Category Archives: Rant

The Washington Post and Me*

Rant, ,

A fellow student at Southlands College in London grew up in the Washington DC area — Columbia, Maryland to be exact. He had many stories of growing up in a planned city around the time it was founded. One story wasn’t about Columbia though — it was about when he was a paperboy, delivering the Washington Post. He remembered when he delivered the Post at the time of the Watergate scandal. I could tell he was proud to have been a small part of providing his neighbors the news about Watergate. I was very impressed. I’d heard of the Washington Post, but had never read it.

In 1985 my husband and I moved to the DC area and one of the first things we did was subscribe to the Washington Post. We read it daily, and spent much time reading the thick Sunday edition. Dean read the news, sports, and editorial sections. I might have read the news, but was mostly interested in the Style and Food sections and Book World. I may have also read the comics. I was proud to be a Washington Post subscriber and may have name dropped it occasionally when talking to friends and family who did not live in the DC area.

In 2000 I answered a question posed on Twitter by Jay Matthews, education writer and columnist for the Washington Post and he used my story in an article on teaching creative writing — in fact he used my story as the lede! To go from thinking the Washington Post was a magical publication to subscribing to it to being featured in it was quite a trip.

We’ve kept a subscription to the newspaper for the entire time we’ve been in the area — that’s over forty years. It has often been the first source of breaking news, especially when it was available to read online. When Jeff Bezos purchased it we were not alarmed.

Over the years I’ve come to rely on the Capital Weather Gang for skilled weather reporting, Ron Charles for book reviews, and Tom Sietsema for restaurant reviews. I even corresponded a bit with Tom Shales — once the TV critic for the Post. We bonded over both having been born in the same Illinois town. I found his TV recommendations perfect.

About the time the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President, I started reevaluating my relationship with the Washington Post. I know several people who cancelled their subscription then. I couldn’t do it. We had history.

But now it’s different. Earlier this month The Washington Post cut a third of its staff, including Ron Charles and Tom Sietsema. Except for the Capital Weather Gang, I have no reason to read the post anymore. (Tom Shales was laid off in 2010.) Like many others, I feel betrayed by the Washington Post. I should have seen the warning when Bezos bought it. When Harris was snubbed.

Dean and I are going to think on it a bit before we pull the plug on our 40+ year relationship with the Washington Post, but the only reason I’m keeping it now is for the weather and the archives.

*or is it ‘I’?

A tale of a few clothing stores

Rant, Rave, Things, , , , , ,

There are a few stores in my town where I have recently bought clothes. Three are in the same shopping center and one is closer to the downtown area. I’ve written about one of the stores at the shopping center before — that one is my favorite. I like all three though, and like the parking situation.

Those stores have people who work in them that are kind, honest, empathetic and non-critical. They help me find exactly what I am looking for and tell me if something is not exactly right for me. They also at least recognize that I shop there often.

The store nearer downtown is a different story, and I’ve spent my last dollar there. I’d noticed it years ago, but since it seemed to only sell underwear, I never went it. Finally, though, when I saw a sign outside mentioning Cut Loose, one of my favorite brands of clothing, I stopped in. The front of the store holds tops and the back of the store has a rack of jeans — one brand I like is featured there (NYDJ). The rest of the store has underwear and pajamas.

I have found a couple of items that I really liked and wear there — a pair of jeans and a top. I prefer it when no one helps me, when I can look through the store on my own and decide if I like something or not. However, usually either the owner helps me or her associate does. Once I had both helping me when I was trying on bras. They also grabbed a bunch of tops for me to try on and exclaimed how wonderful they all looked on me. I ended up buying a number of tops, plus the bra that day. At one point during my fitting, one of the woman suggested I exercise. I’d never had anyone tell me that (except doctors and my kids and husband). I was offended, but still purchased the items.

Of the items I bought that day, the only thing I’ve worn much is the bra. I keep trying on one item, but it just is not me. The others, well, I have worn them once or twice, but they are not me either.

I’ve continued to go to the store, sometimes buying items, usually not. The most recent visit was my last though. I’d been to lunch with a friend, and parked in the parking lot where this store is located. I figured I had some time left on my parking stub, so went to check out what was on sale. The owner was there and asked if I’d shopped there before — I was masked, so I understand that she didn’t recognize me, but when I dropped my mask, she still didn’t. That’s okay. She asked my size, and pointed me to what she called cute tops in the front. I found nothing cute, in fact everything was pretty tacky.

I mentioned that the jeans I were wearing (same brand as they carry) were size 4. She told me they were too long. I countered that I liked my pants long and she argued if they were shorter they could be rolled up to become capris.

Anyway, I’ll stick to the nicer and easier (and free) parking shopping center stores and forget this one exists.

WordleBot is a smug, pompous, conceited botsplainer

Musings, Rant,

Sure, after I finish playing Wordle I do not have to check WordleBot’s egotistical analysis of my daily attempts but I do anyway. Call it hopeful (maybe WordleBot will praise me) or maybe self-destructive (WordleBot often shames me for not using the same guesses as it does), but I check in with WordleBot about 95% of the time. The only times I don’t check is when I’ve made a very stupid guess.

The NYT WordleBot introduction page has this to say about WordleBot:

“WordleBot is a tool that will take your completed Wordle and analyze it for you. It will give you overall scores for luck and skill on a scale from 0 to 99 and tell you at each turn what, if anything, you could have done differently — if solving Wordles in as few steps as possible is your goal.”

Josh Katz and Matthew Conlen, New York Times

The thing is, WordleBot never loses. But WordleBot doesn’t play the hard version either. It’s always using words that do not have the letters previously uncovered. I always play the hard version.

Another gripe I have with WordleBot is that it’s happy to give me positive reinforcement if I do worse than it, but if I get the correct word in fewer tries than WordleBot it tells me I was very lucky. Not “Congratulations, you beat me!” but more like “Eh, lucky guess.”

Today, for instance, I guessed the correct word in two tries. WordleBot guessed it in three. Here’s what WordleBot had to say:

“You got it! But, with 10 solutions still to choose from, this was a very lucky guess.”

WordleBot July 19, 2022

I am not alone in my criticism of WordleBot. Back in April (before I knew about WordleBot), Christopher Livingston over at PC Gamer wrote an amusing article with an equally amusing title, The official Wordle companion bot is here to tell you how bad you are at Wordle. Also in April, Mashable’s Cecily Moran wrote NYT’s new ‘WordleBot’ will passive-aggressively insult your strategy. Finally, Alice O’Connor, associate editor at Rock Paper Scissors wrote an article about WordleBot called Wordle’s official WordleBot analysis make me feel even more foolish.