I’m not recommending anything, you realize.
Still, if the effect translates to other mammals… I am probably immortal.
But he makes the save!
I got forwarded this video by a friend whose sense of humor is a sometimes little more cruel than I’m usually comfortable with. But I watched, and I wound up laughing for a different reason than I think he did:
Look again. What’s funny to me here isn’t just the remarkably unfortunate bounce (although the 10-year-old in me couldn’t help but snicker) — it’s that the goalie inadvertently makes the save.
I will think of this video now every time someone screws up completely and still manages to get things right in the end. Trebekistan has whole passages about this. We all screw up, constantly. Your sympathy here isn’t with the kicker, is it? It’s with the goalie. You know the feeling. That’s a large part of why this is so funny. But things can still come out OK. There is always hope.
The kid makes the save. This video is a tremendous reminder that things can still work out, I think.
Also, well, snicker.
Your tax dollars being spent to convince 29-year-olds not to have sex
Seriously. Your money is being spent on abstinence-only programs for people who have already been having sex long enough to think they’re pretty good at it.
Urging abstinence doesn’t work particularly well on teenagers — in conservative Texas, sexual activity actually increased after kids took the program. And of course, these programs specifically replace teaching the use of condoms. Brilliant.
Now let’s try the same strategy on people old enough to have kids approaching puberty themselves.
I just hope I can remember where I’m supposed to be
If the Yale thingy wasn’t cool enough, now there’s this, and I’m jazzed:
Thanks to the discussion of memory techniques in Prisoner of Trebekistan, I’ve just been invited to speak to a cognitive science class at UCLA.
Neat!
When I was a kid, I was always told what to learn, but rarely how. Some of the stuff in Trebekistan, particularly around chapter nine, has a lot of the how and even some of the why and when.
One of the reasons I wrote the book is that I dearly want everybody to know how to remember stuff better. Learning how has made a big difference in my life. (Although if you saw me blow a big Final clue in last year’s Ultimate Tournament of Champions, you know it hasn’t been quite as much as I’d like.) The stuff I found out might help you or your family, too. Hope so.