Monday, June 18, 2007

- A few days ago, my brother pointed out that the Nathan's hot-dog eating contest is coming up. No one is a bigger fan of Kobayashi (the ultimate competitive eating champion) then I am, but I am pulling for Joey Chesnut. The name alone makes Joey a legend! He sounds like he should be sticking-up airports with Henry Hill or having a calzone with Sil and Tony. Besides, the Cooney Island hot-dog contest is on Independence Day, and Joey Chestnut is a true-blue American! You gotta root for him!

I think we should have a little wagering pool amongst us friends. Let's each pick who will win and how many hot-dogs the winner actually eats. I am picking Joey Chesnut, and I think he will eat 54 dogs.

Here is a wikipedia article about Joey Chesnut. He aint some old, fat slob like many competitive eaters. He is just a regular, 23 year-old college student from California:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Chestnut


- Ten super-hero powers that can (nearly) be duplicated with modern technology:
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/05/04/10_techs_that_g.html

- Another typing test. I can barely break 50 words per minute with this one. That makes me think it is a good test:
http://www.jonmiles.co.uk/fingerjig.php

- Wireless, wireless, wireless. Everything is going wireless these days. Your internet, your console gaming machines, your home phones, etc. What if scientists could figure out how to transfer electricity wirelessly? Now that would rock! Well, that technology is on the way. The ramifications are staggering:
Wireless electricity

- The Sopranos TV show has ended. I will truly miss it. IMO, The Sopranos was a hit and miss TV series. Sometimes it was the best TV has ever offered, and other times it was boring, chaotic, and completely off the mark. Only a few people read this site, and of those who watch the Sopranos I know you kids have already seen the finale, so what I write in this update will not spoil it for anyone.

The final episode was a HUGE disappointment to me. I know that one of the big selling points of the Sopranos was that many of the storylines were open-ended and the show was never meant to give closure, but come on! I really needed some kind of resolution to Tony's story and some of the other major plot elements. David Chase owed us. Instead, he rubbed our faces in it. I always knew that Chase had contempt for his audience and the final episode clearly proves it. My best interpretation of the finale is that Tony got iced, and that's why it ended so abruptly. The whole show was based around him. I am guessing that Tony got shot in the head and that's why the show suddenly went dark. Here is an article supporting the same theory:
Sopranos Ending

- The last Civil War veteran died in 1959 (the war ended in 1865.) World War I started in 1914, ended in 1918, and America entered WWI in 1917. If the youngest American WWI veterans were 16 or 17 years of age in 1917, then simple math tells you that America's youngest WWI veterans are now at least 106 or 107 years old. For this reason, there are very few veterans left from WWI. In the next few years, there will be no one left who fought in WWI. Here is a list of all known veterans (from the Allied side) of WWI. According to my counting, there are only ten Americans veterans still living:
http://www.answers.com/topic/surviving-veterans-of-world-war-i