A magician does a trick where there seems to be a wiener floating in front of dogs’ faces. What surprises me is the reaction of two of the dogs. While most try to eat it, as I would expect them to, these two shy away from it in seeming fear. It is as if they realize that the laws of nature are being violated in some way and that hence something is seriously wrong and alarming.
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I could never get a Yo-Yo to obey me. It would roll down the string and stay there despite my best efforts. So I am impressed with the skills of world champion Gentry Stein who won the title in Prague in 2014.
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Last evening saw the opening ceremony of Gay Games 2014 in my hometown of Cleveland. The games have been held every four years starting in 1982. In 2018 it will be in Paris. I must say that I am proud of the city for offering to host the games and working hard to put out the welcome mat. The institution where I work (Case Western Reserve University) is hosting some events at its athletic facilities. And from all reports, the opening night festivities seemed to have gone well.
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I have heard the phrase “get your ducks in a row” but I have never seen it done literally with live ducks. This is pretty impressive. If he could do the same thing with cats, he might make obsolete the ‘herding cats’ metaphor for something that is impossible to do.
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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.