A minor annoyance, I guess, since I have a touch screen, but it is a bit annoying when you know longer have a cursor that you can operate from the touchpad on your computer. It happened all of a sudden. Here one minute, gone the next.
Should be an easy fix, right? I tried AI, which gave me an 8 step solution, but lost me after step 2. So, I went to YouTube. A number of videos. I picked one, which was 3 minutes 38 seconds long, and lost me at 51 seconds.
Maybe if I turn the computer off, it will be there when I turn it on. Or maybe the computer won’t even turn on. Like Edie’s car.
I am getting a late start on this post today. We just had a very nice lunch. Fresh salmon, broccoli, and mujadara. Musjadara? An Egyptian dish made of lentils, rice and onions. Why did we have such a nice lunch on a cool, rainy Saturday? Because that is what we had for dinner last night (with some other things), and these were left overs. We can have the same thing tomorrow if we want, although the salmon will be a day older and maybe better in fish cakes than on its own.
Yes, I know this is the first day of Sukkot, as well as Shabbat, but we did not go the synagogue today. Services on Sukkot are a bit much for me. I think Sukkot back in Second Temple times (around the turn of the millennium) would have been fun. The services in Jerusalem were apparently very musical and festive. And when we put a sukkah every year, and entertained in it, we had much fun. And this year, we have been invited to four sukkah parties and will be able to make three of them, weather permitting (a big question for tomorrow). But services at the synagogue where you wave the lulav, and march around the synagogue, and have a service even longer than usual? Not for me, thank you.
Our good Israeli friends are now at Dulles Airport, about to board their plane for Rome, where they will change planes and head home. They, and two of their sons, were (in various combinations) our house guests for the last two weeks and they are always welcome. The two elders (only about 15-20 years younger than we are) left in the middle (leaving the two younger sons with us) for one of the two weeks, when they wanted to do a driving tour. They have been here many times (and lived in the U.S. for a couple of years about 25 years ago), and wanted to go somewhere new. So I suggested they follow the route we took in August with a few changes, which they pretty much did, and had a great time.
They spent two nights at the restored Lackawanna Radisson Hotel in Scranton, toured a coal mine, visited the railroad museum, and went on to Troy, NY and then up to Saratoga Springs, NY and over to Williamstown MA and the Clark Museum. Saratoga Springs and Williamstown were not part of our August trip, but part of a trip taken two years ago, and were places I suggested they would enjoy (which they did). But then, they went to their other advisor, a man whom I also know, named ChatGPT, who suggested that they drive east to Plymouth MA, which is not something I would have suggested, but it was good for them, as the landing of the Mayflower and things related appear not to be items found on Israeli elementary school curricula, so they learned something. Chat (dear ChatGPT: do I know you well enough by now just to call you Chat?) then suggested they go to Newport RI and to Mystic Seaport (good choices), which they did before heading home with a stop outside of Philadelphia to visit old friends there. But, Chat did not tell them to make a stop that I would have suggested before Mystic, and that would have been the Whaling Museum in New Bedford MA, which is something special.
Hopefully, we can relax the rest of today. We have a dinner tonight (we being ten of us) with a bunch of friends – a group that has a pot-luck (is it pot-luck if the dishes are all coordinated beforehand?) dinner every couple of months. And then tomorrow, two sukkah parties and dinner with Michelle and Josh.
Watching off and on the news of the day – it seems that Mr. Trump is soon going to be running out of feet to shoot himself in, but he seems to have phoenix-like qualities, so we can’t get too cocky. For example, I just saw an article that says that independents in Texas may be breaking for Paxton over Talarico. Hard to imagine, so it looks like some additional work is needed there. And I also saw something that said that an AI platform had hacked into three government websites. That is pretty disturbing: government websites control things like atomic bombs. Maybe AI will actually be able to destroy us all.
But which of the AI platforms will first be able to do that? It will be quite a rivalry, and humans may not be involved at all. It may simply be a race AI to AI to see who can be the most destructive first. In this no-holds barred competition, I guess it is possible that the AI systems will be able to destroy each others before they destroy us. We may just get out of this first after all.
Can I play the odds at Kalshi?
