Jim Bouton | Terry Lennox | The Long Goodbye

Looking at a clip of The Long Goodbye and noticing the name of the actor who played Terry Lennox.

Decided to look him up because I don't recall ever seeing him in anything else.

Here's Wikipedia on Jim Bouton, who played Terry Lennox:

James Alan 'Jim' Bouton (born March 8, 1939) is an American retired professional baseball player. Bouton played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a pitcher for the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots, Houston Astros, and Atlanta Braves between 1962 and 1978. He has also been a best-selling author, actor, activist, sportscaster and one of the creators of Big League Chew.

Bouton retired midway through the 1970 season, shortly after the Astros sent him down to the minor leagues. After a handful of unsatisfactory appearances, Bouton left baseball to become a local sports anchor for New York station WABC-TV, as part of Eyewitness News; he later held the same job for WCBS-TV. Bouton also became an actor, playing the part of Terry Lennox in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), plus the lead role of Jim Barton in the 1976 CBS television series Ball Four, which was loosely adapted from the book and was canceled after five episodes. Decades later, Bouton would also have a brief one-line cameo as a pitching coach in the James L. Brooks film How Do You Know.

Who would have guessed?

Macron Wins But So Does Le Pen

Macron won the second round of the presidential election in France, as expected. Of course, with the upset over Brexit and the US presidential race, ‘expected’ has taken on a meaning tinged with an understanding that nothing is expected to definitely be ‘as expected’ any longer.

A lot of voters entered a null vote, indicating that they didn’t like either candidate. That is not an invalid vote as in UK elections, but a positive vote indicating a preference.

That aside, Marine Le Pen got 10,644,118 votes (33.9% of the vote) against Macron’s 20,753,797 votes (66.1% of the vote).

In the 2002 election, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front took 4,804,713 votes in the first round.

In the run-off Jacques Chirac took 25,537,956 votes, representing 82.21% of the votes cast and Jean-Marie Le Pen took 5,525,032 votes, representing 17.79% of the votes.

So Marine Le Pen has doubled the votes and the percentage. Well yes, she might have gained a lower percentage if those null votes had gone to Macron.

But the raw numbers would still show that between 2002 and today, Le Pen the daughter – leader of the National Front – got twice as many votes as her father did fifteen years ago.

And that is a bad result for France and for the world.

Originally posted on No More Pencils under the same title Macron Wins But So Does Le Pen

What they really mean about Obama’s Wall Street speech

What they really mean about Obama’s Wall Street speech is that it is tainted by the suspicion of an agreement that when he resigned, certain people would pay to hear him speak in return for favours given.

You can’t bribe a president in office or before he gets into office. You can’t bribe a prime minister, or a first minister, or any leader in a relatively open society. You can’t because sooner or later they will be found out. The money can be paid to an offshore account behind a wall of secrecy – but sooner or later it will be found out.

Or if it isn’t found out, then the tension of worrying that it might be found out will drain all the joy out of the money.

There is a simpler way. Just promise that when the president or the prime minister, etc., resigns – that he or she can give speeches at $10,000 a plate or whatever. And the speech can be deadly dull and not worth the cost of attending. But those who promised to attend will attend – and the money will be paid and nothing can be proved – and that is how people get away with it.

Not that anyone thinks Obama has done this – the problem is that he is tainted by the whiff of suspicion on those who wouldn’t think twice and perhaps haven’t thought twice about doing it.

This article originally posted on No More Pencils under the same title

cPanel - The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI

I noticed a check box to activate CGI on a site I was setting up in cPanel.

Here's the barebones from From TechWalla

The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, protocol is used to run guestbooks, forums and other interactive scripts on websites, and cPanel provides webmasters and bloggers with a number of ways to get CGI access. Make a more useful and dynamic website by accessing and installing CGI scripts through cPanel.

The CGI Center includes scripts for a guestbook, a random HTML generator that rotates text messages, a statistics counter, the current time and date, a countdown timer for New Year's or some other special occasion, CGI email, a website search engine and scripts for various advertising banners.

Bombogenesis For The Air Masses

Bombogenesis is a mid-latitude cyclone that drops in surface barometric pressure by 24 or more millibars in a 24-hour period. The height contours pack around the center of rotation and the number of height contours increases rapidly in the developing stages.

Blackrock Overtakes British Government as Major Shareholder at Lloyds Bank

In the Business section of The Observer in mid-January I read that Blackrock has overtaken the British Government as the major shareholder at Lloyds Bank

The major US investment firm Blackrock has become the biggest shareholder in Lloyds Banking Group usurping the government, which is selling down its stake.

Blackrock, which describes itself as the world's biggest fund manager, with $5.1 trillion of investments, owns the largest stake in the bailed-out bank as the Treasury’s holding has now fallen to 5.95%.

The Treasury makes a disclosure to the stock market every time its stake in Lloyds falls by one percentage point, and an update earlier last month showed its holding falling below 7%.

In a stock market announcement on Monday, the Treasury said it had sold a further 700,O00 shares to push its stake below 6%.

Mervyn King on Brexit

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England prior to Mark Carney, is reported as saying in an interview with Sky News:

During the referendum campaign, someone said the real danger of Brexit is you'll end up with higher interest rates, lower house prices and a lower exchange rate, and I thought: dream on.

Because that's what we've been trying to achieve for the past three years and now we have a chance of getting it.