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Five Assorted Thoughts: Dangerous Baseball Stats, Verlander vs Schilling, Giselle vs Brady, A Good Sign and the End of My Silent Personal #freestacy Twitter Protest

Posted: October 29, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, internet/free speech, Sports
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The St. Louis Cardinals were up 2-0 in the top of the 9th of game 1 when a graphic came up on the screen saying that the Cardinals had never lost a postseason game when up 2-0 in the ninth. The Phillies ended up scoring 6 runs winning the game and the series.

Yesterday the Astros were up 5-0 going into the 4th when on the screen came a graphic saying the Houston Astros have never lost a postseason game when up by five. The Phillies tied the game by the 5th and won in extra innings.

As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over”.

As of yesterday Justin Verlander who got a no-decision in yesterday’s game is 0-7 in World Series play and holds the highest ERA of pitchers with more than 30 innings pitched in World Series history.

I find that rather incredible. Verlander is without question a first ballot hall of famer1. He led the league in Wins, ERA WHIP and hits per 9 innings last year With 244 wins he has an actual chance of getting to the 300 win mark and if you watch him pitch over the years the person who most comes to mind in terms of style is Curt Schilling. Throws strikes and strikes out a ton of guys, walks very few but on the down side gives up HR’s and doubles on occasion to guys who can make contact.

Yet Schilling is legendary in World Series 4-1 with two more rings (3) than Verlander (1).

Given the similarity of stuff, style and grit I just can’t see how Verlander and Schilling produce such different results in World Series play.

Of course if Hoston wins this series nobody will be talking about or worrying about Verlander’s series stats except Verlander.

1Subject of course to having acceptable political beliefs in the eyes of the liberal sports media

How DARE Tom Brady decide to honor his contract and all those fans who bought season tickets to watch him play this year! No wonder his wife left him!

Gisele will of course land on her feet. She’s much richer than him and will have no shortage of a choice of rich accomplished men who will want her to choose from.

That she would break up their family over a season of football when Brady had stated that he would be playing through age 45 for years and for which he had a contract to play, is to me a narcissism on a huge scale. Would it really have been that hard to wait three more months?

This goes to show that wealth and fame does not guarantee happiness.

It’s day three of the Musk Era on Twitter and if you want to see the difference in real terms here it is explained in one tweet:

I’ve never got beyond 3500+ followers myself despite questioning Trump at press conferences and long interviews with Ted Cruz and some serious coverage of presidential campaigns and given that the blog is not of the scale it once was I likely will never reach the numbers other have but I’ve always presumed that was on me.

A lot of people think the return of Donald Trump to Twitter will be the sign that the era of censorship will be done. The moment I’m waiting for is different.

I use tweetdeck and because I follow Stacy McCain so closely I kept a column of his tweets up. On the day he was suspended the error messages: User has been suspended came up.

Stacy had 80,000+ followers at the time and his blog is his primary source of income. This was a direct attack on a conservative with six children’s ability to support his family by a bunch of leftist apparatchiks out to crush dissent and was the herald of what cumulated in the banning of Trump

Rather than remove the @rsmccain column I’ve left it there all those years and every time I open tweetdeck the “User has been suspended” message has come up and it refreshes several times an hour while I’m on the page.

When that column is populated again then I’ll know that free speech has returned to twitter.

Head Exploding Time for the left In One Tweet:

Posted: October 27, 2022 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, internet/free speech, News/opinion
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The full statement is available at Glenn’s site here.

I’m wondering if someone at Twitter in a last act of defiance will “accidently” lose all Trump’s old tweets so the account will have to start fresh. I’m sure it will be an accident.

What will be really funny will be the reactions on twitter, particularly if he’s back up before Monday.

This will be fun.

Doctor Who New Old Doctor That’s Weird and Likely Won’t Work

Posted: October 27, 2022 by datechguy in culture, doctor who, entertainment, Vive L'Empereur
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11th Doctor: I never forget a face

The Curator (4th Doctor): I know you don’t and over time you might revisit a few, but just the old favorites eh?.

Doctor Who Day of the Doctor 2013

As you might know I have not watched a new episode of Doctor Who since the last scene of Peter Capaldi run

Jodi Whitiaker’s Doctor was a disaster for the ratings, for the sales of the show, for the merchandizing and according to my oldest who did in fact watch those episodes was an era with the writing so bad that according to him, A Doctor Who fan all his life, only three episodes of the run might be recognized as Doctor Who Episodes.

Like the Sylvester McCoy era it was all about the agenda and ignoring the fans even to the point of rewriting the canon of the series. In fact it was so bad that they decided that when the current showrunner left with Ms Whitaker they would bring back Russell T. Davies who was the original showrunner of the revival in the hope to get people to start watching again.

But a lot of people like myself still weren’t interested. I understood that Davies would while still writing woke (and believe me his era was plenty woke but it wasn’t in your face and with the exception of the whole “President Obama is going to fix the economy” BS in his final episode “woke” took 3rd place to providing fans with good writing and good characters.

Thus I had absolutely no intention of bothering to watch what was to follow and was content to, in my mind, have Capaldi’s Doctor decide to die, and I suspect a awful lot of those who left the series behind likely had the same idea. So what do you do to gain the interest of those who walked away and took their eyeballs and wallets with them?

Well apparently you do this: (Rather large spoiler)

I didn’t watch the episode so I had no idea this had happened that until I saw something on Youtube.

This was a complete shock to me as it likely was to everyone else who wasn’t in the know. I think it’s in terms of marketing, rather smart. It’s an attempt to get people like me who didn’t want anything to do with the Jodi Whitaker era to give it a shot.

How bad did they want to get away from the Jodi Whitaker era? They wanted to get away from it so bad that for the very first time ever the Doctor’s Clothes regenerated into David Tennant’s clothes so that there would be absolutely NO reminder of the Jodi Whitaker on screen when Tennant, the favorite Doctor for most fans of the new era (Mine was Smith) returned.

In fact think about the episode itself assuming you’ve watched it. Apparently the only thing anybody is talking about concerning the series was cameos by the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th doctors which was a good idea in terms of drawing some eyeballs but was a really bad idea because all those cameos underscored just how much better each one of those characters were as the Doctor than Whitaker’s.

I must admit I find myself wanting to see the three David Tennant Episodes they are planning but I may not be in the majority. The good folks at Nerdrotic did a livestream reviewing the show and their reaction in the fan world seems otherwise.

As Nerdrotic put it at the start of his Doctor Who Livestream on the finale:

This is obligation and we’ll certainly talk about the VERY long episode made longer because I was stealing the iplayer and I had to refresh it every five ten minutes for it to work. Yeah she’s gone, it’s over. I know everybody’s going to be excited about David Tennant and then Russell T Davies coming back in two years but I’m not. There were some nice little moments, none of them included Jodi Whitaker the first female Doctor played by Jodi Whitaker Who will now be the last female doctor played by Jodi Whitaker who we will lovingly called Dr. Karen SHE DEAD so now that’s good finally gone.

And that was pretty much the nicest thing they had to say about it in two hours.

Dave Cullen had nothing better to say on his show either.

In conclusion I believe it doesn’t matter if they bring back one of the most popular Doctors in the form of David Tennant. In my opinion the damage to Doctor Who’s lore and it’s legacy is already done.

Will the gamble work. Will it be too little too late and will they decide that the 1st Doctor is William Hartnell after all?

And of course the Doctor as Mr. Cullen reminds us after Tennant the next doctor is going to be portrayed as a Gay Black Doctor with a Trans companion. I kid you not.

Well that’s going to bring the folks back who didn’t want to have an agenda shoved down their throats is it? In fact the whole idea that you will have three episodes of Tennant with Catherine Tate returning as Donna (and hopefully Bernard Cribbins too if he’s physically able) recreating the glory days will, in my opinion draw an even bigger contrast to the in your face gay/trans agenda pushed on a show that was a nationwide English icon.

Given that the woke is dying and losing all over the world maybe they will change their minds. Perhaps this is to give the BBC time to see if the shift is permanent and settle for the first black Doctor rather than pushing a LBBTQRSTURWXYZ card in 2024 and attempt to make the show right again.

I doubt it, the show. No matter how much the country rejects this agenda, the folks in charge at the BBC have embraced it fully and unless and until their own jobs are in jeopardy the agenda trumps all.

I think Nerdrotic & Dave Cullen are right, I think the Tennant gamble will fail to save the show but I’ll give the three episodes a shot to see if it’s Doctor Who or if it’s the Woke agenda delivered by a familiar face.

I have a feeling it’s the latter.

Update: Was not aware that Bernard Cribbins had died in July but it is possible that he shot scenes before his death.

Thank Those Horrible No Good White European Cultures and The Doctors They Produced That You Haven’t Died from Pneumonia or Tuberculosis

Posted: October 26, 2022 by datechguy in culture, medicine
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As I sit on my couch on the 4th day of antibiotics for Pneumonia coughing up interesting green patterns I found myself contemplating how people handled the disease prior to antibiotics.

I did some searching and it didn’t take me very long to figure out just how damn lucky I am to have been born in 1963 rather than 1863.

I looked up Pneumonia, it’s been known since early Greek Civilization and discovered that one in four used to die from it. In fact from 1917 to my mother’s death in 2012 a Mass was said on the feast of St. John the Baptist by my family in payment of a vow made by my grandmother for the recovery of my infant Uncle John from the disease

Fortunately for the world those horrible terrible no good imperialistic White European scientists were on the case:

A novel technique called antiserum therapy soon began, and by 1913, anti-pneumococcal serum therapy, if given early in disease progression, was able to reduce mortality from 25% to 7.5%. However, this treatment method was slow, costly, and time-consuming.

On Sunday my Nurse practitioner had quipped that Pneumonia had been going around and most of the people she saw that weekend had caught it. I thought about the people I saw coming and going from Urgent care that day and imagined one if four doomed to die from it.

In the 1930s, the first antibacterial agent,. Although sulfapyridine gained a lot of notoriety when it was used to treat Winston Churchill’s bacterial pneumonia in 1942, this agent was quickly set aside upon the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin in the early 1940s.

By 1977 a vaccine was introduced by 2000 a 2nd which could protect against even some antibiotic resistant strains was created. While people still die of Pneumonia today particularly in third world countries for a person like me in America while I have to deal with the cough and aches my biggest worry barring complications is if I have enough vacation and sick days left to cover the time I’m off.

Of course if in the days of my grandparents all born in the 1800’s Pneumonia boasted it was the “Captain of the men of death” Tuberculosis could turn to it and say: “Hold my beer”

TB known also as consumption till about 100 years ago like Pneumonia is an old disease. There were indications of the disease in Egyptian mummies and written records from China, India, and Ancient Israel. In Ancient Greece the disease was well known and even if you lived in an empire where the sun never set in the mid 1800’s it didn’t mean much to TB

In 1838-39, up to a third of English tradesmen and employees died of TB, whereas the same proportion decreased to a sixth in the upper class

Just a reminder in 1838 England was the most developed nation in the history of the world and one sixth of their ELITES died from Consumption.

It ravaged populations an example:

By the beginning of the 19th century, tuberculosis, or “consumption,” had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived. Victims suffered from hacking, bloody coughs, debilitating pain in the lungs and fatigue

Run that through your head for a moment.

For thousands of years TB slaughtered populations, but fortunately for the world those horrible terrible no good imperialistic white European scientists were on the job:

The famous scientist Robert Koch was able to isolate the tubercle bacillus. Using the methylene blue staining recommended by Paul Ehrlich, he identified, isolated and cultivated the bacillus in animal serum. Finally he reproduced the disease by inoculating the bacillus into laboratory animals.

Robert Koch presented this extraordinary result to the Society of Physiology in Berlin on 24 March 1882, determining a milestone in the fight against TB

In the decades following this discovery, the Pirquet and Mantoux tuberculin skin tests, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin (BCG) vaccine, Selman Waksman streptomycin and other anti-tuberculous drugs were developed. Koch contributed also to the elucidation of the infectious etiology of TB and for his scientific results, he was awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1905

Despite the efforts of these horrible white people and the vaccines and treatments they and their successors developed, TB, while not thinning the world’s herd dramatically as it once did , is still a danger killing 1.5 million each year but there is some good news:

Around five percent of the 9.5 million people who contract TB each year are resistant to commonly-prescribed antibiotics, making them difficult to treat. ​Until recently, “the situation with drug-resistant TB was horrible,” Spigelman said. ​Patients were forced to take five to eight pills a day, and often a daily injection, for up to two years, with horrible side effects and a cure rate of just 20 to 30 percent. ​But a new drug regimen BPaL, first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019, consists of just three pills a day for six months, and has far fewer side effects and a cure rate of 90 percent, Spigelman said. ​”I think it’ll really be an amazing game-changer.”

So when you think of all the things in the world that are annoying your particularly if you are a leftist railing against microaggressions and white culture, take a moment to consider how lucky you are to be living in 2022 and if you’re really perceptive take a moment when nobody is looking to thank your lucky starts for all those horrible terrible no good imperialistic white European scientists and doctors whose work allow you to live long enough to gripe about the horror of being “misgendered” or having someone fail to use your desired pronouns in your august presence.

Closing note John Hopkins press has a book out on the subject titled Pneumonia Before Antibiotics Therapeutic Evolution and Evaluation in Twentieth-Century America by Scott H. Podolsky. If you found this post interesting you might consider it a worthwhile read.

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