Lost in the fuss over the G7 and Singapore summits was the other big news of the week, that the Miss America pageant had decided to eliminate that portion of the competition that had the contestants posing in swimsuits, which apparently now consists exclusively of skimpy bikinis. This has given media the chance to run photographs of women in bikinis with double-entendre headlines like the one above. So I thought, why not me too?
The Ohio Department of Transportation released the following video.
What surprises m is that the police are really chill about the whole thing and let him, after he had rammed the vehicle several times, keep jumping on the car for a long time, only moving in when he falls off. I am glad that they waited for him to calm down since there was no one in the other car and it was a wreck already. But as always, I wonder how things might have turned out if he had been black …
There’s more on the incident here.
The news today has multiple stories about chef Anthony Bourdain who committed suicide in Paris at the age of 61. I am not a foodie, never watch cooking shows, and had never heard of Bourdain until he recently appeared on a TV show (I think The Daily Show) to talk about the #MeToo movement and distance himself from his chef friends like Mario Batali for their acts of sexual abuse. He also made an apologia, not because he himself had done anything on those lines (he said that he had not tolerated such things in the kitchens he ran) but because he felt that the fact that the women he knew (even his girl friend Asia Argento) had not confided in him with their horror stories was a sign that he was not seen as an ally.
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Take a look at this 17-second video.
Watch what ensues when a motorcyclist has a minor collision with a car.
This year’s national Spelling Bee competition ended on Thursday and, to no one’s surprise, the winner was once again an Indian-American. All but three winners since 2002 (and every one since 2008) have had Indian-sounding names. I have written many times before about the Spelling Bee, expressing my view that it seems like a colossal waste of time and effort by children and their families spent in learning to spell obscure words that they will likely never encounter again in their lives, apart from the fact that they could always simply look it up if they needed to.
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This video shows an extraordinary rescue of a child who was dangling from a fourth floor balcony in Paris.
I am not sure what to make of this video. It looks … weird.
Pickles are not something that I grew up with in Sri Lanka. They were a new food I encountered only once I came to the US and I found that I do not like them at all. When I find them in food, I carefully take them out before eating unless I accidentally eat them because they have been cut up small.
But for the longest time, I was not aware that pickles were just cucumbers that had been processed in some way. I had thought that pickles were a separate kind of plant. Then once in conversation with my daughters, I casually said something about pickle plants. After a brief pause of incredulity, they laughed hilariously at my ignorance and I discovered that I had been wrong all this time. I learned later that the word pickle is itself shorthand for ‘pickled cucumber’. If I had known the full name, I would have not been confused.
It makes me wonder what other things I believe that are absurdly wrong but common knowledge to everyone else. And what kind of event will bring my ignorance to the surface.
