10. Chicken Boo – Stops having any entertainment value after you’ve seen it twice.

9. Hip Hippos – The one with Noah’s arc was good. Other than that…

8. Minerva Mink – Obnoxious lead. Has its moments.

7. Katie Kaboom – Clever concept, but repetitive. Maybe I’ll enjoy it more when Lain is a teenager.

6. Goodfeathers – Definitely has its moments, but episodes seem to bifurcate between good and kinda boring, with the latter outnumbering the former. Never terrible, though.

5. Rita and Runt – Reasonably steady and consistently good, though (almost) never really good.

4. Slappy Squirrel – The Woodstock segment, above, is utterly brilliant for fans of classic rock and Abbott & Costello. Segments tend towards the good or bad, with not much in between.

3. Pinky & The Brain – There is a reason this one took off.

2. Molly & Buttons – I am not sure I would have appreciated this one as much before Lain was born. But she was and I do. It’s also one of Lain’s favorites.

1. Warner Brothers (and their Sister Dot) – Yeah. Obviously.

Swedish women don’t like the phrase “flying solo” and are looking for a replacement.

Is feminism leaving behind the disabled?

Susan Krauss and Matt Huston look at how to break up, and how not to break up, while Maureen O’Connor writes about how to win your break up.

If you want to find the Hollywood sign in LA, there are people going to great lengths to make it as difficult as possible, and they’ve enlisted Google Maps.

Razib Khan looks at gender and transgenderism.

Sandeep Jauhar looks at the importance of medical cost transparency.

What are some foreign misconceptions about the United States?

Is science in Europe going in the wrong direction?

The story of Aimee Semple McPherson, a glamorous evangelical preacher in the 20’s who plum disappeared.

I’m still reading Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series. Jim Bennett doesn’t buy the CSA-UK-French alliance in World War I.

James Hamblin looks at nationwide pay and salaries of physicians. Our county in Arapaho stands out as being particularly low-wage.

Erik Sofge thinks we’ve been tricked into fearing AI.

“Dragon Age: Inquisition is easily the most personal, well-designed relationship system I’ve ever seen – and if we learn anything at all from the media we consume, then our awkward, virtual sexual encounters in games like this could maybe shape us all into better, more respectful people.”

Adam Mansbach, of “Go The F* To Sleep” fame, announces his college syllabus. Salon, which seems to be self-parody sometimes, actually does a decent job with real parody.

hotestheadsofstate.com has a list of the hottest US presidents. It cheats a little with some of the pictures, showing them when they were younger. Franklin Pierce grew into a clone of Mitt Romney, which is reasonably attractive, but nothing like the photo presented. I’m on board with the top five, more or less, but it kind of goes off the rails after that.

I’m rather shocked by George W Bush being in the top ten. I’m also a bit surprised to see Taft and Cleveland, our two most obese presidents, avoid the bottom of the list.

Relatedly, here is a list of presidents who were hot when they were younger. Teddy Roosevelt’s position on this list makes more sense. When I was audioreading How Few Remain, which features a young TR, I never got away from envisioning the older version. He actually looked like an actor I can’t quite place. Can you place him?

Tia Ghose writes about the relationship between the stress of strangers and empathy.

In what is potentially very important for Africa right now and may be important to us in the future, scientists are working on a steam machine that turns fecal material into drinkable water.

Who doesn’t want to read a story about beavers, parachutes, and Idaho?

You know what we need to extract and recycle rare earth metals? We need fish sperm, apparently.

Unrealistic beauty standards for babies?! The article is (I’m pretty sure) a joke, but my wife would applaud the development, as they can’t really use real newborns and it drives her crazy when they use older babies to represent newborns.

Men smoke more than women in almost all of the world. Exceptions: Sweden, Icesland, and Nauru.

If you have $1,000,000 to spend, there’s a mech robot for sale.

I have some old smartphones sitting around. If this pans out, I may be able to combine them into a computer.

Sheldon Richman argues that some libertarians spend too much time trying to feel superior and not enough time trying to actually win people over.

It seems to me that posting sample photos on a “fake boyfriend or girlfriend” site is kind of counterproductive.

Check out some artifacts of war.

Matthew Yglesias makes the case that small employers pay less.

Did you know that if you are perceived to be a smoker, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer?

So it snowed a little bit today, but mostly it was cold and rainy. When I went to the store, I had to pull over because rain was falling on the windshield and immediately sticking, to the point that after a couple of miles, I couldn’t see anymore. I ended up turning on defrost to the maximum. By the time we got the store, Lain and I were both sweating and she was crying from the heat. But I could see!

That’s not actually the story that this post is about. The story is…

So Clancy is spending the night at a neighbor’s house. About one tenth of a mile from here. Worry not for the Truman-Himmelreich marriage. She’s there because she can’t get here. She drove up our street, which has an incline, and the car decided that it could go up no further and decided to go back down again.

This is the incline:

She can walk a bit, but for the most part is still on crutches. We decided that she should not tread up an incline that the car could not. So she’s down there.

After putting Lain to sleep, I needed to let the dog out. While the dog was out, I decided I would throw some salt on the driveway. After taking care of the area immediately in front of the house, I decided to see if I could make any progress on this part:

Given the level of ice, you might have some sort of idea what happened next. Sure enough, I lost my balance. No, wait, losing my balance isn’t quite right. What happened was that I started shifting. Surfing, as it were. Except without a board. And on ice and concrete instead of on water. Realizing what was happening, and that there was no stopping it, I decided that the best course of action was a controlled fall, and then laying flat on my back in case I got more traction and to make sure I wouldn’t lose my balance.

Above you see three arrows. The red arrow is was I was when I started. The blue arrow was where I ended up. The green arrow is where the incline was such that Clancy’s car couldn’t make it. In between the blue arrow and the green arrow is apparently a place sufficiently level and/or ice-free (I don’t remember, my mind being distracted by other things) that I didn’t slide all the way to the street below.

Here’s another view, a picture actually taken not far from where I ended up in fact:

When my hands heal, I’ll probably think it’s funny. Under different circumstances, it might have actually been fun. When I was going down, it made me think of those waterslides that you lay on your back and slide down with a gush of water. Except, once again, ice instead of water. And a driveway instead of a tube.

Kyle Smith says that Scandanavia isn’t all that as they have high depression rates, but Scott Alexander says that depression is not a proxy for social dysfunction.

Sorry I missed this during the holiday, but apparently some single Japanese men were busy spending their Valentine’s week protesting Valentine’s Day.

I would love to take the advice of Joseph McCabe, and forego Disneyland in favor of a Hayao Miyzaki theme park.

Some of the proposed changes to the Japanese constitution seem disturbing. It would be helpful if they had more than one major political party.

Android watches have not taken off as Google might have hoped. I’m pondering getting a Pebble.

You might think of Batman as a superhero, but tell that to the ghost of Stephen Merrill, who was killed by an uppercut from this alleged hero. (It’s actually an article about obituaries requiring a cause of death, and so Merrill’s became that uppercut.)

As we continue to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, photographer Stefan Koppelkamm presents the contrast between East German and eastern Germany.

Professor Tom Murphy (UCSD) argues that the oil boom has bought us a couple of decades to move away from oil, but there’s still reason to worry.

Daniel Gross looks at American Oil Production, and why it isn’t (yet) cratering like it should. Can it survive $10/oil?

The New York Times looks at prosthetic hands and Deep Stuff looks at nursing care robots.

It’s outrageous when Big Money boasts of its ability to buy influence. On wait, they’re talking about immigration! Nevermind, then.

Tennessee’s high school athletics authority has suspended two teams for an unusual reason: They played in competition to lose.

The TSSAA removed Riverdale and Smyrna from the high school girls basketball postseason on Monday following a report from a high school referee in charge of their District 7-AAA consolation game held Saturday where he said that both schools “played to lose the game.”

Both Rutherford County schools were placed on restrictive probation by the high school association for the rest of the school year and probation for the 2015-16 school year.

Both schools were fined a total of $1,500 apiece.

Over There, Sam Wilkinson objects:

Both coaches had instructed their players to do what they did because both coaches realized that winning that night’s game put themselves in a worse position in further tournament play. Because of an odd quirk in the Tennessee seeding mechanism, either team winning the game would have been punished by being put in a bracket that included Blackman High School, a regional powerhouse, a team ranked first in Tennessee basketball and fourth nationally. Blackman had beaten Smyrna by 23 points in January, and, a few days later, beat Riverdale by 8.

Both coaches rightfully recognized that being on Blackman’s side of the bracket would almost certainly involve getting beaten, and presumably thought that being on its opposite side might mean having a better chance to advance further in the tournament. There was no way to know this for certain of course but there is rarely a way to know anything for certain, so both coaches preceded make the strategic decision to encourage their players to understand that losing might be more beneficial than losing.

When I played football in middle school, we were playing a team, ahead 8-0. At the middle school level, place-kicking is non-existent. Even punting will only move you about 20 yards or so. That we were on their side of the field was a really, really big deal. We were on our own five yardline or so. Turning the ball over meant that they would get the ball right in scoring range. In order to avoid that, we gave the ball to our fastest running back and he was told to evade the defense for as long as he could in the endzone. It was essentially a self-inflicted safety. But it meant that we would be able to kick the ball off from the 20 instead of from the 5, and kicking from a tee meant that the kick would go further than a punt, with less possibility or error. It was a genius move, and we won 6-2.

The coach gave us a lecture after the game, though, about how you should always try your best, but “best” can mean different things under different circumstances. I knew exactly what he had done, and I thought it was awesome that he won us the game.

Despite that bit of strategery, though, I come down against the coaches in the TSSAA case. It’s one thing to sacrifice a play (or three) for strategic advantage in a game, but another thing entirely to throw a game for playoff positioning. I just can’t get on board with that, and would be embarrassed and angry if I went to watch my daughter (or future son) intentionally lose in order to avoid a tougher game next.

There is some flexibility here. Such a game, where you’re not worried about losing, is a great time to give kids that don’t get as much game time an opportunity to play more. I can also forgive missing free throw shots because you’re trying some fun things (underhanded, etc). These are things that can add fun to a game. Intentionally getting ten second penalties isn’t fun. It isn’t enriching. At best, it’s exploiting a loophole. At worst, it undermines the points of playing the game to begin with at that level: having fun, and learning teamwork and competition. Sam and others might argue that two teams trying to lose together are engaging in a competition, but it’s not a meaningful one.

It makes me think, just a bit, of how sometimes a part of me will actively wish that Southern Tech (or some other team I am rooting for) will lose out so that our coach might be fired and replaced with someone better. I have to actively tell myself that’s a bad mentality to have (there are debates on the message board). But I’m just a guy and if I hope we lose that makes me a bad fan. If players were to actually try to lose a game with the hopes of replacing a bad coach, I’d want the new coach to replace as many players as possible, such would be my embarrassment.

Play to win. If you’ve already effectively won, or don’t care about winning, play to have fun.

I’ve been watching the Amazon Original TV show Bosch, which is based on Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch book series. I will tack on some thoughts on the show at the end. But for now, I am reminded of something that Connelly did that sort of left me rolling my eyes. It’s something that multiple authors do. It is an understandable temptation for each book to have a sense of finality behind it. But if you’re writing a series of books with a single protagonist, it… doesn’t work so well, often as not.

At the end of one of the books, Harry Bosch leaves the LAPD. Done! Finished! Finito! Except… Connelly still has books to write. There’s only so much you can do with Bosch working freelance, or as a private investigator. Connelly actually said as much himself in and afterword on the later book when Bosch rejoined the force. Well, duh Connelly.

In another series (which I won’t name because it is spoilerish, but I will call S2), the sense of finality was the main character Finding Love at Last. The end result is that his wives kept having to die.

There is actually some crossing between the two of these. Bosch fell in love in one book and then out in the next a few times. And at the end of the first S2 book, the character Quit The Police Force to require peacefully at a shrimp hut. In the second book, he joined another force, which he quit by the end. Finality! He was back in the next book, and the author didn’t have him quit again after that.

There are actually more I can name, but you get the idea.

As far as I have read, Stephen Cannell has kept his Shane Scully character faithful to the Love Of This Life from the first book, and she hasn’t died yet. It can be done! It does require a fair amount of discipline, though.

Another series (S3) had the woman from the first book throughout until the second-to-last book, where she died, and her shadow hung over the last book. Very well done. Especially since it was sort of a Match Made In Hell. In the last book, when dealing with the rubble of the Love Of His Life that had been unfaithful to him twice in the last few books, literally said “{$%@ you, [wife]” at a point in which it was warranted. And he meant it.

The Jason Bourne series also did this right, at least when Robert Ludlum was writing it. That was only three books, though, but the Love Of His Life from the first book was there throughout, and they made it work. When Ludlum died, though, another writer took over. Killing her off was the first thing he did. He didn’t even bother killing her off. He just announced that she had died. (The same character died at the very beginning of the second movie.)

You can have characters quit, or fall in love. That’s no problem. But seriously, you have to have a plan for what to do next. There’s only so much dramatic finality you can have in a book that is part one of a series.

—-

Some thoughts on the Bosch TV series:

The TV show is okay, intersecting a couple of plots from a couple of books. Which is a good move, because those of us who have read the books get both familiarity and the uncertainty of not knowing how they are going to intersect.

Titus Welliver is an awkward age for the role. Being a Vietnam vet is a significant part of the Bosch character, but he’s too young to have served in that war (and the budget doesn’t support fitting it 20 years back when the books were written). Rewriting it to Afghanistan, which they did, doesn’t particularly work… but there’s also the fact that he’s too old for Afghanistan.

Apart from that, my only real complaint is minor: too much exposition. It’s like the writers felt the need to try to tell us everything about the character as quick as possible. I don’t think we need to know everything about him right away.

But I like that it’s a mystery over a season. Which something like Amazon (or Netflix) is perfect for, since all of the episodes are released at once. It’s my dream that someday there will be a Kindle County TV series, wherein each season will have a different court case or investigation (and a largely different cast). I thought of that before Netflix and company started making TV shows, but it’s actually perfect for it.

Political scientists and reporters rank states by corruption. New Jersey came out as the most corrupt, though Louisiana didn’t participate.

Ben Domenech (I assume, with caution) wrote a piece in The Federalist arguing that feminists should get some of the credit for the falling abortion rates.

Britain is expanding the definition of child abuse. Widely. As skeptical as I sometimes am of our own system, I can always say “At least we’re not Britain.”

Clickhole tells the inspiring story of young Alex Lambert, who overcame bullying by changing those aspects of his personality that were causing other kids to pick on him.

Even as we experience the Golden Age of Television, we’re also experiencing a sitcom recession. Josef Adalian considers what can be done about it.

Nuclear power is making a comeback in China, and an Airbnb-type company is making a splash.

Randal Olson looks at unique American baby names, and wonders what caused the upsurge in the 1970’s.

Can text messages be used to increase med compliance?

With budgets being tight and crime being low, it’s no surprise that states are re-evaluating expensive incarceration options. It is a bit of a surprise that Texas is one of the states leading the way. Perhaps they hate taxes even more than they hate criminals!

Biblical literalism doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means.

Kevin Drum explains that yes, in fact, some people do love Facebook (and Walmart!), and it speaks questionably of the person who doesn’t recognize this.

Why dogs kick when you scratch their belly.

For those of you who may recall, Captain Power was a TV show slash game back i the 80’s. Depending on who you asked, it either rocked or sucked. I can’t speak to how good the TV show was because I never saw it. I did have the game, however, along with a VHS cassette.

The game primarily consisted of pointing at a screen and trying to hit bright red parts of the opposing fighter planes. There was also yellow, and if you didn’t “dodge” it by turning your plane-gun away, you’d get hit. Get hit enough times, and the plane ejects.

I didn’t know what to expect when I asked for it, but I should have expected what I got even if I was young. Of course you wouldn’t be able to maneuver. it was a VHS tape! and whether you were doing anything or not, the game would go on and (on the VHS anyway) you would win. Your participation wasn’t actually necessary.

I have a bit of a flashback with that when Lain watches Dora the Explorer. I give myself two episodes of “Dora time” a day, where she watches the show while I get various things done in absolute piece.

For those unfamiliar, the formula for Dora episodes is that Dora and Boots have to go somewhere. They consult a map, avoid Swipey the Squirrel who wants to steal something, and so on. Dora is always asking “you” (the viewer) for help. It’s interactive as far as that goes. Lain participates sometimes. It’s pretty great.

At some point, though, Lain is going to figure out that her participation is not necessary. Dora will get where she wants to go with or without her help.