Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy

 Suffers head injury, becomes musical prodigy? Wait a minute! How does that happen? One day you're a normal, run of the mill individual, and the next, you're on the way to becoming a musical superstar. This also happened to a lady who woke up one day and found she could speak Russian. Only problem was her job was in sales and Russian appeared to be the only language she could now speak.

Six years ago a Denver, Colorado man hit his head hard after diving into the shallow end of a pool. Days later, he sat down at a piano and discovered he was a musical genius. Derek Amato is one of just 30 “acquired savants” worldwide. Each discovered an inexplicable abilty that was unleashed after an incident. Amato was 40 years old at the time of the accident.

“I remember the impact being really loud. It was like a bomb going off. And I knew I hit my head hard enough that I was hurt. I knew I was hurt badly,” he described in a Science Channel documentary.


He was taken to the hospital with a serious concussion, and suffered some memory loss and hearing loss. A few days after the accident, Amato visited a friend who had a keyboard and felt inexplicably drawn to the instrument, he told TODAY on Thursday. He sat down to play and beautiful, fully structured, original music flowed from his hands. He played until 2 a.m.

“As I shut my eyes, I found these black and white structures moving from left to right, which in fact would represent in my mind, a fluid and continuous stream of musical notation,” Amato said in a blog post on the Wisconsin Medical Society website. “I could not only play and compose, but I would later discover that I could recall a prior played piece of music as if it had been etched in my minds eye.”

Though he had dabbled in the guitar before, he’d never touched a piano, Amato told TODAY.
Rare cases like this open up a whole new realm of scientific exploration, as scientists investigate how this can happen. The big question is: do we all have this superhuman ability built in, if we could just tap into it and release it?

Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, who researches savants, told the Atlantic Magazine he believes that after a trauma, other regions of the brain step in to compensate for the loss of function, which rewires the brain in ways we can’t imagine.

Scientists have a few cases to study as they explore the question, the magazine reported. Orlando Serrell was hit in the head with a basketball at age 10 and discovered he could remember the weather for each day after his accident. Alonzo Clemens suffered brain damage after a head injury at age three, but can create incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in just minutes.

Amato told TODAY that though he still gets painful migraines and has lost 35% of his hearing, it’s well worth it. Amato left his corporate job and became a professional musician. He’s released one album of original compositions and is working on another.

So I guess there's hope for all of us if we want to experience brilliance in our lives! Maybe if I hit my head unexpectedly, I may become a top 10 golfer or a Grammy winning singer! Or an English teacher! (Oh, I see that one's already happened!)

‘Dead' boy wakes up and asks for water at funeral in Brazil

I don't know whether to feel appalled or really sad at this news. It seems as if the value of life in places like Brazil is almost set to zero. I've seen that movie City of God with the Brazilian street kids killing each other over territory and heard the stories of how the local police routinely go round with automatic weapons killing whoever is on the street whatever their ages. Sad, very sad.

Apparently, the latest story to come out of that country is about a two-year old boy who sat up in his coffin to ask for water before laying back down again lifeless, according to a Brazilian news website Website ORM  which claimed that Kelvin Santos stopped breathing during treatment for pneumonia at a hospital in Belem, northern Brazil.

He was declared dead at 7.40pm on Friday and his body was handed over to his family in a plastic bag. The child's devastated family took him home where grieving relatives held a wake throughout the night, with the boy's body laid in an open coffin. But an hour before his funeral was due to take place on Saturday the boy apparently sat up in his coffin and said: "Daddy, can I have some water?".

The boy's father, Antonio Santos, said: "Everybody started to scream, we couldn't believe our eyes. Then we thought a miracle had taken place and our boy had come back to life. "Then Kelvin just laid back down, the way he was. We couldn't wake him. He was dead again." Mr Santos rushed his son back to the Aberlardo Santos hospital in Belem,where the doctors reexamined the boy and confirmed that he had no signs of life.

He said: "They assured me that he really was dead and gave me no explanation for what we had just seen and heard." The boy's family decided to delay the funeral for an hour in the hope that he would wake up again, but ended up burying him at 5pm that day in a local cemetery. Convinced that his son was victim of medical malpractice, Mr Santos has now registered a complaint with the police who have launched an investigation

He said: "Fifteen minutes after rushing him away for resuscitation, they came and told me he was dead and handed me his body. Perhaps they didn't examine him properly. Dead people don't just wake up and talk. I'm determined to find out the truth." The local state department today confirmed the boy had been admitted to hospital in a critical condition and was declared dead after suffering cardiac-respiratory failure.

Read more:  http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/dead-boy-wakes-up-and-asks-for-water-at-own-funeral-in-brazil/story-e6frf7n6-1226386975762

Euro 2012: Polish anti-hooligan squads equipped with testicle-biting dogs, sonic cannons that induce involuntary urination

If you're thinking about going to Poland or Ukraine and starting trouble, this should give you something to think about. Don't know about you, but I don't fancy the idea that there will be dogs trained to bite you directly in the testicles. I've become quite attached to my testicles over the years and like to keep them in working condition wherever possible. I stopped wetting myself around about aged 3 and half as well so don't fancy being forced to do it in Joe public thank you very much.

Here's the story: From testicle-biting police dogs to sonic cannons capable of inducing involuntary urination, Polish anti-hooligan squads have an array of weapons ready for potential trouble-makers at Euro 2012. The English-language Krakow Post newspaper asserted in an editorial that local law enforcement agencies were more than ready to tackle any hooligan threat at England's southern Poland base camp.

                                           Alik Keplicz/AP

"The Polish police are going to come down on troublemakers like a bag full of anvils and you don't want to be there when it happens," the paper warned. 

Krakow has a long history of hooligan violence -- the local police have seen it all before and they will ruin your day if you try it on. These lads' mums and dads rioted under Soviet machine guns -- a few chairs thrown by beered-up fans is not going to intimidate them. Do not expect softly, softly police tactics.

"Poland's anti-hooligan squads are armed with: Shotguns firing baton rounds that probably won't kill you as long as you're 30m away, a truck-mounted water cannon affectionately known as ‘the typhoon', a high-tech sonic cannon that can make you wet yourself on its lowest setting, dogs trained to bite you directly in the testicles." English fans are not expected to arrive in Krakow in significant numbers, with England's Group D games all taking place in Ukraine.

Read more:  http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/euro-2012/euro-2012-polish-anti-hooligan-squads-equipped-testicle-biting-dogs-sonic-cannons-induce-involuntary-urination-article-1.1091396

IKEA's Products Make Shoppers Blush in Thailand

It's a constant source of amusement and delight to me when I hear stories that large retailers have simply not done their homework when trying to take a very successful and really lucrative business model and transplant it cross-culturally. It's as if the proverbial dollar signs have been flashing across their visual/spatial spheres rendering them completely blind to the absurdly obvious. No matter how improbable it may appear at first glance, the following well-known dictum should always be followed: "If something can go wrong, it most certainly will at some point."

James 

Hookway/The Wall Street Journal - A local language team transliterates original product names into Thai.

BANGKOK—Is Redalen a) a town in Norway b) a bed sold by Swedish furniture chain IKEA or c) something that sounds uncomfortably close to getting to third base in Thailand? The answer, it turns out, is all three. IKEA is famous for using tongue-twisting Scandinavian names to help identify its sofas and beds. But as the big-box retailer expands into fast-growing new markets, it is discovering that those hard-to-pronounce names can also have other meanings, and that spells trouble in other languages.

Take Thailand, for example. IKEA launched a new superstore here late last year, its fifth-largest in the world. It is packed with shoppers seeking bargains among the flat-pack, assemble-it-yourself furniture or wolfing down Swedish meatballs in the IKEA restaurant. Reading a standard IKEA catalog aloud, though, can draw strange looks, or worse. Besides the Redalen bed, there is the very nice Jättebra plant pot, which can sound in part like a crude Thai term for sex, and a host of other problematic words.

To solve that problem, IKEA is saying adjö (Swedish for adieu) to unintentionally saucy product names, and hej (hello) to a team of Thai speakers who modify terms so they can't be so easily misinterpreted.

James Hookway/The Wall Street Journal

IKEA also sells Swedish-style preserves.

"The Swedish…words are important because they bring a unique character to the brand," says one member of the team, Natthita Opaspipat. She spent nearly four years preparing for the launch of IKEA's Bangkok store by carefully scrutinizing terms to see how they sounded in Thai before transliterating them into Thailand's cursive, Sanskrit-influenced alphabet. In some cases, she and other team members change a vowel sound or a consonant to prevent unfortunate misunderstandings.

"We've got to be careful," says the 29-year-old Ms. Natthita. "Some of them can be, well, a little rude." Getting product names lost in translation is becoming more of a problem for companies as the whole world becomes a potential market. There are numerous examples of firms launching, say, a new car, in places such as South America or Greece only to discover the name had some unfortunate connotations.

When the owners of British food company Sharwood's spent millions of dollars launching a new curry sauce in 2003 called Bundh, the firm was deluged with calls from Punjabi speakers who said the new offering sounded like their word for "backside."

Redalen bed

In China, Microsoft's search engine Bing sounds like "illness" or "pancake" when spoken in local dialects, depending on the tone. Microsoft executives there then made the search engine's Chinese name biying, which also referred to a longer Chinese expression you qui bi ying, which roughly means "seek and ye shall find."

The problem, for some companies, goes back decades. When Coca-Cola began looking for a suitable Chinese version of its name after launching the drink there in 1927, it found that some local shopkeepers had produced homemade signs using Chinese characters to replicate the sound of the words "Coca-Cola," without noticing that the characters in combination could be read as "female horse fastened with wax" or "bite the wax tadpole," according to Coca-Cola researchers. Coke tweaked the spelling in such a way as to take on an added meaning: "to permit the mouth to be able to rejoice."

The risks are particularly high for IKEA, which does business in more than 40 countries. It has more than 9,000 Scandinavian terms in its catalog, which is constantly being revised and updated.
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad introduced the naming system back in the 1950s to help himself cope with dyslexia, using Scandinavian place names or children's names that identify the company's wares instead of dull, easy-to-forget product codes.

But Thailand, for one, has a conservative streak, which means IKEA risks offending sensibilities if it doesn't police its pronunciations. To minimize mishaps, Swedish IKEA employees drilled Ms. Natthita and a handful of other teammates on how to pronounce IKEA's names when dealing with customers. If a word sounds a bit off-color, Ms. Natthita is asked to suggest a slight change while keeping the word as close to its original as possible.

"It's a good system," said Lars Svensson, Bangkok-based marketing director, who appears to relish properly pronouncing words that sound especially unsavory to Thai ears. He says that, with the transliterations, some Thais wind up pronouncing the words more accurately than English speakers who struggle with Swedish. Even so, "there are always going to be a few that trip you up," he says.

 Read more:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304707604577422073271517262.html

Chaos as Saudi students run free

Everyone likes to let off a bit of steam at the end of term or semester, but this is ridiculous! While students in western schools have been know to play the occasional prank, some of the misdeeds done by Saudi youths leave you gasping with shock! For example, as well as pouring sugar down the petrol tanks of their teachers, they look for sneaky ways to damage their cars too by letting the air out of the tires or even damaging the brakes.

 

 

Surely this is more than "Boys will be boys!" Shredded books, torn papers and smashed cars were the scenes outside both government and private schools after students finished their final exams in Saudi Arabia. The chaotic sights represent the schoolboys’ freedom from having to study and getting closer to the end of school year.
 

“My friends and I usually shred our school books into small pieces to celebrate the ending of the school year and finishing a certain subject,” said Mohammed Omar, a high school student at a private school in Jeddah. “This is a way to express the end of having to lock ourselves in our rooms to study and stress over school subjects,” he added.
 

Finals are the most difficult time of the year for school managements and cleaners according to a public school supervisor, Khalid Al-Jehani.
 

“We expect the chaos and we prepare for it around this time of the year because we have been dealing with it for a really long time now and we know this will never change,” he said. “We tried telling the students many times that the only people who suffer are the cleaners because they have to pick up the pieces of paper that are scattered around the school yard,” he added. 

 

When I was at school, the worst thing we did was let off a stink bomb in assembly, or knock on a  teacher's door and run away. What has become of today's youth? In other countries, this would be met with police being called and statements being taken regarding criminal damage to school property, but in Saudi Arabia, it seems that this is considered normal behaviour as it happens without fail at the end of every year! Surely this is more than "Boys will be boys!"

Read more:  http://www.arabnews.com/node/413940