Just for Laughs

The Forester and The Lawyer

A forester and a lawyer were in car accident and showed up at the pearly gates together.

St. Peter greets them at the pearly gates and takes them to the homeswhere they will spend all of eternity. They get into St. Peter's holy vehicle and head on down a gold road, which turns into a platinum road, which turns onto an even grander road paved with diamonds, to a huge mansion where St. Peter turns to the lawyer and says, here is your home for the rest of eternity, enjoy! And if there is anything you need, just let me know.

Then St. Peter took the forester to his home, back down the diamond studded boulevard, down the platinum highway, down the street of gold, down an avenue of silver, along a stone alley and down an unpaved footpath to a shack. St Peter says "Here you go" and goes to leave when the forester says "Waitaminute!, how come the lawyer gets the big mansion and I get this shack?"

St. Peter says: "Well, Foresters are a dime a dozen here, we have never had a lawyer before."

The Power of Meditation...

Yet again scientists are acknowledging the power of meditation, something our rishis emphasized thousands of years ago! This is incredibly interesting and sheds some scientific light on moorti puja again... So much has been said about yoga and meditation in recent times. We should be proud and also try to take advantage of something so close and dear to us..

Here is the most recent article from NY Times...

I am also including some other interesting articles on the mind and meditation and such...

This one is about how meditation increases the size of the brain!

In general, a lot of research is being conducted in general! This article is from NPR nearly 4 years ago and so I am sure there is tremendous material out there... Basically, we should all be proud of what we have been given and hopefully we can take advantage of it and realize what we have BEFORE others come and tell us what we have!

Words of Wisdom

I thought I would get back into posting powerful quotes with a topic very important to every one of our lives... OPTIMISM. Optimism is the strength to keep on going! Without it, success is not possible. As long as we have a positive outlook towards life and always remember that anything is possible, nothing is impossible! No matter how bad things are, no matter how bad we are hurt, no matter how much wrong we have done, always remember that what happens next is in our hands and we CAN make it better so don't give up!

"The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose." --- Kahlil Gibran

"Optimism is a happiness magnet. If you stay positive, good things and good people will be drawn to you." --- Mary Lou Retton

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” --- Maria Robinson

"What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." --- Oscar Wilde

Just for Laughs

It has indeed been a loong time but hopefully this laugh will be worth the while....enjoy and smile!

Three engineers and three accountants are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three accountants each buy tickets and watch as the three engineers buy only a single ticket. "How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asks an accountant. "Watch and you'll see," answers an engineer. They all board the train. The accountants take their respective seats but all three engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train has departed, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on. The accountants saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the accountants decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all that). When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" says one perplexed accountant. "Watch and you'll see," answers an engineer. When they board the train the three accountants cram into a restroom and the three engineers cram into another one nearby. The train departs. Shortly afterward, one of the engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the accountants are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, Ticket, please."

Sportsmanship in its purest form...

As a lifelong sports fan (and a crazy one at that), it is rare in today's world to see true sportsmanship. When I read this article it gave me goosebumps and I knew that it was something I had to share! Most of us have probably heard that story about the Special Olympics (where the kid falls down and then all the people hold hands and finish the race together) but we probably wondered if it was a true story. Well here is one for you to tell with video included...

I hope that it touches you too and is something that you think of the next time you step on to the basketball court, track field, or any other competition in life--athletic or otherwise! This is the true spirit of sports... (The below version is abbreviated but for the full version click here)

Good Sports

An extraordinary act on the ball field redefines fair play.

Louisa Thomas

Newsweek Web Exclusive

On Saturday, April 26, a Western Oregon University player named Sara Tucholsky stepped into the batter's box against Central Washington University. With two runners on base, she stroked a pitch over the center field fence. Tucholsky, a five-foot-two senior with a career .153 batting average, had never hit the ball out of the park, not even in batting practice. In her excitement Tucholsky missed first base. As she turned back to touch the bag, she blew out her knee.

The umpire ruled (mistakenly) that if Western Oregon substituted a runner for Tucholsky, the hit would be scored as a two-run single. If any of her teammates touched her, the ump said, she'd be out. Tucholsky crawled back to first base and hugged the bag, unable to continue.

It would have been a tough end to the right fielder's career. But Mallory Holtman, the all-time home run leader for Central Washington—the opposing team—approached the ump and asked her if players on her team could carry Tucholsky around the bases.

The two teams were vying for the top spot in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, and Central Washington needed to win to stay in the race for a berth in the NCAA Division II championships. Thanks to Tucholsky, Western Oregon would go on to win the game, 4-2, and secure the conference title a week later. Thanks to Holtman and her teammates, no one cared about the score.

You can watch a clip of Holtman and her teammate Liz Wallace carrying Tucholsky on YouTube. The video, filmed through a chain link fence by a player's mother, is shaky and washed out. Excited whoops give way to quiet confusion as Tucholsky fails to follow her teammates around the bases. But then the cheers grow louder, edged with astonishment, as Holtman and Wallace appear from behind the line of Western Oregon players, all of them standing, and carry the diminutive Tucholsky around the dirt diamond. The two girls, their white jerseys flanking Tucholsky's red one, pause at each base and gently dip, to let the injured player tap her good foot on the bag. It looks a little as if they're bowing.

Sportsmanship is easy to praise and hard to practice. The rhetoric of fair play is deeply entrenched in organized sports—there's hardly a league at any level without a sportsmanship award—but the spirit is less so. What makes Central Washington's action so extraordinary is that it was so unexpected and spontaneous. It went beyond the normal rules of the game and came at the cost of the team's own success. Manufactured shows of sportsmanship—the lackluster handshakes with the other team at the end of the game or, more spectacularly, the deal cut between opposing coaches to allow the injured Nykesha Sales to score a basket uncontested to break the University of Connecticut's career scoring record in 1998—have a stale air.

Sportsmanship, Creed said, "is to be permitted to grow and spread of its own accord." The end of war, he believed, would surely follow. Alas, neither universal sportsmanship nor world peace has come to pass. But Creed was right about one thing: true displays of sportsmanship are infectious. YouTube videos of Tucholsky's home run have been viewed more than 300,000 times over the past two weeks. Watching it may not bring about world peace—but it may just give us a better sense of what brotherhood means.

In the News...

I promised that it'd take less time between posts so here it is as promised...there isn't any of the normal news today but hopefully you'll find something here that interests you and that you find worthy of being commented on! Please do leave comments and share your thoughts... (the picture to the right is just a cool picture of a volcano that exploded in Chile)

For all of you science fans... a group of scientists this week announced that they created the first ever genetically modified human embryo! This has become a major issue of debate over the last decade as science gets us closer and closer to human cloning! On one hand you have the clear benefits to medicine and humanity. Perhaps we can cure diseases like cystic fibrosis, etc. someday. On the other side, is it right to manipulate with God's mechanism? More importantly, what about people who would give themselves certain genes to become superior to others? Perhaps we could all lose our uniqueness and destroy nature's perfect balance... In any case, a very fascinating research and something worth discussing...What's your opinion?

For all of you history fans, did you know that Hillary Clinton was NOT the first woman to ever run for President? This was a truly fascinating article even if you do not really like history. As it turns out, in 1872, a woman named Victoria Claflin Woodhull was bold enough to run for president at a time when women couldn't even vote! Not only that but she ran with a black man, a man mostly everyone has heard of--Frederick Douglas! Hopefully that alone has you intrigued but if not, Woodhull was a feminist, had an affair, and spent Election Day in jail! Here's definitely a story worth reading...

For all of you who are crazy sports fans, this week saw a major change in the world of women's sports. Two of the best female athletes--Annika Sorenstam (golf) and Justine Henin (tennis)--both decided it was time for the other things in life that matter to them and retired while they were on top of their sports. While we rarely hear much about female sports and pay much attention to them, it is interesting to at least know a little bit about how different things are for women than for men and how they also work equally hard. So for you true sports fans or just girls who are proud here it is.... Justine Henin and Annika Sorenstam. (The first link is a column about the retirement of both women)

In the News...

This news update is LONG LONG overdue so forgive me for the delay but hopefully this week I can get a few posts up to get everyone started on some good summer reading!

It has been a long time since I last brought up politics. I avoided it mostly because it was just getting far too attention already in the media. But I thought I'd bring it back up just to set the stage for the November election... Hillary Clinton is done for all practical purposes (although she is still claiming that she will win!) and I think it is important to go back and look at where she went wrong. At the start of this race, she was the favorite and everyone expected her to push her way straight into the White House. What happened? Here is Time Magazine's explanation of her mistakes...but challenge yourself to find out more and figure out for yourself where she went wrong!

And so that leaves us with Obama vs. McCain... if you're already tired of politics, I am sorry to inform you that it is only going to get worse. From now until November, all you will see, hear and breathe will be Obama vs. McCain so in the spirit of that here is a short article previewing the presidential race from a new source I started using called the Economist (for those of you who do not know, the Economist is considered one of the most reputable news magazines in the world. If you want to really be considered up-to-date and current on your world knowledge, check out the Economist!)

For those of you who could care less about politics, here is the latest in the world:

China's massive earthquake! This was truly a tragic event and the consequences are still unfolding slowly but as of now well over 15,000 people are dead and many many more have been affected. Here is just a brief article summarizing what is happening... But of greater significance is also the Chinese government's response. America has always criticized their government (many times unfairly... I'd say most times) but this is proving to be an example of their progress and strength...

Bomb attacks in Jaipur! It is sad but terrorism is on the rise in India and there are more and more of these attacks taking place. This could be a simple effort by terrorists to rev-up India's religious conflict but hopefully the country is able to remain united and work together to overcome such cowardly acts... The article is just a summary of what happened in case you didn't hear and while I try to avoid trivial articles like this, I thought it would be of interest to many because of how close it is to home...

I promise that there will be more to come really soon! No more long gaps....

SAT Prep of the Day 7

Word of the Day:
CONTENTIOUS -- argumentative.
The meeting was a disaster because of the contentious people who wouldn't let anyone else talk.

Question of the Day:

Today's question is from the Critical Reading section... Choose the word that best fits the meaning of the sentence...

The committee’s report was entirely ------- ; those who ------- it did so with the deliberate intent of damaging my reputation.
a) erroneous . . expunged
b) legitimate . . perused
c) infallible . . endorsed
d) spontaneous . . compiled
e) malicious . . circulated

Whatever was in the report, we know that it was damaging to the person's reputation. Thus the first word has to be something pretty negative...NOT spontaneous or legitimate or infallible. Something erroneous could lead to damage but for the damage to happen the report had to be published or spread, NOT expunged (to get rid of). That leaves us with E!

This was rated as a hard question and hopefully you saw that it wasn't too bad!