most favorable possible light.

Are the media going soft on Trump? If so, why? I suspect that if they are lightening up, it's because they've come to believe that constantly battering Trump has produced numbness and even sympathy. That's the effect it has on me. And the post-birth abortion lie is a very special problem. To expose the misrepresentation, you must focus on the death of infants, and that generates powerful feelings that abortion-rights proponents may fear.

"To have my name associated with something so unspeakably vile has affected me in more ways than I might have shown."

"I just didn’t want to address it right away, and I didn’t want to give the terrorist any more attention. I didn’t want to make it about me. Because I don’t think it has anything to do with me. To put it plainly, I didn’t want hate to win. But it’s clear to me now — the ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ movement should have ended then."



From "‘I didn’t want hate to win’: PewDiePie ends ‘subscribe’ meme after Christchurch shooter’s shout-out" in WaPo.

With more than 95 million subscribers, [Felix] Kjellberg [AKA PewDiePie] long held claim to the title of YouTube’s most popular channel until recently. But as he promoted an anti-Semitic YouTube channel, produced videos that cracked dark jokes about anti-Semitism and Nazis and once yelled the n-word while playing a video game, critics raised alarms about his influence on the young and impressionable.

The “Subscribe to PewDiePie” movement evoked some of those same concerns — culminating, of course, with its invocation during the Christchurch massacre. The grass roots effort started harmlessly enough last year, with viral videos and pranks....

"Here we go again Bernie, but this time please show a little more anger and indignation when you get screwed!"

Trump tweeted this morning (here and here):

The Democratic National Committee, sometimes referred to as the DNC, is again working its magic in its quest to destroy Crazy Bernie Sanders....

....for the more traditional, but not very bright, Sleepy Joe Biden. Here we go again Bernie, but this time please show a little more anger and indignation when you get screwed!

As I was just saying, the presidential campaign is a test. But how do you do well on this test? Trump gives an answer: Show anger and indignation when you get screwed!

Bernie stood down in deference to Hillary, back in 2016. At the convention, the anger he so graciously suppressed for the woman who screwed him did show a little...



ADDED: But he did it to himself:

"Here’s the deal. I have to be much more aware of the private space of men and women."

Said Joe Biden on "The View" last week.

In the context of past incursions on female personal space, I found this subject line unusually dumb:

That's from email received within the last hour.

I'm not saying I'm worried that Biden wants to get in my private space. I'm concerned about his "intelligence, long in doubt."

"Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it's worth the risk."

"Voters across multiple states said that they recognize the 'electability' question is often unfairly aimed at women running for office — but stressed what they said was a need to be realistic" (NBC).

"I can hardly think about it. It makes me sick thinking about how nasty this could get for a woman,” Marianne Mason said, clutching her stomach as she waited for Sen. Kamala Harris of California to arrive at a town hall event at the University of Iowa on a recent Wednesday night. "How are they supposed to rebut someone like Trump? I want to see a woman in the White House, I really do. But I just don’t know if it can happen against him."...

"I think against Trump any woman is going to have difficulty with electability, that’s just kind of a reality we have to contend with," said Emily Van Kirk, 22, at a West Des Moines campaign event with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in March. “We need to make sure we are making an informed decision about who is actually going to be able to combat the things he says that are not only derogatory but just ignorant about women.”

Shirley Ehlers, a retiree from Perry, Iowa, who has been active in women’s political organizations in her community, agreed. “We have Trump for president, and that says a lot," Ehlers said. "That shows a disrespect in this country for women at a lot of different levels. I think we need to address that first before a woman can win."

Ridiculous. If you can't stand up to Trump, how are you going to stand up to Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and the rest of the world's bullies? To say women have to wait until Trump isn't the opponent is to say a woman should never be President.

ADDED: I don't know why these woman-doubters think Joe Biden is better equipped to take on Trump. He was very weak debating Paul Ryan in the VP debate in 2012. Here's my live-blog of that debate, preserving my perception of how pathetic Biden's performance was. He's 8 years older now. I don't understand why he's even asking to be considered adequate. His announcement of his candidacy, wafting dishonest racial bullshit, disqualified him from consideration, in my opinion. And that was tightly scripted and pre-recorded, so a lot of poor judgment and poor delivery could be hidden. Imagine him exposed on the debating stage. These people who think Biden is a safe choice must have a really abysmal opinion of the other candidates. Maybe they're already coming to terms with an inevitable Trump victory in 2020 and they're just aching to avoid the pain of a second-in-a-row failed female candidate.

ALSO: A woman can stand up to Trump in the same way a man would. Hillary Clinton wanted to use a special female privilege against Trump. She and her proponents worked hard at portraying him as offensively sexist for criticizing her, being disrespectful, and seeming physically intimidating. I think that's a mistake if you're asking for the role of President. The campaign is a test, and there can be no special treatment once you become President, so you shouldn't act like you need gender-based accommodations on the test.

"Last week a Sri Lankan MP had proposed a ban on women wearing the burka, saying it should be outlawed on security grounds."

"Muslim groups have been highly critical of the president's decision. 'It is the stupidest thing to do. Three days ago we [the Muslim community] took a voluntary decision regarding this. The All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulema told all Muslim women not to wear face veils for security reasons. If they wanted to wear a veil, then they were told not to come out,' Hilmy Ahmed, vice-president of the Sri Lanka Muslim Council...."

From "Sri Lanka attacks: Face coverings banned after Easter bloodshed" (BBC).

"Morse and Figliomeni unpacked their boxes, filled with thousands of frozen sausages they produced at a factory south of Perth, according to a recipe developed by a man they jokingly called Dr. Death."

"It called for kangaroo meat, chicken fat and a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison — called 1080 — derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to animals, like cats, whose evolutionary paths did not require them to develop a tolerance to it. (The baits would also be lethal to other nonnative species, like foxes.) As the sun brightened the brume, the baits began to defrost. By midmorning, when Morse helped load them into a wooden crate inside a light twin-engine propeller Beechcraft Baron, they were burnished with a sheen of oil and emitted a stomach-turning fetor. The airplane shot down the runway and lifted over the gently undulating hills of the sand plains that abut the Indian Ocean. Rising over the mantle of ghostlike smoke bushes that carpeted the ground to the treeless horizon, the plane traced a route over the landscape, its bombardier dropping 50 poisoned sausages every square kilometer.... Dr. Death, whose real name is Dr. Dave Algar and who is the principal research scientist in the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions for the state of Western Australia, told me that he began developing the recipe for the poisoned sausages by examining cat food in supermarkets and observing which flavors most thrilled his own two cats. As Morse said: 'They’ve got to taste good. They are the cat’s last meal.'"

From "Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats/Feral felines are driving the country’s native species to extinction. Now a massive culling is underway to preserve what’s left of the wild" (NYT).

The highly rated comments at the NYT support what Australia is doing. Example:

We used our yard to create an environment for native birds and insects. It worked. Our land was a perfect habitat for many species of birds, both local and migratory. Until our neighbors got two cats. Six years later I have only the nuisance birds (English sparrows, starlings, ring-neck doves) nesting in my yard. The ground-nesting birds haven't fledged babies since the cats were turned loose to pillage. Not only do they destroy birds, but gardening for food is also now difficult because they defecate in my raised beds. I have had to kill baby bunnies left gutted on my doorstep because the neighbors' cats have decided to 'treat' me. The owner says they bring in dozens of dead and dying birds, lizards, small mammals and snakes every week. Cats that are allowed to roam are a scourge. Australia has it right.

AND: Another NYT commenter:

If there were millions of feral dogs roaming the USA in packs, attacking deer, turkey, water fowl, mammals like raccoons and opossums, and other game and native wildlife, you could be darn sure we would be hunting them down.

BTW: there ARE millions of feral cats roaming the USA, killing millions of song birds every year. Why are we letting that happen? Because cat people are totally unrealistic and rather difficult to deal with!