Cellebrations?

Apparently it's Spreadsheet Day today.  I find this very sad.

U-S A-U-S

Heard some people chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A" the other night on TV.  Do you know that if you only tune into that two thirds of the way through, they're actually chanting "A-U-S, A-U-S".  Makes me feel very patriotic.  So much so, I'm off to buy a strudel.

Air 1999

According to the very groovy logo on Google today, it's 50 years since the first manned space flight.  All those great hopes launched in a blaze of optimism. 

A mere eight years later, we were walking on the moon.  So over the next 42 years, you'd have thought we'd have really gone places.

Oh I know there's robots running around on Mars and amazing telescopes being built but I just find it disappointing that 50 years after we first went into space, we're all still here.   No-one is living on the moon and I can think of a few people that should be. 

Meanwhile back on planet earth, even our planes fly slower today than they did 30 years ago.  It wasn't like this in the Jetsons!  Are we never going to get jetpacks? 
    
It's not all bad though. We do have Facebook and Twitter, so at least we can whinge more quickly.

Alphabet Football: The B&W Show

The English Premier League is entering its final phase, and as it stands, it looks like this:

Pos	Team	Pld	GD	Pts
14	Blackburn	29	-12	32
15	Blackpool	29	-15	32
16	West Brom	29	-15	32
17	Birmingham	28	-12	31
18	West Ham	29	-13	31
19	Wolves	29	-15	29
20	Wigan	29	-23	27

That's a lot of teams beginning with "W" currently propping up the table, and a lot of teams beginning with "B" sitting nervously above them.

If it were to remain as it stands, the bottom 3 would be the same bottom 3 that were there at the start of the season when the teams were listed alphabetically.  If things are to be resolved alphabetically, this must give great heart at the other end of the table to Arsenal fans.

The only team missing from the alphabetical tussle at the foot of the table are Bolton Wanderers, who are doing very nicely thank you, in 7th spot. 

This is a shame, from a purely lexical point of view, as they'd potentially qualify as either a "B" or a "W" when taking their full name into consideration.  On that basis, I'd also be worried about what the future holds if I was a "W"est "B"rom fan.

Well, What Do You Know?

Every year the BBC publishes a list of "100 things we didn't know last year". It's always an entertaining read and it's interesting to see how many of them you actually knew. Sad to say, that while several of them are not particularly surprising, this year I can only claim to know 5 of them!

Of the 95 I didn't know, the most startling facts were that:

• Hamburger-related injuries are on the rise in Taiwan
• The two most common pronunciations of Van Gogh are wrong.

Although some might argue that finding out that Donald Trump's hair was real was very unexpected...

For the full list, see the BBC site.