I have expressed my puzzlement with several aspects of the national spelling bee competition, especially the fact that the words have become increasingly obscure over time. (For example, in 1932, the winning word was ‘knack’!) One question in my mind is why such a pointless activity as spelling highly esoteric words has become so attractive that young children spend countless hours learning to do so and then subject themselves to sweating it out in front of cameras and large prime time TV audiences in a format that seems to revel in their agony. To win this contest requires knowing the spelling of 150,000 to 200,000 words. This is astonishing when one considers that Shakespeare used only about 33,000 words in his plays and this is considered to be close to the upper limit of most people’s vocabularies, even those who have high levels of formal education. So these competitors are learning to spell a lot of words they will never, ever use.
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I never quite understood the Pokemon craze, especially the Pokemon Go one that was a massive sensation recently and just as quickly disappeared from the news. But it appears that the craze is going strong and there is even a Pokemon World Festival that was help this year in South Korea. Really.
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Some of you use ad blocker software and that may prevent you from seeing some of the content on this page. Part of the problem may be, as Trickster Goddess said in a comment, that the FtB content is not encrypted (as you see since our URL begins with ‘http’ and not ‘https’) and if you are using browsers and settings that allow only encrypted content to get through, it may strip out some content, like images. I suggested a long time ago that FtB join the wave and use encryption for all its content but it did not go anywhere. Part of the problem is that this site is run on a shoestring budget and anything that is not critical to just keep the site running tends to get deferred.
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Pretty much everyone has some relative that they find embarrassing for some reason and on the occasion of getting married may prefer that one’s friends and in-laws not meet them because of the awkwardness that might ensue. The problem that arises during weddings, especially in traditional societies, is that one is obliged to invite relatives and also have less control of who will meet whom.
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At baseball games, spectators seem to be obsessed about catching balls that are hit into the stands or are thrown there by fielders, even to the extent of adults grabbing them away from children. I don’t get it. Why is the appeal of catching a baseball so great that you would deny a child that pleasure? Maybe it’s my background in cricket where the same ball must be used and people in the crowd who catch the ball throw it back onto the field. It would be unthinkable for someone to hold on to the ball.
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This little bird knows how to have a good time.

The NBA basketball championship playoffs are currently underway. Even though the Cleveland home team the Cavaliers are the defending champions, I am not a basketball fan and have not watched any of the games so far. Part of the problem is that it is a very fast moving game (when it is not stopped for timeouts and the like which are the bane of American sports but allow for plenty of commercials) and I do not know the finer points of tactics and strategy to fully appreciate what is going on.
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I have written about my love affair with newspaper comics before. From my childhood I have read the comics pages in the newspapers and continue to do so in my local newspaper the Plain Dealer. I used to read every single comic in it but after some time I stopped reading some of them because they were not simply not funny (Marmaduke for example) or because I was not interested in the dramatic ones that had long storylines like Spiderman or Judge Parker.
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If one is involved in a minor fender-bender accident, the natural instinct is to get out of the car and survey the damage. But it turns out that car thieves are exploiting this tendency to deliberately rear-end people’s vehicles and then taking the car keys and stealing the car from them when they exit the vehicle. Cleveland has seen such incidents and as result, the local police in my suburb have put out guidelines as to what to do if you are rear-ended.
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