As the US population ages, there will be many people who are retired and in nursing homes. Such people may lack mobility and risk feeling lonely and useless, not a good thing for people who have such a wealth of life experience and so much to contribute. Stephen Colbert describes a nice program where older people teach English to foreign students by talking to them over the internet.
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Three new bloggers have joined FrethoughtBlogs. They are Heina Dadabhoy who writes at Heinous Dealings, Aoife O’Riordan at Consider the Tea Cosy, and Hiba Krisht at Between a Veil and a Dark Place.
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In the urban areas of Sri Lanka, schools tend to be mostly single-sex K-12 and among the boys’ schools there were intense sporting rivalries. During those games, boys would show their support using generic cheers that were common to many schools. These cheers originated long before my own time and likely had been around for (I suspect) at least a century. One of them was used when your team had suffered a setback and was meant to show that this was not a cause for concern. It consisted of the following verse set to music.
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The Salt Lake Tribune writes about a private educational outfit that fired one of its employees because he wrote a blog post about the use of ‘homophones’ (words that sound the same while having different meanings and even different spellings) because they were afraid of “creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.”
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I do not need much of an excuse to further attack the NFL. To its own players and the violent and misogynistic values it promotes are enough. But the way that it treated one of its players Ray Rice after he was caught on camera beating his wife was an absolute disgrace.
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The FreethoughtBlogs site is about to go through a major re-design that will be implemented tonight so that you can expect the site to be down for a short while during the transition. When it comes back up, it will look different. There are bound to be some issues that will need to be addresses so please be patient.
The Polaris Career Center in the Cleveland area provides training for people in areas such as auto repair, cooking, operating machinery, cosmetology, etc. The usual things that such centers do. But an eagle-eyed person noticed that some of their course offerings are, to put it mildly, bizarre.
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Wiseman is an academic and amateur magician who periodically comes up with interesting little tricks and explains how they are done.
Some readers of this blog very kindly send me links to items that they think may be of interest. I appreciate them and often use them in subsequent posts. I do have a request, though, that is triggered by the fact that there are many spam messages out there that use links and attachments as ways of transmitting various kinds of malware.
As a result, I never click on links or open attachments that I am not sure are genuinely meant for me, even if they are from people I know well. I only do so if the link or attachment is accompanied by a message that is highly unlikely to have been generated by a bot, which means that it includes something that is not generic but is specific to me and goes beyond just an opening greeting that has my name. It does not have to be a long treatise, just something that tells me that the message actually was targeted to me personally.
This is a practice that I recommend to everyone as a safety precaution.
Thanks.