Welp, the Giants are making some brutal work of Yu Darvish and my Padres. Now 8-1 in the bottom of the 2nd. Will still stick it out tonight, in case a comeback happens.

At least the White Sox won earlier today.

Update: It’s now 13-2 in the bottom of the 8th. At this point, I’m just staying up to see if any wacky shenanigans ensue with Don and Mud.

Wordle 297 4/6

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The Padres are in San Francisco this week, and I’m still waiting to hear Don Orsillo riff on Mauricio Dubon’s name.

In The New York Times: For a certain segment of American evangelicals, “right-wing political activity itself is becoming a holy act.”

At a pep rally with incredibly loud marching band music for incoming freshmen at the high school. Having major flashbacks to my own south suburban San Diego high school experience. Except with way, WAY more white people.

Wordle 296 3/6

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Ian Bogost explores how fixing Facebook may be a matter of just making its users pipe down. As the headline on his Atlantic piece says, “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much.”

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context. …

The capacity to reach an audience some of the time became contorted into the right to reach every audience all of the time. The rhetoric about social media started to assume an absolute liberty always to be heard; any effort to constrain or limit users’ ability to spread ideas devolved into nothing less than censorship. But there is no reason to believe that everyone should have immediate and constant access to everyone else in the world at all times.

Truth.

Random linkage: April 11, 2022

I bookmark a lot and print things and stash stuff in Pocket, but I don’t always get around to reading things. Maybe if I park links here to look at later, that might help. Or not.

Listed here, in no particular order:

I’m 56. Also can confirm.

I need to keep reminding myself that not everybody intends to come off like a patronizing pain in the ass.

Am I wrong to be creeped out by MLB umpires wearing the logo of “the official cryptocurrency exchange of Major League Baseball”?

This may have been one of the last times she willingly wore a dress. We took her shopping yesterday to buy a dress for her confirmation next weekend, and she acted like we were shopping for roof shingles or a urinary catheter.

Several YouTube instructional video replays later — as well as at least two attempts to swat a playful cat away — I finally succeeded at making a palm cross.

Wordle 295 3/6

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Wordle 294 5/6

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We cut the cord late last year, so we’re seeing how long we can go without NBC Sports Chicago (which carries White Sox games locally) before we cave and subscribe to a service like YouTube TV that carries it. Right now I’m having serious withdrawal.

Wordle 293 4/6

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Wordle 292 4/6

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Pleasantly surprised to see three or four Padres fans on this Spin list of 108 musicians predicting the 2022 baseball season. Still too many Dodger followers, though. And it’s sorely lacking Geddy Lee talking about his Blue Jays.

Theologian Greg Hillis tells MLB: “Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball” (Commonweal).

Don’t run from baseball’s leisurely pace. Embrace it. Teach about it. Market it. … No matter how distracted we are, we know intuitively that there are deep patterns within us and without us, and that happiness is in some way connected to our discovery and contemplation of them.

Hillis’s essay is prompting me to give Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture another spin.

Wordle 291 4/6

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Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post: “… there is nothing on the list of pandemic school ‘lessons’ that we didn’t already know before covid-19 — and for a long, long time.”

Random finding: “Rare footage discovered of Prince, 11, at 1970 Minneapolis teachers’ strike” (Guardian)

Work around the clock: Not quite as bad as it sounds, but still

Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic:

I’ve noticed a new island of work at the end of the day. Sometime around 9 p.m., I’ll open my computer and see that I have about a dozen urgent-ish emails and Slack messages. So, while in front of the television or with a podcast playing in the background, I’ll spend a late-night hour or more replying to these messages, typing the same intro over and over: ‘Sorry for the delay …’ ‘Oops, I missed this …’ ‘Hey, just seeing that you …’

I can relate. In fact, I’ll probably be online like this tonight after F and C go to bed to catch up on work; I have an appointment this afternoon, so I’ll play catchup if needed later.

Most meetings, I believe, are useless time sucks spawned directly from Satan’s Outlook calendar. Fortunately, I am less prone to meetings than some of my colleagues, though I am stuck with my share. Others, unfortunately, aren’t so lucky:

‘People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,’ says Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft. ‘That means everything else—like coding and email and writing—is being pushed later.’ Workday creep and meeting creep aren’t two separate trends; they’re the same trend.

(In other news, there’s a “Human Understanding and Empathy” group at Microsoft. Who knew?)

I’m grateful to have a job with this kind of flexibility. But I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of being “at work” around the clock.

Thank God I work late less than I used to, and only if it means I’m able to take care of important errands or spend time with family. But it requires a lot of restraint of my workaholic tendencies, which fortunately have dissipated with age and a growing sense of knowing better.