Presented
By
Of Hockey Pucks and Teddy Bears
Monday April 23, 2001
- TITLE: "Hockey Pucks and Teddy Bears" It was just fun to say. I am, as you know, enamored of iambic meter.
- "…pelotas and piñatas …" A pelota is the ball used in Jai Alai. It is thrown by a player wearing a basket called a cesta. Here is a link to some Jai Alai definitions.
- "…shout slogans either in or about English …" Quebec is like its motherland, France, in its zeal to protect French not only as the official language, but as the ONLY language.
- "…Why do I have to think of everything …" Before you write long e-mails complaining that I am giving good ideas to the enemy, please consider this is not exactly like publishing "How to Make an Atom Bomb with Odds and Ends Commonly Found in Your Folks' Garage"
- "…and probably all-time final - game." The XFL sprung out of the mind of the Ron Popiel of TV sports, Vince McMahon of pro-wrestling fame. The ratings on NBC have been so awful - the XFL set an all time record for the lowest prime-time viewship some weeks - that there is little chance NBC will do it again. Even UPN, which has run the secondary game every week, has suggested there is a better chance of running new episodes of My Mother the Car than to air XFL games next year.
- "…Inside the Directors' Studio …" Inside the Actors' Studio is a program run on the Bravo network in which James Lipton, Dean of the Actors Studio Program, of the New School in New York, has conversations with actors and directors who then take questions from students.
- "…Quantum physics joke …" I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it makes my earlobes hurt. Dr. Heisenberg is Dr. Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) who is best known for positing the "uncertainty principle" which holds that the more precisely one can measure the location of an object, the less precisely one can know its momentum. If you want to know more, start here.
Erwin Schrödinger developed a mind experiment to help understand Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which involved a cat in a sealed box, a Geiger counter, and poison. The point (more or less) was that because of the uncertainty of nuclear particles hitting the Geiger counter, thus releasing small amounts of poison which the cat would have to breath, it was never more than a 50-50 proposition whether the cat was alive or dead. Until you opened the box then the cat was either alive OR dead and it was a 100 percent certainty.
The joke involves waking Schrödinger's cat (which might be alive or dead) and saying to Dr. Heisenberg, "certainly."
That joke KILLS at MIT.
- Mullings' Catchy Caption of the Day:
Student demonstrating against Double Dutch rope skipping.
-- AP Photo/Canadian Press, Kevin Frayer
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