Race Day

I just finished running a 5K in downtown St. Louis, finishing at 26:12. My concern is that there are people running the race who have runners' physiques--they have long legs and they glide like they aren't even touching the ground.  An even bigger concern is that some of the people they allow to enter the race are able to run much faster than me.  For instance, the man that won my age bracket finished in 19 min.  It's not fair that they let people like that enter the race. Even worse, the race was filled with morning people--They walk around annoying owls like me by being chipper at 7am.  I'm going to propose that they begin their next 5K annual race at 10pm, that they screen out all of the larks, and that they ban all of the people who are unfairly fast.

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Rambo, the name and the apple and the name

Last night at an art gallery, I met a woman named Jan, who mentioned that her middle name was "Rambo." Guaranteed conversation piece. I bit. "Any relation to the Sylvester Stallone movie?" She explained that her great great great . . . . grandfather was a neighbor of William Penn, and was somewhat famous for developing the "Rambo" apple, quickly a prized species that can still be bought today. Fast forward to recent times, and I'm quoting from Wikipedia now: "According to author David Morrell, the apple provided the name for the hero of his novel, First Blood, which gave rise to the Rambo film franchise. The novelist's wife brought home a supply of the fruit as he was trying to come up with a suitable name for the protagonist." Who would have seen that path from the name Rambo to the movie character.

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Problems with Orifices

What kinds of things do people stick into their orifices? It's limited only by their imagination, it seems. This article summarizes hospital reports and it's an eye-opener---wait, I shouldn't have said that, because some of you might now try to stick something in your eye. The data comes from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. Here's a sample of things people stuck into their ears: Ear: SEED PAINTBRUSH "SOME BALLS" SLAG MAKEUP BRUSH PATIENT TOLD PARENTS THAT THE CATS STUCK SOMETHING IN HER EAR GASOLINE BUTTERFLY HERSHEY KISS "CLASSMATE PUT A ROCK IN EAR, HAS PIECE OF PAPER IN OTHER EAR" Check out the article for lots more. But now I must mention that I once attended a deposition of a doctor in Atlanta. On his bookshelf, he had a big jar of screws, nails, coins, nuts and bolts and other metal things. It all weighed more than a pound. The doctor related that a man came to the ER complaining that he didn't feel good. An x-ray revealed all of this crap in his stomach. The medical staff did surgery to take it all out. Shortly thereafter, "the man died of something else." Go figure.

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Stress analysis of a strapless evening gown

Here is a stress analysis of a strapless evening gown.   I just KNEW there had to be a scientific approach to this mysterious ability for nothing to hold up something.  Here is the focus:

Effective as the strapless evening gown is in attracting attention, it presents tremendous engineering problems to the structural engineer. He is faced with the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it will fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety. Some of the problems faced by the engineer readily appear from the following structural analysis of strapless evening gowns.

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