If this doesn’t scare the hell out of people …

… about the danger posed by hurricane Florence, nothing will.

The Weather Channel has used green screen technology to graphically demonstrate what different levels of storm surges might look like if you happen to be trapped in it.

Inexplicable lapse by Serena Williams [UPDATED TO INCLUDE VIDEO]

Serena Williams is a tennis phenomenon, dominating the sport for two decades even as she had a baby during that period. She will easily go down in history as one of the greatest tennis players ever. But earlier today, the 36-year old lost the final of the US Open 3-6,4-6 to 20-year Naomi Osaka for whom this was her first major final. But what was noteworthy was how ugly the match was.
[Read more…]

Are there no punishments for cheating in baseball?

I hate cheating in sports and feel that players who do so should be punished severely. I have written before on this when it comes to cricket where a player who violates the rules is punished and if the act is particularly egregious, such as showing signs of premeditation or careful planning or collusion, then the punishments become even stiffer for ‘violating the spirit of the game’.
[Read more…]

I don’t understand some people

You have no doubt heard of the phenomenon of the people who ‘dine and dash’. These are people who eat in a restaurant and then leave without paying. The usual perpetrators are small groups of young men. Why they do it is unclear, since usually it is not because they are hungry and lack money for food. Maybe they treat it as a lark. This is a despicable practice, especially since some restaurants dock the server for the amount of the unpaid bill. Given that servers get paid less than the minimum wage, this seems particularly outrageous.
[Read more…]

Today is National Dog Day

In honor of the day, here is a little video of a dog ‘rescuing’ a child from the ocean. The dog either thought that her shrieks of delight were actually signals of distress or maybe he was acting on the general principle that children should not be in the ocean without wearing a lifejacket. He was also probably annoyed at the grownups present for not aiding in the ‘rescue’ and instead simply filming it.

[Read more…]

The last days of ‘Peter Bergmann’

There is a haunting short documentary about a mysterious man who appeared in 2009 in Sligo, a small seaside town in Ireland, with a carefully laid out plan to get rid of all traces of his identity. He was successful in that no one has since been able to figure out who he was, which is quite surprising in this day and age when it is so hard to hide our traces.

It appears that not only horses are thoroughbreds

There was an interesting case of a young women who blew through a stop sign at 60 mph and when she was stopped by police and questioned, volunteered an interesting defense.

A woman seen speeding through a stop sign at 60 mph (97 kph) told officers they shouldn’t arrest her because she’s a “very clean, thoroughbred, white girl,” police said.

Her eyes glassy and bloodshot, Lauren Elizabeth Cutshaw was slurring her words and a Breathalyzer showed her blood-alcohol level at 0.18 percent, according to police in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Cutshaw, 32, told the arresting officer she shouldn’t be jailed because she was a cheerleader, a dancer and a sorority girl who graduated from a “high accredited university.”
[Read more…]