Ever wonder what the hell to blog about?

Nothing seems to fit together... you have this and that, but no theme... and having just cleaned up after your dog, your senses are numbed.  So, getting desperate, you say, "OK. I'm going to write about everything all at once." Satisfied with that stroke of genius, you begin:

If this doesn't have you shaking your head, then you are not a bobble-head doll... or too dense to get the irony. In South Carolina, two black high-schoolers were awarded a $150,000  settlement against their school because other black students mocked them for "acting white."  Their lawyer said the school had an obligation to protect them from racial harassment and "to do well in school is considered acting white... that is part of why we're saying that it was racial." Wait... huh? Sad, actually.

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile was about 100 times more powerful than the one in Haiti. (It's a Richter Scale thing.) Want to know how powerful that is? Well, it MOVED the capital city, Santiago, about 11 inches to the west/southwest... the Chilean city of Concepcion is actually 11 feet further west! And no, I don't know how they measured it... don't ask stupid questions. That's my job.

Think that's a big deal? The six- mile wide meteor that hit Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula a mere 65 million years ago-- the one that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs-- altered earth's orbit by 3 1/2 inches! Now I know... for that, they borrowed God's GREAT BIG TAPE MEASURE.

All this does is confirm my theory. If China, with it's 1.3 billion people, really wanted to threaten the rest of the world, all it would have to do is tell all of its people to stand perfectly still until an agreed-upon split second, then jump up and down at the exact same time. Whammo! end of earth... either that or it will bring the dinosaurs back and prove once and for all that Godzilla was real. (He certainly looked real in the movie.)

Usain Bolt, the world-record holder of the 100-meter dash and acknowledged "fastest man on earth, hits the tape at about 28 miles per hour in just 9.69 seconds. How impressive is that? Compared to a cheetah, not much, but if you consider, from the starter's gun to the breaking of the tape, 42 babies were born in the world... more if one of the mothers was Octomom. Now I am impressed.

A Wyoming University study determined the real limitation on running speed is the rate at which muscles in the body can contract and propel the limbs forward. By analyzing muscle fibers and running lots of tests, it was theorized that a human, running a perfect race, could hit 40 mph! That would give him a 6.67 second, 28 baby, 100-meter dash... and leave Bolt some 40 yards behind.

World record for driving a truck the most miles with cardboard completely covering the front windshield has to go to the Chinese guy who didn't have time to fix the cab's shattered glass. So he punched a few eye holes in the makeshift cardboard 'windshield' and alternated seeing by using the holes to see and sticking his head out the driver's side window. How far did he drive in the bitter cold? Would you believe 400 miles? When he was finally pulled over by observant police, his face was a windblown bright, Barney-like purple.

A joke... always end a lame post with a joke:

Patient: Nurse, I keep seeing spots in front of my eyes.
Nurse: Have you ever seen a doctor?
Patient: No, just spots.

And they call the wind Maria... I don't think so!

Away out here they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
And they call the wind Maria*

... and don't tell me you weren't singing the tune as you read the verse. Well, that's a fun wind... like, "ha ha, look at my cow, blowing away with milk coming out her nose" fun. We make up romantic songs to those winds.

I tell you friend, that is such a sissy wind compared to some. Ever been to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire? It stands just 6,300 feet above sea level (Mt. Everest is at 29,000 feet), but because it sits in the path of three major storm tracks and has a few other geological factors thrown in, Mt. Washington has some of the hardest-blowing winds ever recorded, often exceeding 100 mph! As a fact, a big wind almost blew my step-daughter off the mountain (seriously) when she was visiting there as a little girl.

A category 5 hurricane-- the kind that destroyed New Orleans-- exceeds 155 mph and you know what that can do. Now let's push the envelope... winds over 200 mph. Actually, for Mt. Washington, that is not even rare. It once held the measured wind speed record of 231 mph. 

How strong is a 200 mph wind? If you were lining up against 6' 4", 260-pound Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears, it would be like hitting cotton candy compared to "the big wind." Nobody goes out in the big wind.

Tropical Cyclone Olivia, which tore across the Indian Ocean in 1995, had winds measuring 253 mph... the highest ever recorded on earth! 

If the rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
We'll call this wind @#%&*!!ier (has to rhyme with Fire, sort-of).

*Soundtrack and Lyrics from Paint Your Wagon"

World record!

Actor Warren Beatty has had affairs with Diane Keaton, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Madonna, Liv Ullmann, Twiggy, Mary Tyler Moore, Jane Fonda... and a lot more really big notables, according to biographer Peter Biskind in his new book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America... enough for a very impressive life, if that's how score is kept.

But, at almost 73, does he remember who has a dimple here, a tattoo there, a birthmark in some funny place? If so, how does he keep the details straight? Well, he probably doesn't... because this new autobiography calculates he has had affairs with 12,775 women... enough to fill New York's Radio City Music Hall (right) --twice... not counting the Rockettes, of course.... and the daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings and stolen kisses were not included in this number! (I didn't make that up.) 

World Record? I hardly think so.

How could you forget one of the most famous basketball players of all time, Wilt Chamberlain? Sure, Wilt scored 100 points in an NBA game once but, according to his count, that hardly measured up to the 20,000 women he said he 'scored' before he died at age 64. (To add scope to that stat, if the number 20,000 represented days, that would be almost 55 years... so Wilt must have been a very busy man. He was, by the way, a lifelong bachelor, which is understandable since he certainly wouldn't have had time for a wife.)

"The point of using the number," Wilt said, "was to show that sex was a great part of my life as basketball was a great part of my life." I guess! He also said, "With all of you men out there who think that having a thousand different ladies is pretty cool, I have learned in my life... that having one woman a thousand different times is much more satisfying." And who of us mere mortals could know enough to deny that? Wilt is probably one of the very few to speak from experience... oh, and Warren.

Life is like a game of chess...

... both are almost impossibly difficult at times. 


How complex is chess? According to former champion, Garry Kasparov, "The number of legal chess positions is 10 to the 40th power, the number of different possible games, 10 to the 120th power. A player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy (100 billion to 70 sextillion--70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000--say astronomers). There are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe (don't even ask). These comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this ancient board game. They are also handy--and I am not above doing this myself--for impressing people with how complicated chess is."

OK, I believe you, Garry... Chess (and life) can be challenging beyond comprehension. But at the end, in life, if we've played a great game, we get an automatic seed to The Finals.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Wrong, wrong wrong. Pictures lie! An old journalism professor of mine (who should know because he spent half-a-lifetime as a photographer for UPI) said that if we ever say that or write that, we would get an automatic FE (fact error = failure) stamped on our paper... and he had a big rubber FE stamp that he would delight in using...with red ink, no less. This was before... way before today's digital world.

So what you see isn't always what you get. Ever watch a good magician?

Do you know that, beside being Groundhog Day, this is also the day when many top-talent, big name singing stars will re-record "We Are The World," this time for the benefit of Haiti relief efforts.

Now here's where the (digital) magic trick comes in... Janet Jackson wanted to sing the part her brother Michael (he died, you know) sang in 1985, but she couldn't make the recording session. No problem. She will sing it in a remote studio and it will be digitally inserted in the final cut. So as you see it replayed, look for her. You will see her but she really isn't there... and I'll bet you won't easily be able to tell.


Side note: Michael Jackson, who died last June 25th, was the music industry's top-selling artist for 2009 moving 8.3 million units (CDs, digital downloads, DVDs, etc.). It's amazing what you can do when you are dead.

Alpha and Omega... in real life

Presently, only Yale and the University of North Carolina have one. It's a JEOL microprobe (a high powered microscope). What is so special about that? Well, your best biology lab microscopes can magnify up to 1,000 times. Now that's a lot, especially if you are in Biology 103 and looking at a fly. (Now you know where the idea for the Vincent Price movie, The Fly, probably came from.) But, through the lens of the JEOL, you can see 30 atoms laid end-to-end. That, my friends, is a 300,000 times magnification. OK, that's the alpha.

It doesn't take much imagination to know where to look for our omega. The universe, of course... you know, space everlasting. Scientists estimate it stretches to 6 billion light years from edge to edge... and is ever expanding.  As you may recall, just one light year is 186,000 miles per second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 364 1/4 days in a year (yeah, about 6 trillion miles) x 6 billion years. (I just love that... it blows me away.)

That's the omega of the range of man's perceptual understanding... from .1 nanometers (about one ten- billionth of a meter (Shaq O'Neil, for example, is 2,100,000,000 nanometers tall) to 6 trillion light years.


Gives new definition to describing the one that got away, doesn't it?

Award season is upon us

While we are priming up for the Academy Awards, some of us have already watched the Golden Globes, the Grammys, the Emmys, the Tonys, the People's Choice awards, the Screen Actor's Guild awards, the Independent Spirit awards, the Director's Guild awards, and on and on.

However, none of these dramatic, climactic, suspenseful presentations ("I want to thank the Academy, my beautiful wife Zeona, and little Ricky and Lucy... you kids go to bed now, and of course, my agent and best friend, Bradley F. Braverman") are my favorites. No, not by a long shot. Who can deny the thrill of the Darwin Awards (highlighting human stupidity) or the Bulwer-Lytton awards (featuring the world's worst opening sentence of a fictional novel). Now here is class, excitement and real human entertainment... and somehow, the two do go together...sort-of. For example:


Darwin 1: When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up, the robber-to-be earned his Darwin by turning the gun to his eye so he could 'check down the barrel'... then he pulled the trigger again. It worked!


Bulwer-Lytton 1: Harvey placed the muzzle of the .45 against his head, and as the cold steel touched his temple, a sudden shiver raced along his spine and the hair-trigger took on the frisson, his brains missing Marlene's photo, where he wanted it to go, and splattered across his burgundy nightgown, so he got the color combination right.

Darwin 2: As a female shopper exited a convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. Within minutes, police grabbed the snatcher and took him back to the store. When asked to stand in front of the lady for a positive ID, he replied, "Yes, officer. That's her. That's the lady I stole the purse from."


Bulwer-Lytton 2: After quickly scrutinizing the two dangerously buff men coming toward her in the dark and wondering whether she could take them both out, P.I. Velma Plusch mentally inventoried her arsenal -- two pistols, two stiletto-clad feed, two leather-gloved hands, two each eyes, ears, lips, and breasts -- and decided that she could.

Darwin 3: An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train.  When asked how he received the injuries, he told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.


Bulwer-Lytton 3: Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay -- the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.


Now here's a toss-up: After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting had escaped.  Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride.  He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn't discovered for three days.

You know what today is, right?

This (if it is still Monday, January 25th) is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day!   You know you love it, but did you know that it was invented as a wall paper? Some use it as a wrapper to protect things in shipment or storage. That is the "standard way." But most of us use it as something far richer... as therapy for the body and soul. Who doesn't enjoy the 'pop-pop-pop' that can go on endlessly (or until the bubble wrap and time to pop run out.) For some it is a mania. For others it is an indescribable nuisance.

Now the real deal is to find those 'mania' people and pair them with the 'nuisance' variety... then stand back and watch what happens.

If you want to know more, go to the Bubble Wrap site (highlighted above) and read the story. It's five minutes of pseudo-popping fun. BUT... if you want something I-tangible, go here: Just don't blame me if you can't break away from this compulsive fun for hours. Oh, by the way, there are 250 Facebook pages for Bubble Wrap.

Things you will be richer knowing...

... though not in dollars.

• India is known for a lot of things... most of all, a lot of people. Of it's 1.2 million residents, half--600-plus million--have no indoor plumbing (i.e. toilets). FYI: That is twice the number of the entire U.S. population. In addition, India has 238 million cows, more than any other nation. These walking hamburgers (my phrasing, not theirs, since cows are sacred in India) burp, belch and fart. Add 200 million more sheep and goats to all of this and you have a contribution of methane gas that does more damage to the environment than all of India's dynamically growing number of cars, motorcycles and motor bikes on the road. Pee-yew! I mean phew! The numbers boggle the mind.
  

• In China, a pretty strong guy just set the world record by doing 12 one-finger push-ups. He can also do a one-fingered handstand with his right index finger. And, I'm just guessing here, he can probably pick his nose like a demon too.

• Today's news just brought the sad story of a man mauled in his daughter's home by her four pit bulls. Ever wonder what possesses someone to have four pit bulls in her house? Ever hear of Golden retrievers or Yellow Labs?

• Hate to tell you I told you so (not really though), but television can kill you... or at least, shorten your life expectancy. According to the American Heart Assn. Journal, a recent study shows each additional hour spent in front of the TV increases the risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent. Scroll three posts down to Which half are you in? and you'll see my 'told you so' moment. So, the watchword is discretion... watching TV's good stuff (and there is lots) takes some discretion. "I watch Dancing With The Stars and that Simon Cowell thing, every rerun of America's Funniest Videos, and smoke. How am I doin'?" Sorry pal. Your best hope is that you are an optimist. Other studies show that "the glass is half-full" people live 14 percent longer, so maybe it's a trade-off. And if you don't like that, stick around and wait for the next study.
  

• A big OMG! to the young South Korean girls who took home $10,000 for winning the LG Mobile Worldcup texting championship in NYC last week. The two girls texted, word-for-unabreviated-word, from a written script for one hour, switching off when one of the girl's texting fingers needed a rest. They were penalized for errors so the pace of 35 wpm for one hour was even more impressive. They LOL all the way to the bank.

• In a small Chinese village (and I mean really small) where no inhabitant is taller than 4 feet, 3 inches, outsiders not 'measuring up... er  down,' are banned. Do I see a lawsuit coming?

• Point to Ponder: "Insane people are always sure that they are fine," says writer Nora Ephron. "It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy." Fact: one out of four of us are mentally unstable in one way or another. So look around and figure it out. Me? I'm fine.
  

It's a "Nuts Out There" kind of world...

... but just perfect for my blog. For example:

• A guy arrested for slashing the tires of 45 or more cars in Colorado, explained to police that he had been overwhelmed by radiation from a nearby nuclear plant and, oh yeah, he had been forced by his mom to wear braces on his teeth as a child. Well that certainly makes sense. 

• A German man was arrested for beating another with a swan. Said he had been in a park when he met a man with an offensive East German accent. Grabbing the nearest swan by its neck, he swung it mercilessly at the stranger, yelling "They should rebuild the (Berlin) wall right up to the sky because of you!" Neither the man or the swan suffered serious injuries. I guess the swan wasn't loaded... but the man was. 

• The family of an English missionary who was eaten by cannibals on a Pacific island in 1839, received a formal apology from the descendants in a reconciliation ceremony... along with the promise to remove that recipe from its cook book. (You do know I made that last part up, don't you?)

• Steven Foster (not the dead songwriter but a supermarket clerk in England) returned $1.3 million that was wrongly deposited in his bank account by his employer.  "At first, I just thought it was a Christmas bonus," he said. (I made that quote up, too.) Anyhow, the employer rewarded him with a case of Budweiser. (That's true.) Personally, I think a case of Fosters would have been more fitting.

• From the 'Well I'll Be A Monkey's Uncle' department: An Australian orangutan escaped from her enclosure using a stick to short-circuit the electric fence, then climbing out on a ladder she made out of debris. "We've had issues with her before where she tries to outsmart the keepers," said one of her keepers. I think she just did.

• A guy in New York was fed up with the poor customer service he was receiving from his bank, so he did the obvious. He sued them for $1,784 billion, trillion (1,784 followed by 21 zeros), plus $200,164,000, to teach them a lesson. The suit was eventually dismissed when it was noted that the dollar amount requested is more money than exists on earth.

• And finally, another New Yorker (do you notice a pattern here?) driving erratically, was pulled over and charged with a DUI. As the officer approached the car, he noticed the man climbing from the driver's seat into the back seat. The man then told the officer that, although he had been drinking, he was not the one driving. The officer did take note that there was no one else in the car.
  

Ted Williams' head... and other stuff

In reviewing all the happenings in sports over the past decade, perhaps the strangest is the 2002 headline: Ted Williams Dies. Head Frozen. What an ignoble end for perhaps baseball's all-time greatest hitter who, twice in his career, took time off and, as a Marine pilot, become a World War II hero. The Splendid Splinter, or Ted, as I like to call him, was the last man to bat .400 in 1941. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Ted died in 2002 at age 83.

Now here's where the weird part comes in. Ted wanted his body frozen so that many years down the line, when science comes up with a way to cure "old age," Ted could be brought back from his state of er, brittleness, and live again... perhaps even bat .400 once more. Let me tell you right now... ain't gonna happen.

You see, even when technology allows (wink, wink,) word has it that someone at the cryogenic plant bashed (perhaps accidentally--benefit of the doubt) a wrench into his frozen head, which had been perhaps accidentally separated from his body. Poor Ted. Post death, he could see the stitches on a baseball pitched to him at 100-mph. Now, he didn't even see this coming.

Among other bizarre sports happenings, the U.S. mens basketball team finished SIXTH in the '02 world championships on its home court in Indianapolis! So much for world dominance there.

Fan turned villain, Steve Bartman reached for an almost-in-play foul ball at one of the rare Cub post-season games and probably cost those lovable losers their first-- and perhaps only-- shot at the World Series in my lifetime. And to rub it in even more, Boston won.

Pro quarterback Michael Vick killed dogs. NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on games he officiated. And  hundreds of major league baseball players were caught, or thought to use performance enhancing illegal steroids, setting records that some believed were unbreakable  (except for Cub favorite Sammy Sosa, who spoke poor English and no doubt, didn't understand the situation). Yes, it was the birth of the footnote in the record books: "Asterisk denotes records broken by cheaters."

Oh yeah, The Detroit Lions had their first perfect season, 0-16, about the same time all the auto plants in the neighborhood bet their shirts on a Super Bowl... and lost, big time. And a Dallas high school girls basketball team won a game 100 to nothing, once again proving a good defense is hard to beat.

Thank God we still have that bastion of honor sports, golf. Whoops. Scratch that.