Why do people think this is funny?

I am not a fan of practical jokes in general because they tend to have an underlying mean streak that finds humor in unsettling, upsetting, or even frightening the targeted person. Perhaps among close friends practical jokes are marginally acceptable though if I had a friend who was a regular practical joker, they would not be my friend for long. I like to take people at face value and having to always second-guess the actions of someone else would get old very soon.
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Ruining national treasures

The national parks in the US are truly wonderful, a tribute to many generations of the public that have seen the value in protecting lands for their beauty and historical value and have supported government attempts to preserve their pristine nature. Hence it is sad that some people are trashing the parks simply because there are few or no rangers on duty due to the Trump shutdown of the federal government.
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The strange fascination with New Year’s Eve celebrations

When I was young, we would as a family go to church at 11:00 pm on New Year’s Eve. The minister Rev. Arnold Cooper had an excellent sense of timing and the service would reach a climax right at midnight and he would pause while fireworks went off all over town and then briefly resume to give us an uplifting final blessing and send us on our way. During that pause, my father would slip a large denomination currency note into my hand, a tradition that I continued with my own children until they grew up and moved away. Then all the parishioners would mingle outside for awhile wishing each other all the best for the coming year. (This was Sri Lanka so it was warm and we could hang out outside indefinitely.) The family would then go home and eat and drink something before going to bed. It was low-key but nice.
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Kevin Spacey’s weird video

When news broke on Christmas Eve that actor Kevin Spacey was going to be criminally charged with felony indecency assault and battery for sexually assaulting a teenager at a bar, few expected that he would respond with a bizarre three-minute video titled “Let me be Frank” where he channeled his character Frank Underwood from the show House of Cards for what seemed like an passive-aggressive pre-emptive defense.
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Surely we can do better?

Yesterday’s issue of the Plain Dealer had this tragic news item.

Deputy kills man holding gun to head

Authorities are investigating after a Wayne County Sheriff ‘s deputy shot and killed a man during a confrontation Sunday morning in the downtown area of Apple Creek. Deputies responded about 10:50 a.m. Sunday after receiving a call for assistance from the Apple Creek Police Department, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office said in a post on Facebook. Deputies learned that a man armed with a handgun was behind a downtown business and threatening to shoot himself, the sheriff’s office said. Over the course of 34 minutes, law enforcement tried to de-escalate the situation. The man continued to hold a gun to his head and told authorities they were going to have to ”shoot him.” The man approached a deputy who told him multiple times to stop and drop the gun, the sheriff’s office said. The deputy fired one round from his rifle, hitting the man.

The man was holding a gun to his own head and threatening to shoot himself so the police shot him? I understand that a man advancing towards you with a gun is dangerous even if he is pointing it at his own head, since he could suddenly point it at you. But is shooting to kill the only option in such a situation?

This illustrates how the police in the US are poorly trained when it comes to dealing with deeply troubled people, treating them as if they are indistinguishable from violent and dangerous criminals.

Is no sport safe from bad behavior?

Whenever I rail against unethical and rude behavior in sports, fans of curling have pointed out to me that that game exhibits the highest standards of sportsmanship and it did seem to be the case and I became a convert. Hence I was saddened to read about bad behavior in curling. In one case, a Russian curler was stripped of his Winter Olympics bronze medal after he admitted to doping

Krushelnitsky had initially protested his innocence after testing positive for the banned heart drug meldonium, claiming his drink had been spiked. However on Thursday he dropped his appeal before he was officially banned by the court of arbitration for sport.
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It means that the medal won by Krushelnitsky and his wife Anastasia Bryzgalova will be awarded to the Norway pair of Kristin Skaslien and Magnus Nedregotten, who had originally finished fourth.

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How the peace symbol came to be

I am always on the lookout for interesting pieces of historical trivia and how the famous peace symbol came into existence certainly qualifies. It turns out that it was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom by superimposing the international semaphore alphabet signals for ‘N’ and ‘D’ so that the symbol represents ‘Nuclear Disarmament’.

On Good Friday 1958, thousands gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest nuclear weapons. They were responding to a string of test blasts conducted by the United Kingdom, the third nation to join the nuclear club after the US and USSR.

For the next four days, the bravest among them marched to Aldermaston, a small village 50 miles west of London where British nuclear weapons were designed and stockpiled.

On the protesters’ signs and banners, a new symbol was making its first appearance. Gerald Holtom, a designer and a pacifist, had developed it specifically for the march just a few weeks prior. He believed that a symbol would make the message stronger.

He was right: The symbol was adopted soon after by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and went on to become one of the most widely recognized designs in history.

“It’s a minor masterpiece with major evocative power,” said design guru and cultural critic, Stephen Bayley, in an email. “It speaks very clearly of an era and a sensibility.

“It is, simply, a fine period piece: the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well.”

The symbol has a strong similarity to the Mercedes Benz emblem (that has resulted in some satire about how people mistakenly used one for the other) and I wonder if the car company ever considered suing for copyright infringement. Of course, this was in 1958 not long after the Nazis had been defeated in World War II and a German company’s efforts to suppress a peace symbol may not have been viewed as the wisest public relations move.