Don’t people have better things to do with their time?

I have not seen the recent Wonder Woman because I am not a fan of comic book superhero films. But it has been a huge hit and the fact that the superhero in this case is a woman acting alone rather than as a member of a team dominated by men has clearly resonated with a lot of people. So it was not a surprise when two young Sri Lankan women, inspired by the character, dressed up as her at a Comic Con event in that country, where they were photographed in costume.


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Swearing in sign language

Swearing can be quite cathartic. I myself do not casually swear (though I do use the word ‘hell’ a lot) and never swear in anger at other people. But I cannot prevent the occasional “Oh, shit!” escaping from my lips when I do something stupid or careless or when some unfortunate event occurs. In the video below, we see how swearing is done in sign language for those who cannot verbalize it. It may also come in useful when the recipient can see you but cannot hear you. (Language advisory, obviously.)

A story about dog loyalty for National Dog Day

Today is National Dog Day so I would like to share this story about how dogs can be extremely loyal and dutiful. I heard it on the radio program The World on Friday, August 25, 2017. It tells the story of two dogs of Lynn Landry, a sheep rancher in British Columbia, who was forced to evacuate due to raging forest fires.

Landry and her husband took their four border collies, but they had to leave behind their flock of 90 sheep and their Maremma sheepdogs, Tad and Sophie.

“There was nothing we could do,” says Landry. “We had to leave.”
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Another Leopold and Loeb-type murder?

Some readers may be aware of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case where two young undergraduates at the University of Chicago who came from wealthy families kidnapped and murdered a 14-year old boy in 1924 just for the hell of it. They felt that with their superior intellect, they could get away with carrying out the perfect murder. They were found and convicted.
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When metaphors metamorphose

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch caused some eyebrows to be raised when he sent out a Tweet that said, “We’re not going back to healthcare. We’re in tax now. As far as I’m concerned, they shot their wad on healthcare and that’s the way it is.” It was the phrase “shot their wad” that caught people’s attention because that phrase is now associated with male sexual ejaculation and not something that one might expect a senator to use in public.
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You need the best mud for a mud festival

Local officials in Rotorua, a popular tourist destination in New Zealand for geothermal activity and geysers and mud pools that I have actually visited, are under fire for spending about $70,000 in public funds to import five tons of mud from Boryeong, South Korea for a mud and music festival known as Mudtopia. What’s wrong with their own mud, which attracts people to that region?
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Kind of self-defeating, no?

A Florida man was outraged by vehicles used by utility workers partially blocking his driveway. This of course happens all the time since those vehicles can be quite long and they have to be parked near the utility poles. Rather than politely asking the workers to move so that he could get out, something that has always worked for me whenever I encountered this since the workers are right there, this being Merika and the man being a real Merkin, he brought his gun and started shooting at the vehicles, including at the engine and the tires, deflating them and making the vehicles immobile.
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