The Bro Is Mentioned Twice

After a happy bout of tennis yesterday, The Bro and I began discussing whether we rank among the world's top 1 billion tennis players. Are we better than 83.4% of the planet's population at the game? I think yes, as I have no knowledge that the people of Indonesia and China, not to mention most of the rest of Asia, as well as Africa and South America, have ever picked up a racket. He pointed out that naturally gifted athletes would have an inherent advantage, but I'm skeptical; could LeBron James beat me in straight sets? These are the kinds of things I wish there was an easy way to discover.

This sort of Big Picture Thinking is entertaining. The UofM vs. OSU game last month, for example, with its 111,591 people (the most people I've ever shared an experience with), sported .037 percent of the country's population.

On the same note, the oak tree that is the Sunday New York Times listed 40,000 as the number of deaths that result every year from car crashes. That's 109 every day, a tad higher then the 14 that was once quoted in USA Today. Assuming the reality is somewhere in between, doesn't this seem like an awfully large number? There's nothing in American life as dangerous as controlling multi-ton machines of metal running at speeds between 1 and 80 miles/hour, yet it's done. All the time. Is this the best we can do? Wookie hates me for bringing up teleportation pretty much every day, but I swear, its time has come.

On a completely unrelated note, I would like to share the difference between New York Life and Tampa Bay Life, courtesy of the wedding announcements that appear in the major papers in each region:

This is from the Tampa Tribune: "Andrew...is employed by Vanc E and Hines Motor_Sports...he races competitively on the National Hot Road Association circuit, riding a Screamin' Eagle/Vanc E and Hines Harley Davidson V-Road."

Great. Follow your passion.

Now to New York: "Virginia...is an associate producer for CBS News...covering politics and Congress. Her father is the general counsel for [Important Financial Firm]...her mother is the chairwoman of the NY Landmarks Preservation Foundation...Edward is a producer in the Washington bureau of ABC News, covering Capitol Hill...he gradated cum laude from Georgetown University.

Or change the world.

I often feel stuck between these two worlds; that is, following the less-than-intellectual passion of baseball and just having fun, or attempting Something Important that Dr. Hulme always challenged his students to do. It's US Magazine as serious reading vs. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography as pleasure reading; James Patterson vs. Jonathan Franzen, and if this makes me an elitist, it's not more than The Bro dividing movies into the Good Movie and Entertaining Movie categories (Memento vs. Armageddon).

Woohoo Sunday Night.