Cleaning out the inbox

    The inbox has been bulging with so much to take care of, so hopefully, we are making strides in getting close to normal as football season nears its start.

I've written before about why team handball hasn't become bigger in the United States (2012 with the pictured Pernille Larsen dominating the game I watched) and while the topic of team handball usually comes out around Olympic time, I do enjoy watching the occasional game from Europe when the Olympic Channel carries them on occasion.

Yahoo writes of why the sport isn't bigger here, why the assumption of American dominance should the best athletes begin to play, might be not quite as accurate as we think, and how the system that makes small European countries perform very well isn't all that different than the system that creates athletes in other sports in the USA.

The Smithsonian Magazine writes of a recent NOAA expedition to the Atlantic Ocean in the north and their remote-controlled robot on the ocean floor discovered this picture of a real-life Spongebob Squarepants and his friend Patrick Star.

The occurrence was unusual because sponges in the deep sea are usually orange or white to blend in better in the environment rather than Spongebob's yellow coloring.

It was also unusual as starfish are known to eat sponges as part of their carnivore diet.

The Toronto Star writes of the long-term future of the CFL's Toronto Argonauts.

The article discussed the Argonauts' options for the future and the problems of a league often struggling to make ends meet that missed an entire season.

The CFL is big business in the prairie provinces (Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Edmonton, and Calgary) and struggling its three biggest cities (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) but is unusual as in the area of potential revenue sharing as it would be their smaller markets subsidizing larger ones which is the opposite of the problems in Major League Baseball.

MSN writes of a problem in lakes and ponds as people toss unwanted goldfish into those bodies of water.

Without predators, the non-mative fish are beginning to take over these areas and bulk up in sizes as big as a football!

The Goldfish certainly qualifies as an invasive species as it can eliminate native fish, mess with the quality of the water (as anyone that has ever cleaned an aquarium can tell you), live to be 25 years of age, and live in water that has frozen over!

SkyatNight Magazine brings us an article on the work being done of restoring many pictures of the Earth and Moon that were taken during the Apollo program.

It's amazing the amount of material from the Apollo program that is in the public domain, yet few seem to know about and even fewer are accessing to use or restore.

We wrap with Vice's article on the eccentric Bradley Koda, the owner/operator of Best Electronics, who appears to have the largest number of remaining parts for Atari computer/video game consoles dating back to the 80s.

These parts are pretty much what is available to fix Atari machines for their devotees so part of looking for obscure things will be dealing with the person that possesses these items and the fact that they hold all the power in the transaction.

The article deals with the Atari crash and the rare parts but also of the perils of dealing with Koda and how you can easily find yourself on his list of undesirables- a list that seems impossible to be removed from.    

Stumbling onto something new....

I was visiting my dad on Monday, as I often do anymore and he was watching the Olympics.
I was quite an avid follower of the Olympics as a child, having a few memories of the 72 games in Munich, but able to remember many of the stars of the Montreal Olympics in 1976 like it was yesterday.
Anymore, the summer games do not have the same resonance for me as they once did, but dad was watching some things, so I watched with him.

After watching some women's basketball (not too exciting) and weightlifting (I always have enjoyed watching weightlifting), a game popped onto the screen that dad and I wondered just what we were watching.
We would not find out just what it was until the conclusion of the game was almost near, but I found myself enthralled by the game and had to watch more the next day.
What I discovered by the end of the next game was surprising to me, considering my usual biases...

First, though, let's talk about the game which is team handball.
When I hear handball, I think of the close relative racquetball, which I always think of as an indoor game of 2 to 4 players on a small court inside gyms and clubs.
The game that we saw had no resemblance to that game and instead was a hybrid between the best of basketball and hockey that was physical, but not in an over-the-top manner.
Each side has six players and a goalie and the rules can be found in the link above, but as dad and I watched we were trying to learn the rules on the fly.
One rule which was pretty easy to learn was the arc (which looked like a three-point line in basketball) in which the players could not penetrate and had to throw the ball past the goalie from beyond the arc.
Basically, the goalie does not have to worry about being interfered with by a screen from the opposing team.
Another was the player with the ball needed to be mobile after three seconds and can only take three steps.
There was far more than to the game, but I figured those few details out as the game went.
Many of the things that I had wondered about were rules that I would figure out later online, but I really enjoyed the women's game between Denmark and Korea, which would see Korea eek out a win despite the best efforts of Pernille Larsen (shown above against Spain), who seemed to score every time that Denmark had possessions late in the game.
My only wonder was why Denmark did not get the ball to Larsen even more than they did.

I looked forward to a men's game the next day to watch and surprisingly, I did not enjoy it as much.
The men almost seemed out of control, like a car wanting to drive faster than the driver wants it to.
The women's game for me was far more enjoyable and they might have made a fan out of me if I can see more games, which would be most likely online from the top-level European teams.

Sometimes, giving something new a chance can turn out to be quite enlightening and I will be attempting to see more of women's handball as the tournament progresses....