The Canadian

If you haven't been paying close attention, then you don't know that there is a current 15-day Jeopardy champion, Mattea Roach, a 23-year-old woman from Toronto, Canada who is for the most part demolishing the other contestants and sailing away with another notch in her belt, whether she gets the Final Jeopardy clue or not.

Because of Covid lockdowns and international restrictions, there haven't been any Canadian contestants until just recently as restrictions have been loosened.

Mattea is proficient in all categories, and especially anything to do with geography, so much so that I'm imagining her parents placing a globe over her crib rather than a mobile, such is her command of rivers, countries and mountain ranges.

Her occupation is given as a tutor, in particular an LSAT tutor. She is not a lawyer, and frankly, I forget where her advanced education has so far propelled her. Like most Jeopardy champions who manage to string together several consecutive days of winning, there is often no doubt of the eventual outcome by the time Final Jeopardy rolls around. Unless she makes a stupid bet and flubs the last question, she is going to win. 

In fact, the other day her two opponents were in negative numbers by the time Final Jeopardy came around that Mattea was the only one standing for the final question. It was a walkover, and she got it right with a modest wager. Her opponents weren't even at the podiums because they had nothing left to wager.

She is almost conservative to a fault. No James Holzhauer swashbuckling wagers. She tops out at say $4,000, and when she does it she signals it with a limp-wristed wave of her hands. Like many young women her age she does sport some piercings, noticeably some hardware through her nose that is visible, but not overpowering. I do wonder how she blows her nose without hurting herself, but I image she is able to.

There is a small tattoo of something on her left forearm of something. But for the most part, she presents a clean-cut image with her rounded frame glasses that would put any parent's mind at ease if she were babysitting, or tutoring their child for the LSATs.

Her aggregate money won is not outstanding for the number of days she's been champion. Her wagers are conservative, and she starts her turns off by selecting the lower denominations first. Through 15 days of her winning streak she sports $352,781 won, certainly nothing to sneeze at, but not stratospheric given a 15-day streak.

Will she make it 16 days? Tonight's Final Jeopardy clue looks like a doozy. I know I don't know it. Under the category of African Surnames...Adetokunbo, "the crown has returned from overseas," is fitting for the Adetokunbo family who left Nigeria for this country in 1991. My attempt at an answer would be to guess England.

Is this the end of Mattea? Or, will she be so far ahead that it won't even matter if she doesn't know the answer? It will surely be better if she does.

I wish her well.

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April 21, 2022

April 21, 2022:  A day so good there are two of them.

Something seemed a little off when I checked out the easel desk calendar this morning for today's date.  Sure it's Wednesday, but how come it tells me it's the 21st, when tomorrow is the 21st? There is no April 20 on this calendar. In fact, there is no April 20 on any of the easel calendars I gave members of the family this Christmas as stocking stuffers. No matter what the pictorial theme of the calendar is, there are two April 21s.

Is it because someone wanted to obliterate Hitler's birthday, which is April 20, 1889; or wanted to obliterate the shootings at Columbine High school 23 years ago in Colorado, perpetrated because the kids were somehow honoring Hitler; or is it because 420 has something to do with pot, and someone at the calendar place was trying to make a point about something?

I've NEVER seen a calendar that got a date wrong, and I'm 73 and have been looking at calendars for a long time. An email to Calendars.com got me an obtuse response that they would replace my "defective" calendar, but it wouldn't match the pictorial theme for the one I bought.

I said "thanks, but no thanks." I see the calendar as a collector's item, somewhat like the Inverted Jenny stamp from 100 years ago.

The obvious printing error has got me thinking. What if you could designate one day a year that you would like to see repeated because it meant so much to you. Birthdays, anniversaries, championships,  divorces, could all be cause for a two-time, two-day celebration. Conversely, what if there was a day so black, or one you would rather not remember at all that you would like to see it eliminated, causing the dates on either of it to be duplicated.

This of course would be personal calendar customization (PCC), and there might he a market for it. Black hole day. Talk about stricken from the record.

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A Virtual Day at the Races

Making a winning bet is right up there with one of life's great joys. Making the first bet of the season a winning bet is even better. Signs of spring? The Wood Memorial at Aqueduct, now four weeks before the Kentucky Derby. It is Aqueduct's Belmont Day.

We used to make it our seasonal outing, but it's been tough to sell The Assembled on attending Aqueduct, despite it being a superior track to watch races from, over say Belmont. The parking lots seem under constant construction, with casino and track parking competing for spaces. It's been ugly.

The card for the Wood is always good, and packed with stake races. At the start of the America's Day at the Races telecast, Andy Serling, sitting with Acacia Courtney Clement reminisced that he first saw the Wood 46 years ago with his grandmother. My first Wood goes back a bit further, to 1969.

I was there in 1973 when Angle Light saved the betting public's bacon when he won the race and his entry mate, Secretariat finished third. It proved a bit of precursor to Secretariat's problems with mile and an eighth races—the only problem he had.

There once were giveaways on Wood day, the T-shirt and digital watch long falling into the garbage for poor fit, or falling apart. No matter, we generally came out for it. The only day Aqueduct is crowded these last few decades. Wood Memorial day is Aqueduct's rite of spring classic.

The tarps come off the turf courses, and turf racing returns to Queens on Wood Memorial Day.  I bet the winner of the Wood, Mo Donegal on the strength of his Uncle Mo breeding, Todd Pletcher training, and Joel Rosario riding. I didn't even download the past performances. Uncle Mo offspring are tearing up the tracks. He is proving to be a great sire, and I'm sure a good source of income for Mike Repole, who enjoys the game so much as an owner.

Rosario's ride was a beaut, angling out deep in the stretch to run down the front runner Early Voting. Mo Donegal certainly stamped himself to be a Derby horse. The Derby field should boast a good set of possible winners. As the daffodils and forsythia bloom, the Derby picture gets clearer and clearer.

The winner's circle for Mo Donegal was crowded. Donegal Racing must be one of those fractional ownership groups because it looked like the mid-week attendance at Belmont all trying to fit into the photo. A lot of people for a winner's circle; not many for a track attendance.

There were other notable performance on the day. Speaker's Corner running a respectable 1:211/5 in the Carter Handicap, carrying the high weight in the field with 124 pounds, a laughable high weight amount, but that's the way it is these days, winning for fun, at a deserved short price of 75¢ to $1.00.

And to close out the 11-race card, Wit seems to have solved his gate issues and got out there in good order and won the 7 furlong Bayshore by a nose, just nipping Highly Respected at the wire, giving the always exuberant owner Mike Repole another good day.

Perhaps fittingly, there was a brief rain shower that helped create a rainbow that arced over the track. Was it Finian's Rainbow with a pot of gold at the other end? Ask the Donegal people. They would tell you yes, with a leprechaun counting the gold.

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No Standing

A sports section with no standings has no standing. Who's in first? But, we get two full pages today on someone who plays ping pong really well. Why don't they just drop the New York from the masthead and call themselves a magazine suitable for a waiting room? They are pathetic.

I'm not deluding myself in thinking if I, or others protest so much they will see the errors of their ways and restore actual sport scores to the editions. After all, sports has winners and losers everyday, so why not keep track?

No, The New York Times is not a New York paper. They did away with their New York City coverage from the largest city in the nation. Imagine that. That takes cojones. Or a brain dead management.

When Joe Drape was at a book signing appearance at a Saratoga book store in 2016! he declared that he was going to be the last racing reporter for the paper he wasn't kidding. Today's little email reminder of what to watch on TV tells us about The Grand National from Aintree (England) on TVG at 12:15, but not about the Wood Memorial, a major prep from for the Kentucky Derby held four weeks from today. The Wood Memorial from Aqueduct, a racetrack located within the city limits in an outer borough in Queens, is televised on FS1 this afternoon, but no one at the Times knows this except Joe, and he's been told to stand down. Less to do I guess.

When is the next Yankee game going to be played, who are the probable starting pitchers? The Mets? The Rangers, Devils, Islanders, and even the Nets and Knicks do not exist in The New York Times's reordered world. But a ping pong player does, a story more suitable for a New York section, if there was such a thing. In an era of massive sports betting opportunities, the paper seems to think scores and  upcoming games don't matter. How delusional can you be?

We have two full pages today on Tiger Woods making the cut at the Masters, certainly a notable achievement, but he is 19th, nine strokes back from a golfer who has a five stroke lead at eight under par, Scottie Scheffler. There is a small picture of Scottie with a caption. Go Scottie.

My bile duct is empty, and I doubt I'll be making any more comments about a newspaper that doesn't seem to know what its readers want. The earth in a cemetery, probably in Queens, where a former sports editor James Roach is buried, has probably moved a bit this week.

I don't know why Bill McDonald, the obituary page editor of The Paper of Record, hasn't already included a piece on the death of sports coverage in the paper. He should get Randy Archibold, the current sports editor of the magazine sports section to write the piece. 

Jimmy Breslin was right when he declared they write long sentences to prove they went to college. I wonder if I can get home delivery of USA Today.

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The New York Times Sports Section

Getting older is not a problem. The problem is noticing what is no longer around.

Getting older is a function of continuous breathing, made possible by somewhat healthy habits and a great cardiologist who could be counted on being at work at 3:00 A.M. one Saturday morning in 2020.

Sustained life means witnessing the same thing over and over again, e.g. war. Make your own list as to what to add that. Those who say we've "got to make sure this doesn't happen again" are deluding themselves. It probably already has. If it hasn't, it will. Just wait.

This might seem like a lot of philosophizing for writing about the topic that the NYT Sports Section has eliminated agate scores from their editions. No Standings. No short range notice of the upcoming schedule for teams. Less information, but LOTS of pictures.

It's almost as if the editors have adopted a belief that people can't read anymore. ENORMOUS photos fill the pages. Full page photos. It's not that we can't read, we're not allowed to. They can't write anymore.

I have to admit I missed that the agate scores and standings were not there as of yesterday. It wasn't until I saw someone's Tweet this morning mourning the passing that I realized, yep, that's what they did. The Times Sports Section is now a worthless POS. 

The paper eliminated TV listings some time ago, and now apparently will refrain from giving us the upcoming baseball standings. Can you imagine opening a sports page that doesn't contain where the Mets are? Where the Yankees are? Where the Rangers, the Islanders and Devils are? Where anyone is in the standings? I guess the editors feel we all do everything on our cell phones, so why list anything? All the news that's fit to ignore

It was more than a lifetime ago when the teenagers in Brooklyn opened their favorite sports section in 1958 and realized they weren't going to learn the West Coast Dodger score because of the time difference. The Dodger and Giant games finished too late Eastern time to make the morning edition. No box scores to dissect.

The cutback in content continues. The paper no longer sends beat reporters to local games. Nada. There must be some belief that everyone is watching things on their smart phones. I have a smart phone. I use it as a phone. But then again, I'm over 70.

The problem with getting older becomes apparent more and more every day.

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Fuzz

Mary Roach has written a book about all sorts of animals and plants and how they get in our way, and we in theirs. Her passport is well- stamped with trips to the Vatican, India, and even New Zealand. This science writer gets around.

Her book has a clever cover design showing what looks like a law enforcement patch with different animals and tress depicted inside the border. Prominently placed in the center is a bear who is going through a trash can. This fits the sub-title of the book: "When nature breaks the law." And often leaves a mess behind.

Each chapter sees Mary telling us about a different locale and particular animal, or plant problem. I'm sure no one suspected that their garden azaleas and rhododendrons (they're in the same family) are poisonous.

We probably don't know they're poisonous because Agatha Christie never chose to have someone bumped off with an azalea or rhododendron. Castor beans and ricin, which get their fair attention in Ms. Roach's book, are the source of organic death. Go green when you kill.

Certainly we see and experience animals as a nuisance and sometimes a danger. But what about that tall leafy thing in your yard that provides shade and leaves to rake in the fall when you're wearing a flannel shirt? Ms. Roach tells us in Chapter 7, "When the Wood Comes Down; Beware the Danger Tree"

"What a Douglas fir does it does very, very slowly, and that includes dying. Possibly the least attractive feature of a nine-hundred year life span is the century or two spent dying...Because if it falls, anyone it lands on will spend a very, very short time dying."  

I doubt a decaying tree will ever be used to provide a quick death in a death sentence, but trees are dangerous when they're wounded. We had a fairly large maple in the backyard when we moved into the house we're in now. Maples are nice. They have large leaves that turn nice colors in the fall. They put on a show, especially if there are a lot of them.

Maples are also very shallow rooted, and topple easily when the ground is very wet and there is a fair amount of wind. The large leaves act as a resistance to the wind, and down comes tree, boughs and all.

But before this main event occurs, a maple, or any tree, can decide to let branches loose and let gravity do the rest. No problem, so long as you or something you might like to keep, like a car, is not the way of the falling branch.

The maple we had on occasion would drop a good size branch here and there and put a mighty dent in the deck. This was a "Danger Tree" that we eventually had removed. We replaced it with a nice Zelkova in nearly the same spot. The yard is safe again. 

Bears, elephants, monkeys, cougars, gophers, snipes, rats, mice, deer, geese, all get their day in Mary's sun. Animals we know have a heightened sense of smell to help them to react to predators in their midst before the predator gets them. What I never knew is that we as humans can mimic their smell tracking techniques.

And we know dogs can track scents very well, be it that of another animal, or an escaped inmate. The fairly recent jail break from Dannemora prison in upstate New York in 2015 saw a massive manhunt through the woods using police and hounds. 

The escapees knew something about being tracked because they would spread pepper on the trail they had just walked on. Pepper sets off a fit of sneezing for the hounds, and they lose the scent. But not permanently. The dogs are trained to start sniffing in a "zigzag, sweeping wide left and right until they pick it up again."

Ms. Roach mimics this technique when a "young man passed by in a reek of Axe body spray. I let him turn the corner and disappear from view, then waited a few minutes. By zigzagging hound dog-style, I was able to track him to his destinations, a cheesesteak place on the next block."

Holy crap! I use Axe body spray, (Don't ask which one. I get a 12 pack every now and then from Amazon and pay no attention to the marketing name they've attached to the product.) but hopefully not in the proportions that Mary's young man did. He must have really sprayed himself down. My own application must be more modest because I've never seen a posse of neighborhood cats walking behind me.

Lesson learned: if you're an escaped inmate who's on the run, bring pepper and forget the deodorant. With luck, you might make it to freedom. 

Ms. Roach is a science writer, but not someone who uses heavy scientific jargon. There are sometimes lengthy footnotes which are quite informative. In a section on how to humanly eradicate (kill) rats and mice, there once was a device that lured them into a trap that saw a guillotine blade come sliding down. The New York Post would have written the headline "Headless rat found toppled over."  

The device is no longer being made, but a used one can be found on eBay with luck. Mary's suggestion is if you're selling your "small animal guillotine for God's sake clean the blade before you take the picture." There is great advice in this book.

One of my favorite sections is Ms. Roach's trip to the Vatican, that City State nestled within Rome that had a serious problem with gulls descending on the outdoor altar in St. Peter's Square and laying waste to a massive display of daffodils in 2017 on the eve of Easter Mass. Lasers are brought in for the next day's display to dissuade the gulls from dive-bombing the flowers, flowers they don't even eat, but are instead interested in looking for worms in the soil. The lasers work, and the gulls are lulled to sleep.

Ms. Roach doesn't get an audience with the pope, but her credentials do qualify her for an audience with "the Vatican Director of Gardens and Garbage." She is quite interested in how the church sees the attempted eradication of one of God's creatures, the rat. After all, Pope Francis is influenced by St. Francis of Assisi, "the humble, nature-besotted Capuchin."

Chapter 13, "The Jesuit and the Rat; Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life." Ms. Roach's views and reactions to a rat in her midst are forever changed by the spiritual contemplation she comes away with.

I'm not however convinced she might not have a different viewpoint if one starts coming up to her on a NYC subway platform.

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The Outlaws

What is it about British humor that makes it so appealing? It's the writing and the deadpan delivery. Thank goodness the NYT, despite eliminating its TV section, is at least giving a nod to shows, basically produced by various cable networks that might have appeal. It is through these listings, or features that I learned of The Outlaws, a six-part miniseries produced by the BBC and now on Amazon that follows the lives of  seven people assigned to community service in Bristol, England who are supervised by a rotund Rosie O'Donnell/Rebel Wilson-like supervisor, Diane, who plays tough, but doesn't really succeed at it. She is as appealing as the rest of them.

For four hours a day, for 100 total hours of court ordered community service, these seven people are her charges who are tasked with cleaning up a decayed community center in hopes of restoring it to use for...you guessed it, the community. What the seven get up to when they're not pushing brooms and filling trash bags and wheelbarrows with detritus, is dramatic and as funny as when they're forced to spend time with each other for those four hours a day wearing their day-glow orange vests that identify them as inmates of a sort doing community service with "Community Payback" stenciled on the vests' back. (I'm guessing not Saturdays and Sundays. I'm not familiar with community service.)

Anyone who watches a fair a share of British produced shows knows they depict mixed marriages as often as not. And this one is no exception. Rani, is the young, hopefully Oxford-bound student, who has a shoplifting addiction for nice girly things that her mother discourages her from having since studying is of paramount importance. Rani says her library books have been out more often than her. The studying works, to the mother's delight, because Rani is going to enter Oxford on a full scholarship, as her mother likes to tell anyone who doesn't even ask. Asians aren't the only Tiger Moms.

Her mother, an Indian, is married to a Polish plumber who got out of Communist Poland and came to the U.K. Rani theorizes she shoplifts for things to find freedom. She claims her father, educationally stern like her mother, only thinks freedom is something he had in Communist Poland when he got hold of a can of Pepsi. Rani is fun-repressed, and sentenced to community service when the mall security cameras finally nail her stuffing her bag with glitzy swag she only hopes to someday wear. Off she goes for four hours a day.

As the credits unfold for The Outlaws the actors names are not very recognizable to an American audience, until Christopher Walken's name appears prominently at the end of the scroll. Walken is now 79, looking every bit of it, but still possessing that demeanor, strut, and voice of someone who is still trying to convince you of something. Can it really be 44 years since he was in The Deer Hunter?

Walken is Frank, who doesn't try to be British, because he's not. He's a Yank. He tells his fellow probation buddies that he came to England in 1971 to avoid the draft and Vietnam and stayed and raised a family.  His daughter tells her kids that Walken is a lying, thieving gambling, drinking mass of protoplasm that only thinks of himself, and most of all, cannot be trusted. She pounds this profile of grandad into her two children because he's coming to spend time with them while he's on his electronic monitoring ankle device while on parole. And parole of course involves community service at the wrecked community center. And a 7:00 P.M. curfew.

Walken's parole and probation comes after serving 18 months for check forgery, a crime he doesn't really think was a crime, but was more like a "misunderstanding." So be it. His daughter distrusts him so much that when she drives her son to school and leaves the car with Walken in the back seat she instructs her teenage son to stay by the car when she briefly leaves it so that Walken doesn't leap into the front and steal the vehicle. "He can't be trusted."

In one of those coincidences in life, as I was settled in to the first episode of The Outlaws, I noticed in Friday's WSJ Mansion section that they were featuring Christopher Walken in their weekly piece on where people grew up. I didn't know he was a New Yorker, coming from Astoria and was of German descent and grew up in his family bakery. His mother was starstruck, and basically took him to auditions for child parts in the '50s as TV needed child actors to fill the parts in the family sitcoms that were being produced. No end to what you learn.

John is the son of an Irish father who built until now a successful brake pad business. But the factory is floundering, and John is attempting to sell the family business, or at least get some foreign investment. He is conservative and struggles with the trend toward wokeness and designating pronouns. I don't think it's clear why John is doing community service, but here he is.

Myrna is a older black woman who is a leftover from the protesting '70a and '80's who is now marginalized by the newer Black Lives Matter people and their approach to protest. She also harbors a deep regret. She's there because she hitched a parked police Outreach trailer to her vehicle with two officers inside as she drove through Bristol shouting about police racism through a bull horn. She's been doing this sort of thing for decades. 

Christian is an affable young black boy, about Rani's age, who is left caring for his 15 year-old sister in a council flat after the drug addicted mother could no longer provide care. He is trying mightily to keep her away from the gangs, but he himself finds he's at their beck and call. There is a twist as to why he's there, as he provides the central plot surrounding a duffel bag filled with the Queen's currency. Life changingly filled to the top.

There is Lady Gabby, the Kardashian/Lindsay Lohan character famous for being famous, followed everywhere by the paparazzi, who is assigned community service for keying her girlfriend's car with the word "Skank" after their breakup. She has anger issues, and doesn't take rejection easily. She has 1.2 million social media followers, but no friends

Then there is Greg, played by Stephen Merchant who co-wrote the series with Elgin James and who co-produces the series and directs episodes. Stephen Merchant is a 6'7" comedic tower that is this generation's John Cleese. On talk shows, Stephen tells us that the idea for the series came to him because his parents were community service supervisors, and Stephen grew up observing the vast array of types of people that came through that system.

Stephen Merchant is well-known in the U.K. as a creator and star of The Office. His character Greg winds up with assigned hours because he backed his car into a police car in a parking lot as he attempted to evade questions about his presence there with a young woman in the passenger seat who was performing a sexual favor on him. Greg is a struggling, divorced lawyer who has trouble getting anything right at the office. He is their punching bag, facing termination.

The end of Episode Six reveals another star of he series, but that would be revealing a spoiler. Check the credits as they roll.

The great news about this delightful six-part series is that there will be another delightful six-part series as Season Two. It's already in the can. Stay tuned.

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