Hello, friends, and welcome to the weekend. Ready for some brunch?
You know what I love about going to a brunch? Surprises. Brunch is unpredictable. They might serve you roast beef, they might serve you eggs Benedict, they might serve you French Toast. You just never know. There is a “suprise” element. Well, we’re going to play on that theme today. Today is all about surprises.
Of course the big surprise of the week came when Anthony Kennedy unexpectedly resigned from the Supreme Court. Though he is 81, he had given no indication of his intention before this week. Many people were not exactly thrilled with this surprise. Seth Meyers tried to talk him out of it: “Justice Kennedy, what are you doin’ retiring, man? You have a great job where you barely work, you get to wear a robe all day and give your opinions on stuff. That basically is retirement. Stick around, at least until we get a new president. Six months tops.”
When Trump was asked whom he would nominate to replace the judge, he responed, “I dunno yet. Leaning toward either Simon Cowell or Adam Levine”.
New trend: surprising your dog. Also called the Whatthefluff challenge. Here’s the basic idea:
Election shocker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina running her first campaign, ousted 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district on Tuesday. An activist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Ocasio-Cortez won over voters in the minority-majority district with a ruthlessly efficient grassroots bid, even as Crowley — the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House — outraised her by a 10-to-1 margin. Crowley had served in Congress for 20 years, and the polling only weeks earlier had not been in Ocasio-Cortez’s favor.
Surprise in the World Cup: Germany is out! The defending champs shocking failed to make it out of the group stage, the first time that has happened since 1938. They lost to South Korea 2-0, which allowed Mexico to advance. A few of the headlines from Germany:
Other countries, of course, reveled in the Schadenfreude. Brazil’s Fox Sport tweeted one word:
A joint Mexico-Sweden Chorus arose: “Bye-Bye Germany”
According to a new study, older people who have sex regularly tend to have better memories. I had something witty to add here, but I forgot what it was…
This surprised me: The percentage of U.S. multiracial congregations almost doubled between 1998 and 2012, from 6.4 percent to 12 percent, according to a study published in June in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. In the same period, the percentage of U.S. congregants attending an interracial church has reached almost one in five, advancing from 12.7 percent to 18.3 percent. The 2012 statistics are the latest available.
Bus driver surprise:
Most people seem to think that the meaning of “science” and what disciplines are scientific are pretty much agreed upon. Surprise. The people that think most deeply about this (scientists and philosophers of science) have long struggled with these questions. What makes science science? Daniel Sarewitz attempts to answer the question in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard:
What separates science from other intellectual activities? The search for a distinctive logical structure of scientific inquiry and for the essence of scientific truth goes back at least to David Hume’s concerns with the limits of inductive inference (does the fact that the sun rose yesterday mean that it must rise tomorrow?) and has been pursued along a variety of philosophical lines. Perhaps best-known among such efforts is the falsifiability criterion devised by the Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper, according to which science should be recognized not by the evidence it garners on behalf of one proposition or another (supporting evidence can be found for pretty much any proposition) but by the types of questions it asks—questions that can be empirically contradicted. ‘In Lost in Math, however, Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who is funny and writes with that slightly oblique flair sometimes found in totally fluent nonnative English writers, learns at a scientific conference that Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used . . . since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence.’ Exactly.
What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical. Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the ‘demarcation problem,’ the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a ‘family resemblance’ among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called ‘science’ that the rest of the world should recognize as such.
The demarcation problem matters because the separation of science from nonscience is also a separation of those who are granted legitimacy to make claims about what is true in the world from the rest of us Philistines, pundits, provocateurs, and just plain folks. In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value. Yet Hossenfelder’s jaunt through the world of theoretical physics explicitly raises the question of whether the activities of thousands of physicists should actually count as ‘science.’ And if not, then what in tarnation are they doing?”
Wait for it…(it’s worth it)
A Restoration Surprise: Six years ago, a well-intentioned woman’s attempts to restore a fresco of the scourged Christ in a church in the north-eastern Spanish city of Borja went viral, with her efforts dubbed “the worst restoration in history”. Perhaps you’ve seen the before and after pictures of what is now called, “Monkey Christ”: 
Well, that didn’t turn out well…But surely since then people who have authority over precious historical works of art have learned to only give restoration privileges to professionals, right? Especially in Spain, right? Surprise! For 500 years, the painted wooden effigy of St George that adorns a chapel in the Spanish town of Estella has been locked in a silent struggle against his old foe, the dragon.
Parish authorities decided George needed to be freshened up, and so they hired…wait for it…they hired…a local handicrafts teacher. The result has not exactly won unanimous applause:
The mayor is pissed. ““The parish decided on its own to take action to restore the statue and gave the job to a local handicrafts teacher. The council wasn’t told and neither was the regional government of Navarre. It’s not been the kind of restoration that it should have been for this 16th-century statue. They’ve used plaster and the wrong kind of paint and it’s possible that the original layers of paint have been lost. This is an expert job it should have been done by experts.” Apparently the mayor doesn’t like surprises.
Quick, which country has the world’s smallest dessert? The answer may surprise you.
Photographer Darren Pearson this month captured this surprising shot: incredible long exposure shot of lightning striking a tree.
Well, that’s it for this week. How about some surprise gifs?
The Internet Monk Archives 
I did for a little bit, then I thought ‘photoshop’. Not quite a photoshop, but it’s not a photo of a lightning strike, but a composite photo by an artist to give his rendering of what it would look like. Here’s the backstory. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/long-exposure-lightning-tree/
Now some of the commenters are free to declare Saturday brunch to be ‘fake news!’
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That’s all I got.
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And let’s remember that Deutsche Bank has been caught and fined for laundering money for Russia. Gee, what a coincidence….
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Justice Kennedy should’ve recused himself from cases in the Trump era, even if that meant resigning or retiring earlier when Trump took office. The conflict of interest presented by his son’s business relationship to the Trump family was too close with too much opportunity for and appearance of the likelihood of influence peddling. But in the Trump era, all this has become acceptable and normal.
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Of course it doesn’t matter…..in a banana republic.
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This. Definitely this.
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If that particular stupid bipedal being was the one who made the can opener work, or pulled up the tab, or ripped open the packet of food, the cat would care what happened to it. But cats are smart enough to recognize that something it can still hear breathing hasn’t really disappeared.
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“SCIENCE!”
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Well, Eugenics and Master Race Theory were respectable mainstream science for around a century…
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Note that like every “Ees Political” science question since Nuclear Winter, the sides break down almost exactly by Party affiliation. What we have developing is two “Ees Party Line” dogmas in opposition, with Evangelicals breaking just as cleanly to one of the two Party Line dogmas.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is AMAZING . . . . no wonder she won 🙂
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You know how to spell macrame! You even know how to put in those little French accent thingies! Color me impressed!
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What is string theory?
Is that, like, macramé?
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Without the historic accomplishments of labor unions life would be hell for all workers in the U.S. Make fun of them all you want, everyday of your life you or people you love have benefited greatly from the existence and achievements of labor unions. I can only assume you’d prefer to live in the world of the Robber Barons.
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Robert F I agree with you about the historic and ongoing need for good organized honest labor union . Just to shorthand it my best metaphor is Animal Farms where the pigs became like the other ruling farmers above the farm animals they represented.. It is somewhat of a balance that requires good faith and respect on both side of the table which is as gone as Samuel Gompers.
Senecaigiggs, with you too on your thoughts about public sector unions, should not be allowed to bargain .
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Well, the Supremes just a couple days ago injured private sector unions in a way that may prove mortal to them.
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Gosh, you’re really smart. I mean, with intellects like yours and Adam’s and some others making comments regularly here at iMonk, the rest of us should get props for having the courage to comment at all. Seriously.
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There’s a concerted effort to bring him down because he’s a total high-handed jerk and bully, who likes to glower and hulk over people and institutions that don’t say he’s great, or don’t swear eternal fealty to him for supposed favors done. Example: Harley Davidson is supposed to be indebted to him forever because he gave it some tax breaks, even though such loyalty for a corporate favor would be bad business and possibly bankrupt it in the wake of the punitive tariffs being imposed. But President Petty is incapable of understanding any of that, because he’s a bad businessman and a bad friend. If you touch him, you’ll get hurt, guaranteed. Loyalty only runs in one direction with this guy.
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John Barry, shoot me an e-mail please – my name, yahoo domain.
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I’m fine with labor unions in the PRIVATE sector; not so good with labor unions in the PUBLIC sector.
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String theory: if you look at physics up to about a century ago, it was the theoreticians catching up with the experimentalists. Everyone always knew that an apple would fall. It took Newton to generalize this and describe it mathematically. The Clark-Maxwell equations describe light. X-rays were discovered more or less by accident, and only explained later. Einstein’s Nobel prize was for his explanation of the photo-electric effect, which was itself discovered by someone else.
Then about a century about this changed. Theory surged past experiments, making predictions which experimentalists then had to figure out how to test. As the cycle of theory and experiment ran its course, the equipment needed grew bigger and bigger and more and more expensive.
When we talk about whether or not sting theory is real science, we really mean that theory has progressed past the point where there is any likely prospect of testing it. In a sense this doesn’t matter. The methods being used are the same as in the past, so past success suggests these methods are sound. On the other hand, theory usually involves some assumptions. Varying assumptions give a range of outcomes. In the past, experiments produced clarity about which assumptions were correct. Put another way, experiments calibrate theories. The problem string theory has is that having outstripped experimental evidence, there is nothing to calibrate it. We end up with various versions with no particular reason to believe one is more likely correct than another.
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This is one of those things that is a deep philosophical conundrum without really being a problem in the vast majority of cases. We have all along distinguished between “hard” sciences like chemistry and “soft” sciences like sociology. Where to draw the line between soft sciences and humanities? Often it matters less than you would think. Linguistics, for example, straddles the line without worrying too much about it.
Climatology, by the way, is clearly a science. It isn’t the hardest of sciences, but neither is it the softest. Anyone using this as an argument about climate change is being disingenuous.
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Well you can observe evolution and speciation under laboratory conditions as well as in the field. Climate change is also observable. The “anthropogenic” part is an extrapolation based on the evidence which, frankly, is pretty overwhelming.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to think of a category of thought called “science” in the abstract. Perhaps we should restrict our terminology to “scientific method”, defined as the various strategies we devise to scrutinize natural processes. These methods vary according to their area of applicability.
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So in the world of Seth Meyers, Colbert, Conan the Unfunny and Jimmy Fallon as political analysis I guess it does matter.
Donald Trump honest confession was he was part of the insider establishment, gave money to both parties and knew how the “system of the establishment worked. He was a part of it.
So Justine Kennedy was a key executive of Deutsche Bank from 1997 to 2007. They are the non USA bank that is known for taking risk, as a matter of fact they just failed a Fed “stress” test that most banks that are more conservative pass.
In the elite circles of the establishment all the elites are within the Kevin Bacon degrees of connection
So Justin Kennedy knew that Trump was going to be President in 1997 to 2007? . No, he made a smart business decision and bet on Trump and other risk takers
One of the reasons Trump is so opposed by the political and financial establishment is that he knows their game, he has played it. That is why there is such an alliance to bring him down.
The Times article alluded more to the fact that Trump somehow talked A. Kennedy to retire which is a stretch but its Trump so throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.
Vox will surmise that Trump talked Ruth the Bader Ginsburg into dying if that happens or he was the cause of it because he was President and it happened.
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Good News!
https://pjmedia.com/faith/going-to-church-could-help-you-live-longer/
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+1
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So true. In an interview about Animal Intelligence a researcher was asked why so many studies were conducted on Dogs and particular types of Monkeys, way more than on all other species combined.
The answer “they cooperate”
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The big unsurprise of the week was finding out Kennedy’s son had loaned Trump $1 Billion dollars years ago.
But that doesn’t mattter.
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Yes! Very funny!
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Nooooo…the country with “the world’s smallest dessert” is Lilliputia where they serve tiiiiiny liiiiitle blintzes on tiiiiiny liiiiittle plates…
Hey if the Okies are toking then as I said yesterday, the culture war is won.
Ok I finally got my ink pens ready, where is the Book of Kells?
Did anybody but me think of the Burning Bush when they saw the picture of the lightning tree?
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Lol
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I have nothing but bad feelings about the forthcoming Anthony Kennedy replacement to the Supreme Court vacancy. But then, the current court had already gone a good distance toward eviscerating labor unions. So many benefits we take for granted in world of labor in this country were the result of labor unions fighting for them, and their victories redounding to the benefit of every worker, not just union members. Like 40 hour work weeks, like overtime at time-and-a-half, like minimum wage, like child labor laws, etc., etc., etc.? Thank the historic contribution of unions. Without strong unions and collective bargaining, don’t expect those benefits to remain. Nothing is free, as our conservative capitalist friends like to say, everything must be worked toward to be achieved and maintained; without labor unions doing that work, don’t expect the labor gains of the past that they worked for and maintained to remain.
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The Standard Poodle ‘double-take’ is priceless! still LOL
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Good one! That one needs to be said in a Rodney Dangerfield voice, too.
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Sex and memory? A young man asked me if I could remember the first time I had sex — I told him that I was so old, I couldn’t even remember the last time I did.
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I hesitate to say this, since I’m not an anthropogenic climate change denier and I believe evolution happened, but if we adhered to that requirement, would either anthropogenic climate change or biological evolution be considered scientific theories?
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Lol! True. Unless the stupid bipedal being had a treat for the cat; in that case, kitty would care greatly!
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Old joke alert! 😉
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–> “According to a new study, older people who have sex regularly tend to have better memories. I had something witty to add here, but I forgot what it was…”
It helps them remember what things are used for.
It helps them remember where things go.
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The only reason a cat wouldn’t fall for the disappearing act is because it wouldn’t care what happened to the stupid bipedal being that once occupied its space.
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Love it!
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BTW, my wife just read the column and told me, “Your memory is about to get worse, buddy
“…
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If you can’t design a controlled experiment to verify the results, I’m not sure it should be called “science.” In textual criticism, technically speaking you could create a text and ask people to copy it by hand for a thousand years and then check the results, but no university would give funding for that experiment. 🙂
After the Enlightenment, people got very excited about the idea that science can lead us to absolute truth with absolute certainty. And the physical sciences were making so much progress in explaining and improving the world that it seemed like there was no limit to what science could achieve. So, suddenly every field of study (including theology) wanted to see itself as a science.
This is why the postmodern critique of modernism is so essential in our society today. Not as a way of completely supplanting scientific thinking (science works, after all, and produces obvious benefits for society) but by forcing us to have a bit more humility and openness to admitting that there are things we do not know and cannot know.
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I think both dogs looked shocked by the visual. Especially the poodle looking one. They get over it quickly, get their senses back and investigate. Pretty funny.
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Picked up a hitch hiker last week. He was surprised I did and asked if I wasn’t afraid I may have picked up a mass murderer or something. I let him know that I thought the chances were astronomical that a mass murderer would pick up a mass murderer.
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The dog just playing along is a strong possibility; dogs certainly have [its science!] theory-of-mind, object persistence, as well as sophisticated turn taking abilities. All the components needed for true game play.
Not only do dogs have better hearing an a sense of smell, but their optics are significantly faster – at about 80fps vs human’s lowly ~55fps. So a human moving quickly enough to “fake out” a dog? Not likely. And a cat’s optics clock in around 120fps – – – so not even the slightest chance; no doubt my cat watches me and sees a lumbering klutz.
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I’m not sure that peer review and reproducibility answer the question so neatly. As for peer review, this is a great way for a discipline to police itself. Yet there are many peer review journals in disciplines you apparently do not regard as scientific (or lesser science): anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, textual criticism. In fact, it is hard to see why most disciplines could not create peer-review journals.
Reproducability is more germane, but this criteria by itself is hardly without problems.
First, this would exclude whole disciplines from being classified as science if their normal method was more observational and inductive (geology, anthropology, paleontology, much of evolutionary biology, much of zoology and botany, etc…) than experimental.
Second, we would have to define the term reproducibility, and then justify that definition. This is not secondary or nit-picking, but crucial. A report on a questionnaire given to scientists by Nature magazine notes, “What does ‘reproducibility’ mean? Those who study the science of science joke that the definition of reproducibility itself is not reproducible. Reproducibility can occur across different realms: empirical, computational and statistical. Replication can be analytical, direct, systematic or conceptual. Different people use reproducibility to mean repeatability, robustness, reliability and generalizability.”
Third, of course, is the fact that so much of published scientific experiments in peer-reviewed journals simply cannot be replicated. From that same Science article:
“More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.
The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.”
Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology1 and cancer biology2, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence.
The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be.”
Link: https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970
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A friend of mine ordered a chicken and an egg on Amazon…… He’s going to let me know.
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Gomer Pyle “Surprise Surprise Surpirise”
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Clarifying the status and epistemology of science is the main task of a whole discipline, philosophy of science. Names like Bacon, Hume, Kant, Popper and Kuhn are associated with it. The questions they have raised have only become more important in the last century.
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But besides that, both cats and dogs have keen senses of hearing. If that dog couldn’t hear her scoot around the doorway into the other room, then either something is wrong with its hearing, or this is a trick she’s taught the dog and they’re both fooling the rest of us with it.
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I don’t think a cat would fall for the disappearing act that the young woman played on that Siberian husky in the instagram video. Cats are better than dogs with certain unconscious spatial calculations, which means they know how to take the high road when you take the low road, and cut you off at the pass.
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She blinded him with the key to older people having better memories.
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> Anthropology certainly isn’t
Nope. And I dismiss a lot of those arguments – and many of them can be made other ways anyway.
But there are some elements of predictability, at least in Architecture. Humans DO tend to, over and over again, across terrains, and across ages, reproduce some of the same basic patterns in use and proportion. And prosperity correlates to a degree with those forms. So we know that now… but since Humans, when left unhindered by onerous regulation, tend to just-do-that anyway … is that Predictive? Or do we just know that now?
> Is string theory reproducible, or demonstrable?
You’d need to ask a Phyisics what String Theory is first, or which String Theory. I do not pretend to know enough to answer that. **BUT** Quantum Mechanics is demonstrable. Both IBM and HP have quantum labs developing Quantum Technology – which is the very definition of Reproducable-and-Demonstrable. There are Quantum Entanglement based data network interfaces in operation TODAY.
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Is string theory reproducible, or demonstrable? Is it predictive?
Anthropology certainly isn’t, and yet a lot of our current social theory about humanity seems to draw an awful lot from anthropology.
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Sure, I am good with that – I am very big on demonstrability. And I am pretty confident I am in the majority in finding these philosophical|theological debates tedious and much with the missing-the-point.
If some thinker is now down to “What is, exactly, science?” as a burning question. . . he|she had passed their prime and is sliding into the writing-books-targeting-the-Oprah-network-people phase of their career. It happens, many great minds have an astonishingly short shelf-life.
It is also possible a lucrative book deal proposed – and suddenly that became a burning question. This is something “Think Tanks” occasionally do to build up some spin and help pack the schedule for future speaker and conference tours.
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Science… is what she blinded him with.
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So practical and technical applicability and success of the disciplines, and also the predictive ability of the models or theories involved, would be key in determining whether they are science or not. This would seem to exclude a discipline like history or textual analysis from being called a science; that wouldn’t mean they can’t narrate truth, or use a significant scientific component in their attempts to reach truthful narrations of their subjects, only that they are not actual sciences in some of the tools they use and the results they attain.
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First.First
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Jack Lalanne – exercise guru from 60’s TV died at the age of 95. Someone asked about the key to his longevity. He replied it was “having sex almost every day.”
” I almost have it on Monday, I almost have it on Tuesday, I almost……..”
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> Does anybody have any idea?
Peer review and reproducability. There really isn’t a problem here.
Ok, sociology, economics, etc… are Lesser sciences as they are derivative. Ok, moving on. Again, no problem to solve.
A problem only exists here for people who want, for some reason, for there to be a problem. Technology demonstrates the efficacy of the current system – from hard tech to the dramatic improvements in predictive algorithms in meteorology, equipment failures, and even marketing.
Many many effects even in Lesser sciences are reproduced all the time. Like for example: “””older people who have sex regularly tend to have better memories””” When we know that people who have strong social networks and more social interaction live longer and have overall better health outcomes – – – w”e are reproducing that result in one study after another. At this point one can comfortably, and “scientifically” IMNSHO: having friends is a positive.
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more often than not
the threat of rain gives way
to a blessing
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Re: What is science: Are history and textual analysis really sciences? I understand they use scientific methods and have a significant empirical component, but the large amount of subjective interpretation necessary in both has always seemed to me to mean they are not sciences. They seem more like detective work to me, and require reading between the lines of the evidence to connect facts with a narrative that is highly speculative in many cases. But then, can’t the same be said about the various models of how emergent evolution unfolded in our planet’s lifespan?
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Not second.
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If Sarewitz is correct, then the difficulty in defining what is science and who is a scientist parallels the difficulty many are having in distinguishing news from Fake News. This seems to lend more ammunition to those who say that anthropogenic climate change is not a real or significant thing, or that vaccines are not necessary or may be dangerous, or etc. If there really is a difference between science and pseudo-science, or between true narration of facts and untruths or lies about them, then we need to find a clear way out of the epistemological morass that is expressed in this article. Does anybody have any idea?
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Not first.
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First?
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I think the “real” story of the Justice Kennedy retirement is sad, that the man had to work until he was 81 years old.
Let this be a lesson to young people , you must start early planning for your golden years. Personally , I always thought he was too judgmental and was so old he had to write down his opinions, senior moments. I know President Trump will not only find someone who is a judge but is also mental and you must expect them to have the ability to be able to be judgmental is a very discerning way.
I know many of my friends could not be on the Supreme Court, who are they to judge? is their standard reply. That leaves the judgment up to up and I am quick to judge.
I often cite the case law handed down by Solomon in the Real Mother Vs. Lying Friend Who Wanted the Baby case that is now black letter law. Acting as Judge and jury as he was paid over $20 a day juror fees, Solomon ruled the baby was to be cut in half and each woman receive half of the child. You know the rest of the trial outcome as it has been on Law and Order. Note that Sol, sounds more folksy, ordered the baby “cut” in half not split in half as he did not want a split decision. Wisely the real Mother , knowing that half a loaf is better than none , knew that old maxim did not apply to a baby. Luckily the Mother was not a Planned Parenthood facility and baby parts were unable to be sold , due that it was the Bronze Age aka the actor George Hamilton period .
I also predict that no matter who the wise and learned President Trump nominates the Democrats will view the judge with Dredd in honor of one of S. Stallone’s most underrated movies. I too have been Borked and it is no fun. Borking someone should be against the law.
I wanted to be a judge at one time but in the Miss Universe contest. I spent years looking at beautiful women and judging them on physical beauty, poise, talents but when it came time for the interview section the police usually were called so my training was never complete. I helped get stalking laws passed in several states and many of my relatives have extensive dealings with the legal system and like Justice Kennedy have a lifetime appt. in the legal system.
I know decisions can be life changing , for years I yelled at Monty Hall and his contestants to decide on Door #2, no one would listen, ever one is just out trying to make a deal.
;
I still miss Johnny Carson, Seth Meyer is aptly named , not too many people have heard of him either.
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