Why does a truck full of birds at rest weigh the same as the same truck with the birds in flight? The birds are weightless in the air, right? That’s why they don’t go splat. Flying birds should make the truck weigh less.
Turns out it’s more complicated than that.
Hospitals across the country are retheming after a recent study unearthed a startling fact. Of 250 children surveyed, exactly 250 of them expressed an aversion or out-and-out fear of clowns. I suppose a generation of administrators raised on Bozo and Ronald McDonald were slow to realize that garishly painted faces were just about the last thing children wanted to see when they were already scared out of their minds.
If you happen to find yourself in Sun City, Arizona, watch out for llamas. At last report two of them were running wild, creating a great deal of havoc with local traffic and amusing any number of YouTube viewers.
Presumably, the llamas have a home somewhere, and they left it. In retrospect, they probably regret that decision. But in any event, we have to deal with reality, not the world of our own imagination.
Every once in a while I will deviate from my standard policy and read some comments on a YouTube video or other internet post. I will never cease to be amazed at the willingness of complete strangers to weigh in with the most subjective criticisms imaginable. I don’t know where the term “trolls” came from, but I like it. It conveys the image of some semiliterate, untalented nobody lurking in his basement (which is to say, his mom’s basement), lobbing ill-conceived and ill-informed mortar fire at people who are actually doing something with their lives.
Maybe it’s American Idol’s fault. …
The legendary country music star Glen Campbell once toured and recorded with the Beach Boys. (It’s possible some of our young folks don’t recognize the name of either of those acts. Parents, do your job!) Campbell, a legendary guitar picker, likes to say he played bass for the band, but he wasn’t a “bass player.” I heard him liken the concept to ordinary people in the casinos. They may be playing blackjack, but they aren’t black jack players.
Have you seen the one in which a man is being attacked by a bull elk? The man is trying desperately to keep a tree between himself and the massive beast. Every once in a while the elk would bellow angrily. (Who knew a big deer, essentially, could sound so mean?) The man, wisely, did not choose to run in those moments; no doubt the elk would have run him down easily.
