Numerology

People familiar with cribbage know that there are a couple of “magic” numbers in that game. 29, for example, is the highest score you can get in a hand. And then there’s 19, which is the only score between 0 and 29 that you cannot get in a hand. It’s just not possible. People I played with in the long ago past used to declare 19 points for a hand with no points. Everyone knew what that meant.

Although I’m not a big football fan, I was fascinated when I tuned in to the end of the Steelers/Chargers game last night to discover that the score at the time (11-10) had never been the final score in an NFL game. Never. It looked like the final play might ruin that, but the referees called an illegal forward pass, which negated the interception and resulting touchdown, so the game did, indeed, end at 11-10. The call, which officials later called a mistake, also benefited bookies because it kept the spread at 1 point instead of the 5 point spread most were betting on.

I made my first new post to my WordPress web site since adding the LiveJournal plugin and was happy to see that it acted as I hoped it would. I had this fear that it would run amok and add all sorts of random posts. I also had my first spam attack on the WordPress site this weekend, 10 spammy comments posted in response to my previous entries. However, since I have the site set up in a way that comments require administrator approval, I was able to nuke them all in a few clicks and none of them made it to the site.

I was very impressed by Obama’s interview on 60 Minutes last night. It was good to see him out of campaign mode, where he was forced to parrot the same stump statements over and over again. He looks like a very intelligent man who can think on his feet and even get a little feisty with the interviewer (as he did with Kroft over the dog/mother-in-law thing). His smile is occasionally fleeting, but it lights his face up in that passing moment.

I was a little sad to see Terence and Sarah go on Amazing Race. They were fierce competitors for the most part, even if I didn’t like Terence’s attitude very much. The fact that he couldn’t eat meat, not even for $1 million, may haunt him for a while. Not just any meat, of course, fatty sheep butt meat, but still. Nick and Starr are doing fantastically well, and I hope the troubles they previewed for next week aren’t as severe as they want us to think. Thanks to the fast forward, they should have a little extra time to mess around. The website clips show a lot of things that we don’t get to see, like the fact that Nick and Starr forgot some of their belongings at the fast forward restaurant and had to go back to get it while they were headed for the pit stop.