Well the Olympics are over but it looks like a least one athlete has been reading my blog. Here I was saying that Taekwondo was kind of dull so the Cuban tae kwon do champ Angel Matos decided to liven things up a bit by kicking the referee in the head! Shame I missed that. Anyway he's been banned from the sport for life, can't say I blame the IOC for that call -- what referee would be willing to oversee a match with Matos after that.
With all the Olympics stuff going on I missed a really good story involving critical thinking. This has to do with that Bigfoot scam that happened in the States, where a couple of guys froze a gorilla suit in a block of ice and claimed it was Bigfoot. Even some major media outlets were reporting on it. Shock of all shocks, thanks to the media hype they sold the "body" to some pro-Bigfoot people for some undisclosed sum and by the time the buyer managed to thaw it out and discover it was a rubber suit the guys had skipped town.
I kind of feel bad for the buyer as they obviously let their enthusiasm for Bigfoot override their caution. When someone announces that they have found an hereto undiscovered new species of 7 foot primate that had been roaming North America without us discovering it until now verify it before putting money down.
So what do I think of Bigfoot? Sorry all you Bigfoot enthusiasts out there but I cannot believe that a species as large as Bigfoot, which apparently roams North America from Alaska all the way down to Alabama, could have escaped being captured and studied by now. How can a species with that big of range have escaped detection all these years?
Anyway for those of you are interested in such things Google the word "cryptozoology". This is about researching legendary animals, though I think most of those people are a little out there. Bigfoot, yeti, the Loch Ness monster, and so forth, there are people still trying to find them.
In local news the big stories are a Qatari student in the UK who was beaten to death by a gang, and a road rage incident in Qatar where one of the drivers pulled a gun and started shooting at the other car, causing an accident which killed the other driver. (Both drivers were Qataris) The gun incident is kind of concerning as that is the first time, that I know of, that has happened here. The guy with the gun is now in serious trouble of course but even if he had not killed anyone or shot the gun he was facing good jail time. Qatar takes unregistered guns very seriously, it was only a couple weeks ago that another Qatari had his car searched by the police where they discovered an unregistered rifle and some ammo. The guy got three years in prison! Ouch. That is some serious gun control laws.
Finally, a piece of trivia that you may have seen in the papers recently. The Collins Dictionary company recently announced what they believe is the most misspelled word in the English language. The result?
Supersede
Because it is not spelt "supercede". Collins believes we get it wrong because we are used to words like "precede" and "intercede". I was surprised because I definitely would have spelt it with a "c". I surveyed six people in the office and five of them thought it was spelt with a "c" and the sixth wasn't sure if it could be spelt either way. Oxford dictionary agrees with Collins. One of my co-workers suggested that maybe "supercede" is an acceptable North American spelling. If anyone has an American or Canadian dictionary who can verify it, please let me know.
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