Wolverton Mountain

Here’s the late great Nat King Cole with a song that showcases his velvety voice and was a huge hit back in the day, its jaunty music balancing its somewhat ominous lyrics. I had not realized until today that the Clifton Clowers mentioned in the song was an actual person who lived on Woolverton Mountain in Arkansas, though the rest of the song is fictional. His nephew wrote the song and decided to immortalize his uncle by using his name.
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As idea whose time has come?

Remember when Mitt Romney proposed the idea of self-deportations for undocumented immigrants during the 2012 election and the idea sank like a rock? Given the current climate, that now looks like one of the more humane solutions proposed by Republicans and Funny or Die has a report on how Arizona governor Jan Brewer has come up with a practical way of implementing it.
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Fallout from the Ashley Madison hack

I mentioned earlier my feeling that the hack of the Ashley Madison website and the dumping of all the information about its subscribers was not a good thing. These were the private activities of private people and there was no discernible public interest served by releasing this information. Unfortunately, people seem to have created new sites to help people use the database to make it easier to find people according to where they live.
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A party of hyper-ventilators

Just when you thought that politics could not get more trivial in the US, we reach new lows. The decision by president Obama to officially have the traditional name Denali become the official name of the mountain in Alaska that had been called Mt. McKinley should have been a minor news item, relegated to one paragraph in most newspapers except perhaps in Alaska.
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Unusual out in cricket

In cricket, there are eleven ways in which a batter’s innings can end of which five are common (bowled, caught, stumped, run out, and leg before wicket). Five others (hit wicket, hit the ball twice, handled the ball, timed out, obstructing the field) are much rarer and I have never seen such an out in all the matches that I have watched live. The eleventh is where the batter leaves the field voluntarily or due to injury or some other reason without getting out by one of the other ten ways and this is referred to as ‘retired’.
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A question for baseball mavens

Here’s a question for knowledgeable baseball fans. Cricket and baseball are similar in many features but there is one difference that puzzles me. In cricket, as in baseball, a batter gets out if he hits the ball and a fielder catches it before it hits the ground. In cricket, a common way this happens is if the batter is ‘caught behind’, i.e., touches the ball with the bat or glove and the fielder directly behind him (known as the wicket keeper) catches it.
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Reminder: Vyckie Garrison to speak in the Cleveland area

The Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Center for Inquiry holds its biennial Humanism Banquet on Friday, October 2, 2015 from 7:00-10:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the Cleveland suburb of Independence. The guest speaker will be Vyckie Garrison who was once part of the Quiverfull Movement, a Christian fundamentalist group that shuns contraception and believes that it is god who opens and shuts a woman’s womb, which must keep him/her/it pretty busy. The movement encourages families to have vast numbers of children in order to create an army for god and they believe that god would not let families have more children than they can handle.
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