For Rangers, Team Effort in Season Finale Helped Secure Presidents' Trophy

"Class, is there anything wrong with that headline that appeared on Wednesday in the NYT written by their outsourced sports department The Athletic, a group of likely non-Guild writers who put other Guild writers out of work?" 

"Yes, Matthew"

"How many presidents are there? If there's more than one, then the apostrophe is placed correctly. But I'm thinking there's only one president of the NHL and the people who write the headline and the article are ignorant of where the apostrophe should go."

"Matthew, you're right."

"Extra credit Matthew. Who is the president of the NHL?"

"Long-time Queens lawyer Gary Bettman. Used to be a Canadian Clarence Campbell, but no one knows that anymore except me and my granddad."

"You're a smart young man, Matthew."

"Thank you. Gramps has been muttering a lot to himself these days. He's been Tweeting (X'ing) news shows and news people about how they've got it all wrong."

This was the recent exchange in Miss Hagerty's third grade elementary school class yesterday morning as the class was going over current events.

Normally I just cringe a bit and feel slightly superior when I encounter a misplaced apostrophe. The correct placement of an apostrophe is probably the most perplexing rule of all punctuation. The deli that tells us they have Heroes' is but one example of misuse.

I have sympathy. But until the Pooh-Bahs of punctuation change the rules, we're stuck with what is confusing. You don't pronounce an apostrophe, so therefore the placement of it, correct or otherwise, does nothing to how you say something. Trying to get people to get it right writing it is like pissing in the ocean.

If any team other than the New York Rangers were to have won the President's Cup, signifying finishing the regular season with the most points in the standings, I wouldn't have been assaulted with Presidents' Trophy.

But since we're in New York and all the New York nightly news shows show a backdrop of PRESIDENTS' TROPHY when telling us that the Rangers have secured this rather meaningless title. Only the Stanley Cup counts, and it's 30 years now for the Rangers since they last won it.

Matthew is right. Gramps has been Tweeting all the networks, the NYT and The Athletic and The Athletic reporter who wrote the story about the Rangers, Peter Baugh (@Peter_Baugh), a youthful looking writer who Gramps sarcastically asked, what J-school did he attend. 

Lynn Truss, Benjamin Dreyer, Mary Norris and William Strunk with E.B. White have all written guides on correct punctuation, none of which seem to have reached Mr. Baugh's desk and that of others in the media business.

It's the sheer number of people who are misusing the apostrophe with regard to President's Cup that has got me crazy. How can so many screw it up?

Go to Google on President's Cup and you see it both ways, correct and otherwise. The incorrect  use is the most frequently one found.

Once the playoffs start, winning the President's Trophy will no longer be New York Ranger news. The only Ranger news that any fan wants to read is that after 30 years they win the Stanley Cup. 

If the Vegas Golden Knights can win one after being in the league less than 10 years, the Rangers should be able to do it this year.

We'll see, won't we?

Bibliography:

https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-four-apostrophes-of-apocalypse.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2019/02/verbal-punctuation.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-infernal-apostrophe.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-grammar-lady.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-vote-is-in.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-what.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-disappearing-apostrophe.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2017/07/eats-shoots-and-leaves.html
https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2017/02/presidents-day.html

http://onofframp.blogspot.com

Untrapunctual

Live long enough, and you get to experience some things twice. First it was the famous Heidi game in 1968 that pre-empted a New York Jets-Oakland Raider game that turned into a late-scoring barnburner. And then it was last night when CBS couldn't shoe horn in the Masters golf tournament, the Masters Green Jacket ceremony for Scottie Scheffler, this year's winner, 60 Minutes, some cop show and local news in the waning hours of a Sunday evening. 

CBS was attempting to defy gravity and squeeze in way more than they had minutes left in the evening. They needed a 26 hour day, and no astrophysicist came to their aid.

Even professional golf at the highest level is played at a glacial pace. The Masters broadcast was set to end at 7:00 EDT. My guess is CBS thought that by then the winner would have finished playing, signed his card and stood around in Butler Cabin to have someone drape a green jacket over their shoulders that hardly looks good on the wearer, considering the colors a golfer wears when heading to the first tee on a Sunday. But, it's the Masters tradition.

I gave up watching grass grow when Scotty Scheffler had a four stroke lead with two holes to play. I was hungry and dinner was ready. I don't need to stick around and hear Jim Nantz intone that we've just witnessed a Biblical event. It's golf Jim.  You're lucky any of us watch it at all.

Of course 60 Minutes, the network's marquee news show, has to be shown in its entirety. The clock has now pushed past 7:00 and 60 Minutes, takes, well 60 minutes, otherwise also known as an hour.

I did tune in to enough of 60 Minutes to catch the piece on the Tazmanian Tiger. Back from extinction, or not? I love Australian accents.

What followed 60 Minutes I have no idea. I timed myself to tune in at 9:00 and catch some Billy. It's not like I've never heard the guy before. Been to a MSG concert; have probably every recording of his, starting  with vinyl.

I'm 75 and don't stay up too late. I like to read before going to sleep. So what the hell was the scene of someone driving car to some waterfront location, and looking like every part of every cop show there is? I don't even know the show's name.

The INFO button gives me the chyron that Billy's show starts at 9:00. Clearly not. Rain delay? Some lame announcement that Billy is coming up next. Yeah, when, when this cop crap is over?

There's no need for me to stick around for a televised concert that's already been taped and one I've already seen. Live performances can add some nuances to the music, but in general, they could be lip synching too.

Thee aren't that many of us alive today who can compare the pre-empting of the Billy Joel concert to the pre-empting that NBC pulled when broadcasting a New York Jets-Oakland Raiders game in 1968. I can. I was 19 at he time and was leaving the house with my father with the conviction that the Jets had the game solidly won.

Only later when the final score was announced did we learn that no one saw the full game because NBC pre-empted the game for a telecast of a show about the story of Heidi, the orphaned 5-year-old Swiss girl who grows up with her grandfather. That's where the "Heidi" game comes from.

The firestorm from that one became legend. Even in 1968 the TV audience for an A.F.L football game would have vastly exceeded the Billy Joel faithful who were ticked off at the telecast cutting Billy off while singing Piano Man, his signature sone.

No one didn't know how their bets were going to come out watching football, as even a 1968 audience had a vested interest in the game,

Will heads roll at CBS? Will some poor technician take the fall for following the manual? Not likely if they're in the union. Was someone unavailable to make a command decision because they were in Nantucket waiting for their flight back to New York from their weekend home? My bet is no one at CBS was past 10 years-of-age in 1968.

The Heidi game got an unexpected sterling revisit in an obituary—of all places—when the director for the Heidi telecast, Delbert Mann, passed away in 2007. His obituary in the NYT was written by the peerless Margalit Fox who laid out the circumstances on the widespread kerfuffle over Mr. Mann's production being started at the "ultrapunctual" time of 7:00.

It's not likely the pre-empting of Billy's concert on CBS will ever crawl into someone's obituary, unless of course the schmuck who gave the order to pull the plug and head to the affiliates' 11:00 news is publicly identified and given lifetime industry pariah status.

Executives can be noted in their obituaries for accomplishments that we understand. Take Frank A. Olson who has just passed away at 91, on the same day as O.J. Simpson. They were otherwise linked in that Mr. Olson, as an executive at Hertz, put O.J. in the driver's seat in those Hertz commercials that had O.J. doing broken field running through airports. Go O.J. Go.

Decades ago on the show Laugh In, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin awarded a Fickle Finger of Fate to that week's numbskull. If the person responsible for pulling the lug were publicly known then they'd get the FFF award, or better named The Heidi trophy.

http://www.onofframp,blogspot,com

Dishwashers

Leave it to the eclectic topics of the A-Hed pieces in the Wall Street Journal to land on a story of how people load their dishwashers and the friction that differing ways of loading one infect domestic relationships.

The partner frustration over who left the cap off the toothpaste tube has been eliminated by the manufactures now attaching the cap to the tube. Loading a dishwasher has replaced the verbal tussles.

A-Hed pieces are the gems of the WSJ. Rupert Murdoch once considered eliminating them. Was he nuts? Consider that recently they have touched on hotel rooms and Murphy beds; Matzos; an April Fool prankster at Citibank in the executive suite.

I have to say my wife and I really do not disagree on how to load the dishwasher and I have to say the dishwasher is never a cause of disagreements. Fox News causes more friction than the best way to keep the plates and spoons clean.

We would have never made the cut to be interviewed by the reporter on how we might differ on loading the dishwasher.

Consider that the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom, and his wife Akshata Murty are asked who does the job of loading the dishwasher, and who does it best? A prime minister!

The reporter, Natasha Khan, takes us on a trip of all the highly educated people and their equally highly educated partners who share their dishwasher loading stories and preferences.

Ms. Khan lifts an interview the Sunaks gave fashion magazine Grazia in which basically Rishi tells the world his wife makes an effort, but he makes the effort better. Read: he rearranges things without rancor. They do look happy.

There is a Facebook group (of course there is) Extreme Dishwasher Loading which saw a jump in its membership to top 31,000 members after the couple's remarks.

YouGov Omnibus claims that 65% of Americans believe there is a right and wrong way to load a dishwasher, rather than "just my way and your way" which seems less combative.

Another poll  claims there are 18 arguments a month! amongst Americana households over dishwasher loading. This seems incredible. Where do these numbers come from? Are reports filed? How many lead to domestic violence and 911 calls was not disclosed. 

After the prime minister and wife have weighed in, we meet Nina and Stephen Edwards who describe approaches that diverge in the woods. Stephen is a is a professor of computer science at Columbia and admits to making a "mental map" of how things should go in the dishwasher  Don't we all? Nina, an illustrator and adjunct professor at Pratt institute, admits to "just making things fit." Way to go Nina.

It's obvious from the photo of the couple touching hands atop the appliance battlefield without knives in their hands, that whatever divergent stacking methods they advocate they still love each other. How many couples can say that?

Does anyone really take the task of dishwasher loading seriously? There is nothing that cannot be elevated to seriousness.

There is a Proctor and Gamble "dish-science center" on the outskirts of the corporation's headquarters in Cincinnati that is staffed by scientists! who recreate kitchen dishwasher scenarios of scorched food and dirty plates to answer the question that many have on their minds, "to pre-rinse or not."

One of the scientists, Martin Eberhard, at the facility (you wonder how heavily guarded the place might me) tells Ms. Khan that he never pre-rinses because dishes that are too clean fool the sensors which are trained to detect food remnants and make the dishwasher work less efficiently.

Is he nuts?. What dishwasher does he have? One with sensors? I don't remember that being a feature on our dishwasher. I see nothing that looks like an electric eye.

For ourselves, my wife and I easily co-exist. Sometimes she rearranges how I've stacked it, but it's usually an improvement. We both agree where the dinner plates, smaller plates, bowls and glasses go. She places the silverware in the basket; I place it in the top rack. 

We do differ on how close the plates are to each other. I go with the spaces designed by the manufacturer, therefore getting more plates lined up. She leaves an extra gap if she can. She tells me with no extra gap the dishes don't come out as clean. I've never tested this. I don't believe her, but don't argue either. There's just her way, and my way, not the highway.

As for pre-rinsing, that is done if necessary, but I clean my plate so well there is no need to pre-rinse. And when I clear the table, as I always do ever since I once wore an apron selling hot dogs at Coney Island in the summer after graduating high school for a money hungry Greek, I've always considered myself to be a Greek busboy. I scrape the plates over the garbage can quite well. For some reason I like to do this.

Thus, plates do not enter our dishwasher with food stuck to them. My wife is always proud of the dishwasher repairman who once had to come over and made her day when he said she was very clean about her dishwasher. The drain wasn't clogged with foodstuffs. Apparently, in his experience, he encounters those who he describes as using their dishwasher as a garbage disposal.

One couple, the Freemans, he a fitness trainer and she a fitness influencer, made a clip that was viewed by 21 million people on their dishwashing techniques. They provided a soundtrack to their loading. He, waltz music to show off perfectly spaced plates, and she, AC/DC to accompany her zero technique that she describers as "a racoon on meth."  

People will do anything for attention these days. And people will watch.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Now You See It, Now You Don't

We've gotten very good at metrological and astrological predictions.

Weather predictions are highly accurate these days. They weren't always that way when we were watching Uncle Weatherby and Carol Reed telling us to "have a happy" on local TV channels.

Weather is so big now there is a cable channel dedicated to bringing us the weather 24/7. It's a brave new world.

Radar, Doppler Radar, computer models all aid the weather  people in telling us what we can expect today, and probably in the next 5 days. Storm brewing off the coast? Will it hit us or not? Stay tuned.

We're way past the weather surprise that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900 when an unpredicted hurricane came ashore and killed 8,000 people. That doesn't happen today.

Weather is sexy these days. It's got its own wording. Temperature is shortened to "temps." Rain, a.k.a. precipitation, is shortened to "precip" measured in tenths of an inch! TV weather personalities create ratings. AccuWeather Alerts galore.

My wife will find a way to time her viewing that catches all three network weather reports after 6 o'clock. Our kitchen TV can look like TV sets in P.C. Richard's. almost simultaneously showing her the weather. She's a master at what Lee, Jeff and Nick have to say, all before dinner.

The latest, and most long lasting celestial prediction of course has been that of the total solar eclipse that swept across North America yesterday, April 8.

The photo at the top shows what a total eclipse of the sun looks like. There were areas of the country that did see something that resembled that photo. Not so in the New York Metropolitan area. It was predicted that we'd get a 90% totality. False advertising. I've seen a darker sky with thunderstorms rolling in. Yesterday looked like the glow from a 40 watt lightbulb. For us, it was the failure of the Comet Kahoutek in 1973 to be seen. That resembled the letdown of another New York Jets season.

Never mind. TV news was not to be outdone. They sent their top personalities to parts of the country that were in line to see a real total eclipse. Throngs of people who might otherwise be in school or work were looking up through their special glasses. New York upstate schools were closed.

I didn't bother to get special glasses, and I didn't even go outdoors. Decades ago as a kid I remember taking a piece of window glass and getting it sooty from candle smoke and trying to see a total eclipse from the backyard in Flushing, NY. Or maybe it was a partial eclipse. I don't remember.

I read in yesterday's NYT that back then ophthalmologists said looking through smoked glass was not good.  Yeah, now you tell me. I suffered no ill effect from my viewing because there was nothing to see. It must have been cloudy, because I was certainly not impressed.

In 2017 I was at Saratoga racetrack when an afternoon solar eclipse was going to go through the area. They extended the interval between races when the eclipse was due to come through. They weren't sure how the horses would react. It was hardly spectacular.

The morning news show Good Day New York seconded the opinion that the eclipse here was a bust. Their poll said that 4 out of 5 people said the eclipse hardly lived up to the hype. There is nothing that cannot be overhyped. Think of how well the Mets were predicted to be last year with Justin Verlander and Jacob deGrom as starting pitchers. Yeah, how did that work out? 

Knowing when an eclipse will come is very helpful, especially if you've been transported back in time like the character Hank Morgan (The Boss)  in Mark Twain's tale of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

I'm certainly not surprised that no one remembers this tale.  It was made into 1931 and 1949 movies starring the likes of Will Rogers and Bing Crosby. Hank's memory of an upcoming eclipse in 528 A.D. saved him from being cremated alive at the stake. He out-Merlined Merlin. Thus, it is always good to know what the future holds. You never know how it might save your life.

What to do with those now pretty much worthless glasses? Throw them away like what you did with those 2024 New Year's Eve glasses? You can donate them through Astronomers without Borders. Most people got them for free at libraries or Moynihan Station, but surely there were those who paid for them. It seems there is nothing that can't be reused. And maybe tax deductible.

With all the news about the heavens and Space X rockets there was a news story a few days ago that President Biden wants NASA to devote resources to determine what time it is on the moon. It is not clear why. Also not clear is who is going to change the moon's clock when we go back and forth with Daylight and Standard time. Hmmm. 

And what was the weather prediction for today in the Metropolitan area? Sunny, mild, 60° Spot on.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

All Shook Up

No, Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis didn't reappear from the grave.

The last time I was in a building that shook I was in Tower One of the World Trade Center on the 29th floor, thankfully not higher up. My day ended with no injuries to anyone I knew, but of course not to thousands of others. It's history what happened on September 11, 2001.

I remember once in early April 1982 it snowed in New York City. Our second daughter had just been born, and I distinctly remember my wife holding her up at the storm door to watch me shovel the snow that wasn't going to be around for too long. I waved.

I don't remember the exact date, and I wonder if I'll remember the exact date when the earthquake is mentioned in subsequent years. I remember the months and years of major blackouts in NYC, but not the dates. (There were three.) I won't be buying an "I Survived" T-shirt just to remember the date of an earthquake.

My first earthquake memory was the one in Vermont. It  was early in the morning on October 7, 1983 and woke us up. I heard a very loud bang at the cottage back door. I thought a deer had kicked it, and went back to sleep. Nothing rattled, and nothing fell off any shelves. We never even looked out the window at the lake

It wasn't until listening to the very local radio station that was housed in a tiny brown building up the road on Route 30 (Seth Warner Memorial highway, commemorating a very successful rear guard action during the Revolutionary War by Seth Warner) that we heard we had experienced an earthquake. Holy cow. Really?

A very cooperative soul at the Lake St. Catherine Association, Jerremy Jones, kindly answered my inquiry about the radio station.. He identified it as WVNR, a station that played classic country music. It was only a 1,000 watt AM station at 1340 on the dial, owned by Loud Media, that served the towns surrounding Lake St. Catherine, principally Poultney.

I remember that morning's radio personality making a joke of the earthquake with imagined dialogue between Sally Field and Burt Reynolds, who at the time were a very hot item, with Burt asking Sally if she felt the earth move.

I thought is was hilarious. I imagined a young DJ hoping to make it to a stand up comedy club in a major city, maybe New York, or getting a job at a bigger wattage radio station. I have no idea if there were many listeners who got the illusion between an earthquake and Burt really making Sally happy in the morning with earth moving sex. 

Shortly after when the newest earthquake shook through New York and the tristate area I was on the phone with someone from Manhattan. I learned that they too felt the movement.

I could tell I was talking to a young female. Surely she and I were raised watching different movies. I repeated the Vermont experience and the DJ's joke. No reaction. Zip. Nada. My guess is she knew nothing of Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, and didn't associate great sex with feeling like the earth moved. Oh well, forty years later the same story doesn't hold up well.

As for the experience here at my Long Island home my computer monitor shook for a good 10-15 seconds. I felt the house shake and heard the window behind me rattle. I was nervous. I opened the front door to see if anyone was in the street wondering what happened. I saw our cat Socks racing past me outdoors. 

I went upstairs to ask my wife if we just had an earthquake. She of course felt it too. Nothing yet on the TV but morning talk shows and yapping. After a few minutes my wife said that the news online was confirming an earthquake. The TV news soon caught up.

No damage, other than to the mind that something happened that could have been much worse. Someone posted a photo of an upended backyard chair on Long Island as evidence of the earthquake's power—which wasn't much compared to ones we've heard about in other countries that topple buildings and twist roadways, like the recent one in Taiwan.

When the Trade Center was smacked by a hijacked 767 the building shook, and swayed a bit, but then stopped swaying quickly. I was pushed forward on my office chair and drawers opened up. A sky full of debris started falling. We were on the southern side. The place hit the northern side. I had a friend who was a conference room on the north side who heard the whine of something approaching. Then smack!

No one really knew what had happened. I said to my manager it was either a bomb, a construction accident, or an earthquake. And I didn't think it was an earthquake. Only when we finally emerged from the building did we know what happened.

The Richter scale reading of Friday's earthquake was 4.8, experienced by an estimated 44 million people. That's a lot of people with a common experience. Way more than Woodstock. Look it up if you have to.

The Vermont quake in 1983 was 5,2, and in the NYT story a geophysicist, Dr. Jack Oliver from Cornell University said the measured strength at 5.2 was, "a very substantial one for an Eastern earthquake."

What I know about Richter readings is that there are expressed exponentially. Thus, 5.2 is not just .4 greater than 4.8. So imagine when the number hits 7.0. That's when the buildings start to fall.

Tomorrow's eclipse will of course eclipse that number of people who share a common event. If we all survive.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

You're a Millionaire? Yeah, So

I have a first cousin who is a millionaire, probably the first in the family of middle-class descendants of Greek, Polish and German heritage. He is a retired career naval officer, a Commander, who likely invested in real estate in San Diego and Hawaii, two places he was stationed at during his career. I never see him, but he seems quite ordinary to me since I've known him when he was a kid.

A millionaire is no big deal. There are probably people living on my suburban block of Levitt homes who could be millionaires. It's not me though.

Along with my morning delivery of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal I've added the New York Post. I've done this since the NYT has outsourced their sports department to some outfit called The Athletic, which I think the NYT owns. I only wish I had realized sooner how much I would enjoy the New York Post.

It's the one paper my wife will read. She's a tabloid newspaper woman, likes flipping those pages filled with crime, kidnappings and politicians who are jerks. In fact, "jerk" is one of her favorite four-letter words. I won't go into the others. Guess.

The New York Post headlines are legendary. They should make a coffee table book of them. I'd buy it. Their most famous still might be, HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR. If there were a Hall of Fame for headlines, that should be the first one inducted.

The paper turns events of the day into entertaining headlines. Take the M.T.A.'s recent stupid utterance that they wanted to charge the Road Runners Club $750,000 for lost revenue for money lost on the Verrazzano Bridge due to the NYC Marathon's start there gobbling up the upper and lower levels, for not even the whole day! And the Road Runners have had that start there for decades. No money asked. Until now. Why? To buy more mosaic tiles?

If the M.T.A. loses $750,000 in tolls for a few hours on a November Sunday morning due to people using the bridge for the start of a marathon that attracts 50,000 people from all over the world, they are obviously making too much money in tolls. Are they shitting us?

The current toll for the crossing, if you use E-Z Pass, is  $6.55. Of course that's one way. It's $8.36 for non-EZ Pass drivers

Yesterday the Post treated that piece of news in their inimitable fashion: THE SH!T HITS THE SPAN. You gotta live that paper.

The news shows were full of WTF! Last night I said the governor has to put a stop to that idea. And Governor Hochul did just that, as recorded in a New York Post headline on Friday: VERAZZA-NO! Hochul nixes MTA's $750K NYC Marathon bridge fee. I've lately been saying you may not like someone, but you're eventually going to like something they did.

So who does a photo of the world's most famous entertainer at the top of this posting have to do with the New Yok Post headlines?

Well, it  wasn't full headline across the front page, but on Wednesday the Post showed a photo of Taylor Swift on the left side sharing space with another story, and declared: That was $wift, How Taylor became a billionaire.

The story inside on Page 3 describes the sources that have contributed to her wealth: $400M music catalog; $160M streaming; $80M record sales; $370M touring; $150M real estate; unspecified amount from endorsement deals. One wonders what Bruce Springsteen is worth. Or, are his financial people less savvy than Taylor's?

For anyone who might remember, there is a New Yorker cartoon years ago that shows a fellow in an office standing behind a desk, answering a phone and saying..."A billion is a thousand millions? Why wasn't I told that?"

Of course, millions has long been supplanted by billions. But decades ago millions had real meaning in terms of quantifying an enormous sum. When Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois was talking about proposed federal government spending on developing a supersonic jet in the '60s, the good senator from Illinois intoned, as only he could, "A million here and a million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

And if a billion is a thousand millions, what is a thousand billions? Why a trillion. How high do the numbers go?

Well, I looked it up. Trillion of course has crept into the consciousness since the federal budget and NYC budget have topped that number. Writing exponentially, a million is 10 to the sixth (6), meaning there are 6 zeroes after the one.

So, if a billion is a thousand millions, it is 10 to the ninth (9), meaning 9 zeroes after the one. Logically, a trillion is a thousand billions (who knew?) and would be scientifically written 10 to the 12th power.

Are there more? You betcha.

Quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, all exponentially written by increasing the exponent for a trillion by 3; 10 to the 15th, etc. Had enough? What the hell. How high do the numbers go? Well, infinity, but here is the progressive definition of size, culminating in a gazillion.

A little hard to read, but the link will give you an idea that the naming of large numbers has not been ignored.

You've head people say gazillion? But it's not listed in the table. That's because—wait for it— it is defined by some nerd as 10 to the 28,810 power. Why is that? Because 28,810 is the circumference of earth.

How many zeros is in a gazillion?

A guy named greg actually provides a definition for a gazillion. He claims that "gaz" is actually latin for earthly edge. Assuming this to mean the earths circumference in greek miles, which he claims to be 28,810, he defines a gazillion as 1 followed by 28,810 sets of zeroes.

I kid you not. Are you ready for Jeopardy now? Take the online test now.

http://www.onoframp.blogpsot.com

Joseph Lieberman + 24

Can it really be 24 years since Joseph Lieberman was Al Gore's vice presidential running mate in the 2000 election that elevated the word chad beyond the name of one half of the British singing duo of Chad and Jeremy and the first name of a soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred racing trainer, Chad Brown?

The turmoil of the 2000 seems so long ago that maybe it didn't happen. Trump's loss in 2020 and that turmoil overshadows it. There are people in their 30s who do not remember the machinations of the 2000 election because they were too young to know what was going on.

My wife and I were in Toronto, Canada. We voted by absentee ballot. We dovetailed the Toronto visit with seeing our younger daughter at Geneseo college in Geneseo, New York. She had just started her freshman year. Then we went on to Toronto.

News of the contested election of course reached us in Toronto. Hearing about all the fuss and crazy claims of Nazis voting in Florida, the state whose results were challenged, I was glad not to be in the office hearing everyone's cock-eyed conspiracy theories. It's 2024, and they've only been replaced by the 2020 election conspiracy theories.

I liked what the journalist Jerry Nachman—who has since passed away—who said that all the media from the Northeast was descending on Florida because they had relatives in the state and were eager to see them on the employers' dime.

And who knew Chicago's former mayor, Richard Daly, had a 50-year-old son who was leading the charge in Florida for a recount. The 2000 presidential election might be in the rear view mirror, but in today's WSJ there is a story that a poorly designed Florida paper ballot cost Gore the election.

Perhaps. Whoever thought that a version of how we played battleships as kids by drawing figurative ship on graph paper, turning the paper over, and challenging our friends to "sink" the ships by guessing where they might be on the reverse side by stabbing at the paper with a pencil. Voting then in Florida was an adult game of battleships. And for the want of a state the election was lost. But it wasn't Florida that cost him the election.

If Al Gore had managed to take his home state of Tennessee and its 14 electoral votes, Florida would have been a sideshow, and we wouldn't have been treated to someone trying to determine intended votes by staring at poorly punched paper. That photo is as famous as the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of WW II.

Frankly, I never understood why they needed to try and discern the intention of a vote that was poorly cast leaving a "hanging chad." Why consider it a valid vote? DQ it. But no, Joe Lieberman was too close to getting to the White House for that to happen.

The Democrats wanted a continuation of the Clinton presidency badly. But most vice presidents don't go on to win the presidency when they run on top of their own ticket. I distinctly remembering when Al and Joe and their wives went together to see the then current movie Men of Honor, the biopic starring Cuba Gooding about the disabled Navy diver Carl Beshears who went on to the top rank of Master Diver. The newspapers couldn't get enough of dovetailing the appearance of the four with the title of the movie.

The NYT obit by Robert McFadden empties out his advance vault by one. Someday it will be empty, but the octogenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians keep passing away, and Mr. McFadden is ready to see the off.

The best pun I ever heard about a "hanging chad." is one made by a British racing broadcaster, Nick Luck. Chad Brown is a highly successful, soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred horse trainer, whose charges win top flight races, generally on the turf, here and abroad. Nick Luck is a racing broadcaster from England who comments on many of the foreign race telecasts.

After one afternoon of racing in 2018 with Chad Brown having a remarkable day of saddling the 1-2-3 place finishers in the Beverly D stakes race from Arlington Park in Illinois (now gone) for three different owners, Nick Luck just had to close the telecast with..."on a day that Chad left them all hanging..."

Reading McFadden's obit about Joe you get the sense a good man missed being president. Enough obscurity is guaranteed when you're the actual vice president, but when you lose on as the vice presidential candidate on a ticket, the dustbin of political history awaits you.

Mr McFadden write how Joe worked both sides of the aisle, and was one of the first to take President Clinton to the woodshed in a speech after Bill's affair with Monica Lewinsky spilled out into the open. It was a harsh rebuke for Clinton's behavior, and one that Bill later told Joe that every word in the speech was true. He deserved it.

So, where do political candidates and former four-term Senators from Connecticut go when they start to fade away? Alan Dershowitz tells us in a just published op-ed piece in the WSJ  that he and Joe were working on a piece about Democrats and Israeli support and the coming election.

Well, you go to work for a law firm and live in the Bronx. But not just any part of the Bronx, but in Riverdale, a bucolic corner of the Bronx the belies its 104... zip code. People in Riverdale will never tell you they live in the Bronx. They will always tell you they live in Riverdale. When the phone company was producing phone books they used to produce a separate one for Riverdale residents.

The year 2000. Y2K. I almost see 2000 as a dividing line in my life: B.C. and A.D. Can anyone remember what was the big issue on the presidential mind was just before 9/11? Stem cell research.

President George Bush addressed the nation for 11 minutes on TV on August 9 about stem cell research just before the events of 9/11 forever changed the world. You won't hear about stem cell research in the same way ever again.

2000 and after, when all that's happened seems so clear in my mind. Getting out of Tower One of the World Trade Center from the 27th floor; the execution of my two colleagues at work on September 16, 2001 by our vice president at Empire BlueCross BlueShield from our temporary quarters after the towers fell.

Good things. My daughters graduating college; marrying, having children. My leaving Empire after 36 years and getting the best job I ever had for 7 years at a consulting firm; retiring at 62.

Can the year 2000 + really be 24 years ago?

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com