Surviving a plane crash

More details have emerged about what happened to the four children (aged 13, nine, four, and 11 months) who were rescued 40 days after the plane they were in crashed on May 1 in the Colombian Amazon jungle, killing their mother and two other people.

The mother of the four young Colombian siblings who managed to survive for almost six weeks in the Amazon jungle clung to life for four days after their plane crashed before telling her children to leave her in the hope of improving their chances of being rescued.
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A search team found the plane on 16 May in a thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board but the children were nowhere to be found.

I was reminded about something I used to do with faculty to make them aware of the benefits of using cooperative learning techniques with their students. It consisted of an exercise called Survival in the Desert and involved giving everyone the following scenario. (This exercise was developed by the US military and there were several different scenarios for crashes, the desert being just one.)
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What’s with all the naked Greek men?

Sarah Murray, an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto in Canada who is a cultural historian and archaeologist specializing in the material culture and institutions of early Greece, ponders an intriguing question: Why are so many of the Greek men found in depictions of ancient Greek art not wearing any clothes, even when they are engaged in everyday activities such as working in a foundry where basic safety should suggest that clothing was essential?

Scholars struggle to answer these questions with certainty. The truth is that male nudity, as both an aesthetic and a real practice in the ancient Greek context, was many-faceted. Men in Greek art seem to do pretty much everything without their pants on, ranging from the obvious (having sex), to the sensible (bathing and swimming), to the painful (riding horses), to the seemingly suicidal (fighting battles). The convention of nudity in Greek art cuts across apparent class differences as well as a wide range of activities: ‘working-class’ nude men harvest olives and dig clay for pottery production, while heroes and gods from Greek myths and legends fight battles, pursue paramours and mourn lost friends, all while clad in armour that curiously leaves their most sensitive bits exposed.
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Extraordinary survival and rescue of four children in the Amazon

This has to be one of the most incredible stories in recent times.

Four children have been found alive after surviving a plane crash and spending weeks fending for themselves in Colombia’s Amazon jungle.

Colombia’s president said the rescue of the siblings, aged 13, nine, four and one, was “a joy for the whole country”.

The children’s mother and two pilots were killed when their light aircraft crashed in the jungle on 1 May.

The missing children became the focus of a huge rescue operation involving dozens of soldiers and local people.
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The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group.
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A massive search began and in May, rescuers recovered items left behind by the children, including a child’s drinking bottle, a pair of scissors, a hair tie and a makeshift shelter.

Small footprints were also discovered, which led search teams to believe the children were still alive in the rainforest, which is home to jaguars, snakes and other predators.

Members of the children’s community hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of remaining alive.

That hope turned out to be justified.

The children’s grandmother, Fatima Valencia, said after their rescue: “I am very grateful, and to mother earth as well, that they were set free.”
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She said the eldest of the four siblings was used to looking after the other three when their mother was at work, and that this helped them survive in the jungle.

“She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume,” Ms Valencia said in footage obtained by EVN.

For the 13-year old to be able to keep the others, especially the one-year old, alive for more than a month in a dangerous jungle shows remarkable presence of mind. I do not think I would have lasted for more than a few days in that situation, even if I did not have to care for anyone else.

I just hope that they are not too traumatized by the loss of their mother and the whole experience.

Annoying film titles

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover but I admit there are some film titles that are so annoying to me that I resist watching them. The ones that are most annoying are the ones with deliberately misspelled words that strike me as too cute by half. Three examples that come to mind are Inglourious Basterds, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Biutiful.

This article looks at those and other titles and explains which have some justification in the plot and which are just directorial vanities.

The paparazzi problem

The seemingly never-ending soap opera that surrounds the British Windsor family continues in the US with Harry and Meghan and their story of how paparazzi reportedly chased their vehicle through the streets of New York City, risking accidents, in order to take photographs of them. The photo agency is denying that their photographers acted in a dangerous manner and is refusing their demand to hand over any photographs that were taken during the alleged car chase.

For some reason, there seems to be a large audience that likes to see photographs of famous people taken without their consent. As a result, there is a market for such photos in tabloid media and for paparazzi who go to great lengths to get such photographs, such as surrounding celebrities in public places, even when they are engaged in mundane tasks like grocery shopping or taking a walk or eating in a restaurant.
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The dangerous mania of seeking for views on social media

The rise of social media and the ability to garner fame and money by increasing the number of people who visit your site is leading to dangerous levels of escalation, as ever more outrageous things are done to garner views. We now have the example of someone who deliberately crashed a small plane and filmed it in order to go viral.

Trevor Jacob, 29, faces up to 20 years in federal prison after he purposely destroyed the wreckage of the small single-engine plane that he crashed in California’s Los Padres national forest in 2021, according to a statement from the US attorney’s office.

Jacob, who parachuted out of the plane before it crashed, uploaded a video to YouTube documenting the incident. He initially told investigators that his plane lost power and that he did not know where the wreck was. But his story drew doubts from aviation experts and federal authorities. They later found that Jacob made no attempt to call air traffic control, restart his engine or search for a safe place to land.
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The problem with horse racing

As a spectator sport, the appeal of horse racing mystifies me. A race lasts just a few minutes and unless one is gambling on the outcome, it is not clear why one should care about which horse wins. There does not seem to be that much skill involved as far as I can tell, apart from the way that jockeys position and pace their horses during the race. It is the horses that do most of the work. The fact that jockeys beat the horses with a crop to make them go faster bothers me since it seems so cruel. But it is clear that horse racing has great appeal for many people who will go to considerable trouble and expense to attend events in person.

My ignorance of the appeal of horse racing is irrelevant since people find engaging all manner of activities that others find mystifying. What really bothers me are the deaths of horses at these events. I knew that horses sometimes fall during a race or during practice and injure their legs and then are euthanized. But I had not known how common that was until I saw this news item that said that seven horses had to be euthanized in the last few days during the lead up to the Kentucky Derby yesterday.
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Goal keeper scores goal

I would imagine that it is extremely rare for a goal keeper in a soccer match to score a goal for their team but that is what happened in this game.

Argentine goalkeeper Leandro Requena scored one of the most outrageous goals you are ever likely to see during his Cobresal side’s 3-1 win over Colo-Colo in Chile’s top soccer league.

With his team already leading 2-0 in the 77th minute, Requena took what initially looked like a fairly innocuous goal kick.

However, with Colo-Colo goalkeeper Brayan Cortés well outside of his penalty area, the ball bounced over his head and towards goal.

To add to his embarrassment, Cortés stumbled as he tried in vain to chase the ball as it crossed the line.

According to TNT Sports Chile, the goal was scored from a distance of 101 meters which, if ratified by Guinness World Records, would break the record for the longest range goal in history.

I do not know if they keep records for the longest shout of “g-o-o-a-l” by a TV announcer but this one could be a contender. It clocked in at about 12 seconds. Do announcers train for this?

Now that’s optimism

I was struck by this news item.

The billionaire mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose conservative media empire spans the globe, is engaged to marry for the fifth time at the age of 92 years old, he told an interviewer in his own tabloid newspaper, the New York Post.

“I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” Murdoch said of his new fiancee, Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose late husband was Chester Smith, a country singer as well as radio and TV executive.

The pair intend to get married in the summer. “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch said. [My italics-MS]

Good luck with that!

Can we stop ‘going forward’?


In reading and listening to news items, I find many people using the phrase ‘going forward’. It has become so overused that I find it grating to hear. It is often redundant but seems to be a more a rhetorical device, a filler, to end a sentence. For example, an analyst discussing financial news might say “It is not clear what the Fed will do going forward” when “It is not clear what the Fed will do” conveys the same sentiment. After all, ‘will do’ implies the future and besides, the Fed cannot go backwards anyway.

Other phrases that have become cliches are ‘perfect storm’ and ‘think outside the box’. Mercifully the latter seems to seems to be going out of vogue, probably because everyone is sick of hearing it so much and it is the kind of corporate jargon that managers like to inflict on their employees.

These are my personal pet peeves. My dislike of them is largely because of their overuse, not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. This article lists other ‘junk’ words and phrases that the author thinks people should try to avoid for various reasons.