aedfed comments

Perhaps the NK players can defect to SK, or better yet to Canada -- our team didn't even make it that far.

I'm for any ball that goes in the net more than the old ones.

what the hell is she holding?

Looks like some sort of club -- presumably to knacker the groom should her outfit start giving him second thoughts and he tries to escape.

Two paragraphs; two mistakes. I quit reading after that. Japan's population is 127 million, not 135 and Russia isn't a member of the OECD. But hey, why let a few facts get in the way of opinions?

Ohno's spin on his DQ was that it was a conspiracy by Canadian officials. Right. Even his American teammates say he's a teammate in name only and will be glad to see him retire.

If we're going to get rid of sports that require little physical effort, then that would eliminate the sliding sports. They take skill and guts, but very little effort (about the same as driving too fast down from the local ski hill on switchback roads in a snowstorm). Perhaps if they had to drag their bobsleds or luges to the top of the hill as part of the timing, it might qualify as something athletic.

In the summer Olympics that would do in archery, shooting, sailing, and the horse events (unless they start giving the medal to the horse and oats to the rider).

Whether we find a sport boring or not shouldn't really be a factor (Can't get to sleep? Here, try some ski jumping). Another consideration is whether a sport is played widely in places that actually have winter.

Which brings me to curling. I agree that it's not the most exciting or athletic sport (although it requires as much fitness as the sports I've mentioned above), but it is widely played in Europe, Canada, and the US, i.e., countries where it snows and freezes in winter.

Time to boot woman's hockey out of the Olympics!

And replace it with what? Women's ski jumping? That's a real crowd pleaser. Or maybe mixed curling? Nope. Curling should be on its way out of the winter Olympics, too, according to some.

Like it or not, women's hockey is hugely popular in Canada and the US and draws more TV viewers than most women's winter sports. The teams from the other countries will improve as they invest more money in developing their women's hockey programs.

As far as the importance of the game to Canadians goes, sure we want the women to win (and wouldn't be any happier than US fans were when their women lost at the Salt Lake Olympics), but if they lose, it's not going to trigger mass suicides across the country. I mean it's not like the victors get to enslave the residents of the losing country.

I realize you're being ironic, Nessie, but the goal differential is used when determining placings for the gold medal round, so there's a reason teams want to thrash their opponents as badly as possible.

Comparisons to baseball and rugby don't work, because we're talking about countries that have winter, a much smaller number (I doubt we'll ever see a hockey team from Latin America or Africa). Women's ice hockey is played in all of the European countries, as well as Canada and the US. Their programs simply aren't as well developed as those in Canada, the US, and Sweden (who beat the US in the round robin section of last year's world championships).

Turfing women's hockey out of the Olympics isn't the best way to encourage other countries to continue to develop their programs.

Parity will come - look at women's curling where the Chinese are already competitive.

Pure political posturing. Or perhaps he's miffed because he couldn't find a French-speaking waiter at a Chinese restaurant in Richmond.

There's no surprise that they were unable to agree on the number of deaths. Given the mass confusion at the time, there's no way anyone can say for sure how many died, or how. It's completely different from the planned, organized extermination of European Jews, Gypsies, and others by the Nazis.

However, even if you take the lowest figure of 20,000, that's still enough to qualify as a massacre in my book.

It would be best if the two governments would agree to disagree and quit using the emotions surrounding the massacre to stir up hatred against the other country for political purposes. In this case, the Chinese government seems particularly culpable, but Ishihara and his ilk are not above it in Japan.

The photo is so obviously digitally altered, I'm not sure why this is a problem. It's when they try to make the emaciated look appear normal that most of the damage is done.

Of course, people should also be complaining because they use Photoshop to remove skin blemishes and discolourations to make the models appear perfect.

Probably sounded too much like his wife/mother.

designed to be small, safe and unobtrusive enough to mingle with pedestrians

Sounds like walking to me.

Is that 希望 as in we "hope" all this stuff works now that we have it up here?

During the years I lived in Japan, I cycled 10s of thousands of km, mostly for pleasure and in areas where there was little traffic. However, I also commuted to work and about town during the years when I didn't have a car. The uni where I worked didn't seem to have an issue with cycling to work and the money I was paid for commuting to a part-time job allowed me to buy a new bicycle every 3 years or so.

The biggest danger was always other bicycles. I never knew where they'd come from. The worst collision I had was a head on with a bicycle on a dark, rainy night. He had no light, and was peddling against the flow of traffic with an umbrella blocking his view of what was coming towards him.

My attitude was that all the other vehicles and pedestrians had one mission -- to kill me -- and cycled with an appropriately defensive attitude. I also looked for streets were less congested and offered cars/pedestrians fewer opportunities to kill me.

One of the good things about cycling in Japan is that it's possible to keep up with the flow of traffic on streets where the speed limit is 30 kph. The drivers are generally aware of cyclists and very few set out to make life difficult for cyclists on purpose. There weren't any sidewalks where I usually cycled, so I rarely used them.

One of the things I loved about living in Japan was that I didn't have to drive. Sure I had a car, but I could walk to the supermarket, cycle or walk to work, cycle to many local destinations, and take the bus or train for holiday trips (much more relaxing than driving). That left the car for jaunts with the family to places too out of the way for public transport.

I liked the fact that Japanese drivers were generally courteous, although they did some incredibly stupid things. The one thing I hated was having to think, "Now where will I park?" whenever I set off in the car.

Carradine may have engaged in a dangerous form of sex play In Bangkok? Who'd have thought it?

Of course anyone famous who dies under unusual circumstances without a pathologist or doctor at their side, must be the victim of a conspiracy of some sort, right JFK, Elvis, Marilyn, Janis, James?

Dramamine is not an antihistamine. It's an anti-nausea medication, so it does nothing for ears or sinuses. It does, however, make you very sleepy, which can be effective.

I've never been on a flight where I was next to a kid who was a real terror. My own was always well behaved, partly because of his personality, and partly because we made sure he was well entertained. For babies who are still nursing, nursing them during takeoff and landing works wonder for ear pain. The sucking seems to pop their ears naturally.

The biggest issue we had was the effect of lower air pressure on the little one's bowel function. It always seemed to cause a BM on the way up. Not a problem on international flight where the washrooms are larger and have a change table. On internal flights, where the washrooms are small with no changing tables, we usually had to wait until the plane emptied to change him, otherwise the smell would have emptied the plane on its own.

At the universities I taught at in Japan, the only way you could fail a student with no questions asked was to demonstrate that they hadn't attended class. One of the ironies is that the more "prestigious" universities in the cities had bigger attendance problems because the students are living on their own. At smaller regional universities, students are more likely to live at home and their moms make sure they get up and at least head towards university.

With an iPhone, even if the lecture's a bust, at least you can surf the Web and entertain yourself that way.

Given that they're in the school of informatics, maybe the whole point is to see whether they students can develop ways of spoofing the GPS system so it shows they're in class regardless of where they are. That would be worthy of an A.

Well, the Burakumin Liberation League can't be too upset with Google. They still use them to provide the site search on their home page.

All of these ranking systems (there's more than one) are somewhat deceptive. A university is made up of so many different faculties and schools that lumping them all together and saying this one is best isn't very useful. It's more accurate to examine the faculty you're interested in entering and seeing how it compares to others. Or you may have a particular professor you want to write a dissertation under, in which case, even if the university's reputation isn't the highest, you'd choose it because of the professor.

At a lot of companies in Canada, the sexual part is left out and it's simply called harassment. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female, so things such as bullying would also be covered.

My complaint about it is summed up quite nicely in these sentences,

Harassment is unwelcome behavior that makes the other person (or people) feel uncomfortable. It makes no difference whether it’s intentional or not, since it is the victim or subject of these unwanted attentions, that judges if the conduct is offensive and unwelcome or not.

At my current workplace a female colleague has expressed discomfort over the fact that a male colleague in the next office changes from street clothes into jogging clothes in his office. His door is closed when he changes, but it bothers her. Using the definition above, he could be disciplined for sexual harassment if she chose to file a complaint.

It doesn't matter whether a sensible person would or would not be offended. It's all to do with the sensibilities of everyone else. When you're in a multicultural workplace the potential for offending someone is unlimited.

Of course, at my last job in Japan, I was on the company "sexual harassment committee" with a man who'd been caught having sex with an underling in his office. Needless to say, we didn't make a lot of progress as a committee.

So if they succeed in attacking the White House, do they make the JT list of conspiracy theories?

I mean, who'd believe that Al Qaida could attack the White House. It must be another example of the US Government attacking itself or it's own people . . .

It's my understanding that the reason former high school baseball team members are such popular recruits for companies is that they're used to being yelled at and doing what they're told.

Presumably, the recruits in this story were made of different stuff.

I'm not saying that a non-electric bicycle is for everyone, but people in normal health who've never tried one of the new light-weight city bikes, may be pleasantly surprised by how easy to ride they are. BTW I'm not an American and I cycled year-round in Japan for more than 15 years.

I still say a good bike with an aluminum frame and between 18 and 30 gears gives excellent performance at a price less than an electric bicycle. It's also much easier to ride if you lose the power assist.

One could also argue that Africa "benefited" from European colonization, e.g., they built railways and roads, but that would ignore the fact that most of the "benefits" were for the colonists, not the native inhabitants.

Besides, it's not for the colonizers to extol the benefits they bestowed, but rather for the colonized to decide whether the "benefits" were worth the cost. I don't know of any nation today who's asking to be colonized by anyone.

"and spoke in what sounded like Portuguese" You'd think that Brazilians might be a bit more certain if the thieves were speaking in their mother tongue. Or maybe it's just sloppy translation from the Japanese.

On the plus side, they did get rid of croquet (another possible gold medal sport for the Japanese) and Indian clubs (a sport that involves juggling something that looks like bowling pins).

Given that the modern Olympics has nothing to do with the ancient Olympics, that precedent shouldn't be binding.

My big issue with the modern Olympics is that it was started by rich white guys in Europe with too much money and time. There was noting praiseworthy about being amateur -- it just meant they had enough money that they didn't have to work, while the average working stiff was putting in a 10 or 12 hour day.

Beelzebub has described the current purpose of the Olympics perfectly. It's not about which sports require athleticism, but which ones will draw an audience (preferably a rich audience -- thus we're not likely to get rid of horsey events any time soon).