1.31 On The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast, Stewart and journalist Gabriel Gatehouse attempt to understand why so many people bought into the QAnon conspiracy theory. The Financial Times: ““”They ended up in some unexpected places. If you take the main conspiracy theory points literally — Hillary Clinton and other global elites are in a cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles — then obviously it’s nonsense. But if you take QAnon as a sort of parable, where a group of powerful actors are effectively running things behind the scenes, it makes more sense.”
1.31 The New York Times buys Wordle from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures.”
1.31 Liz Cheney in a tweet: “Trump uses language he knows caused the Jan 6 violence; suggests he’d pardon the Jan 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy; threatens prosecutors; and admits he was attempting to overturn the election. He’d do it all again if given the chance.”
1.30 Trump admitted in a written statement that he’d wanted former Vice President Mike Pence to “overturn the election.” Commenting on Congressional efforts to clarify vote certification procedures, Trump said “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
1.28 Ivy’s first snow
1.30 Howard Hesseman dies at 81
1.29 Trump, at a rally in Texas: “Another thing we’ll do — and so many people have been asking me about it — if I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”
1.28 Police honor NYPD cop Jason Rivera at St. Patrick’s Cathedral one week after he and his partner were murdered in the line of duty.
1.27 Breakfast with Cara and Ivy at a diner in New Jersey.
1.26 The school board of McMinn County TN voted unanimously to remove the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum due to concerns about “objectionable language” and nudity in its cartoon depictions of the Holocaust.
1.26 Dinner with Paul and Anne at the Red Hat in Tarrytown.
1.26 Moulin Rouge
1.25 Music Man
1.24 Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker: The [Wordle] grids themselves might be key to the game’s appeal. They are more than abstract patterns. C. Thi Nguyen [says]“”Games are all about agency. . . what a player can do in a game and how the player is motivated. In Wordle, you start off with no guideposts, making a first guess more or less at random. Then, as you identify correct letters, a strategy forms, the same way poker players respond to cards revealed in the river. On Twitter, Nguyen described this as a process of “agency expansion.” Thus a Wordle grid serves as a record of the player’s agency, tracking the conditions she faced and the decisions she made as she played the game. A player might have faced walls of gray squares and then suddenly reached five greens on the very last turn. Or she may have earned one more green square with each turn, making a slow, but steady, crawl to the finish line. Each grid forms a grand narrative, an epic of victory or defeat in miniature. Nguyen wrote that the game is “a triumph of social graphic design.” He told me, “I can glance down a feed and see a bunch of my friends’ grids and know what happened.”
1.23 Roger Bennett on Twitter: “This game we just watched together. Single greatest I have ever witnessed. Arc of an Epic Poem. In days of yore, ballads would be written about it and sung for generations. Tapestries would be woven of that Kelce touchdown. In these times of chaos, nothing unites us like sports.”
1.23 The most thrilling weekend of playoff football began on Saturday with two games that were won with field goals kicked as time expired. In the first game, the Bengals upset the top-seeded Titans 19-16, winning the first road playoff win in franchise history on a 53 yard kick from Evan McPherson as time expired. The nightcap, a defensive slugfest played in single digit temperatures, the 49ers rode a touchdown scored on a blocked punt to a 13-10 victory over Aaron Rodgers an flaccid Packer offense. On Sunday’s first game, Tom Brady and the Bucs overcame a 27-3 third quarter Ram lead to tie the game with a TD with 70 seconds left. But Matthew Stafford hit Cooper Kupp with a 44 yard bomb with 26 second left, and Matt Gay hit a 26 yard kick as time expeired for the win–the third game won by the visiting team on a game-ending field goal. But the piece de resistance was Kansas City’s 42-36 OT victory over the Bills, in which a superb Patrick Mahomes outlasted an equally superb Josh Allen. In the astonishing final two minutes of regulation, the teams scored 25 points, the last three as time expired as Mahomes led KC on a 13 second drive to set up a field goal. Andy Reid: “”When things are grim, be the Grim Reaper.”
1.19 David Davis to Boris Johnson in Parliament: “I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday he did the opposite of that. So, I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear: Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain. “‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.'”
1.19 Mitch McConnell: “”If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”