Saturday News & Notes: A Bit of Football

Against all odds, there's some football in my Twitter feed.  Amazing, no?

Giants questions: Offensive line, Tom Quinn's status, injuries and more #nyg http://t.co/oPaM36m4L8 pic.twitter.com/WetpnnRzSw

— Big Blue View (@bigblueview) May 30, 2015

Saturday Morning Reading Room: The Jobs Report

Saturday mornings are my favorite time of the week.  I get up early and have the whole house to myself.

Here's what's caught my eye:

217,000 Jobs Added, Nudging Payrolls to Levels Before the Crisis (NY Times)
"Em­ploy­ers hired 217,000 work­ers in May, the La­bor De­part­ment re­port­ed on Fri­day, enough to fi­nal­ly lift to­tal pay­rolls above where they were be­fore the fi­nan­cial col­lapse near­ly six years ago...  

For the fourth con­sec­u­tive month... em­ploy­ers added more than 200,000 po­si­tions, the first time that has hap­pened in 14 years."

This is What Passes for News These Days...

Not much in the way of interesting news today.  Plenty of geekdom, though.

Source: No more blackjack for Ben Affleck at Las Vegas casino (CNN)
'The actor was "banned from playing blackjack at the Hard Rock casino in Las Vegas," a source close to Affleck told CNN on Friday.

Affleck was "not booted" from the casino as other reports have indicated, the source said. Rather, the source says, he was asked to leave after casino security told him: "You are too good at the game."'

Saturday News: Star Wars, a Training Update, and Other Stuff

Not a lot going on today, but there were a few things that caught my eye.

Lucasfilm Clarifies Future of STAR WARS Expanded Universe, Announces New Prose Novels (Newsrama)
They're going to shit-can it.  From Lucasfilm's press release:
"In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe."

Five Things on a Friday: The "Cleaning out My Library" Edition

After we finished our walk on Sunday afternoon last weekend, Sally asked me if I had any books to donate to the local library's annual book sale/fund raiser.

"Do I?" I replied.  "Hell yes I do."

My boxes of books, now destined for Stratford Library.

But the best thing about this isn't just that I got a chance to get all into my own personal fung shui, nor is it that I'm helping the local library, though both of those are worthy results, of course.

No the best thing was that I found a bunch of stuff that I thought was lost.

Five Things on a Friday: The "New Kind of War" Edition

Greetings from Albany!

I'm up here for a class, and I've got about an hour.  Let's hope I can get Five Things down.

1.  It gets cold in Albany.
We had seventy-degree weather over the weekend and into Monday in the City, and it was still reasonably warm, if rainy, when I got into town.  But that all changed Tuesday night.