After I posted that video about how dogs react to magic, I received an email from professional magician Rick Lax with a link to a video where he tried doing similar tricks with cats. The results were quite different, as you can see.
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Last Wednesday I wrote about the strange experience that I had with my computers three years ago when the camera light would unexpectedly come on and stay on until I put it into sleep mode or shut it down. This problem baffled even senior engineers at Apple but then the problem disappeared just as suddenly and inexplicably as it started.
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Sri Lanka played an excellent final game and managed to defeat the favored India quite comfortably. After winning the 50-over World Cup in 1996, Sri Lanka had reached the final in world championships four times before (twice in the 50-over format in 2007 and 2011 and twice in the 20-over format in 2009 and 2012) and lost in all of them, twice to India. So although they have been consistently strong over the last decade, they needed to overcome the feeling that they had lost the ability to win the big game.
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A magician shows dogs a treat that he has in his hands and then makes it ‘disappear’. The reaction of the dogs is amusing but I hope they gave the dogs the treats after the camera stopped rolling. I don’t like to tease dogs. They are so trusting.
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Like many older people, I tend to find some new ways of speaking grating. I still wince at the increasingly common use of the response “I am doing good” when someone is asked how they are. The same with “I could care less”. And the word ‘nucular’ drives me up the wall. I am not enough of a rude pedant to actually correct people when they speak like that, taking such liberties only with my own children when they pick up these ways of speaking from their friends.
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Cadillac came out with a commercial for its new electric car that struck some as being crass in its braggadocio and praise of consumption and excess. It was ripe for parody and one might have expected some comedy website or show to do one. I did not expect a rival car company to do it. See for yourself.
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Marcus Ranum sent me this link to the news item that a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that college football players are like employees and should be treated as such and have union rights. As Marketplace reports:
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Here is a video showing how a construction worker was rescued from a burning building. He seems to have shown considerable presence of mind, buying time by jumping from one ledge to another as the fire came closer. The whole thing has a voiceover, perhaps from the person doing the recording. She actually said at one point, “OMG!”. Do people actually use such initialisms in conversation?
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In a comment on my post about voiceover artists, reader Anthony Burber referred me to an interesting article by a middle-school teacher Jessica Lahey who was concerned about the number of girls in her class who had an ‘upspeak’ in their voices or, even worse, adopted childish voices.
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