Meat judging has its own national championship
While March Madness dominates intercollegiate athletics, another group of collegians works out amid coaches’ whistles, endures bloody, 12-hour practices, and cheers on teammates preparing for the national championship in meat-judging, in which about 40 colleges compete, according to a March Wall Street Journal report.
Coaches at powerhouses like Colorado State and South Dakota State say skills such as evaluating T-bone cutting and spotting whether a pig has too much back fat come with determination and concentration (and, of course, practice, as one coach said it all comes down to time spent in the meat locker, at 38 degrees. And pro scouts are watching from the stands, representatives of U.S. meat companies, seeking talent.
Fine Points of the Law
The North Carolina Court of Appeals voted 2-1 in February to approve a worker compensation claim for only one of a woman’s breast-implant replacements, ruling that the other implant ruptured (in a job-related accident) only because it had been improperly installed. The dissenting judge said, even so, the compensation fund should pay for the second replacement, too, because to achieve their purpose, both breasts must be aligned properly on the chest.
The Entrepreneurial Spirit!
Cosmetics from the American company Blue Q, under the “Lookin’ Good for Jesus” brand urging users to “Get Tight with Christ,” were pulled from stores in Singapore in February due to complaints, but Blue Q said it’s not abandoning that line of hand and body creams, lip balm, breath spray and bubble bath.
Science on the
Cutting Edge
A team of researchers from the University of Calgary and the Tokyo Institute of Technology proudly announced in February that they had successfully stored “nothing” inside a puff of gas and then had managed to retrieve that same “nothing.” That “nothing” is called a “squeezed vacuum,” and the physicists tell us that a light wave can be manipulated so that its phases are of uncertain amplitude, then the light itself removed so that only the “uncertainty” property of the wave remains.
‘ In February, the South Korean cellphone company KTF announced a new voice-analysis program for its customers to enable them to evaluate their sincerity when calling a lover. The caller can point the phone’s camera at himself and see a meter on the screen measuring his own passion, then receive a text message afterward noting voice expressions by the person receiving the call (surprise, honesty, etc.).
Leading Economic Indicators
To feed the fast-growing women’s hair-extension business, brokers in India scour the countryside for Hindu temples that encourage female worshippers to shear themselves as good-luck offerings to the temples’ gods, according to a February dispatch in Germany’s Der Spiegel. Historically, the hair was used to make mattresses, but because the celebrity-driven extension business is so large, salons around the world pay from $125 to $250 per pound for strands of never-chemically-treated hair of desirable hues. Shaving is a Hindu tradition, and one donor told Spiegel she had long prayed for her husband to stop drinking and that when that “miracle” happened, she felt compelled to offer her hair.
‘ In the worst slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti (where 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), rice now sells for 30 cents a cup (double the price of a year ago), according to a January Associated Press dispatch, leaving the poorest of the poor to subsist mainly on “cookies” made with dirt. Choice clay from the central plateau is at least a source of calcium and can be baked with salt and vegetable shortening. However, recently in the La Saline slum, the reporter noted, the price of dirt, too, has risen about 40 percent.
The Continuing Crisis
At a February casting call in Pittsburgh for the movie “Shelter” (to star Julianne Moore), producers announced they were seeking extras to play West Virginia mountain people from the hollers (Pittsburgh is about 40 miles from the state line), specifically an albino woman, extraordinarily tall or short people, those with unusual body shapes and faces (especially eyes), and “a 9- to-12-year-old Caucasian girl with an other-worldly look. ‘Regular-looking’ children should not attend.”
Tireless Obsessives
Takahiro Fujinuma, 37, was arrested and charged with making at least 2,600 calls (perhaps more than 10,000) to directory assistance. “I would go into ecstasy when a lady (operator) scolded me,” he told a reporter (Tokyo; January).
Ms. Lee Amor, 23, pleaded guilty to calling or texting her jilting ex-boyfriend more than 10,000 times over a 65-day period (South Devon, England; February).
John Triplette was arrested, suspected as the one who made more than 27,000 calls to “911” since May 2007 (consisting mostly of mumbling and making bodily noises) (Hayward, Calif.; February).
Least Competent Criminals
Not Ready for Prime Time: Robber Adam Grennan, 39, did not make it out of the Mt. Washington Bank in Dorchester, Mass., in December. So intent was he in not appearing nervous that he waited patiently in line, eyes straight ahead, until the time came to hand the teller his holdup note.
He did not notice that a uniformed Boston police officer, working security, had slipped quietly behind him in line, and he arrested Grennan immediately as Grennan was quietly demanding large bills and “no funny money.”