It’s the off-season for Learned League, so almost every day brings four or five “One Day Specials” – single-topic trivia quizzes. I read all of them and usually submit my answers if I have good guesses (or better) for at least five questions (out of 12).

Yesterday’s One Day Specials were on Web Design, Time Inc., Math in Theatre, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t submit that one, but I did answer the others – and got all the questions right for Web Design.

I wasn’t alone in that – 38 players of the 1195 who submitted answers got them all right. Each correct answer earns 15 points. But there’s another factor besides correct answers on One Day Specials: moneying. You have to designate five of your answers as “money” answers – for each of those you get right, you earn a bonus, computed as the percentage of wrong answers for that question. So if 30% of the people answered wrong (or didn’t answer), you’d get 30 extra points. So you want to money the five questions that most people will miss.

I came close – I picked four of the hardest questions. But I thought that more people would know one of the frameworks powering today’s popular browsers (Blink, Gecko, or Webkit) than would know the name of the Weird Al Yankovic song which talks about HTML (White & Nerdy). I was wrong, and finished in 10th place – still by far my best finish ever in a One Day Special.

I’m writing this early tonight because I have a Shir Hadash Board meeting in a few minutes. Our new Transitional Rabbi will be there, and I’m looking forward to meeting him. I’d signed up to bring snacks this month; Diane graciously made pumpkin muffins for me to bring (we kept a few for ourselves, of course), and I’m also bringing grapes.

We finished watching Only Murders in the Building – I’m looking forward to the second series whenever it comes out.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet day here – there’s been a little rain on and off all day, with hopes of more in the next couple of days. No progress on the cooktop front. No photo editing. Just quiet. We didn’t even walk as much as usual, and the only wildlife I saw was birds on the high school lawn.

Two years ago was different – we were in Bulgaria, where we learned an old Bulgarian proverb: “To err is human; to blame it on someone else shows management potential”. That was an interesting trip, indeed!

We started seriously shopping for a replacement cooktop today – ours is probably still fixable, but if one switch failed for no particular reason, can the other three be far behind?

We’d taken a look at Best Buy and Home Depot over the weekend and were under-impressed with their selection. Two friends recommended University Electric so we went there this morning. You could look around on your own or request help – we were serious enough to ask for help, and our salesperson quickly took us to the right section of the store. Consumer Reports strongly recommends the Bosch induction cooktop, so that’s what we looked at. We got a good price quote ($50 lower than anything we found online), but availability is a question (of course). More to come….

After shopping, we took a walk on the San Tomas Aquino Creek trail, which we’d never been on before; it goes right through Santa Clara’s semiconductor heartland (we passed AMD, Nvidia, and Intel), but we did see a little wildlife while we were walking.

We had planned to go food shopping next, but we were too hungry to be trusted in a supermarket, so we went to Athena Grill for some tasty Greek food; the deep-fried pita bread was almost worth the trip by itself!

My main computer at home was a 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2010 until last year. Actually, I had two 15-inch MacBook Pros for most of that time – but I replaced them both last year, one with an M1 Mac mini and the other with a 13-inch MacBook Air.

I’m very happy with the Mini, but the Air is a bit underpowered, and the 13-inch screen is small. So I was looking forward to today’s Apple announcements.

As rumored, they came out with a 14-inch and a 16-inch MacBook Pro; the 14-inch is the same size as the Air but has a bigger screen; the 16-inch is the same size as my old 15-inch, but with a bigger screen. And even the base model of either of them is much much faster than this Air.

But I’m not sure the new machines are really what I need. The bigger screens are very attractive – but the new computers are heavier than this one (¾ pound for the 14-inch and nearly 2 pounds for the 16-inch). And, if I’m being honest, I rarely need more computing power than this Air gives me – and if I did, an M1 Air is the same weight as this one and quite a bit less expensive than the new Pros.

I may change my mind when I actually see one of the new machines in person – but so far, my wallet is safe.

Local salmon season has ended, and our fish market contact didn’t have any halibut this weekend, so we decided to try something unusual for us – Pacific sea bass. I didn’t have any recipes which specifically called for sea bass; the New York Times did, of course, and we tried Bass Fillets Baked With Ginger and Sesame Oil.

We weren’t terribly impressed – it was ok, but uninspiring. If we make it again, I’ll try doubling the amount of ginger-garlic paste and sesame oil. The recipe also only calls for cooking the fish for 7 minutes; fortunately, I read the comments before cooking the fish – they were unanimous in suggesting 15 minutes, and that was barely long enough.

On a brighter note, it’s raining! Not much rain, but it’s the first we’ve seen here for months and months!