Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, October 24, 2025
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29 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
I’m back!
Dear Wife and I arrived home yesterday. Our trip to Italy was great but sad.
Sad? DW’s 60 year old brother Leonito aka Lito died of a heart attack on Sep 28. He had suffered a stroke one week earlier but DW spoke to him on Sep 27. His sudden death was shocking.
We were in Palermo when Lito passed away. Our travel plans changed and we flew to Tacloban for the funeral. Thank god for Sophie and Sonia our travel agents. Our Italy itinerary had to be rearranged in addition to getting us flights from Palermo to Tacloban and back.
Our side trip to Switzerland didn’t happen*. We did tour all parts of Italy DW and I wanted to see.
I could write lots about the trip but at the moment I’m concentrating on getting the household back in order after a month of neglect.
In less than 3 weeks I’m off on a book signing tour. According to my LA my latest book is doing better than anticipated and expectations were high to start with.
So Amazon crashed a few days ago. Why the world didn’t immediately come to an end, I don’t know.
*- No problem. DW and I visited Switzerland in 1997, Betty (DW’s cousin) and Hubie understood we couldn’t come for their grandson’s christening, in any case we may be going to Switzerland again next year as part of a trip to Germany.
Sorry to hear your sad news. Glad you made it back safely. Missed your commentary.
Is anybody going to put it all together? I may be a puritan but I think gambling is on a par with drugs as a danger to civil society.
NBA coach Chauncey Billups, player Terry Rozier arrested in FBI gambling probe
NCAA approves rule change letting players, staff bet on pro sports
Industry Profile: Casinos/Gambling
This made me laugh!
No, Willie Nelson is not playing the anti-Bad Bunny halftime alternative
The Florida headline of the day- Thieves cut hole in mall roof, steal $50,000 in sneakers
I’ve been having a lot of problems with the Chrome browser. It is not playing well anymore with my VPN (Surfshark). Even with trying bypassing I end up having to turn off the VPN to get anything done. So I’m experimenting with Firefox and Edge.
Anybody have any thoughts on this? Using HP Laptop and Windows 11 is the OS.
@Scott: I’ve always used the Opera browser. It has a built-in VPN. It’s generally worked fairly well for me.
The headline of the day- Illegal alien failed CDL test 10 times in 2 months before fatal Florida crash that killed 3
I always wanted to comment on that crash but never got around to it but never got around to it.
What probably occurred- Singh missed the Fort Pierce exit and as it is over 30 miles to the next exit that is why he attempted the illegal maneuver
Another thing- The driver of the vehicle that struck the truck had to have been distracted. How else did he miss the semi that was in the middle of its illegal maneuver when the accident happened?
@Scott:
Drugs are worse IMHO. That opinion coming from my years of working in the medical field and having witnessed a few fatal overdoses. Gambling is a disease but it won’t cause you to croak.
We’re going to read more and more of these sports gambling type stories. I’m afraid the legalization of sports gambling has opened a pandora’s box.
This message has been brought to you by the letter t on my laptop keyboard. It had been regularly refusing to type for about a day. The cause- some debris underneath it which I have now cleared.
Trying to type with a malfunctioning t on your keyboard is no fun at all. Only masochists would endure it as long as I did.
Re Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl….gotta laugh at the manufactured outrage. Nothing made the phoniness more clear than “Deacon Mike” Johnson grousing about BB’s selection and then conceding he has no idea who Bad Bunny is.
Dem outrage = Trump quid pro quo pardon of money laundering crypto convict and the unauthorized demolition of the East Wing.
GOP outrage = Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl.
Getting ready to have a birthday lunch with several dozen second graders. My youngest grand girl turns eight tomorrow and we’re taking cupcakes for her class. There’s an official birthday party Saturday at the skate rink, which I will pass on. Too loud.
People throw some money at kid’s birthdays. More than when we were raising our kids, anyway. Chucky Cheese used to be the only game in town for kid’s parties. Now there are rock climbing venues, gymnastic auditoriums, escape houses etc. that cater to kids parties.
Having a post Christmas – pre New Year birthday, mine was quite often overlooked in the holiday rush. Not that I minded much. I have always been uncomfortable being the center of attention.
@Charley in Cleveland:
That makes two of us. I don’t know anything about Bad Bunny either.
Well our fellow Americans are wising up. Democrats are now more trusted on economic matters than the gop.
Reality finally bites.
@Bill Jempty:
“That makes two of us. I don’t know anything about Bad Bunny either.”
But at least you aren’t demanding that the NFL remove him from the halftime show at the Super Bowl.
Yesterday I spent a few hours working a product list with prices, taxes, brands, etc. By quitting time I was 85% done. All such work files are on auto save, so they are uploaded to the cloud, specifically the corporate server on MS One Drive. IN addition, I still hit the save button now and then.
I still check the time stamp in the file manager before closing the file. Yesterday at around 7:30, the time stamp was 3:45. I hit save a dozen times, made changes, made changes and hit save, and the time stamps didn’t budge. So I saved he file to another location as well.
Today, retrieving from One Drive, it lacked about half the work I did. Fortunately the version saved elsewhere was complete.
This has happened before, but it doesn’t happen all the time (if it did, the cloud would be kind of useless). Last time I did report it to IT. They said they checked and everything was ok. Hell Week is coming*. Pretty soon I’ll be working huge files with 24 such listings. I need to make sure the progress gets saved. I’ll have to try IT again, I suppose.
@Moosebreath:
Of course you’re right. I’m only demanding the Miami Dolphins can win a NFL game against someone other than Jets.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/24/baltimore-student-ai-gun-detection-system-doritos
I love our new AI surveillance state.
@Bill Jempty:
And adding me makes three.
Though, tbf, that can be said of many a performer.
And for that matter, what is the Super Bowl anyway?
😉
@JohnSF:..what is the Super Bowl anyway?
When I had 11 cats it was it was what I used to feed them.
@Scott:
@Bill Jempty:
@JohnSF:
https://youtube.com/shorts/JFzskp7qaII?si=KHmTXWz3o14iTGnY
Josh Johnson nails it.
P.S. Bad Bunny is a GLOBAL superstar. If you don’t know anything about him, you need to expand your news sources. Because he’s in music, movies (Bullet Train with Brad Pitt), TV, has hosted SNL twice, and is one of, if not the, biggest artists on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. You not knowing Bad Bunny says more about your information sources than anything else.
@Bill Jempty:
I think the Dolphins have been stuck in deep, long term mediocrity since Don Shula retired. About the only highlight I can recall, is the brief period when they ran the Wildcat Offense and the time the rest of the league figured it out. That was back in 2010 or so, right?
@Gustopher:
Fortunate that the poor kid didn’t get roughed up, or worse,
killedsummarily executed.Also a good thing he didn’t have a bottle of fragrance labeled “Opium”. Otherwise, he may have been booked. Oh, wait, this was Baltimore. They would know better.
Of course, there is a nonzero chance that if he did have drugs on him, they just would have stolen it and passed it off to a shady bail bondsman.
@EddieInCA:
I’m familiar with Mr. Bunny, but it’s not my music: not enough adolescent alienation. And I don’t think he even mentions Satan once.
@Michael Reynolds:
Maybe he would if you played a BB CD backwards.
@EddieInCA:
Oh, I’ve heard the name.
Just as I have actually heard of the Super Bowl, despite my tendency to joke about it.
It’s just I haven’t had a pressing desire to investigate either in more depth.
Now though, I suppose I must go seek something out of the Bad Bunny.
I must just hope he’s not as liable to start, then stop for no apparent reason, as is American Football. 😉
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael, Michael, Michael –
The title of this Bad Bunny song is, literally, “T Am The Devil”.
@EddieInCA:
It can say a lot more about interests and taste.
Can you name the top contemporary authors in a genre you never read? Neither can I.
Ugh, MS keeps shoehorning Copilot into more and more unlikely places.
For instance, it just popped up on the search in page feature in Edge. You write a search term, and get either right away or as you move to each occurrence, a Copilot prompt more or less like “What does this page say about (search term)?”
It doesn’t happen every time, and I can’t quite tell what triggers it. I clicked it once just to see what it would do. nothing remotely useful for what I was trying to do. Worse, nothing at all I couldn’t have done with just search in fifteen seconds.
It did understand my abbreviated search terms. I’ll give it that.