Next US president will be a lefty
Regardless of whether Americans elect the Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama president in November, the man who takes up residency in the White House will be a lefty — at least in terms of the hand he favors. He will follow in the footsteps of a slew of presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, who were left-handed.
The United States has had four left-handed presidents since 1974: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, the New York Sun noted recently.
Even the ranks of vice presidents or unsuccessful contenders for the White House are heavy with left-handers: Al Gore, Bob Dole, John Edwards and Ross Perot were all lefties, in hand terms if not all politically so.
The high ratio of left-handers who climb to the top of the political ladder is all the more baffling when one considers that only 10-12 percent of Americans write with their left hands. “Six of the 12 chief executives since the end of World War II will have been left-handed: Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton and either Obama or McCain,” wrote two right-handed scientists, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, in the Washington Post. “That’s a disproportionate number, considering that only one in 10 people in the general population is left-handed,” they wrote.
The reason might be that left-handed people use the right side of the brain more, and that’s the side that visualises the whole of a problem, is more capable of multi-tasking and even shows greater creativity, wrote the New York Daily News.“Many artists and great political thinkers were lefties — Pablo Picasso and Benjamin Franklin, for example,”wrote Wang and Aamodt. “Lefties are over-represented among the mathematically talented and are also more likely to find unexpected or counter-intuitive solutions on problem-solving tests.” But with all those talents, one has to wonder why there weren’t that many left-handed presidents in the more distant past.
The answer, says the Washington Post, is because they all had left-handedness drummed out of them by teachers or tutors. “For years, left-handedness was not treated as a point of pride, much less a qualification for high office,” wrote Wang and Aamodt. “Remnants of anti-leftiness are everywhere... The words ‘adroitness’ and ‘dexterity’ derive from the French and Latin words for ‘right,’ while ‘gauche’ and ‘sinister’ derive from the words for ‘left.’ “In the New Testament, the souls of sinners who fail to meet with the Saviour’s approval are sent to his left —and to eternal damnation.”
Socks - Obsessed Boys
Boys at a Birmingham school believe they have beaten the world record for the longest washing line of socks.
Children at King Edward’s School, in Edgbaston, passed the previous record of 0.8 miles.
They assembled more than 28,000 socks and 24,500 pegs for their attempt, which also aimed to raise money for the schools’ charities. The record-breaking bid will be now checked by officials from the Guinness Book of Records.
Duncan Witcombe, head of biology, said he decided on the bid after reading the Guinness Book of Records during the winter. He said: “It’s been a lot of hard work the last two days, setting it up yesterday in the rain and getting the boys out here today to do it. I’ll sleep better tonight.”
‘Bollywood Burner’ aims for world’s hottest curry title
London restaurant was serving up Thursday what it hopes will be confirmed as the world’s hottest curry, with even the chef admitting it is “too extreme” to keep on the menu.
Vivek Singh at The Cinnamon Club grabbed some of the hottest chilli peppers known to man to create the Bollywood Burner, a lamb-based dish with a fierce kick. The curry is so hot that diners are asked to sign a disclaimer confirming they are aware of the risks involved before daring to eat it. The Bollywood Burner is being submitted to Guinness World Records for verification of its status as the planet’s hottest curry. The verdict should be announced within three weeks.
Student Toby Steele, 19, from Brighton on the southern English coast, was the first to taste the Bollywood Burner. “I’m usually a korma man and I suspect this is the hottest thing I’ve ever tasted,” he said. “It was nice actually, you could really taste the spices.
“The initial taste isn’t that hot but now, a couple of minutes later, I feel a bit floaty and light-headed.” The dish, inspired by cuisine from Hyderabad in southern India, includes the Naga and its seeds — confirmed by Guinness World Records as the hottest chilli pepper in the world.
On the Scoville scale of piquancy, the Naga scores 855,000 — more than 100 times hotter than the jalapeno, which measures 8,000 on the scale. “We found a list of the 10 hottest chillies and decided to try and use some of them. I think it will be the hottest curry in the world,” said Singh.
The curry will not be a regular feature on the menu, he added. Lianne la Borde a journalist said: “It is the hottest I have ever tasted. At first, it tasted delicious. Then my mouth caught fire. It even made me feel dizzy.”
And their news man James Ellis said it was “innocuous enough at the first bite,” but one helping “saw my taste buds melt in fury at the inferno in my mouth. “Meanwhile, my heartbeat, which started at a resting pace of 68 beats per minute, zoomed up to 128 — the equivalent of doing aerobic exercise.”
Six-legged deer discovered
A deer has been discovered after being attacked by two dogs in Everett Springs, Georgia in the US. The fawn has two distinct pelvises and uses one leg from each to walk. It also had two tails, but one was amputated because of the injuries it suffered during the attack. It is now recovering at the West Rome Animal Clinic, in Rome, Georgia, where vet Dan Pate said: ‘It is really an anomaly. It appears it had an identical twin that didn’t form all the way ‘Somehow it has a fairly normal gait, although the centre legs seen to get in the way.’
Why nine is a magic number
Retailers’ belief that customers like a price ending in a nine rather than a rounded-up zero -- 199.99 instead of 200.00, for instance -- has been borne out by scientific research on a restaurant menu.
Researchers carried out a field study at a small, 22-seat restaurant in Brittany, western France, where customers were given a limited choice of dishes (five pizzas, four of meat, three of fish and four salads).
The team singled out the restaurant’s second most-popular pizza to see what happened over six weeks, when customers were faced with the option of a rounded-up price or a price ending in a nine.
For the first two weeks, all the items on the menu had zero-ending prices.
For the following fortnight, the price of the “target pizza” was brought down by one centime of a euro (1.58 of a US cent), to 7.99 euros ($12.62), while the prices of the other dishes still ended in a zero.
For the last two weeks, all the dishes had nine-ending prices.
The popularity of the target pizza rose by around 15 per cent during the test’s second phase, the study showed. When the item was pitched at 7.99 euros, it became easily the restaurant’s most popular pizza against rivals with zero-ending prices. It was ordered by 49.50 per cent of customers who ordered a pizza. But in the first and final phases -- when all the dishes had the same price -- the target pizza was preferred by 34.1 and 35.9 per cent in pizza orders, respectively.
The paper, by Nicolas Gueguen and Celine Jacob of the University of Southern Brittany in Lorient, appears in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.-AFP
