In the resort town of Skagen you can watch an amazing natural phenomenon. This city is the northernmost point of Denmark, where the Baltic and North Seas meet. The two opposing tides in this place can not merge because they have different densities.

***Note: a reader wrote in to say that the photo might actually have been taken on a cruise near Alaska. Here’s a link for more info:
Merging Oceans

Regardless of the location, this is a stunning photo!

Sal Wallerstein was at the country club for his weekly round of golf. He
began his round with an eagle on the first hole and a birdie on the
second.

On the third hole he had just scored his first ever hole-in-one when his
cell phone rang… It was a doctor notifying him that his wife had just
been in a accident and was in critical condition and in ICU.

The man told the doctor to inform his wife where he was and that he’d be
there as soon as possible. As he hung up he realized he was leaving what
was shaping up to be his best ever round of golf.

He decided to get in a couple of more holes before heading to the
hospital. He ended up playing all eighteen, finishing his round shooting
A personal best 61, shattering the club record by five strokes and
beating his previous best game by more than 10. He was jubilant….

Then he remembered his wife. Feeling guilty he dashed to the hospital.
He saw the doctor in the corridor and asked about his wife’s condition.

The doctor glared at him and shouted, “You went ahead and finished your
round of golf didn’t you! I hope you’re proud of yourself!”

“While you were out for the past four hours enjoying yourself at the
country club your wife has been languishing in the ICU! It’s just as
well you went ahead and finished that round because it will be more than
likely your last! For the rest of her life she will require round the
clock care and you will be her care giver! She will need IV’s; you will
have to change her colostomy bag every 3 hours; she will have to be
spoon fed 3 times a day and don’t forget the hygiene care.”

The man broke down and sobbed.

The doctor chuckled and said, “I’m just fucking with you. She’s dead.
What’d you shoot?”

You can click on the poster (and the next one that will appear) until it becomes more readable!

Dear gentle blog reader,
Learned something new today about cultoromics and Ngrams:

To borrow from the Bard, what’s in a word?

When and how often a word is used in literature says a lot about culture, society and trends, claim researchers who created a computer program to analyze words and phrases in millions of books. They dubbed the tool Ngrams and the field, culturomics — the study of human culture based on the analysis of digitized text.

Here’s a link to the rest of the article:
Santa Fe Institute lecture delves into field of culturomics

And here’s a link to try out Ngrams:
Culturomics

Remember Crayola’s original pink-beige “flesh” crayon?

Groupthink runs contrary to the American cultural ideal of individualism. Then again, so does the goal of mainstream media. Wonder if the two phenomena are related?

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in . . .

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Here’s a link to the rest of the article:

The Rise of the New Groupthink

Checking out at the supermarket recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. I apologised and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The cashier responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

She was right about one thing–our generation didn’t have the green thing in “Our” day. So what did we have back then? After some reflection and soul-searching on “Our” day here’s what I remembered we did have…. Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles repeatedly. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store
and office building. We walked to the shops and didn’t climb into a
300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two streets. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the
throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling
machine burning up 240 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every
room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of Wales. In the kitchen, we blended & stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Sdyrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the
lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by
working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing
pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor
blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because
the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or
walked instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad that the current generation laments how wasteful we older folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Whoa — look at that snow!