There are a lot of crazy people out there. An Ipsos Global Public Affairs survey conducted for the Reuters news agency finds that one in 7 (14%) of the global population believes that the world will end in their lifetime. About 10% associate this with the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy that supposedly signals the end of the world on December 21, 2012, totally ruining the Christmas holidays. [Read more…]
I enjoy playing the board game Scrabble, starting with my family when I was a child and playing with my own daughters when they were young. And now that they are grown and have moved away, I am still able to play with them thanks to the app Words With Friends. [Read more…]
As I have said, I am a sucker for animal recue stories.
This time we have a series of photos of a mother dog repeatedly going into a burning building to recue her 10-day old puppies one by one and carrying them to safety.
Sadly, one of the puppies did not survive the burns.
Almost everyone has heard the story about how Orson Welles produced a radio drama based on H. G. Welles’ story The War of the Worlds that was broadcast October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween. The dramatization largely took the form of a series of news bulletins that interrupt regular programming about the Earth being attacked by Martians. The story goes that people who heard it thought it was a real news story and there was mass panic and hysteria, with people all over the country running out of their homes and into the streets in fear. [Read more…]
The Olympics is a good time to realize that there are some great sports out there that we in the US never get to see played at a high level.
One of them is the reputed fastest sport in the world: Badminton. [Read more…]
As everyone knows, Jamaican Usain Bolt won the 100m with a new Olympic record. Caity Weaver reports that just before the 100m final began, some jerk among the spectators had been hurling abuse at Bolt and that just before the starter gun went off, he threw a green bottle at him that fortunately fell behind the athletes and did not distract him or cause a false start. [Read more…]
Todd Canady, 23, of Waco, Texas may want to seriously consider enrolling in firearms safety training classes. [Read more…]
Eight badminton players (four doubles teams) in the Olympics have been booted out because of charges that they deliberately lost their games. Why might they have wanted to lose? Because these were pool games in qualifying rounds and whom one played in the subsequent round depends upon your ranking in your qualifying group. Being second in your group may sometimes provide a better path to getting to the finals than being first, depending on how teams in the other groups fare. This kind of tactical maneuvering for group ranking is a common problem in any sport that has round-robin qualifying group matches before going into the sudden-death final rounds. [Read more…]
I first watched the Olympics on TV in 1976, when I was in the US as a graduate student, and quickly became fed up. The inane chatter of the anchors and commentators, the frequent long breaks for commercials, and the excessive focus on only showing events in which Americans had hopes of winning medals, were all annoying. [Read more…]