With the winter Olympic games in Sochi, Russia, nearing their grand finale, you have to admit—the herculean efforts and protracted training endured by these young athletes of the world is astounding. And it’s not like they were suddenly impressed or inspired a year ago to take a shot at the Olympics. These athletes have been locked onto this Olympic dream for years. And even longer than that as fellow Michiganders Meryl Davis and Charlie White have shown us.

 5,700 feet underground is enough to stir up anybody’s latent claustrophobia. Although I suppose that if you’re used to being that far down and are doing it for a living (as miners do), it’s pretty much old hat to you. Unless, of course, your way back up to the surface has been blocked, as was the case this week with South African miners in the Harmony Gold mine west of Johannesburg.

You knew it would come to this, didn’t you? You pick up the phone and the cheerful voice on the other end introduces herself as Samantha West. Bright and engaging, she proceeds before you realize it is a soft-sell pitch for insurance. But as she continues, something doesn’t seem quite right. Perhaps it’s the phone connection. Maybe it’s her voice, you wonder. Finally you blurt out, “Are you are a real voice or are you digital?” Her charming laugh in response is winsome.

Who could be comfortable connecting the National Security Agency (NSA) with God in the same sentence? But read on. The New York Times this week broke a new story with further astounding details concerning the NSA’s global surveillance program.

You knew it was cold when the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago kept its polar bear inside! And when every state in the union dipped below 32 degrees on Tuesday (including Hawaii). Suddenly Americans have added two meteorological words to their vocabulary, “polar vortex.” Like a spinning top atop our planet is a band of high altitude winds that circle the Artic.

Scientists think they’ve found the secret to our good and bad habits. It has to do with the pleasure-sensing chemical dopamine, coursing up and down our body’s internal highways. Dopamine “conditions the brain to want that reward again and again—reinforcing the connection each time—especially when it gets the right cue from your environment” (South Bend Tribune 1-4-11). For example, you enjoy munching on chips (no doubt a healthful kind). You usually do it before supper, while you’re watching the evening news.

(Spoiler alert: I’m against it.) It was practically a feeding frenzy this week, as Americans lined up across the nation to purchase their $2 Mega Millions lottery tickets before the Tuesday night drawing. One news report from the Nevada-California state line indicated that Nevadans were streaming across the border to purchase the lottery tickets in California (a Mega Millions participating state), with a waiting line so long that it stretched from the California store back across the border into Nevada.

Twin holiday tragedies this past weekend have preoccupied both the news media and the nation. We’ve all seen the pictures. The Metro-North Railroad train, its locomotive and seven cars upended, splayed and flung beyond the tracks and nearly into the Harlem River. Four dead, 60 injured.  Just as tragic was the fiery crash of  actor Paul Walker, star of the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise. A security camera captured the Porsche Carrera GT’s explosion after slamming into a tree and concrete pole, killing both the actor and his friend and driver Roger Rodas.

Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15, 1620, Bradford wrote: “But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . .

Can you believe it? Earth may boast (according to wiki.answers.com) 23,259,475,120 dialects, but researchers have discovered in a new study that when it comes to confusion, we all speak the same language! No kidding. It turns out that our English word, “Huh?”, is about as universal as it gets. The so-called “Huh-hunters” (linguistic anthropologists) headed to remote villages on five continents and examined ten very different languages.