"A teenage snowboarder hangs from the side of a chairlift. He tries to swing his dangling feet atop the seat, to no avail."

"His grip starts slipping after about six minutes. Then his hand finally slides. Other riders watch the teen plummet some 50 feet past pine trees onto the snowy terrain."

"A cruise ship’s passenger log is comprised entirely of the exact demographic that is least prepared for a cruise to go to pot."

"A cruise is a giant boat full of your mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law does not belong in the wild."

So writes Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, where I guess mother-in-law jokes are okay. (What is it, the 1950s?) Oddly, Hesse is also claiming to love cruises. And she prefaces her disparagement of older women with "I say fondly."

"Rookie golfer suffers Black Widow spider bite during Women’s Australian Open, uses golf tee to remove deadly venom."

"After being informed that a bite from a Black Widow can kill a child in about 30 minutes, Daniela Holmqvist channeled her inner MacGyver and took matters into her own hands."

9-year-old boy thrown off a 5-story building, hits the pavement and survives...

... and names his assailant.

"Have you ever eaten bread?"/"I have. But they have not. They have never seen it."

"At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. 'When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.'"

The old man's name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century....

[In 1936] Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2... had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents' stories.....

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them.

Video here. 

Arms transplanted.

To an Iraq War veteran who lost both arms and both legs.

Brendan Marrocco is the first Iraq War veteran to survive losing all four limbs in a bombing

His chief surgeon, Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, said Marrocco’s operation was “the most expensive and complicated arm transplant surgery ever performed."

"The snake, not in any way, shape or form, had intended to eat the baby — it was trying to have a group hug."

"So in the dark, they’re going to see a baby as this warm spot."

"DM, thank you for providing the map of Canberra. Were it not for that..."

"... I would have had trouble reconciling the city's layout with a man impaled on a bedpost."

A comment at The Daily Mail has the distinction of being the first thing that made me laugh out loud in 2013. (Please forgive me!)

If we truly care deeply about the death of young children...

... what are the most effective things we can do? There's so much talk about gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, but rather than fixating on the particular device that has fixated our attention, perhaps we should reflect on what actually causes the most fatality in children, particularly since we have so much power to act affirmatively to prevent these deaths.

Here is a chart (PDF) from the National Center for Health Statistics, showing the "10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2010." Young children's lives are clearly most threatened by accidents.

Here's a chart (PDF) showing "10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group Highlighting Unintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2010." You can see that the greatest threat, by far, is the motor vehicle accident. Second, for 5- to 9-year-olds, is drowning. Third is fire. Homicide by firearm is fourth for this age group.

Go ahead and talk about the problem of murder, but let's remember that one thing we've learned from the Newtown massacre is how much we love and want to protect children. Children are continually dying from crashing cars, drowning, burning, suffocating, and poisoning. There are so many things we could do to be more careful and protective every day. Some of these things are fabulously banal, like keeping your eyes on the road and not walking away from the bathtub. There are no political enemies here to demonize, no legislation to stuff down your stubborn opponent's throat.

We're fixated by violence, and we love remedies for violence that have a frisson of (metaphorical) violence. But if we really care about the death of young children, we could take care.

What time is the world supposed to end?

It is 12/21/12 at long last, I just noticed, after paying some some attention to the real, albeit mini, apocalypse that is Draco the Blizzard. I was going to note that the world hasn't ended, but there's the question of what time the Mayans pinpointed on this Day of Days:

I know the world isn't really going to end today, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would believe it is. But my 11-year-old brother thinks it's going to end, and I want to be able to go scream "I told you so!" in his face as soon as possible.

Thanks.

ABC is checking midnight in each of the world's time zones. Weather prediction noted:



I like NASA's reassuring web page. Excerpt:

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?

A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then — just as your calendar begins again on January 1 — another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Wikipedia has a huge article on the somewhat larger topic "2012 phenomenon." Excerpt:

Many assertions about the year 2012 form part of Mayanism, a non-codified collection of New Age beliefs about ancient Maya wisdom and spirituality.... Archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni says that while the idea of "balancing the cosmos" was prominent in ancient Maya literature, the 2012 phenomenon does not draw from those traditions. Instead, it is bound up with American concepts such as the New Age movement, millenarianism, and the belief in secret knowledge from distant times and places. Established themes found in 2012 literature include "suspicion towards mainstream Western culture", the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Age by individual example or by a group's joined consciousness. 

Is there a bigger crock than secret knowledge from distant times and places?

If you crashed your $376,000 Lamborghini Aventador into a snowy ditch and walked away from it...

... you'd Instagram it. You know you would! (Compare me, in 2005, when I wrecked my car.)

"The mother of the loner who massacred 26 pupils and staff at a US primary school may have played a major part in his catastrophic mental breakdown..."

"Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse."

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot....

Lanza’s aunt Marsha said Nancy was ‘self reliant’ and that they talked a lot about how she was preparing for the economic meltdown....

As for her son, he was described yesterday as a ‘ghost’ – an autistic genius, according to former school fellows, but also a ‘deeply disturbed’ young man who was so withdrawn that even many of his closest relatives hadn’t set eyes on him for years.

"How at 6 1/2 years old can you be that smart, that brave?"

"I think it's impossible outside of divine intervention. She has wisdom beyond her years."

"Jacob coolly followed school protocol, blocking the library entrance with a file cabinet before steering the youngsters into the supply closet."

"The kids, following her directions, walked inside in short order. They remained in the closet for about an hour, even as an eerie postshooting silence descended on the building before police arrived."

"She did what she was trained to do, but also what her heart told her to do."

"I would expect nothing less from Vicki."

ADDED: The woman on the phone (in the iconic photo) is Jillian Soto, Vicki's sister.

It's twelve twelve twelve.

Should I wait 'til twelve twelve to say that?

At twelve twelve today, what will you do? It's our last chance to line up the numbers, which we've been doing since January 1, 2001, which became especially satisfying when we could do it with double digits on October 10, 2010, something we were able to do again last year, and are doing one last time today — last time, unless you picture yourself surviving beyond the turn of the next century. Really, are you that optimistic? There are those who see all of us going down a week from tomorrow.

What it takes to save someone who's fallen on the subway tracks.

It takes a woman applying moral pressure on men who have the strength to do it. You need the strength and the will. The woman created the will in the men.

Same as it ever was. But women need to know this.

"I managed to get my head up and scream 'croc' and then this giant dragged me under again."

"I got my head above water again and this time I was swearing and saying get this thing off me. I was just screaming for help. I couldn't feel any pain but I could see his teeth sinking into my leg. I thought I was going to die. I could only see about four centimetres of the top of my leg and the rest was in the croc's gob."

Well, clearly she survived, since we have that quote, but how did she survive? (The saltwater crocodile was 3 meters long.) Her friend on the shore — Al Sartori — went in:

"I jumped into the water and on to its back and stuck my thumbs into its eyes until I felt it start to slacken off.... I picked up the croc and chucked it back into the water and it came back at me. It was pretty heavy."

Great heroism by Satori! A euonym? "Satori is considered a 'first step' or embarkation toward nirvana."

The student's mind must be prepared by rigorous study, with the use of koans, and the practice of meditation to concentrate the mind, under the guidance of a teacher.... Chinese Zen master Wumen Hui-k'ai (無門慧開)... struggled for six years with koan "Zhaozhou’s dog"...

The koan is: "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Does a crocodile?

Wumen, having understood the koan wrote this poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

I know a poem about a crocodile:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

"I want to become a doctor... because I want to save people."

"And when I do, I won't take any money from them."

"Cold, mold loom as hazards in Sandy disaster zones."

"City officials estimate at least 12,000 New Yorkers are trying to survive in unheated, flood-damaged homes, despite warnings that dropping temperatures could pose a health risk. Many families have returned to coastal homes contaminated with mold or filled with construction dust."

And: "A pregnant Hurricane Sandy victim was booted from her hotel room yesterday and forced to hunt for a place to stay because FEMA dropped the ball on her reservation.... 'I feel like a homeless person . . . like a street rat,'  said [Keri] Christian, who’s expecting a boy in January. 'It’s aggravating and physically demanding. I’m really pissed.'"