As everyone knows, sometimes things get haunted. It just happens, ya know? The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the sky is blue, the water cycle makes it rain, planes somehow fly, and sometimes, despite one’s best efforts, people, places, things, etc. get haunted. Such is life. Now as topical as it is to write about hauntings during the month of October, I'm also bringing this up because I live close to a house that is allegedly haunted.

Before each MLB season, I like to scan through various indicators for teams that seem primed to be better— looking at factors such as the differential between their actual and Pythagorean record (i.e., the record predicted by run differential), second-half improvement, farm system quality, team age, offseason moves, changes to payroll, long-term franchise trajectory and more. The Chicago Cubs didn’t check off all of those items going into 2024, but they looked promising in enough of them — especially the Pythagorean luck factor — that I called them a “no-brainer pick” to improve on their 83-win showing in 2023, particularly after the team re-signed the resurgent Cody Bellinger to a new contract right before Spring Training.

MØRNING! Welcome back to 🔥QUICK FIRE🔥, our new fortnightly dispatch of insight and opinion, straight from the MØRNING studio.  This week, we’re chatting horses. More specifically, how they seem to be galloping through our feeds and thoughts more regularly than usual. Why, you ask? Theories incoming… I recently spent an evening scouring eBay for miniature horse figurines (lol) to gift my girlfriend, who developed a sudden obsession with horses earlier this year.

We have two questions this week that relate rather nicely. First Harisch Sood asks: “Why did Latin die out as a widely spoken language?” And the answer is that it didn’t — it slowly developed into a new language in the many places it spread to. ncG1vNJzZmikla22pLvNr5ilpJWue7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZrCgqWKxqrCMpZitoZ5isaqxjKisrQ%3D%3D

This video, which is a few years old now, shows my gelding (the buckskin) displaying clear stallion-like behaviour towards another gelding (the palomino). The context is the following (because context is everything when interpreting behaviour): the palomino is a client horse that has just arrived. My two horses, who have lived alone in a stable social group for over a year at this stage, are in their usual field, while the new horse is in a smaller, adjacent field.