Dear Aliant,

It’s not me, it’s you.

We’ve been through a lot together. Land lines and cell phones. Dial-up, high-speed, wireless Internet sticks and now, fibre-op. I’ve treated you well. Sent you hundreds of dollars every single month. Tried to keep the lines of communication open. We’ve talked and talked – never more than during my recent move to New Brunswick. In fact, we just got off the phone with one another, marking our tenth call related to my move from Nova Scotia.

I called you just now because I was alarmed to receive a bill for nearly $800. This happened for a few reasons: I lost track of my last bill during the move, so there was an outstanding balance (sorry about that). But there was also more than $100 in long distance accrued over just a couple of days. The phone at my old house wasn’t disconnected on the date I had requested, so I continued to make calls. What I didn’t know was that my long distance plan had been disconnected, on schedule… without my knowledge.

Over the past couple of months I’ve talked to lots of your employees. I’ve helped them understand that when you move from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick you end up with two separate accounts listed in different places in their computer system. I’ve been calm and understanding when things have not gone as planned – technicians not showing up on the scheduled day, information already provided not being recorded in my file. Your business is a complicated one with lots of moving parts, and I get that.

And you’re right – when we were in Baddeck, you were really the only game in town for cell service with reliable signal. You offered the most attractive options for bundled high-speed and land lines. I feel like I really tried. I mean, I have three accounts with you alone.

But the thing is, Aliant, now I live somewhere with more choice. It’s been some time since I’ve felt like things were really right between us, and I owe it to myself to see who else is out there. It’s a big world, and I need to explore it.

So, Aliant, I just want to say good luck, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us. It’s been fun, sometimes. Keep in touch, okay?

Love always,

On this day when everything changed, I think often of my friend. But that’s nothing new – she’s been on my mind every day this past year.

For a year now, she has chosen to keep getting out of bed every morning, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep going—even when it seemed her world was crumbling.

One year ago, in the days before this day, my friend was living as we all do when nothing major has gone wrong, when we are simply caught up in life’s daily details. She had no sense everything was about to change.

Then it did.

On April 30, my friend’s husband was in a freak accident. He nearly died, but rescuers revived him and got him to intensive care, albeit in grave condition. There doctors determined he had a spinal fracture and would likely never recover the use of his arms or legs. Suddenly, everything came into sharp focus – the important and the meaningless, the value of good health, and its fragility.

My friend did not falter. She began looking for the training that would let her become her husband’s full-time caregiver. Most every day, she traveled an hour to the hospital, and then an hour home again, as she worked to be both wife and mother. She made sure her son had time with his father at the hospital. She answered his many questions about his dad, and continues to answer all he has asked in the days since. She saw only her beloved husband through the tubes and wires and medical equipment that surrounded him, and never stopped wanting to help him through, to bring him home. She pressed forward with intent.

Six weeks after the accident my friend’s husband died suddenly and unexpectedly from complications of his injuries. In the months since, she has taught all around her how to live despite her grief. She prepared a stirring eulogy to her husband, and delivered it to the hundreds who gathered for his funeral.

Together, she and her son have forged a path forward. She left a successful career and embarked on an entirely new occupation, becoming a student again and receiving training for the work that is her calling. She is an an unintentional educator on how to live life gratefully. She is the bravest person I know, and I send her much love on this day when everything changed, just one year ago.

The video of a clever mariner squeezing his 80-foot mast under a ’65 bridge on the Inter-Coastal Waterway reminded Chris Lambie of sailing across Florida’s Lake Okeechobee with his father.

We weren’t sure if our mast would clear a bridge on the eastern edge of the lake, as the water level was pretty high. But my dad did the calculations and figured we’d squeak through. As we slipped underneath the span, the VHF antenna ticked gently against one of the girders, and dad got a speck of rust in his eye.

I also remember running gently aground somewhere in the silt that collects everywhere on the southern end of the Inter-Coastal Waterway. I hung off the boom—which we cranked out as if we were on a dead run—to tilt the boat to starboard. My dad then jumped in the water and pushed us out of the soft mud. Not as much fun as it sounds, as we saw lots of water moccasins and alligators in that portion of the trip.

I’m just thankful Chris wasn’t in a kayak.

From 1901 through 1960, with minor variations, 16 teams played 154 games per season, for a total of 1,232 games per year (16 x 154 ÷ 2).

In 1961, the season was lengthened to 162 games, an increase of about five percent. Baseball added two teams in each of 1961 and 1962, four more in 1969, and two each in 1977, 1993, and 1998.

Since then, 30 teams have played 162 games, for a total of roughly 2,430 per year, or almost twice as many as in the years 1901 to 1960.

Still, from 1901 to 1960, there was only one perfect game every 15 years. From 1980 to last Saturday, there was one every 2.6 years.

(Click on the chart to view a full-sized version.)

In the first 60 years after the turn of the 20th Century, only four major-leaguers  managed to pitch perfect games; 15 have done it in the 62 years since. It sure looks as if pitching a perfect game got easier around 1980, but mathematicians argue that this is just an example of a Poisson distribution, which could be crudely stated as the tendency for rare events to appear non-random.

Writing in the Journal of Statistics Education, Michael Huber of Muhlenberg College and Andrew Glen of the United States Military Academy at West Point examined three other rare baseball feats: no-hitters; triple plays; and hitting for the cycle. None of these is nearly so unusual as a perfect game, but all three:

offer excellent examples of events whose occurrence may be modeled as Poisson processes. That is, the time of occurrence of one of these events doesn’t affect when we see the next occurrence of such.

When two perfect games occurred in 2010, statistician Martin Monkman of British Columbia took a similar view in his aptly named Bayes Blog.

As for Humber, his pristine performance at the Mariners’ Safeco Field took just two hours and 17 minutes.

“My wife is nine months pregnant,” he explained, “and I was making sure she didn’t give birth when I was pitching,”

A fresh rumination on feline ennui from vido poet Will Braden. (The original is here.)

H/T BT, via Jezebel.

Playwright Bryden MacDonald adjudicates the Boardmore Theatre’s Festival of One Act Plays at Cape Breton University.

H/T: Alicia Penney via Dream Big Cape Breton. See more of Kate’s work at Harkavagrant.

H/T: Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, at The Atlantic.