Nobody 843

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Nobody # 843

Nobody Asked Me But:

By some strange coincidence, this week’s athlete of the week is another of my granddaughters, Lily. Here she is on the soccer field and enjoying a well-earned, post-game treat.<<<

Just wondering - If 76% of the people in a CNN poll said they were not shopping on Black Friday, then where did all the people in the stores and on the streets come from?<<<

I didn’t know that – Paul Simon only added the third verse to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” because of pressure from the producer of the album. He has never truly felt it belonged.<<<

My sports turkey of the year: Yankee management – if they let Jeter and Rivera get away.<<<

Sign seen – “I didn’t start trouble, it was here when I arrived.”<<<

Which song reminds me of slow dancing when I was young? That’s easy – “Stars fell On Alabama.” And don’t worry. I am not going to sing it for you.<<<

We had Thanksgiving dinner at The Smokehouse across from Warner Brothers, and I didn’t know that the building, which the restaurant has occupied since 1949, was built by Danny Kaye.<<<

David Nolan, 66, died in Tucson Thursday. He was the founder of the Libertarian Party – of all things, because of Nixon’s imposition of wage and price controls in 1971. In 2006 he told the Tucson Daily Citizen that - "The government's job is to protect you; beyond that, it's up to you."

I can live with that as long as “protect” includes protecting me from ignorance, from being impoverished by medical expenses and from free market corruption.<<<

Here are Time magazine’s nominees for “Person of the Year:”

• Julian Assange

• Glenn Beck

• David Cameron

• The Chilean Miners

• Arne Duncan

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan

• Jonathan Franzen

• Lady Gaga

• Robert Gates

• Tony Hayward

• Hu Jintao

• LeBron James

• Steve Jobs

• Hamid Karzai

• David and Charles Koch

• Liu Xiaobo

• Barack Obama

• Sarah Palin

• Nancy Pelosi

• Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert

• The Unemployed American

• J. Craig Venter

• Elizabeth Warren, Mary Schapiro and Sheila Bair

• Mark Zuckerberg

There are some good candidates and some weird ones like LeBron James and Glen Beck, but in my opinion, there is a clear-cut winner here - The Unemployed American.<<<

Adding to my list of greatest film put-down reviews is this one from the Washington Post in 2000 for Battlefield Earth: “A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth.”<<<

Computers are not always correct. One at Cambridge University determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in human history – because nothing important happened that day.

Not true. As I recall, that was the day that I failed my life-saving exam at the University of Arizona and changed my major from physical ed to history.<<<

After the way Sarah Palin referred last week to North Korea as our ally, is it so far fetched to see her choose Kim Jung On as her running mate in 2012?

And isn’t Sarah’s the mouth that just keeps on giving - hope and confidence to the Democrats?<<<

I know Payton Manning is a great quarterback, but I will take Tom Brady any day.<<<

DREAMS

According to a recent scientific study, eating delicious foods like ice cream is the fifth most common dream. The sixth is having a love affair with a celebrity. I have never dreamed either one.

I guess that makes me unique – or out of it.<<<

PHILOSOPHY CORNER

The philosophy of utilitarianism (greatest good for the greatest number) believes that every experience can be quantified and by so doing, the greatest good can be determined. (The most common example is safety versus lives.) Edward Thorndyke tried the following experiment in the 1930s in an attempt to prove that quantification is possible. He asked people on relief (welfare) the following question. How much money would you ask to do each of these?

To have one upper front tooth extracted

To have one little toe amputated

To eat a worm

To strangle a stray cat

To live the rest of your life on an isolated Kansas farm

This is how they ranked them from least money to most:

Tooth

Cat

Toe

Worm

Kansas. (Wouldn’t Dorothy and Toto be shocked with this one?)

When I read this I was appalled. Of these five unpleasant things, by far the hardest for me would be to strangle the cat. How about you?