Today I’d like to share a couple of random things that don’t tie together for any kind of regular post, since they aren’t related to anything in particular. All of the following facts and photos all came out of random rambles, both virtual and real.

The first random ramble is a direct result of the seductive nature of the Internet. I mean, I’ll be reading something while I’m eating my lunch that starts me off down a path that I would never have thought to follow. For example, today I noticed a headline that the first African-American woman to win a gold medal in the Olympics just died this week.

Hmm, curious. I thought to myself, didn’t Wilma Rudolph die a long time ago? You see, if you would have asked me yesterday, I would have guessed that Rudolph was the first African-American woman to win Olympic gold.

But it turns out that Alice Coachman heard that a lot in her lifetime, even though she won her Olympic medal years before Rudolph ever competed. Coachman won a single Olympic gold medal at the 1948 Olympics. She probably could have won multiple medals like Rudolph did in the 1960s,  had the Olympics been held in 1940 or 1944.  But of course those games were cancelled during WWII, so Coachman was only able to compete in the Olympics in 1948. In those games, she won the medal in the high jump, setting an Olympic record with her jump of  5 feet, 6 1/4 inches and becoming the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.  That was interesting enough to learn, but the article goes on to point out that she set that record before the Fosbury Flop was introduced. Which apparently is worth noting.

But, what was that? Before the what? Have you heard of a Fosbury Flop? I hadn’t.

So, from that article I’m off to find  information about a Fosbury Flop. It turns out that it’s the style of doing the high jump that was “popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury first in 1965”, according to Wikipedia. It’s the only style of high jump jumping I’ve actually ever seen, I think.  This video I found on YouTube demonstrates various styles of jumping before the Fosbury flop was adopted. In case you’d like to compare and contrast the styles as well.

My second random fact to pass along is also something I read on the internet over the week. It’s big news: the singing nun won Italy’s The Voice contest.  That happened last month, so you may already know this. I realize I’m either behind the curve or well ahead of it for my North American readers on this one. It turns out that a nun, Sister Cristina Scuccia,  entered one of those TV singing contest songs in Italy and won.  I’d describe her act as Maria from the abbey in the Sound of Music plot channels Whoopi Goldberg in the movie Sister Act,  with an ecclesiastical spin on modern light rock songs. They claim that Sister Cristina Scuccia is really a nun from a non-cloistered convent in Italy. Click here to read the blog post I originally read about her; then click here to see a video of her winning performance. She gets off to a slow start, but hang around for the dancing monks.

It’s hard to top that for strange stories from the Internet today, so instead I’ll finish off with a couple of random photos I took as I was wandering around Baltimore one hot, sultry day back in June.  We were staying in the fancy, newly (in the last 10 or so years) gentrified area of the Inner Harbor. One block off the spiffy, albeit boring, street of disappointingly generic boutiques and shops was an older building that had a big painting on the side of it, without any explanation for that – at least none that was visible from where I was standing.

Painting on a building, near the Inner Harbor, Baltimore

Somewhere in that same area, on an otherwise unused old post on a street corner, was a post with a metal box that had clearly seen better days (and was clearly not in use). The screws and the box case looked old and worn. Which made it all the more striking to notice a shiny, perfectly polished mirrored circle in the middle of the box. It seemed to serve no purpose  other than to act as a fun-house style mirror to reflect me and my surroundings for a quick “selfie” with my cell-phone.

Self-portrait, on a street in Baltimore

Anyway, hope you enjoy your own random ramblings today, where ever they may take you.