At this time of year when I see a brace or a cast on a leg or a protective boot on a foot, I often comment to the misfortunate one, “Where were you skiing?” I almost always get a response, but I don’t remember anyone replying that the injury came on the slopes. Instead, someone was playing basketball or more embarrassingly, slipped off a curb. Still, I was surprised when I said “Skiing?” to the Columbia student with an extraordinarily large brace on his right leg. “No,” he replied, “Crew.” My face must have registered my puzzlement. I couldn’t imagine how one blew out a knee rowing. He continued, “I was lifting weights.”

In the slow sports seasons, I watch a few minutes of televised kennel shows. I am always surprised how many breeds of dogs are registered. I was aware of a Doberman Pinscher, but an Austrian Pinscher? How many kinds of terriers are there? Many of the dogs are beautiful, but some make me suppress a laugh, and I wonder if those breeds could be self-conscious about how they look. E.g., the Affenpinscher and the Puli. And some bring a creepy feeling, such as any hairless one. 

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.” Samuel Butler.

I wrote a month ago that the new year did not always start on January 1, but I have given little thought about when the day begins. For me, it is midnight, but I knew that it begins at sundown for Jewish people and for Muslims. Now I have learned from Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel that “Italians numbered the hours of the seventeenth century from one to twenty-four beginning at sunset, so that if [Galileo’s daughter] Suor Maria Celeste told her father she was ‘writing at the seventh hour,’ she meant she worked far into the night.”

“Every day cannot be a feast of lanterns.” Chinese Proverb.

Galileo may have been a mathematician, an astronomer, and a Catholic, but he also had a bit of the poet about him. Dava Sobel in Galileo’s Daughter says that he long described wine as “light held together by moisture.”

The furor over the half-time show because Bad Bunny’s songs are in Spanish seems feigned to me. I can’t be alone in not being able to understand rap lyrics no matter what language they are in.

As more and more powerful men are revealed from the Epstein files, I can’t help but think of the words from a wise man: “The sin is not in the sinning, but in being found out.”