For Your Amusement
There’s a fun article in today’s NY Post about vanity license plates. The initial cost to get one is $60. Of course, NYC being what it is, owners are soaked an additional $31.25 annually. Many applications have been rejected. For example: the eff word spelled with PH, MURDERQ, PUSSY, GONAD, SCMBAG, SKREWU, and political tags such as OBAMA666, TRIMBUSH, TRUMPEM and NVRTRUMP. How did Kramer’s ASSMAN slip through the cracks?
Even more amusing than the above is the news that Obama is one of porn star Sara J’s 1.1 million followers. I can’t fault him, although I doubt Michelle will take it kindly. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when she finds out, which she probably has by now. Anyway, several years ago I sent Miss J a tweet asking if she were interested in doing a book. Why her? She reminds me of girls I went to high school with and she seems totally committed to her profession and completely without qualm. She — or her screeners, most likely — didn’t respond. I didn’t ask again. Like Don Corleone, my tendency is to ask once. I never returned to the site. I don’t follow celebrities. There’s more than enough news about them. I once read an interview where Sara said her mom supports her but she didn’t want her step dad to find out what she does for a living. I wonder if he’s found out in the interim. How in the world would someone with such a high profile keep it a secret for very long?
In another NY Post article, Reed Tucker offers thoughts on when to draw the line. Here are highlights, edited by yours truly: Advocates declare all the available options should be rejected to the fraction of approximately 1/2.718, which works out to .3679 or 37%. It’s called Optimal Stopping, which has been around since the 19th century and involves a mathematical algorithm used to determine the moment to act when faced with numerous choices while information about future options is limited. Here’s a practical application regarding the dreaded apartment search: spend 37% of your time, eleven days if you’re giving yourself a month, exploring your options. Here’s another example: the best way for an employer to maximize the potential to hire the best candidate is to evaluate the first 37, then offer the job to the first person who surpasses those. On love: play the field for about six or seven years, then stick with the first person who comes along who’s better than all the others you’ve dated to that point. This and other ideas are delivered in a new book: The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives by Kit Yates.
Here’s my only comment for today on corona, culled from a blurb in the World News column in the Post. A swami in India claims to have a perfect cure — drinking cow urine. He also boasts about bathing in cow dung.
Not much action at the floating book shop on this glorious day. By far the best thing that happened was finding the prime parking spot open when I returned home - even after having to drive around the block and wait for a light to change to get to it! It’s silly how that bit of dumb luck has elevated my spirits. I don’t have to move the car until after Thursday’s session and the toil is minimized. My thanks to the guy who bought The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King, and to the gentleman who selected Mary Chesnut’s Civil War by Mary Chesnut and C. Vann Woodward and A History of the American Revolution by John Alden. What made the latter purchase interesting is that the man, a regular customer, recently underwent triple bypass surgery. He said he was undeterred by the current hysteria. The same for Mr. Conspiracy, aka Steve, whom I’ll let have the last word, although I suspect time has altered it in his memory, as I googled to see to whom his mom’s saying might be attributed and found it has been engraved on trinkets and is really about households and not a philosophy of life, although his version makes sense, at least to my twisted mind: “Be clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to enjoy life.”
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