Chez Chesler

The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were. ... Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change. ... Darkened restaurants glowed with candlelight in San Francisco while the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and other landmarks extinguished lights for an hour.

My kids have been playing Runescape for a few years.  Recently the folks behind it, Jagex, have added a site devoted to games, FunOrb, and I've been playing rapid chess there myself (online games against other humans.)

Is this joke original with me, or did I hear it somewhere?

Two great chess masters sit down to play a game.  White opens with pawn to king four (e4 for you youngsters).  Black silently studies the board.  Minutes go by, and after an hour Black tips over his king and says "You have an unbeatable position."

I suspect that nobody who is not a mathematician or computer scientist would find this funny.

Labels: chess, joke, math

I’ll throw in my two cents.  I doubt I’ve got anything to say that hasn’t been said already somewhere in the blogosphere.

• Governor Spitzer was doing his part to help wayward girls.  That’s commendable.
• Dinesh D’Souza disagrees with Alan Dershowitz, pointing out the prostitution has victims, in this case Mrs. Spitzer, their daughters, the citizens of New York, and Professor Dershowitz.  No man is an island, so it follows that every choice has consequences, good or bad, for non-participants. That doesn’t make them victims, and doesn’t justify criminalizing the behavior, if freedom is to have any meaning.
• I agree with those who are enjoying the exposure of former-prosecutor Spitzer’s hypocrisy, and the irony of the situation.
• In his dissent to Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Antonin Scalia suggests that the holding, that "majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest" means laws against prostitution cannot "survive rational-basis review."
• Around here, the Woburn and Burlington police have been running stings and surveillance operations to find escorts who are working in private rooms in local hotels.  I understand that streetwalking may be as disturbing to other users of the public streets as other vendors and business nuisances, but they are going after the same sorts of Internet-based escorts as Governor Spitzer did business with.  They are engaging, in private, in activities which would be completely legal were it not for the commercial aspect.  There are enough crimes with actual unwilling victims here (things like bicycle and GPS theft) that I’d much rather the limited police resources be directed towards solving or preventing those crimes.
• I heard Professor Dershowitz on WBZ-AM (haven’t been able to find this in a transcript online) saying something along the lines that if every politician who engaged in some indiscretion had to resign, we wouldn’t have any elected officials.  I disagree.  If these laws, which the Professor seems only now to be loudly complaining about, were enforced against every minor violation, the bad laws would be repealed.

Labels: Dershowitz, Prostitution, Spitzer

I'm watching the new Fox show New Amsterdam, the one whose premise bears an entirely accidental resemblance to Pete Hamill's Forever, about an immortal guy living in Manhattan (hmm -- I wonder what kind of rent control he's got on his apartment!)

Besides the hundreds of girlfriends in the 400 years he's been alive, he's had so many identical dogs that he calls them by number.  (His current dog is "36".)

I don't know where the show is going.  Last night it seemed to go in a Quantum Leap direction -- theorizing that one can flashback within their own lifetime, John Anderson remembers a time with parallels to the present when he failed to set right what once went wrong, so he'll do the right thing now.  It's not clear how many interesting places he's been -- is it Zelig or Forrest Gump or Mr. Peabody and the Wayback Machine?  (Unlike Hamill's protagonist, he can leave Manhattan, and can even leave the five boroughs.)  Anyway, we learned that during the Civil War he was a medic in the Washington, DC area.

Which means we may well finally have a show that's about Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Dog!

Labels: New Amsterdam, TV