Tweets of the Night

There are lots of sporting reports in tonight's tweets. Whether the athletes has donned skis, like Lindsey Vonn, laced up sneakers, like a Michigan State basketball player, or strutted across the balance beam in bare feet, like a Minnesota gymnast, there has been lots of action tonight.

Of course, there are political and news matters being discussed as well.

Let's check out the tweets:

1) Denver Post Sports @DenverSportsNews: Lindsey Vonn wins World Cup downhill for first win in five weeks.

2) Minnesota Gymnastics @GophersWomensGym: The #Gophers started on Bars, so they'll compete next on the Balance Beam. Still waiting for final two scores to be posted.

3) Katrina vandenHeuvel @KatrinaNation (managing editor of "The Nation"): "Different times, but still worth thinking about what a second-term Obama Can Learn from FDR."

4) Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost: "Suspected U.S. drone attack kills at least 8 in Yemen."

5) Heather Richardson @hlynnrichardson: "Thank you all so much for all the kind messages! So proud of teammate @BrrittanyBowe w/ her first podium." (Richardson, an American speed skater won gold at the sport's world championships in Calgary, Canada, she is originally from High Point, NC)

6) Spartan Basketball @MSU_Basketball: "Coach Tom Izzo calls a :30 timeour with 1:08 left in the second half and MSU leading Ohio St. 53-51." (Sparty, pictured, is the school's mascot)

7) Norfolk Admirals @AdsGameUpdates: "The puck has been dropped and the #pinkintherink game is underway!"

http://www.teamusa.org/Athletes/RI/Heather-Richardson.aspx

http://www.thenation.com/

http://www.norfolkadmirals.com/

For Our International Audience-Let's Get Our Times Right

The novelist Michael Chabon recently told "Mother Jones," more known for its liberal politics that the problem with the Internet was that it has evolved into a deliberate force for wasting time, and a similar point is apparently being made with Sunday's lead story in the business section of "The Washington Post," about wasted time in the office.

With that in mind, we thought we would keep everyone updated on the current time differences with the east coast of America (Philadelphia, Orlando) and the rest of the world. We should have had this posted an hour ago, but we had to check Twitter and Facebook 'just one more time.'

12:00 a.m.

Philadelphia

Washington, DC

Charlotte, NC

2:00 a.m.

Santiago (Chile)

3:00 a.m.

Sao Paulo (Brazil)

5:00 a.m.

Reykjavik (Iceland)

Dublin (pictured, James Joyce statue)

6:00 a.m.

Frankfurt

Venice

7:00 a.m.

Bursa (Turkey)

Rhodes (Greece, pictured)

Sofia (Bulgaria)

Amman (Jordan)

8:00 a.m.

Jeddah (Saudi Arabia, map pictured)

Baghdad

Sannaa (Yemen)

Nairobi (Kenya)

http://www.visitphilly.com

http://www.motherjones.com

http://www.saudiarabiaembassy.net

http://www.visitrhodes.gr/

http://www.visitdublin.com

Things We Learned on NPR Last Week-Problems with the Other Neighbor

Greece is making international headlines due to its financial crisis which has caused riots on the streets. Though the events are not quite as violent or dramatic, as the fall-out from the Arab Spring in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the government in Athens is undoubtedly overwhelmed at the moment.

For centuries upon centuries, Greece's main rival has always been Turkey, my late father's country. I once wore a t-shirt from the Turkish resort of Kusadasi while visiting the Greek island of Rhodes as a teenager in 1985, and yes, the locals noticed!

But, at the moment, Greece seems to having even more of a rift with Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic that is now its own independent, small nation.

As the always brilliant NPR show "The World" (which we should perhaps listen to more often) reported last week, Macedonia unveiled a towering 92-foot statue of Alexander the Great in the capital city of Skopje. The problem is that the Greeks consider Alexander the Great, who was ironically an inspiration to Sultan Suleyman the Magnificient, as their national hero.

The radio series also said in its report that there are already plenty of tensions between Skopje and Athens as Greece has repeatedly tried to block Macedonia's entrance into the European Union.

All of this brings us to the reason why we chose Karagiozis, a Greek version of the Turkish shadow puppet Karagoz, as our image to go with this entry.

As it turns out, both Turkey and Greece have many cultural overlaps. And, the Greek shadow-puppeteer Sotris Haridimos currently has a traveling Karagiozis roadshow in Greece, which an American travel writer saw in Athens and reported on for his travel blog.

Like Karagoz, his Greek counterpart represents the plight of the average person. And, given Greece's domestic turoil, and Turkey's struggles with an overwhelming influx of refugees from Syria, it seems that both countries are a bit overwhelmed these days. And, very few tourists visiting the resort town of Bodrum, Turkey, and the Greek island of Kos, a mere three miles off Bodrum's coast, are concerned about any of this.

SIDEBAR: It is official. The Wimbledon women's final will be between Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic and Russian superstar Maria Sharapova. If we had John McEnroe's email, we'd ask him who he likes on this one. But, then again, I may say something to tick him off, and that would be like an eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

Strange, but True Things We Learned This Week...

All of these things have been verified through various sources, but if you don't believe me, you can spend hours and hours on Google, and leave a post on here saying: "Ahhh, but you are wrong." Let's get started, and we will get to the African pygmy goat when we can:

1. Osama bin Laden (1957-2011) actually liked many American western tv shows as a kid, including his favorite "Bonanza!" I first read about this in "The Week" magazine some eight years ago. But, this week, I also learned that the sinister terrorist leader also like Bruce Lee kung-fu films. But, none of these things are as disturbing as a report I heard from the TRT (Turkish Radio Television) right after September 11th, when I happened to be in Istanbul. A Turkish man who was a classmate of bin Laden's at a school in Switzerland when they were both children said that this future kingpin of terror was 'a quiet unasuming kid who usually sat in the back.'

2. And speaking of Turkey, as "Mental Floss" reported in a recent issue, one never wants to confuse a Greek with a Turk or vice versa. Since the hip magazine didn't mention the man's name, I had to check the BBC's web site for additional details. As it turns out, Athanasios Varzanakos, 77, who would have definitely qualified for our long, difficult names list, a Greek villager, had been mistaken for a Turk. The Swedish yogurt company Lindahl had put the image of Varzanakos on its Turkish yogurt products. So, the Greek man sued the Swedish company for $7 million; he 'only' got $270,000 in return. This leads us to the goat because if one wants to find Greek yogurt or goat milk yogurt, they can go to the Harvest Moon in Floyd, Va. Alas, they don't sell Turkish yogurt which is very hard to find in America except in New Jersey (where there are a lot of Turks and Turkish-Americans).

3. The BBC reported last night that there is a hip hop craze spreading through Yemen, of all places. There have been similar stories in the international media about this curious pop cultural trend. In 2010, Laura Kasinoff of "The Christian Science Monitor" reported that she had seen 'turbaned men dancing with daggers and rappers donning New York Yankees caps' taking the stage in the capital city of Sana for a hip hop fest. Hagage Masead, an American of Yemeni heritage who should not/never be confused with a radical terrorist in Yemen who grew up in New York state, has been at the heart of this movement.

4. "This American Life," a popular weekly NPR show, featured a story about a "Tuscaloosa News" reporter in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who was fooled into publishing a local story that proved to be false in the wake of last week's deadly tornado rampage in the area. Apparently, the story was that a local man from Tuscaloosa, which is also home to the University of Alabama, was killed at a local tobacco store and people walked all over him to get cigarettes. But, one can hardly fault the reporter as this story was verified by local government officials in Tuscaloosa! As a former newspaper reporter myself, I can see how this can happen all too easily for reasons which are far too complicated to explain here. Besides, the militant librarian here in Mount Airy, NC, (not really where I am) has warned that the Internet goes down in 22 minutes and 35 seconds!

The Next 10 Films in Our Netflix Que- Lots of Foreign Films

The dominance of Netflix among the dvd sales market has been subject of NPR pieces on "Market Place" and written articles in "Wired" magazine, which we really need to read some time (subscribing to eight or nine other magazines has its disadvantages!). Though with its own streaming services, amazon.com is projected to be gradually catching up with the online giant soon.

Since it has been a depressing week lately for a variety of reasons, including the tsunami in Japan as well as the political unrest Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Libya, I hope some of these films are a bit uplifting. But, then again, I'm in no mood for "Mary Poppins" which is amazingly enough one of the most favorite films of filmmaker David Fincher ("Zodiac," "The Social Network")!


Here are the next ten films I am scheduled to be recieving from Netflix. In case you were wondering, "Lightning in a Bottle" is a 'rocumentary' about blues musicians like B.B. King.

1. "The Class" (France, 2008).

2. "Yi Yi" (Taiwan, 2000).

3. "The Son's Room" (Italy, 2001).

4. "Not on the Lips" (France, 2003).

5. "Undertow" (2004)

6. "The Mist" (2007)

7. "15" (France, 2003).

8. "Lightning in a Bottle" (doc., 2004).

9. "Rivers and Tides" (doc., 2003)

10. "The Yacoubian Building" (Egypt, 2006).