Posted as memorabilia for me and a few friends and family members. This is not a "game for the ages" for anyone other than Minnesota Gopher fans. Highlights at 4:00, 6:25, and 6:50 for those curious and in a hurry.
26 November 2025
Thinking of refugees on Thanksgiving
If you have nothing else to be thankful for on this day, be thankful that you are not a refugee - political refugee, war refugee, climate refugee, whatever. I fully understand that some migrants are economic opportunists seeking to game the system, but the vast majority are helpless victims of circumstances beyond their control - from wildfires, floods, droughts, ethnic cleansing, national geopolitical policies, and wars.
The top embedded image is from the border between Poland and Belarus, where the migrants are political pawns in an autocrat's power struggle with the EU. They have been displaced from their homes, have only what they can carry, lack food and shelter and are facing an oncoming winter entirely at the mercy of strangers.
Here's an old photo of a Syrian refugee child:
“I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon,” photographer Osman Sağırlı told the BBC. “İ realized she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera.”
It's tempting to succumb to "compassion fatigue" when reading about the never-ending world crises, or to consider oneself safe from geopolitical conflicts, ignoring the potential of becoming a climate refugee.
Reposted from 2021 to add a WTF development:
Foreigners seeking visas to live in the U.S. might be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, including diabetes or obesity, under a Thursday directive from the Trump administration.While assessing the health of potential immigrants has been part of the visa application process for years, including screening for communicable diseases like tuberculosis and obtaining vaccine history, experts said the new guidelines greatly expand the list of medical conditions to be considered and give visa officers more power to make decisions about immigration based on an applicant’s health status.
We (and other countries) have always in modern times screened immigration applicants for health status - especially communicable diseases - which is why Ellis Island exists. But extending those guidelines to chronic or potential disorders gives the immigration office a new method to exclude persons for unexpressed criteria, such as religion and race.
A concise summary of the Oxfordian narrative
I have excerpted the following from the Summer 2025 issue of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter:
"Where do you begin when, at a dinner party, someone says to you, “What’s this authorship nonsense all about? Who is this Oxford anyway?” Have you ever wished for a conversational aid; a simple statement to which you could refer that succinctly describes why you are an Oxfordian? The Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ) is horrifically complicated and requires real commitment, deep reading and thoughtful analysis to have a full appreciation of the issues. It’s difficult to explain quickly to people unfamiliar with the topic.What if we could consolidate and summarize “The Case for Oxford?” What if we tried to winnow down all the research, wisdom and weight of circumstantial evidence accumulated over the past hundred years into a clear set of statements? Is it even possible to declare what all Oxfordians agree on? This spring, a group of Oxfordians in England, the United States and around the world attempted to do just that...The Oxfordian Narrative was deliberately kept to one page with six statements. This core principles section is supported by a few Frequently Asked Questions, all composed from information available in more detail on the SOF and DVS websites...The following set of statements has been compiled to provide speaking and written prompts for Oxfordians engaging externally with the media and more widely. The core principles are concise, positive and authoritative, and are supported by a section of Frequently Asked Questions. They form the basis of the Oxfordian narrative and represent the common ground that is respectful of the many differing views held by our members."
A new existential threat to lemurs
"...in their native Madagascar, the endangered animals are facing a growing threat: City-dwellers with cash to spare love to eat them. They say that the meat from fruit-eating lemur species tastes sweet and that consuming these primates promotes strength and good health. The meat from these tree-dwellers is valued for its cleanliness and “purity.” The startling revelation comes from the first-ever assessment of Madagascar’s urban lemur trade. Conducted over the past four years, it concludes that more than 10,000 lemurs were sold for pricey dishes across 17 cities in the country...
Though dining on wild species from African forests often evokes people trying to survive hunger in desperate situations, this new work suggests that people from a wealthier rung of society in Madagascar, those making perhaps thousands of U.S. dollars a year, are a distinct threat to these endangered primates...
All buyers and sellers included in the survey reported they were aware of the illegality of the trade and feared being caught, jailed or fined. But the economic benefits motivated their actions. They were also aware of how rare the animals were becoming. More than half of the interviewees said they expected to have fewer lemurs to trade in the future because of declining populations..."
"Porgy and Bess" - the American folk opera
"Porgy and Bess was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway in New York City. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. A 1976 Houston Grand Opera production gained it a renewed popularity, and it is now one of the best known and most frequently performed operas.The libretto of Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street beggar living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, her drug dealer. The opera plot generally follows the stage play.In the years following Gershwin's death, Porgy and Bess was adapted for smaller-scale performances. It was adapted as a film in 1959. Some of the songs in the opera, such as "Summertime", became popular and are frequently recorded. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the trend has been toward productions with greater fidelity to Gershwin's original intentions, though smaller-scale productions also continue to be mounted..."
The "American folk opera" term derives from the fact that the musical score combines gospel, jazz, and blues influences and some vocals are of operatic quality, including this one.
24 November 2025
Word for the day: mews
I have encountered the word "mews" many hundreds of times while reading British literature, sussed out that it was an arrangement of buildings, but never looked it up. This week The Guardian featured "Mews-style homes for sale in England," so it was time to dig deeper. One click at Wikipedia did the trick:
A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses in the early twentieth century. Mews are usually located in desirable residential areas, having been built to cater for the horses, coachmen and stable-servants of prosperous residents.The word mews comes from the Royal Mews in London, England, a set of royal stables built 500 years ago on a former royal hawk mews. The term is now commonly used in English-speaking countries for city housing of a similar design....Mews derives from the French muer, 'to moult', reflecting its original function to confine a hawk to a mews while it moulted. William Shakespeare deploys to mew up to mean confine, coop up, or shut up in The Taming of the Shrew: "What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?" and also Richard III: "This day should Clarence closely be mewed up".
The rather modest-appearing one embedded at the top is listed at £8,950,000 because of its prime location in Marylebone and its surprisingly spacious interior.
Addendum: This is the image from the listing depicting one of the bathrooms:
Reader Tom239 noticed that the view is into a mirror and the camera is not evident.
Clever mashup of 150+ movie titles
The sad slow death of the CDC
"A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website that previously said that vaccines do not cause autism walked back that statement, contradicting the agency’s previous efforts to fight misinformation about a connection between the two.The agency’s webpage on vaccines and autism, updated on Wednesday, now repeats the skepticism that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has voiced about the safety of vaccines, though dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link.A previous version of the webpage said that studies had shown “no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder.” It cited a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a C.D.C. study from 2013.On Thursday, the live version of the page stated: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”"
How the tariffs have affected me
There has been a boatload of analysis, commentary, criticism, and speculation about the effects the new tariffs may or may not be having on the U.S. economy. I thought I'd throw some actual data into the mix.
One of my retirement activities has been orchestrating the disposal of all the "stuff" I've accumulated during the past 7 decades. This is what might reasonably be termed a "first world problem."
Books went years ago; Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr collections to eBay, various fiction, history, and science books to the library. Clothes to Goodwill. Rocks, minerals, crystals etc to neighborhood children. High school and collegiate memorabilia to classmates. Now I'm working on collectibles - stamps, comic books, baseball cards etc. For these latter items, eBay is an excellent venue.
This summer I noticed a significant change in how the eBay sales were processing, and I began to track numbers. For the first 125 lots I sold this year, these were the shipping destinations:
United States 72United Kingdom 26Australia/NZ 10Canada 8Others 9 (Estonia, Czech Repub, Sweden, Norway, Sri Lanka, Singapore)
The next 125 exhibited a markedly different pattern:
United States 114United Kingdom 5Canada 2Others 4
At the end of July, sales to foreign buyers evaporated. Instead of 40% going abroad, quite suddenly it was fewer than 10%. The reason became apparent when I looked at the invoices eBay was sending to the foreign buyers (example embedded at top). On a $35 purchase, but winning bidder was asked for $27 in shipping, tariffs, and taxes. The VAT had always been there [this lot going to the UK], but in previous years and at the start of this year I was able to ship small lots of stamps in regular mailing envelopes for USD $1.75 and my sales (typically less than $40) were not subject to tariffs. It was on July 30 of this year that the Trump-imposed tariffs were applied to "de minimus" items of modest monetary value. And I presume what the buyers of my items are seeing are reciprocal tariffs imposed by their home countries?
I have corresponded with some of my (former) buyers in Scotland and elsewhere. They are still interested in my material, but when they have to factor in the new "shipping" costs, my lots become unattractive.
I'm not suffering financially because for me this is discretionary hobby activity and basically a housecleaning operation, not a business. But I will bet you there are lots of small businesses (especially home businesses and side hustles) in the U.S. who are seeing a similar phenomenon be more impactful on their bottom line. I totally dismiss the claims of politicians that the U.S. economy is strong. The stock market does continue to approach new all-time highs, but that's because of an irrational enthusiasm regarding the "magnificent severn" stocks (AAPL, GOOGL, TSLA, NVDA, META, MSFT, AMZN). I will bet you a dollar to a dime that the weakness will show up not in the Dow or NASDAQ, but in the broad-based Russel 2000 index.
And this recent quote I find particularly baffling:
"The Federal Reserve is facing a difficult situation as the US economy shows strong growth and high productivity, yet hiring has significantly slowed... This divergence complicates decisions on whether to cool or boost the economy [via interest rates], with concerns about a potential jobless expansion despite investments in AI..."
Rising unemployment DESPITE AI? Correct me if I'm wrong (please. I'm no expert on such matters), but my understanding was that one of the major powers of AI was to improve efficiency by having the bots do the work formerly done by humans. I would think decreased unemployment would be expected, not a surprise.
Those who understand these sorts of things, please chime in with comments.
Related: A recent Bloomberg article is entitled Boomers Are Passing Down Fortunes — And Way, Way Too Much Stuff. "As the $90 trillion Great Wealth Transfer begins, millennials and Gen X aren’t just inheriting money. They’re being buried under an avalanche of baseball cards, fine china and collections of all sorts..." True that.
23 November 2025
19 November 2025
About those pennies... (updated) (again)
Just to clarify the details regarding the cost and savings:
"Mint operations are funded through the Mint Public Enterprise Fund (PEF), 31 U.S.C. § 5136. The Mint generates revenue through the sale of circulating coins to the Federal Reserve Banks (FRB), numismatic products to the public, and bullion coins to authorized purchasers. All circulating and numismatic operating expenses, along with capital investments incurred for the Mint’s operations and programs, are paid out of the PEF. By law, all funds in the PEF are available without fiscal year limitation. Revenues determined to be in excess of the amount required by the PEF are transferred to the United States Treasury General Fund."
The mint makes money (both literally and figuratively). Any current losses from producing pennies are overshadowed by profits from paper dollars, commemorative coins, proof sets, etc.
The embedded image is of a penny on the planet Mars.
Reposted to add some new information from Bloomberg:
Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins...“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”
Reposted from earlier this year to add some excerpts from a sometimes-humorous article in The Atlantic:
What is the United States going to do with all the pennies—all the pennies in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and the coin purses of children, and Big Gulp cups full of pennies; all the pennies that are just lying around wherever—following the abrupt announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop minting them, effective immediately?The answer appears to be nothing at all. There is no plan...It is my miserable fate to possess more miscellaneous information about U.S. one-cent coins than, possibly, any other person on this planet. This is not a boast. The information I command is data no one without a neurodevelopmental disorder would ever yearn to know; it is a body of knowledge with no practical use for anyone. I contracted this condition last year, as I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture...Another thing I learned daily over the course of my reporting: No one cares about pennies... There were logical reasons not to care: 300 billion pennies—all of them still and indefinitely legal currency—constitute approximately zero percent of the total money supply of the United States (0.0 percent if rounding to one decimal place). The millions of dollars the government loses by paying more than three cents to manufacture one-cent coins represents an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent of the government’s several-trillion-dollar budget...Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.Effectively, they are trash—trash that Americans pay the government (via taxes) to manufacture, at a loss, and then foist back on us..Then I realized they weren’t going to do anything about the vaults, because there was no plan at all to do anything except stop making pennies... This isn’t how it usually works when a smoothly running country elects to retire some portion of its currency... To date, the Canadian Mint has recycled more than 15,000 tons of pennies, redeemed by the public for their face value. Recycling the metal from Canadian pennies (mainly copper and steel) helped offset the cost of trucking billions of unwanted pennies across the nation. And, of course, it kept the coins out of landfills...But it’s unclear if anyone would bother recycling U.S. pennies, which, although copper-plated, are made mostly of zinc. Recycled zinc is worth only about a quarter of recycled copper; nearly 1 million tons of copper are recycled in the U.S. each year, versus only about 165,000 tons of zinc. On top of this, a Canadian Mint official told me, copper and zinc are “very hard” to separate.
Personally I hadn't realized the impracticality or impossibility of recycling a copper/zinc mixture. But the older copper pennies will still have "melt value" (assuming it's now legal to melt them).
When a penny was "... thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar"
The full phrase, as I encountered it* read as follows:
He sent in his expense account: "for himself & Servant, totaling one hundred and ten dollars and thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar."The expense account was by a Lieutenant Armstrong, who led an exploration westward to the Mississippi in 1790.
But why "ninetieths" of a dollar? I thought I knew early American coinage reasonably well, but I had never encountered this type of accounting. I reached for an old copy of Yeoman's Red Book to review the early pennies and large cents and could find nothing relevant, nor was there anything in the continental currency section about cents or pence being 90 to the dollar.
So, back to the web, which promptly yielded the images above, which are of course not coins, but rather -
...small change bills of credit payable in specie issued by the Bank of North America in Philadelphia. This was one of several fractional currencies printed to carry on commerce during the "Copper panic" when the price of copper dropped dramatically and copper half penny coins were either not accepted by merchants or only accepted at far below their denominated value. The notes were printed by Benjamin Bache in Philadelphia on paper supplied by Benjamin Franklin that had a marbled border along the top of the sheet.But why a 90:1 ratio rather than 100 pennies to the dollar? I found part of the answer at the West Jersey History Project:
Mr. Adams, in his report on the subject of weights and measures, made in 1820, remarks: "It is now nearly thirty years since our new moneys of account, our coins and our mint, have been established. The dollar, under its new stamp, has preserved it name and circulation. The cent has become tolerably familiarized to the tongue, wherever it has been made, by circulation, familiar to the hand. But ask a tradesman or shopkeeper in any of our cities what is a dime, or a mill, and the chances are four in five that he will not understand your question. But go to New York and offer in payment the Spanish coin, the unit of the Spanish piece of eight, and the shop or market man will take it for a shilling. Carry it to Boston or Richmond, and you shall be told that it is not a shilling but a ninepence. Bring it to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or the city of Washington, and you shall find it recognized for an eleven penny bit, and if you ask how that can be, you shall learn that the dollar being of ninety pence, the eighth part of it is nearer to eleven than any other number; and pursuing still further the arithmetic of popular denominations, you will find that half of eleven is five, or at least, that half of the eleven penny bit is the fipenny bit, which fipenny bit at Richmond, shrinks to four pence half penny, and at New York swells to six pence."Here is the topic mentioned in The Bankers Magazine, via Google Books during a discussion of the history of the word "dollar":
So, at the time Lieutenant Armstrong submitted his expense account to the government, "the dollar in Pennsylvania equalled seven shillings and sixpence, and the penny was the one-ninetieth of a dollar."
For those who want to pursue this more fully, I think the best discussion I found this morning is in this pdf file entitled State "Currencies" and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar", but it's over 50 pages long and football games are starting shortly, so all I can offer is this screencap:
What a mess it must have been for the early colonists and Americans to cope with currencies and money.
* in Undaunted Courage; Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen Ambrose (an excellent book, btw, of which I've only read a couple chapters and on which I'll have more to say later.)
Reposted from 2012
Sorting pennies in the dark
"You’re in a pitch-dark room. On a table before you are 12 pennies. You know that 5 are heads up and 7 are tails up, but you don’t know which are which. By moving and flipping the coins you must produce two piles with an equal number of heads in each pile. How can you do this without seeing the coins?"I was not able to solve this on my own and had to peek at the answer. Even after seeing the answer, it took me a long time to comprehend why it works.
Reposted from 2010 because I found it while looking for something else and still couldn't solve it on my own.
16 November 2025
Arm of man who fell off a bicycle
Note that not only are the radius and ulna broken, but the metal plates inside the bones (from repair of previous fractures) are bent at a 90 degree angle. The victim explains:
Was on a nice leisurely bike ride - shoe laces got stuck on my bike pedal and wrapped around multiple times over. Fell off as I was braking to get them unstuck. I never want to get on a bike again 😫
United Airlines claims a "window seat" does not necessarily need to have a window
"In August, United and Delta Air Lines were sued by passengers in two separate but similar suits. Both airlines were accused of unfairly charging extra for some window seats without warning that there wasn't actually a window there.
United filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.
"The use of the word 'window' in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view," the airline's lawyers wrote.
"Rather, the word 'window' identifies the position of the seat—i.e., next to the wall of the main body of the aircraft," they added.
I'll defer any commentary on this absurdity.
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