Have You Looked in Vegas

The As Good As News scouting report on Victoria Azarenka predicted her singles loss to Kuznetsova, while noting that we would hear more from her. It did not take long. See the post of September 3 for a photo of the 2007 US Open mixed doubles champs, Max Mirnyi and Victoria Azarenka, who saved five consecutive break points in a second set tiebreaker to grab the championship.

Virus Is Seen as Prime Suspect in Death of Honeybees - A team of entomologists and geneticists identified Israeli acute paralysis virus as a primary, but not sole, cause of mysterious, mass bee hive die-offs in North America last winter. This mystery remains partially unsolved. Other suspected causes -poor nutrition, frequent transport of hives in "industrialized" beekeeping. Wait a minute - let's look at what is really happening here, the workers leave the hive and do not return. This whole die-off thing is really a mysterious disappearance, no one is reporting they found millions of little honeybee corpses in the back yard. In the bee hive you have the queen who is, well, the queen. You have the drones, males who sit around the hive, eat the free honey, watch the big screen plasma TV, take an occasional stab at making their contribution to reproduction and then die young. No real motive for these guys to disappear. Finally, you have the workers, undeveloped females who work constantly to keep the hive going, essentially spending their lives as slaves. The workers are leaving the hive and not coming back. Poor nutrition? Perhaps, but if the virus is not the whole story then we should look for a massive increase in the worker bee population of Las Vegas. Maybe paid vacation and some health benefits would get those worker bees back into the hives.

Survey Reveals Student Attitudes, Parental Goals and Teacher Mistrust - Nearly half of NYC middle and high school students say students who get good grades are not respected. Mayor Bloomberg views this as troubling and calls for a shift to a "culture of success." You may have this one backwards, Mayor B. Nerds are historically unpopular - in fact "nearly half" is a surprisingly low number - the regular kids probably didn't believe the survey was really anonymous. Sure this makes for some tough years in middle school and high school - but isn't that the incentive to get into a college where you can be normal? The fact that one-third of teachers mistrust the principal is more interesting. This may have something to do with the fact that NYC principals can now actually do something if they think a teacher is incompetent. Let's watch this number in future surveys. Will teacher trust go up or down and why - because the principals earn the trust of the good teachers or push out the mistrustful.

The Brothers Solomon - Mixed review of a new movie characterized as slapstick in the style of the early Steve Martin (insert arrow through skull thusly). Key to success - the inspired casting of Lee Majors (The Big Valley, Six Million Dollar Man) as the comatose dad.