All about me

Happy 30th to the Walkman, which started the revolution that meant we would never again "have to endure the tedium of doing only one thing at once." And our great disengagement was soon to follow:

The issue everyone seems to tiptoe around:

But in the Rose Garden at the White House, as he signed one of the nation's most aggressive anti-smoking provisions into law, Mr. Obama did something he almost never does. He talked about his addiction to smoking.

In the silly study of the week, it is reported that research "proves" dogs are smarter than cats. In an experiment, dogs and cats had to choose between two strings, one with a treat attached, one with nothing. The dogs had no problem, but the cats were mystified, demonstrating that dogs have a better understanding than cats of cause-and-effect connections between objects:

What I learned on Tuesday and Wednesday while collapsed on the couch with a summer cold:

Only Monday, but this might stand up as quote of the week, from a forensic psychology professor, on Florida teenager Tyler Hayes Weinman, charged with 19 counts each of animal cruelty and improperly disposing of an animal body in the Miami serial cat killer case:

"When you kill cats, disembowel them and cut their heads off, that is not a good sign and you do not have to be Sigmund Freud to see that," he said.

I'm taking a week off -- back on Monday, June 8.

Rupert Murdoch goes way out on a limb:

NEW YORK News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch believes that in 10 to 15 years, newspapers will be read mainly on digital devices.

[. . .]

At least once a year, the nerds have their moment in the spotlight:

An intense, oddly compelling spectacle of smart kids, the Scripps National Spelling Bee pitted 293 fourth through eighth graders against one another in a tense three-day competition.

Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe won it all on Laodicean, which means halfhearted in respect to religion or politics.

I'm so old-fashioned that I like the occasional historical reference in news stories, even if it takes up a little of the wwwwwh nuts-and-bolts space. I thought I was going to get one when I saw the headline of this story -- "Caesars Palace declares victory: Pres. Obama sleeps there again" -- and read the first paragraph:

I'll be darned. I've known some mentally ill people in my time, but I never realized there were so many of them:

You know them. I know them. And, increasingly, psychiatrists know them. People who feel they have been wronged by someone and are so bitter they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances.