Thought I would share with my family and friends Jason Gray’s fourth edition of his rules of the annual family Thanksgiving football game. He brings us 26 (more) this year beginning with, “Number 1: The game speaks a universal human truth: There’s nothing we enjoy more than getting together with the most important people in our lives. And, if they slip and fall down on the front lawn, face-first, that would be really hilarious.” You can read it here. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Cow tipping is an urban legend that tells of hayseeds on the farm sneaking up on a sleeping cow in the middle of the night and, well, tipping it over. In reality, this prank would be a lot harder to pull off than one might be led to believe in that cows do not sleep standing up, and a full grown cow can often weigh in at about a half-ton. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with cows: How about cow patty bingo?
Ebola virus (green) attached to a human cell (blue). Credit: NAID
Had a little touch of the flu last week, but I am pleased to announce that I am back thumping away at my computer keyboard. But my run-in with what turned out to be a relatively benign parasite got me to thinking about how the relationship between a virus microbe and its human host might be considered an apt metaphor for the relationship of humans with this beautiful planet upon which we reside.
Viruses are different than your standard bacterium in many ways: most bacteria are harmless, for example, and, in certain cases, are actually beneficial to their human hosts. Further, fewer than one percent of all bacteria actually cause disease, although the ones that do can be doozies, such as those that are responsible for the bubonic plague, cholera, meningitis and tuberculosis as well as serious and life-threatening staphylococcus infections.
Read an article in the paper last week regarding how the liberal use of adverbs in prose often evokes the disdain of other writers, including those in the legal profession. For example, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy tells us that avoiding adverbs “forces you to confront the significance of your word choice. You just discipline yourself to choose your words more carefully.”
$19 million total to-date for Derek Jeter’s “Turn 2” foundation.
Now that major league baseball is moving into the playoffs I thought I would re-visit a subject I wrote about at the beginning of the season. Specifically, I posted a piece regarding the ginormous compensation deals that some professional baseball players are able to negotiate during their short careers (Alex Rodriguez in particular), and I questioned whether they deserved such huge salaries. The article, which wasn’t really so much about baseball as it was about the business of baseball, sprouted from a comment by a friend of mine (follow this link to read the article).
Yet another good friend of mine (yes, I have more than one), upon reading my piece on Rodriguez, made a simple and straightforward suggestion as to what might be done with all that excess cash in which major league baseball is seemingly awash, which I opined would go to the owners if not to the players. Her query: “Couldn’t it go to charity?” That struck me as an interesting question and piqued my curiosity sufficient to inspire me to do a little research (not too much, just a little). So this article takes yet a different tack: It addresses what people in the baseball business, as well as other professional sports, do with all that money.
