Reblogged:Friday Hodgepodge

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Four Things

1. Fellow soccer fans might enjoy this list of 15 colorful soccer terms from around the world. My favorite was the fourth:

Stofzuiger -- Vacuum cleaner (Netherlands)

Neat work from the holding midfielder -- he hoovers up the loose ball and moves it on to a team-mate. Every side could do with a vacuum cleaner like him in their ranks to keep things tidy in midfield.

The Brazilian idiom meaning where the owl sleeps is also good.

2. Forty years after he was killed, a man's body was found when a researcher became curious about an unusual tree:

The tree was spotted in 2011 by a researcher who was curious as to how the tree had ended up in the cave and especially in a mountainous area where it was not usually found.

While carrying out his research and digging around the tree, he was then horrified to find a human body underneath and raised the alarm. On digging further, police recovered a total of three bodies.

Munur Herguner added that her brother was believed to have been the one that had eaten the fig, and blood samples from her family matched DNA fragments which confirmed it was her brother's final resting place.

The murder weapon, a stick of dynamite, created the hole in the cave that admitted the sunlight required by the tree.

3. This PJ Media story on "The Five Most Overrated Beers" is spot-on, even about Yuengleng, the one on the list I sometimes drink:

Also overrated. (Image via Pixabay.)

I can't count the number of times I've asked, "Does the restaurant have any beer that I'll like?" only to be told by the individual recommending the restaurant, "Oh, yes. They have Yuengling." What makes that annoying is that most of my friends know me as a "beer snob." One of my first writing jobs was writing about beer for a music site. What makes that answer extra annoying is that it reveals that people assume that Yuengling is a legitimate craft beer and a good beer, to boot. It's neither...

The list also reminds me that I haven't made any beer recommendations here in a long time. Maryland's blue laws are partly to blame, along with the fact that the only place that allowed me to build a six-pack from single bottles was off my beaten path. I'm not obligating myself to a time table, but we move to Florida soon, and both of those annoyances will disappear.

Is it time for my excited-to-move-to-Florida list?

4. Statistician John Cook sums up his post on why programmers aren't paid in proportion to their productivity:

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says "Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before."

(Not calling myself a real programmer, but...) And then there are hacks like me who slap a few search terms into Google a few times and piece those results together into a script that ends up saving lots of time or effort. "I think someone else has seen something like this before," usually turns out to be true.

-- CAV

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