Word: sport
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Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care...
...should. According to a new study just published in the journal Science, the greatest single increase in racehorse speed in the history of the sport occurred about a century ago and owed entirely to where the jockey did - or didn't - place his fanny on the saddle. (See the top 10 animal stories...
That's the way it was in the U.K., at least. In the U.S. - which always had a wilder, frontier relationship with its horses and merely borrowed the sport from the Brits anyway - the rules were looser. American jockeys of the time began wondering what would happen if they did a little work on their own, standing up in the stirrups, bending forward and surfing the motion of the horse as it galloped. What happened was, they went faster - 5% to 7% faster between 1890 and 1900, as more and more riders adopted the idea. That's a huge bump...
Well, that's the last time I try to be a good sport. Even my wife told me that I looked faintly ridiculous, and she was trying to make me feel better. Among the people who would miss us most would be the wise-guy pundits and scriptwriters for satirical TV shows, because they riff on the news we produce...
...American dream unfolds as a familiar tale: a poor kid works hard and grows up to be a rich, successful businessman. The Chinese dream isn't so different, except in the case of basketball star Yao Ming, it goes something like this: a poor kid is pushed into a sport he has little interest in, he brings a lackluster team in Shanghai to victory in the national championships, and he gets drafted by the Houston Rockets, where his offensive prowess earns him seven NBA All-Star awards. Fast-forward to the present and the 7-ft. 6-in. center faces...