Tales from the jar side: Magnus steps down, Super-, Mega-, and Gigayachts, Awesome minor league team names, Fictional deaths, and more
Dad joke: I opened my birthday card and rice fell out. It was from my Uncle Ben.
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 17 - 24, 2022. This week I taught a Spring Data Fundamentals course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, week 1 of my Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks course on the same, an NFJS Virtual Workshop called Latest Features in Java, and I gave a webinar on Functional Programming in Java.
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No Geeky Stuff This Week (Relatively Speaking)
I was going to write about some technical issues this week involving Spring Data and some of the newer features of Java, but I got carried away on other issues, as you’ll see. So we’ll just skip all that. Don’t worry, it’ll keep, and I’ll get back to it.
Magnus Says Goodbye (For Now)
Magnus Carlsen, the Chess World Champion for the past ten years, announced on his podcast that he will not defend his title next year. (BTW, how cool is it that his podcast is called The Magnus Effect, which is what deflects a spinning object moving through a fluid, like a baseball pitcher throwing a curveball?) After sending hints about refusing to play the match for months if not years, he finally made it official after the recent Candidates Matches, won by his most recent challenger, Ian (pronounced “Yan”) Nepomniachtchi (Nee-POM-nee-she, usually abbreviated “Nepo”). Magnus has already defended his title five times, and it looks like he’s had enough. He doesn’t want to do the work of preparing for another defense, especially since he’s already beaten every major competitor in his generation.
I get that. This two-year cycle for defenses is too frequent, since prep and the matches themselves already fill about a year already. I think he’s bored, and wants to play on his own terms.
There many were reactions from his fans:
The included article is sad but supportive, as no one expects Magnus to play any less. In fact, Magnus just won a Rapid and Blitz tournament held in Croatia this week, and he will lead the Norwegian team in the 2022 Chess Olympiad, the team competition held every two years, which will be in Chennai, India, starting July 29. With Magnus on the top board, the Russians banned due to the invasion of Ukraine, and the Chinese not participating due to pandemic travel issues, the Norwegians are ranked third overall. The US is the overwhelming favorite and India is number two. It should be a fun tournament.
With Magnus out, does that make Nepo the next champion? No, he has to face Ding Liren, the Chinese Grandmaster who finished in second-place in the Candidates Tournament. That situation brings with it a fair amount of irony.
See, Ding wasn’t supposed to even be in the Candidates Tournament. He had serious visa issues all year, and thus hadn’t qualified for the tournament because he hadn’t played enough games, even though he spent much of the year ranked in the top two or three overall. Then Sergey Karjakin, the Russian GM who lost to Magnus for the title in 2016, was banned from the tournament for being an appalling, disgusting shill for Vladimir Putin, publicly condemning the Ukrainians (even though he’s from there!) and just generally making an a$$ of himself.
That left a position to be filled, so the Chinese rapidly scheduled a whole series of (relatively) high-level tournaments just so Ding could qualify. He played 28 games in 26 days to make it. Then, in the Candidates Tournament, Ding managed to finish second, which would have eliminated him if Magnus hadn’t dropped out.
Nepo is also Russian, but he has publicly condemned the war, quietly enough to stay under the radar, but loudly enough that people know where he stands. Of course, if the Russians force him to visibly declare his own support for the invasion, there’s a small chance he would be banned too.
That would mean Ding would go from completely out of the tournament to World Champion based on two bans and a withdrawal. That rather reminds me of the way Gerald Ford became President of the United States after the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. I doubt it will happen, but it would be one for the history books.
For the record, I too have decided not to participate in next year’s world championship match, just in case you were wondering.
The Haves and the Have-Yachts
That’s the name of an article in the New Yorker about the ultra-rich buying enormous yachts in record numbers.
The article is very long. Even the audio version clocks in at just under an hour. I read it over several sittings, because even though I put it down to do other things, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the details. For example, here is the classification scheme for ships longer than 98 feet:
If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.
Gigayachts are expensive. The article discusses ships that cost well over $250 million, and claim “a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own.”
(See this Wikipedia page on the largest motor yachts by length that are at least 75 meters — 246 ft — long.)
I think my favorite detail in the article was about the coded messages sent in by the incoming helicopter for one ship. If they reported a Pomeranian was onboard, it meant the wife was, too. If no dog was on the helicopter, it was bringing “somebody else,” meaning the crew had to swap out the dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, and favored drinks in the fridge for the mistress rather than the wife.
Enjoy the article. If you want something much shorter and much more snarky, you can check out the article What’s Up With Dan Snyder’s Yacht in The Defector, which is mostly an interview with the creator of @DanSnydersYacht twitter feed, which tracks the location of said ship:
Best tidbit? Back in 2011 a newspaper article reported it took over $388,000 just to fill up the yacht with gas, and that bill is certainly much higher now. Good. Dan Snyder is a truly awful person, and anything that makes him feel bad is a good thing.
No, Really, That’s The Team Name
This article caught my eye: Diamondbacks prospect Leandro Cedeno launches 527-foot HR in minor-league game. I mean, sure, that’s an awesome feat, but it’s this paragraph that got me:
Cedeno, who plays for the Double-A Amarillo Sod Poodles [emphasis added], launched the 3-0 pitch in the bottom of the fifth inning well over the center field wall and out of the ballpark.
Amarillo Sod Poodles? Really? In a world of excellent names for minor league baseball teams, that one is outstanding. They’re a Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and apparently they have a habit of wearing colorful uniforms:
For the record, a sod poodle is apparently an old-fashioned name for a prairie dog, which itself isn’t a bad name. The linked article includes a couple of other great names, like the Hartford Yard Goats (my local team), the Binghamton Rumble Ponies and the Rocket City Trash Pandas of Madison, Alabama. Yes, those are all good, but there are some others I really enjoy, like the Akron Rubber Ducks, the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, and the Sugar Land Space Cowboys, who are 40-52 in their inaugural season as a Triple A affiliate of the Houston Astros.
Back in the misty days before the pandemic, I used to travel a lot to teach training classes. During baseball season I often tried to find the local minor league affiliate and catch a game. I saw the Dayton Dragons and the aforementioned IronPigs that way, as well as the Columbus Clippers and a few others that no longer exist. That’s life in the minors — teams switch affiliates or move altogether every few years. Prior to the Yard Goats, my local team was the Norwich Navigators from 1995 until 2005. Then they became the Connecticut Defenders (named after the nearby Coast Guard Academy in New London and the submarine base in Groton) until 2009, after which they moved to Richmond, VA and became the Richmond Flying Squirrels, which is another good name.
In fact, for a couple of years in the late 2000s, I had a part-time job scoring baseball games for the company called Baseball Info Solutions (now called Sports Info Solutions). They wanted the result of every single pitch (!), and if the ball was hit in the air for an out, they wanted to know not just where and to whom, but also whether it was a line drive (liner), a fly ball, or a fliner (which is in between those two), and more. For that they paid a small fee, along with two good tickets to the game. I normally upgraded my tickets to the skybox (for about $10 — that’s the beauty of minor league baseball; all the prices are reasonable), scored the game, entered it into their computer system, and submitted my boxscores for payment. I did that a few times a month, mostly for local teams that don’t exist anymore. It was fun while it lasted, but after the Defenders left town, I pretty much stopped.
Minor league games are great for families. When my son was about 8 to 10, I’d occasionally bring him and a friend of his choice to a game where I wasn’t working. I’d give him $20 that he could use for food, or games, or souvenirs, and when it was gone and he got bored, usually around the 6th inning or so, we’d leave and go home. I probably should have supervised him better, but it appears I got away with it.
Just so you know, I ordered a Sod Poodles T-shirt from the official store. Maybe I’ll put a picture in the newsletter when it arrives.
O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?
This article is making the rounds. It lists The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time. Like any ranking, I disagree with several of the choices (seriously, Catelyn Stark rather than Ned?), but the references range from Fantine in Les Misérables to the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings to Marion Crane in Psycho (the epic shower scene) to Uncle Ben in the very first Spider-Man. This list makes quite a read.
(Of course, that’s a different Uncle Ben than the one in the joke in the subtitle. Apparently Uncle Ben’s rice was rebranded in 2020 as Ben’s Original after the George Floyd protests. That was done within hours of the Aunt Jemima brand also being changed due to charges of racism. But back to our story…)
A few notes:
“What a world, what a world!” Yup, you got that right. But if you’re that allergic to water, maybe don’t keep buckets of it lying around where any kid from Kansas can grab them? After all, that castle was made of stone, right? What do you need the water for? Expecting any Roman legions dropping by soon?
I must admit I haven’t seen about a third of the entries, so I have some catching up to do.
By the time of the Red Wedding episode in Game of Thrones, I’d already read all the books, so I knew what was coming. Maybe that’s why Catelyn’s death wasn’t as big a shock to me.
Tony Soprano definitely didn’t make it out of that diner. I was watching the final episode in a hotel in Boston when the screen went blank, and like everyone else I thought the cable had gone out. Nope.
If you can watch the first ten minutes of Up without it getting a little dusty in here, I don’t even know what to say to you.
Thelma and Louise couldn’t have ended any other way.
I remember watching the M*A*S*H episode when Radar announced the death of Henry Blake, and it still hits home after all these years.
I also followed Doonesbury during the entire Andy Lippincott struggle with AIDS and couldn’t believe they were publishing that in the daily paper. My local paper in York, PA, put Doonesbury on the Opinions page rather than with the rest of the comics, but at least they ran it at all.
Wow, a Goodbye Earl reference, to a “missing person who nobody missed at all.”
The poor whale in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy provides a link to an earlier item in this newsletter, because today’s luxury yacht owners would no doubt be the customers for the custom planet builders in those books. Not to mention that the Heart of Gold spaceship, which ran on the infinite improbability drive that created the whale in the first place, was itself a luxury yacht.
For me, one of the biggest deaths they left out was Joe Pendleton in Heaven Can Wait, where an angel pulls him out too early and he has to go back to Earth in the body of another man. Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, James Mason, Charles Grodin, Dyan Cannon — a brilliant cast in a great movie. See it if you can.
I also expected the list to include Jack Dawson in Titanic, but I’m kind of glad they didn’t. Other obvious omissions: Bambi’s mom, Old Yeller, and, of course, Mufasa, who no doubt traumatized an entire generation of Disney kids.
Miscellaneous
Glad Mine Is Better Now
We’ve Been Watching For All Mankind
For All Mankind is the alternative history show on Apple TV+ that continues the space race after the Russians landed on the Moon first. Season 3 is going on now, on Mars, and the show has recently been renewed for a fourth season.
None of that has anything to do with the included video, which is just fun for fun’s sake. And yeah, the Sun’s gravity is a lot.
More about Emmanuel the Emu
It turns out as a subscriber to the Washington Post, I can give out 10 gift articles a month. Last week I included that viral video of Emmanuel the emu. Here’s a follow-up interview with his owner, Taylor Blake, of Knuckle Bump Farms. Plus, here’s another video from her:
Apparently the emu’s full name is Emmanuel Todd Lopez, which somehow just works. Be the Emmanuel you want to see the in the world.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Spring Data Fundamentals, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Week 1 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, ditto
Latest Features In Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
This week:
Week 2 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
The Spring MVC Framework, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
More techie stuff.