Cheeps and Chirps for Dec. 31, 2020: Covid-19 pandemic edition

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comDec. 31, 2020 This largely wretched year has almost reached the end. Celebrate the best and worst — but, alas, mostly the worst — of December 2020 with my microblogging about the event that defined these past 12 months: The Covid-19 pandemic.

Covid-19 death count, part 4: Comparing Covid to recent U.S. respiratory pandemics

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comNov. 26, 2020 Infectious-disease outbreaks of the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic are extremely rare — fortunately. This is, however, at least the fourth pandemic that spreads through the air to have killed 100,000 or more Americans since the beginning of the 20th century. You’ve no doubt heard of the first item on […]

Yays, Nays and OKs for 3-9 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Nov. 30, 2023 In my quick-and-dirty 2023 Stanford football preview, I predicted that the Cardinal might compile a 4-8 record, “with Hawaii, Sacramento State, Colorado and Cal being the four likeliest victims and Arizona and Washington State the most vulnerable clubs among the middling-strength opponents.” I turned out to be […]

A quick-and-dirty 2023 Stanford football preview

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Aug. 31, 2023 College football is back! After a long offseason dominated by news of player transfers and the virtual dissolution of the once venerable Pac-12 Conference, teams are ready to take the field and play some games. Stanford is one of several teams under new management. Former Sacramento State […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 50

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com June 19, 2023 When done properly, masking is a safe and effective way to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 and other airborne diseases. It can also be cumbersome and uncomfortable. With the emergency phase of the novel coronavirus pandemic now ended, masking requirements seem to be a very rare exception […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 49

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com June 18, 2023 The public’s willingness to deal seriously with Covid-19, the deadliest pandemic in a century, began petering out long before the end of 2020. Some people never treated the disease as a true crisis; others weren’t willing to do so for longer than a few weeks. The American […]

Feb. 11–12, 2023, poker recap: Part 1

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Feb. 26, 2023 On Saturday, Feb. 11, I made my third visit to Wind Creek Bethlehem in the past eight months. It was my fourth overall trip to the casino in East Central Pennsylvania, and it saw me find a third different setting for poker at this particular venue. On […]

Year-end reflections for 2022

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Dec. 31, 2022 As I sit here on the cusp of the turning of the calendar, the biggest event in my life over the past year is obvious: I moved for the second time in less than 12 months and for what I hope will be the last time in […]

Farewell to seniors, and the end of an era: BYU downs Stanford, 35-26, in Shaw’s final game

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Nov. 29, 2022 The BYU football team ran for 358 yards and three touchdowns and easily fended off a fourth-quarter comeback attempt to defeat Stanford, 36-25, on Saturday night at Stanford Stadium. The Cougars raised their record to 7-5 in winning their final regular-season game as an independent before joining […]

More than a tablet; not yet a wallscreen

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Sept. 14, 2022 Shortly after Stanford’s 41-28 loss to USC on Saturday evening in a nationally televised ABC game, I tweeted the following: In 2020, when the pandemic made going out to watch sporting events at bars an unacceptably risky proposition, I watched games at home on a roughly 10-year-old […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 48

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Aug. 31, 2022 It’s been six months since my last post about the Covid-19 pandemic. As spring got under way, it became clear that the nation had reached an uneasy accommodation with the novel coronavirus. While the disease infected Americans at a hitherto unseen rate in the early weeks of […]

Aug. 7, 2022, poker recap: Part 2

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Aug. 24, 2022 After making a modest profit at a cash table, I transferred to table 16, seat eight in the poker room at Philadelphia Live (or Live!, as they style it) casino. I was about to play my first in-person poker tournament since Sunday, March 15, 2020, as the […]

Short takes: ‘Blindsight,’ ‘A Desolation Called Peace,’ ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’ and ‘The City & the City’

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com July 21, 2022  Canadian author Peter Watts spent two decades studying marine mammals before devoting his efforts to fiction. His fifth novel, per the Internet Science Fiction Database, was Blindsight, published in 2006, which draws heavily on scientific knowledge and speculation about the way human brains function, properly or otherwise. The narrator […]

July 5, 2022, poker recap: Part 1

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJuly 12, 2022 The most dramatic moment of my $1-$2 no limit Texas holdem poker session on the evening of Tuesday, July 5, came in the 11 o’clock hour, perhaps 60 minutes before I decided to cash out. I’d recently moved to a new table. At this new spot, facing players I […]

Short takes: ‘Sea of Tranquility,’ ‘No One Goes Alone,’ ‘The Hercules Text,’ ‘Deepsix’ and ‘The Minders’

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMay 28, 2022 Sea of Tranquility, the sixth novel from Emily St. John Mandel, is frustratingly elusive. The slender volume begins as a historical drama; jumps ahead to a moment, early 2020, when the world was on the precipice of a historical health emergency; and wanders into the future, when the history […]

Blood, hike and tears: Doings on a recent Tuesday

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 25, 2022 I had a beautiful, sad afternoon to walk in the woods on Tuesday. Several days earlier, I’d arranged to give blood at noon at Paramount Hudson Valley, a theater in downtown Peekskill, N.Y. This town is perched above the Hudson River more or less opposite Bear Mountain State Park […]

Short takes: ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ and ‘Captain Marvel’

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 20, 2022 One thing I’ve been able to do during the pandemic is catch up on a whole bunch of popular culture, mainly movies, that I’d never seen before. Spending 363 out of 365 nights a year at home for two years running seems to have that effect. When the novel […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 47

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comFeb. 28, 2022 The United States has reached a strange pandemic crossroads. On the one hand, new Covid-19 diagnoses have fallen by more than 90 percent from Jan. 14. Then, nearly 807,000 cases were reported daily. On Sunday, Feb. 27, that had dropped to roughly 65,285[1]. As the crush of cases has […]

Geekery: How automated short weblinks and a cloud-based spreadsheet didn’t quite prevent an easily distracted writer from finishing a recent blog post

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comFeb. 17, 2022 To say that I am easily distracted is like saying that the pope is a notable religious figure: It’s an understatement. Let me try to give you an idea of where my brain wandered over the course of preparing my previous blog post. That item, entitled “Vignette: The empty […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 46

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comFeb. 5, 2022 I was idly glancing at my Covid-19 spreadsheet on Friday morning when I noticed something truly startling. The U.S. recorded 20,301,167 new Covid diagnoses in January of this year, exceeding the 20,024,800 cases that were found here throughout all of 2020. Just one month into the new year, 2022 […]

More notes on my video consumption habits

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJan. 31, 2022 For nearly two years, I have stayed home most evenings in an attempt to ride out a pandemic that fewer people seem to take seriously by the day. This has afforded me plenty of time to watch movies. I’ve taken advantage of it, especially over the last three months […]

Grinding away the miles: Notes on walking, past and present, and on dressing for cold weather

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJan. 30, 2022 With approximately 30.5 hours to go as I write this, the month of January 2022 is poised to be at least my second-best month ever in terms of miles walked per day. That information comes courtesy of Health, Apple’s standard iOS app, which has been tracking my walking ever […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 45

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comDec. 31, 2021 Well, it’s safe to say that 2021 did not turn out how I’d hoped it would. I’m sure hundreds of millions of people around the world feel the same way. Covid-19 vaccines arrived with nigh-miraculous speed at the tail end of 2020 and, despite major early problems with distribution, […]

2021 Stanford football by the numbers, part 1: The rushing offense

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comNov. 9, 2021 Stanford football fans know that the Cardinal’s running attack is weak. But just how weak is it? I assembled some figures from school history and crafted a spreadsheet to analyze them. What I found was pretty dire. (See the end of this post for methodology.) Stanford’s media guide contains […]

Bad-Ugly-Good: Taking stock of 3-5 Stanford

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comNov. 5, 2021 What started in September as an uneven season has transformed in October into a nightmare. Since Stanford upset No. 3 Oregon, 31-24 in overtime on Oct. 2, the Cardinal has suffered three straight losses. Arizona State (5-3, 3-2) might have a claim on being a decent team, but Washington […]