5 Things on a Friday: Hot Human Sacrifice & Santa Claus’s Bones

Man, this week just flew by!  Shortest week ever!!!

Just kidding.  This week sucked.  It was long as all Hell.

Happy Friday!

1. How Messing With Our Body Clocks Can Raise Alarms With Health (NPR)

"With exquisite precision, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day," the Nobel Prize committee wrote of the work of Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young. "The clock regulates critical functions such as behavior, hormone levels, sleep, body temperature and metabolism."

We humans are time-keeping machines. And it seems we need regular sleeping and eating schedules to keep all of our clocks in sync…

We can all recover from an occasional all-nighter, an episode of jet lag or short-term disruptions.

But over time, if living against the clock becomes a way of life, this may set the stage for weight gain and metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes.

This is the main reason I’ve never done shift work.  Not only do I struggle with sleep, I’ve also become exceptionally sensitive to these kinds of body-clock changes.

Another way of saying this same thing, I suppose, is to acknowledge that I like feeling good when I exercise, and that’s nearly impossible without good sleep habits.  I therefore work hard at sleeping correctly, and I’ve noticed that it makes a huge difference in my quality of life.

2. Married to a Mystery Man (NY Times)

Suddenly it all made sense. My older brother’s black eye. (He said he’d walked into a door.) The bruises around my younger brother’s neck. (He hadn’t even tried to make up an excuse.) My sister making me walk the long way to the hair salon on the morning of the wedding instead of the direct route past the courthouse. The fact that my bridesmaid’s husband and my sister-in-law, two people who didn’t really know each other, took off together with a lurch and a screech in my husband’s car when I waved at them on the way to the hairdresser.

Everyone had known but me.

It was too much. “Our marriage is based on a lie!” I yelled, and burst into tears.

Great article.  Don’t know if I agree with the premise, but I can totally imagine having this conversation on the way to my honeymoon.

3. The Babysitter

Hot human sacrifice?  How did I not know this was a thing?

4. Kennedy’s Vote Is in Play on Voting Maps Warped by Politics (NY Times)

There was something like consensus among the justices that voting maps drawn by politicians to give advantage to their parties are an unattractive feature of American democracy. But the justices appeared split about whether the court could find a standard for determining when the practice was unconstitutional.

“Gerrymandering is distasteful,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “but if we are going to impose a standard on the courts, it has to be something that’s manageable.”

Agree completely.  And yet this seems to be the issue of the age.  I find myself very much in favor of some kind of usable restrictions on the practice overall.

5. Weekly passing blog: Monken explains why Army threw pass up 21 in fourth quarter (Army Football Insider)

“(UTEP) had moved the ball all the way down there (to Army’s 22 in the fourth quarter) and they were trying to throw the ball,” Monken said. “I’m not so delusional that I think we got athletes that are going to be able to cover those athletes all of the time. They start zinging and zapping and throwing the ball and scoring quick…You saw what happened, they put that onside kick team (after the pick six) out there if they get that thing, it’s a two-score game.

“I thought that if we could hit it (the pass) and make it 42-14, that was going to be it and we could put all of the young guys in and that was going to be the end of the game. It was just a route where we come in motion and they were running that safety across. We were in a squeeze set where Cam (Harrison) was real close and we just ran a switch route. Cam ran right into the play-side safety and the guy wasn’t even looking at him. He didn’t want to cover him. Cam helped him. Had he (avoided the safety) it would have been an underhand toss. It was going to be easy to score right there. And again, we wanted to finish it off.”

I have no idea what Coach is talking about.  I mean, I get wanting to go up 42-14, so you can play some younger players, but Army had been running at will.  Monken is clearly the expert; I’m not arguing that.  However, the play happened right in front of me, and it looked nowhere near being a touchdown.  

Army had the ball near midfield with 5:30 left, up 21 points.  Assuming they run three times and gain no yardage whatsoever, they’d still have been able to pin UTEP at about their own 10 yard line, leaving the Miners something like 4:00, needing three scores!  The worst case scenario was still significantly better than where we wound up.  By comparison, even if the ball had just fallen incomplete, that would’ve put the team behind the chains in a critical situation, having handed UTEP more than :30 following a would-be punt.

Hindsight is always easier, of course, but switching to a four-minute offense was the obvious move.  Sometimes it’s the obvious move for a reason.

* * *

Bonus Round: Ancient Tomb of Santa Claus Discovered Beneath Turkish Church (Newsweek)

The head of Antalya’s Monument Authority, Cemil Karabayram, told the Turkish press the shrine was discovered during electronic surveys that showed gaps beneath the church…

At the time of his death in 343 A.D., Saint Nicholas was interred at the Church in Demre, formerly known as Myra, where he lay undisturbed until the 11th century. Then, according to different accounts from Italy at the time, his remains were taken during the crusades to either Venice or Bari, Italy…

Most Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept that the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, Italy, is the final resting place of Santa Claus’s remains. However, Turkish experts are now claiming the wrong bones were removed and those taken abroad belong to an anonymous priest.

True meaning of Christmas?

A very interesting take on The War on Christmas.  We’ll soon be fighting over the Bones of Santa Claus.

That’s all I’ve got.  Enjoy the weekend.