Snopes.com: Michael Vick attacked by pit bull?

Snopes

I fell for this because I wanted it to be true. Sadly, it is not. Snopes.com is the best resource for confirming or denying stories that seem too good to be true.

Michael Vick Attacked By Pitbull

Claim: New York Jets quarterback Michael Vick was attacked by a stray pitbull.

FALSE

Example: [Collected via Facebook, April 2014]

I just read that Michael Vick was attacked by a stray pit bull. Is this true or false?

Origins: On 23 March 2014, the News Nerd web site published an article positing that New York Jets quarterback Michael Vick had been attacked by a stray pitbull after visiting with management at the Jets' home field, MetLife Stadium:

In a bit of an ironic scenario, New York Jets football player Michael Vick was attacked by a pitbull as he left MetLife Stadium this Saturday (March 22, 2014).

The 34-year-old quarterback was leaving the stadium after visiting with his new team’s management, when a stray pitbull suddenly darted towards him. Onlookers say the dog gave chase as Vick attempted to use some of his classic juke moves to avoid it. Unswayed by Vick’s attempts to elude him, the dog locked onto his left thigh. The dog shook violently back and forth while locked on to Vick’s leg.

Michael Vick has been the subject of extensive news coverage, public opprobrium, and a good deal of satire since he was indicted in June 2007 on charges related to his participation in a dogfighting ring that executed underperforming pit bulls by hanging, electrocution, drowning, shooting, and other brutal means. He pleaded guilty to
federal felony charges and served 21 months in prison, after which he resumed his career as a quarterback in the NFL. Since then he has been featured in a number of Internet-circulated spoofs, typically japes that either ironically portray him as a protector of pit bulls or the hapless victim of attacks by members of that breed.

The item cited above, from the latter category, is one that many readers soon mistook for a reporting of real news. However, it was just another spoof from News Nerd, whose stock in trade is publishing fantastically fictional stories (such as a recent account of a fight between singers Patti Labelle and Aretha Franklin). As the The News Nerd site's disclaimer states, all of its material is satirical in nature:

The stories posted on TheNewsNerd are for entertainment purposes only. The stories may mimic articles found in the headlines, but rest assured they are purely satirical.

Last updated: 16 April 2014


Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/michaelvick.asp#kFIEzJPrvxiM3LOp.99

Honduras has the world's highest homicide rate!

Latin America comprises only 8% of the world's population, but accounts for 31% of its murders.

 

WSJ

 

"A combination of factors is to blame, said Alejandro Hope, a security expert at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a think tank: weak law enforcement institutions, a vibrant illegal narcotics trade that led to a growth in organized crime, a culture of violence, economic inequality, and the region's chaotic urbanization of the past three decades, which created rings of slums around mega cities.

Brazil, the host for this year's World Cup soccer tournament, has more overall homicides than any country, at 50,108, accounting for one in 10 globally, followed by India, with 43,355 murders in 2012.

...

Ms. Me said the most surprising thing to her in the data was the persistence of criminal violence in the Americas over time. The U.N. group looked at data since 1955 and found the Americas, including the U.S., had at least five times higher homicide rates than Europe and parts of Asia.

"Europe was only 10 years from a violent war, so how is it that even back in 1955 the Americas were so much more violent?" Ms. Me said. [Culture?]

The U.S. homicide rate is 4.7 per 100,000—well above every other industrialized country.

The Americas also had the highest rate of guns as the cause of homicide—with 66% of the homicides caused by guns versus 28% in Africa and Asia and 13% in Europe.

However, not all Latin America is a hotbed of violent crime. Southern South America—Chile, Argentina and Uruguay—have crime rates roughly similar to the U.S. There is far less organized crime and better policing in those nations compared to the rest of the region, Mr. Hope said."

Public Health in India: Take Poo to the Loo

Quick! What percentage of people in India don't use toilets?



More than half, according to this article from the Wall Street Journal.


WSJ

Some 620 million people across India defecate outside, the largest number world-wide. About 70% of rural Indians don't use toilets, and 28 million children have no toilet facilities in school, according to Unicef. It is common practice for India's mothers to dispose of their children's waste in the open.

...

Open defecation is a serious public-health problem. It can expose people to diseases such as polio, giardiasis, hepatitis A and infectious diarrhea. In 2012, nearly a quarter of all young children who died of diarrhea world-wide were Indian. Constant exposure to fecal germs can also lead to stunted growth, a condition afflicting some 61 million Indian children.

...

India has made progress: The percentage of Indians using toilets has increased substantially since 1990, when 75% of the population defecated in the open.

There has also been a significant increase in the proportion of schools with a usable toilet, from roughly 47% in 2010 to almost 63% in 2013—and a large majority of schools now have separate toilet facilities for girls and boys.

But India is still far behind other developing countries. Neighboring Bangladesh, which is far poorer, has reduced the number of households without access to toilets to below 10%. In China, the number is about 1%.

Here's a sample of the public service campaign, Poo2Loo:

 

 

 

 

 

Daddy -- Sylvia Plath (1962)

Otto Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not 
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

 

Daddy, read by Sylvia Plath

God Only Knows -- Beach Boys (1966)

Wikipedia

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it

God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave me
Though life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me

God only knows what I'd be without you

God only knows what I'd be without you

If you should ever leave me
Well life would still go on believe me
The world could show nothing to me
So what good would living do me

God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows what I'd be without you
God only knows
God only knows what I'd be without you

Columbia College Freshman Reading

Below is the freshman reading list in the Humanities for all Columbia College students.

Did you graduate from college and never read any of these books? How shameful (for both you and your college).

Haven't read them all? Me neither. But I'm not exactly proud of not having read Cervantes; in fact, I'm vaguely ashamed of it. (Not too ashamed not to confess it, of course, since it allows me to brag about having read the rest of the lot.) All of them will reward slow, repeated re-readings, of course. Gotta get on that.

Explore the Literature

Click on one of the texts below to explore related materials.

Spring Semester

 

The Aeneid

Virgil

 

Metamorphoses

Ovid

 

Confessions

Augustine

 

 

The Divine Comedy

Dante

 

Essays

Michel de Montaigne

 

King Lear

William Shakespeare

 

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

 

Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

 

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

 

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

Fall Semester

The Iliad

Homer

 

The Odyssey

Homer

 

Oresteia

Aeschylus

 

Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

 

The Medea

Euripides

 

The Histories

Herodotus

 

History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

 

Lysistrata

Aristophanes

 

The Symposium

Plato

 

Genesis

Unknown

 

Job

Unknown

 

Luke/John

Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

Advice for a Happy Life: Charles Murray

Some sensible advice from Charles Murray, who cites Jacques Barzun (my intellectual idol of the moment). Barzun's observation that you can't be happily married to someone who differs from you significantly with regard to orderliness, thrift, and punctuality is not something you want to ignore. You should also remember that couples are only as happy in the marriage as they were before the marriage. So if you are thinking that getting married is going to fix your relationship...

I like Murray's advice about "starter marriages" versus "mergers."

My own "tip": If you are a guy, marry a gal who is going to be at least 10% younger than you are on the day of your wedding. So if you get married at 30, she's 27. If you're 27, she's 24. If you get married at 24, she's 21. And never marry anyone younger than 21 (which means that you can't get married until you are 24).
Ladies, I recommend the same formula, in reverse. Marry a guy who is at least 10% older than you. (The gap can be as wide as 25% before you start running into generation gap issues.)

You can see from the above chart that 1960 was the last time Americans en masse followed this advice (males 24, females 21). But except for the madness of the 1950 Return of the WWII GIs / Baby Boom, a 10% gap has been evidenced every decade from 1890 to 1960.

I can't imagine why anyone would marry someone their own age.

 

Take a page out of his book:

JFK was 35 when he married 23 year old Jackie.

She was 33% younger than he was.



WSJ

Ready for some clichés about marriage? Here they come. Because they're true.

Marry someone with similar tastes and preferences. Which tastes and preferences? The ones that will affect life almost every day.

It is OK if you like the ballet and your spouse doesn't. Reasonable people can accommodate each other on such differences. But if you dislike each other's friends, or don't get each other's senses of humor or—especially—if you have different ethical impulses, break it off and find someone else.

Personal habits that you find objectionable are probably deal-breakers. Jacques Barzun identified the top three as punctuality, orderliness and thriftiness. It doesn't make any difference which point of the spectrum you're on, he observed: "Some couples are very happy living always in debt, always being late, and finding leftover pizza under a sofa cushion." You just have to be at the same point on the spectrum. Intractable differences will become, over time, a fingernail dragged across the blackboard of a marriage.

What you see is what you're going to get. If something about your prospective spouse bothers you but you think that you can change your beloved after you're married, you're wrong. Be prepared to live with whatever bothers you—or forget it. Your spouse will undoubtedly change during a long marriage but not in ways you can predict or control.

 

It is absolutely crucial that you really, really like your spouse. You hear it all the time from people who are in great marriages: "I'm married to my best friend." They are being literal. A good working definition of "soul mate" is "your closest friend, to whom you are also sexually attracted."