They're not Oompa Loompas, they've dyed their skin

I don't actually intend to take all these articles from British newspapers, they're just the first ones I find. Here's the Sun:

ONE of the world’s last ‘uncontacted Indian’ tribes has been photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border.

The photos were taken by global organisation Survival International, over one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre state.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry said: "These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct."

There are more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, with more than half living in either Brazil or Peru.

They are in danger of being forced off their land, killed or dying from new diseases.

Survival International supports 82 countries working for tribal peoples' rights.

And here's a picture of said tribe:



Now, I'm not entirely sure I believe the claim that this really is a lost tribe. I mean, if they are, we have no way of communicating with them - so how do we know they've absolutely never run into other humans?

I buy that they've pretty much shut themselves off from civilization, but I'm not sure it's possible for there to be a tribe that has literally never seen any people who were not part of that tribe.

However, that aside, I have a bigger question - why send a plane? Assuming for the moment (and the rest of this post) that they are in fact a lost tribe, surely the sight of a large, bird-shaped-but-clearly-not-a-bird object, making A LOT of noise, would probably be a bad idea? Maybe it would, I don't know, cause them to threaten it with their weapons, as they're doing in that picture?

I'll give them some credit, though - a helicopter would be worse. It looks like a giant flying bug which is about to swoop down and eat you.

My initial thought was that they should send a hot air balloon. If you were to forget everything you know about aircraft and physics, and picture a flying machine, wouldn't it look sort of like a hot air balloon? Plus, you can actually see the person inside, and they can yell down to the ground.

Then somebody pointed out the obvious - those guys have spears. You're in a balloon. It's going to end badly.

So I'm stuck - how can you get photographs of this group from afar, without excessively scaring them or killing yourself?

--Ryan

I now pronounce you man and wall

Or more accurately, wall and wife.

I say this because a Swedish woman has married the Berlin Wall. Here's the full story, from the Telegraph"

Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, 54, whose surname means Berlin Wall in German, wed the concrete structure in 1979 after being diagnosed with a condition called Objectum-Sexuality.

Mrs Berliner-Mauer, whose fetish is said to have its roots in childhood, claimed she fell in love with the structure when she first saw it on television when she was seven.

She began collecting "his" pictures and saving up for visits. On her sixth trip in 1979 they tied the knot before a handful of guests.

While she remains a virgin with humans, she insists she has a full, loving relationship with the wall.

Mrs Berliner-Mauer, who lives in Liden, northern Sweden, said: "I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy.

"The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier."

While the rest of mankind rejoiced when the Wall, erected by the Soviets in 1961 to halt an exodus from East to West Berlin, was largely torn down in 1989, its "wife" was horrified.

She's never been back and now keeps models depicting "his" former glory.

She said: “What they did was awful. They mutilated my husband."

She is said to have shifted her affections to a nearby garden fence.

Objectum-Sexual or objectophilia is feelings of love, attraction, arousal, and commitment for a particular object.

The mere thought of a relationship with an actual human being seems ludicrous.

My favourite part (by far) is that SHE TOOK ITS NAME.

That said, this does raise a number of increasingly bizarre questions.

For one, where are the rules on adultery? If some emotionally-charged East German sympathizer were to find a piece of the wall and kiss it, would that be considered adultery? Would the wife get mad at the woman? Would she get mad at her 'husband' for being complacent in letting it happen?

How about citizenship? I'm not familiar with Swedish law, but if a marriage has been going on for 29 years, odds are that would make the foreign spouse a citizen. Is the Berlin Wall now holding a Swedish passport? And if he is, is he eligible to play goal for their national soccer team?

I mean, seriously, between this and the chimpanzee that wants to be designated as a human, I'm starting to wonder if the main cause of overpopulation is us counting things as humans that clearly aren't.

But I guess those are just some of the problems facing any wallfully-wedded couple.

--Ryan

Get Smart International Trailer

Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway and team up against KAOS, in Get Smart, an upcoming cinema adapatation of the 1960's Spy parody series.

Here below an international Get Smart trailer, from Germany:

(A translation in case you don't read German:)
To be a hero, no need to be a secret agent.
Just one thing to do:

Keep quiet! And turn off your mobile phone!

GET SMART
The more I see from Get Smart the more I want to see from Anne Hathaway! She's getting hotter every time!
;-p

Found Them!

They were in Toronto this past weekend! Unfortunately, Carmen slipped away before the authorities could arrive, and when we went to ask Waldo where she went, we simply couldn't find him.


--
D. Phillips

Cup crazy

(Once again...if you're not a hockey fan, don't waste your time reading this.)

The big day has arrived. Kitchener against Spokane, winner gets the Memorial Cup.

There's one big difference between this year's Rangers, and the last Kitchener team to win the Cup (five years ago) - in 2003, Kitchener was dominant. There was the sense that something would have to go horribly, horribly wrong for that team not to win it all. This year, consensus is that the game could go either way - two great teams, and nobody's sure how the game will unfold.

In the interest of "I haven't seen anyone else do this", I'm going to go through some of the Rangers' best players from this year, and try to find their equivalent on the 2003 squad.

Justin Azevedo is quite clearly Derek Roy, probably the most obvious comparison there is. Both are noticeably smaller than the average hockey player, both are centres, both are in their final year of junior. Azevedo lead the team in scoring, Roy would have led in 2003 if he played the full season. They're also the two players who each received the brunt of the spotlight from the national media.

Mikael Boedker is Mike Richards. Both of their names are derivatives of 'Michael', both are/were eighteen years old in the Cup year, and they're both the huge prospect who broke out on a big stage during the Cup, coming to national attention for the first time.

Nick Spaling is Gregory Campbell. They're both solid contributors who got overlooked (both by fans and scouts) because of all the talent around them.

Nazim Kadri is, strangely, Scott Dickie. Although Kadri isn't a goalie, he is on his way out of Kitchener after the season, and all the fans know that today is their last chance to see his understated contributions to the team.

Yannick Weber is Andre Benoit - high scoring defenceman with Quebecois connections.

Mike Mascioli is Evan McGrath - rookie who you just know is going to be the top player on the team a couple years from now, but is getting lost in the shuffle at the moment.

Mike Duco is Adam Keefe - the fans love him far more than they would the average player of his ability.

T.J. Battani is Nathan O'Nabigon - solid player who was brought in to add more depth to a team that doesn't really need it. They also both have punctuation in their name.

Scott Timmins is Chad McCaffrey - an indispensable part of the team, but you sometimes forget he's even part of it.

Matt Pepe is Steve Eminger - consistent veteran defenceman.

And that's all I've got - the goalies don't really match up at all.

GO RANGERS GO!

--Ryan

Best prank ever?

(No pictures, because they'd ruin the surprise.)

A few winters ago, it snowed in North Carolina. Apparently this is an unusual occurrence, and even a little bit of snow causes everything to close - schools, places of business, etc.

News 14 Carolina, a local cable news station, had a running ticker of cancellations, and allowed people to submit cancellations through their website. However, a bunch of college students discovered that all cancellations were being placed on the ticker immediately, without anybody looking at them. So, being college students, they started submitting some of their own.

Here is the message board thread which contained the hijinks in their entirety. Or, if you're too impatient to read through all that (too bad for you), here are screen captures of some of the funniest to make it through.

If some of the humour seems dated, remember that this was 2004.

Enjoy!

--Ryan

Hitting the links

I didn't plan to do this. I was going to blog tonight, but it was going to be about something funny. However, throughout yesterday and today, little things kept coming up - things that aren't worth a blog by themself, but combined, can be. So here's some links to news stories, and the part that makes it interesting.

A truck driver took out some power lines near my house yesterday. The Record actually has it wrong - it was the corner of River and Holborn (not Ottawa), right at the Zellers entrance to Stanley Park Mall. Went by today, and there's still evidence of damage - one of the lights must have been damaged beyond repair, as it's gone. Also, the entrance/exit to the mall parking lot has now been repainted, which is great news - any time I went out there and straight down Holborn (my preferred route home), I'd be glancing over to make sure that whoever led the left turn lane was aware that he was supposed to turn left.

In other news that's close to home (albeit another home), Brantford police raided five homes for drugs and made 42 arrests. These were all within walking distance of my house (and in once case, quite possibly right across the street). Obviously it's good for Brantford to get rid of these problems, but I'm sure it's no coincidence that this didn't happen until after all the students were gone.

Sticking with Brantford, Peter MacKay was in town to play some rugby. While this story is offbeat enough on its own, the accompanying picture was taken by one of my professors - and another picture he took of the same event wound up in yesterday's Toronto Sun. That was a neat surprise, although it wasn't the first time his photo ended up in a bigger paper.

On another note, Quebec's government has a report on the experiences of immigrants in their province. This story by itself isn't that interesting, but I heard something on the news last night that made me stop for a moment - French-Canadians in Quebec apparently think that minorities need to do more to integrate themselves into the Quebecois culture. So French-Canadians are angry that a minority wants to keep its own culture...seriously, am I missing something here?

This was something I did not expect to see in the Record yesterday, or any day for that matter. Any newspaper, either.

This guy agrees with me about the pig in Monday's Pearls Before Swine.

Finally, the Memorial Cup is still going on. Kitchener is beating Belleville right now in a game that is literally meaningless - the two teams play again on Friday, with the winner of that game meeting Spokane for the championship.

That thing I was originally going to blog about tonight? Friday or Saturday, probably. And you won't be disappointed.

--Ryan

Adventures in food

I've now been back working at Food Basics for a week, and I have a few thoughts on the matter.

For one, I mentioned a few days ago that the music had improved in my absence. I'm no longer so sure that this is the case. When I first started at Basics, there were three music stations (all somehow set up by Food Basics corporate head office in Toronto) which the store could bounce between. This number must have expanded before last summer - either that, or somebody believed that "70s funk" was one of the three most important musical choices for grocery shoppers. The music I listened to on Monday was what I mentioned here before - by Wednesday, it had changed to smooth jazz instrumentals (which was actually a nice surprise, especially when I realized I knew a few of the songs), and now it's back to the usual 60s and 70s music. Variety is the spice of life, right?

Much as I'd like to use that last sentence to segue into something about spices, I just can't do it. However, I have finally solved one of the few aspects of the store which has puzzled me since I started working there - newspapers in the break room. On a semi-regular basis, I'll get up to the break room and find a copy, usually a day or two old, of the Toronto Sun. The Sun is chosen because the tabloid-style paper is the easiest to set on a table and read while eating one's lunch, not because anybody particularly enjoys its style of journalism. I've never known where these papers came from - I assumed somebody bought it and put it up there.

Now I know the truth. If a paper is a day old, nobody is going to buy it. And since the distributor only needs the front page (or wherever the bar code is) to credit us with an unsold paper, there is apparently no problem with someone grabbing a day-old paper and taking it up to the lunchroom. The point of this story: I'm going to be reading a lot of the Toronto Sun this summer.

Speaking of lunch, this is another dilemma for me. I'm going to be missing five meals (mostly lunches) per week due to work. By 'missing', I mean 'not eating at home'. So what am I to do? High school and university living have kinda put me off the "make a sandwich and take it along" route for a while, but at the same time, I'd sooner do that than buy microwavable stuff at the store. There's plenty of take-out options available to me...but I can't eat McDonald's or KFC very often at all, and I'd imagine I'd get sick of Subway and pizza before long. There's also a Chinese place with a great selection of lunch specials, but I don't want to be eating there weekly either. So I guess I'll be bringing my lunch from home a lot, unless any of you have some better ideas.

On another note, I think our customers have gotten four inches shorter, on average, since last summer. I don't know how else to explain the number of times I was asked "can you reach this for me?" yesterday.

Finally, if you pay attention to the news, expect to hear stuff about a potential Food Basics strike within the next few weeks. And that is all I have to say about that.

--Ryan

P.S. Today's Pearls Before Swine once again made me laugh. I think it's the pig's expression in the third panel.

A picture

Just for you, Dan.

I retract my previous statement

3-0 Kitchener and we're not even done the first yet. This team is too good not to win.

--Ryan

Cup Crazy

Pre-emptive warning: if you are not a hockey fan, there is no particular reason for you to read any of this. Except, obviously, the preceding sentence. And that one.

As I start writing this, we are 90 minutes away from the start of the Memorial Cup.

The three best teams in junior hockey - the Kitchener Rangers, Spokane Chiefs, and Gatineau Olympiques - are converging on Kitchener for the next week, to determine the true champion of ice hockey (only players 20 or under, not counting any in the NHL or Europe). The Belleville Bulls are also along to make it an even number.

I'm not even going to try predicting the outcome of the tournament. I am a Kitchener fan, and while they are my pick to win, I have no idea how much of that is because of blind loyalty. Moreover, I have zero familiarity with Spokane and Gatineau, so it's really comparing apples to oranges.

However, I will say this: the atmosphere will be electric. From what I've seen on TV, the Rangers have one of the most vocal fanbases in the league, and that will be ratcheted up a few thousand times with the stakes this high. I think this has something to do with us being the perfect small town/big city blend - our arena holds over six thousand fans, but as anyone who has ever been to a game can verify, everybody in attendance knows at least a dozen other people scattered throughout the arena.

The big question on the minds of the national media - and being pretty much ignored, as it should be, by the local media - is the status of Rangers coach Peter DeBoer, and whether he'll be jumping to the NHL after this season. DeBoer's answer is that he won't talk about it until after the Cup, which is exactly the answer he should be giving under any circumstances. The way I see it, the only way he'll stay in Kitchener is if he's guaranteed to be coaching the World Juniors team next year. Otherwise, he'll be heading to the NHL - probably Atlanta.

I'll be watching tonight's Kitchener/Gatineau game on TV, and I'll be at tomorrow's game between Belleville and Spokane (the only one I'm going to). After that, it's a crapshoot, but I'm hopefully going to be able to watch every Kitchener game.

As I finish writing this, we are 60 minutes away from the start of the Memorial Cup.

--Ryan

Random ramblings

No picture because I couldn't immediately think of one that makes sense. Hopefully you all can contain your disappointment.

Monday night marked my glorious return to the world of discount grocery. Nothing much ever changes around Food Basics - yes, some of the products look a little different and there's a chance I could be on strike before the summer's out, but the most noticeable change is the new tables and chairs in the break room. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the gesture - but if management was going to splurge on something new for the store, 'new lunchroom furniture' wouldn't have been in my top fifty suggestions.

Actually, I guess that's not the only change - the music seems to have improved. At the very least, I don't remember hearing any Dave Matthews Band there before, and I heard them twice on Monday.

Having not worked since January, I was very tired when I was done - and apparently when I'm that tired, I use words like "summation" in e-mails.

On another note, I don't talk about politics here much anymore. That's because there's nothing exciting going on - Obama will eventually wrap up the Democratic nomination in the US, while the Conservatives up here will continue to be hit by scandals that nobody really cares about.

One question, though - when did it become something seemingly bordering on treason to admit that the US isn't perfect? Is anything Jeremiah Wright has said really that different from some of the stuff Martin Luther King Jr. said? So why is one revered as a hero and the other dismissed as a crackpot?

Finally, here's a comic that I found funny. The guy in the third panel is supposed to be the cartoonist.

Memorial Cup preview coming tomorrow or Friday, hopefully.

--Ryan

The forgotten generation

My parents have digital cable. Literally hundreds of television channels. Included in this is YTV, TVO, PBS, Treehouse, BBC Kids, Teletoon, and a couple other childrens' channels I can't remember the name of right now. Between all that, you'd think there'd be at least a handful of shows I remember watching when I was a kid, right?

Wrong.

PBS still shows Sesame Street (although presumably newer episodes), and YTV airs Pokemon (which became popular at the tail end of my childhood). Aside from that, every show on these networks was created after I outgrew it. This means no Reboot, no Groundling Marsh, no Under The Umbrella Tree, not even any Sharon, Lois & Bram or Mr. Dressup reruns.

And this isn't right.

But lo and behold, Channel 284 is something called 'Teletoon Retro'. It looks promising on first glance - Rocky and Bullwinkle, followed by Woody Woodpecker and some Looney Tunes.

However, throw in the Flinstones, the Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, and - clearly for no reason other than CanCon regulations - the Raccoons - and that's their entire lineup.

The same handful of shows, all of which (minus the Raccoons) are old enough that they were popular when my parents were kids.

Are people really more likely to watch this limited schedule over and over again, rather than one which offers more variety? And it's not like cost is much of a factor here - if there was a bidding war going on for Dudley The Dragon, it would already be on TV somewhere.

It's not that the shows themselves were great - they're mostly worse than the ones Teletoon Retro is already showing - but people will be willing to watch them once in a while out of nostalgia. And right now, dozens of television programs I liked as a kid are sitting in a closet somewhere, collecting dust. That's not right.

--Ryan

What's up with CTV?

(I'm told that pictures are a good idea, even if they don't seem to add much to the post itself. Here you go.)

I've noticed something different with CTV News lately. Maybe you have too.

Any reports from overseas - London, Afghanistan, Myanmar, wherever - but not from anywhere in North America, simply look different than they used to. In fact, they have for a few months now - I think it was back in February that I first noticed it.

I can't quite put my finger on exactly what is different about this footage. Upon noticing that people/things in the background seemed to be sharper than in the past, my first guess was that perhaps this footage was being shot in High Defintion - but now I'm not so sure about that. CTV News is not currently broadcast in an HD version; and more importantly, I cannot find any record of CTV announcing plans to air the news in HD in the near future. So why would they invest in HD equipment if they have no reason to?

A while later, I noticed that the audio wasn't always syncing up with the video 100%, there was often a noticeable split-second delay. Combine this with the fact that the video reminds me of something off Youtube (nothing in particular), and a new theory was born: perhaps CTV had just moved to a fully-digitalized method of shooting video and/or transmitting it overseas.

Part of this latest theory still seems plausible to me - perhaps CTV is exercising some budgetary belt-tightening, and video reports from overseas are now being compressed quite a bit before being sent to Toronto, losing some quality in the process.

I'm entirely willing to believe that this is wrong; anybody with a better theory, let's hear it.

--Ryan

Time Delayed Blogging

Yay!

Blogger has announced Future-Dated Posts will be published only once that time has come. This gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside; Google loves me.



I wrote some Google guy a few months ago asking how to do this. At the time my response was "No dice!" so this is making me very happy. Now Ryan can freely blog at any time without fear of overdoing it, and I might have some more regular writings on my alternate blog. (Not too soon, mind you. When a spurt hits me though, it might get better.)

Note: If you want to publish it now with a future date, first publish it first with the current date, and then edit that date. Already published posts won't be retracted unless deleted.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some time-delayed blogging to do!

--
D. Phillips

Attack of the 15-foot duckling!

Taken from today's Expositor...

Enough about cougars.

Police are now on the lookout for a duck……a 15-foot inflatable duck.

The duck was stolen from R & R Pool Supplies on Grand River Street North in Paris sometime overnight Friday to Saturday. It is yellow with a blue and white striped shirt with SIMA in red letters printed on the shirt.

Anyone who has any knowledge of the missing duck is asked to call Brant OPP at 519-442-2241 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.

The police search for the missing duck comes after a month or two of reported cougar sightings in and around Brantford.

My guess would be that they realized there was pretty much nothing to the article, so they tried to tie it in to the cougar. I don't think it worked.

--Ryan

Further proof that my life is nothing but an endless series of coincidences

Yesterday's newspaper included a magazine intended as a guide to the Memorial Cup. I'm not sure who exactly thought putting out a guide for a tournament where half the teams involved aren't even known yet, but there it was.

That gave me an idea for a blog - writing about the Cup-winning Kitchener Rangers team of five years ago, this year's team, and the future of the franchise (particularly head coach Peter DeBoer, who is likely NHL-bound).

But I decided to put that off until next week, closer to the start of the Cup. Instead, I wrote about that dream (and for the record, last night's dreams weren't nearly that monotonously exciting).

Then, today, I was up in Waterloo for my cousin's First Communion. This is actually kind of a big deal for me, as he is my youngest cousin, and I don't think there are any more in the coming. So it was the last First Communion I'm likely to go to (not counting ones that happen to be going on while I'm at a church) for quite some time.

And who was that sitting a few rows ahead of me, in the other section? Why, none other than Rangers head coach Peter DeBoer. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time him and I have ever been in the same building (The Aud nonwithstanding).

It seemed stranger at the time. Honest.

--Ryan

Dreams

For a few months during high school, I was fascinated by the idea of lucid dreams. Lucid dreaming, as far as I understand it, is just like regular dreaming - except you have complete control over the dream, and can remember it better than the average dream (mainly because you're at least somewhat conscious while it's taking place).

I never had much success actually having a lucid dream, but there is one lasting legacy of this period - when I wake up, I instinctively keep my eyes shut. I'm told that as soon as you open your eyes, you lose the dream, so I somehow managed to train myself not to open my eyes upon waking up.

This quirk combined with something else (the food I ate? having a lot on my mind? atmospheric conditions?) last night, and if I didn't have a lucid dream, it was at least the closest I've ever come.

I'm going to try and describe the dream as best as I can remember it. If you're an armchair psychiatrist, good luck trying to figure it out. Otherwise, feel free to read it out of interest anyhow.

----------------------------

It started off in a campground. I was with some other people (I knew them in the dream, but don't think they're anyone I know in real life), and we were looking for the people we were camping with (whom I do know in real life). The campsite we were looking for was number 24601 (I've never seen Les Miserables, but I know of the significance of this number to that play). We walked around for a few minutes trying to find it, and then I spied a sign saying that campsites between two numbers (23000 and I don't remember but greater than 24601) were up the staircase, along with number 9xxx (forget the last three digits).

Yes, there was a staircase in the campground. Going up the staircase led to, in defiance of all laws of physics, more campground. Not another level of campground, just more of it.

We went up the staircase, and at this point the group of people I had been with were somehow replaced by a group of people I do know in real life - some friends and some people I haven't seen in years. It wasn't a change in the plot or anything, it was just that some of the characters changed.

Then I can't recall what happened next - either I don't remember it, or the dream just cut straight to this next scene. I should also note that at this point, the group of people I was originally looking for seemingly ceased to be a concern - when I gained conscious control of the dream, it was still in the back of my mind that I hadn't found them yet, but it didn't seem that important anymore.

So the next thing I know, I'm in a sort of community centre-type building (still in the campground), along with the group that had been following me and a bunch of other people who don't exist in real life.

Everyone already in the building is sitting in a circle (with gaps), and I decide for some reason to ditch the group I was with in favour of taking a single spot next to a few people who look a little uncomfortable. It was also the closest seat available.

Then, and this has NEVER happened to me in a dream before, I start talking to these people. I have never had a dream where fictional characters were even given a face, much less a speaking role or a personality.

I don't know how many of these people I talked to, but I only remember two. There was a quiet black kid, fifteen years old, who was wearing headphones and telling me something about his flight in (he was worried about some electronic device?). Then, and sitting next to me, was a girl with an Australian accent. This is especially weird - I don't remember ever having any sort of accent in a dream before.

All of a sudden, there was a TV at one end of the circle, and everyone else seemed to be paying attention to it. I wasn't that interested, and my mind was focused on a red banner hanging from the ceiling above the TV. I assume the banner was an advertisement for Maclean's magazine, because it contained a picture of Scott Feschuk (easily the strangest single thing I've seen in a dream).

(Actually, reading that last paragraph over, it's giving me an eerie 1984 vibe. Aside from the picture of Scott Feschuk, of course.)

Then the Australian girl turns to me and says something about "I hate that, don't you?" Forgetting that there was a television on, I assumed she was talking about Scott Feschuk, and was about to defend the guy, until I guess my brain clued in, and I just said nothing as she continued on rambling about whatever was on the screen.

At this point, I lost the lucidity, and I'm not quite sure what happened next, but the last thing I remember was trying to push something that just wouldn't budge. I woke up and discovered that I was digging my shoulder into my mattress.

So, yeah, weird dream. Second-weirdest I've ever had.

--Ryan

Mind over matter

Lately I've been spending a fair bit of time thinking (rather paradoxically) about my brain. Or, more to the point, about my memory.

I've known for a long time that my memory is strange - I don't take any notes in school (at all), and I still get better marks than quite a few people who do. I remember things of no importance whatsoever, such as that in grade two, I spent the bulk of the year sitting with Laura on my right and Matthew two seats to my left (last names withheld for privacy reasons and possible embarrassment, and I'm kind of surprised I can't remember the other people at my table). As a kid, I could name pretty much every player on every team in any major sport (something I've since lost interest in). I can remember phone numbers that I haven't used in over a decade.

But all of that pales in comparison to this guy. Given any date, he can remember something about that day - or, given an event, he can tell you the exact date on which it happened.

And he's not alone - the article goes on to talk about one more confirmed person with this condition, and a few potential cases. I remember reading a story a few years ago about a guy who could instantly tell you what date Easter fell on in any year you gave him (not easy to memorize, as there's an extremely complex system in place).

The one message that seems to be consistent is that we all can (and do) have this stuff in our memory. It's recall that's the problem - bringing that information back into our conscious, from wherever we've shoved it.

Think of it this way - you're shown a box with twenty common objects inside. Then the box is taken away, and you're asked to list as many of the twenty objects as you can remember.

My guess would be that most people will get at least ten, quite a few would close in on fifteen, and one or two might be able to get eighteen or more.

When the list is read allowed, and somebody hears an object they did not have on their list, their reaction is almost definitely going to be "oh yeah, how did I forget that?" and not "I don't remember seeing that". That's what I'm talking about - we have no trouble putting stuff into our memory, it's taking it back out that's the problem.

I guess my overarching point, if I have one, is this: the human brain is an amazing thing, and we've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with it.

--Ryan