Denis Shapavalov is my pick for promising new player of the year. A very aggressive lefty, scrappy, and an excellent volleyer. Lots of positive energy although a bit too much temper.
Someone to watch in 2017. Currently ranked over 100 in the world.
Other predictions:
New tennis face for 2018
New tennis face for 2016
New tennis faces for 2011
I still hear most people demonize fat (especially saturated fat), salt, and cholesterol (especially eggs) despite a significant amount of research that says otherwise. Perhaps many decades of having it pounded into everyone will take some undoing.
I thought I’d collect some references to recent research that covers these maligned nutrients.…
I did this for 2011 but I thought it would be fun to put my pick or picks for the next hot player in writing and see how I do.
I was watching a match on Court 5 at the US Open in 2015, which shares seating with Court 4 so you can watch two matches at once.…
You know a store is too big when you need Google Maps to navigate it:
…Some of the big-box stores such as IKEA, Macy’s, Bloomingdales and Home Depot have already been mapped, but not Target. Not Wal-Mart. And not nearly as many malls as you’d like to see, especially in this holiday season.
(Note that in 2018 an article was published that supports what I’m saying here)
What if the placebo effect isn’t a trick?
For a long time, I put homeopathy in the same category as organized religion. I felt both were based primarily on faith with little science to back them up.…
I babbled about philanthropy in an earlier posting called “Wealth now, philanthropy later”, so I was thrilled to see this blog posting on the Harvard Business Review website:
Steve Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist
Try to ignore the hyperbolic title of the article and just absorb the content.
Making the world a better place means making decisions your whole life that either incrementally or substantially make people’s lives better. People…
First world problem.
I record a lot of tennis on TiVo partly because it’s usually inconvenient to watch it live (time zone differences) and if I time-shift it, I can zap the commercials or skim matches I don’t have time to watch all of.
It’s gotten increasingly difficult to not have the outcomes of matches I’ve queued up be spoiled before I’ve gotten a chance to see them.…
It seems like every time I make a phone call to the customer service department of a big company, I get an email, a return phone call, or a postal mail survey asking how my customer experience was. They always say I was randomly chosen but that defies the laws of probability.…
The highlight of the Australian Open this year for me was seeing three very promising players that I’ve never seen before, two of which I’ve never even heard of: