Could This Be The End?

Things seem to have a day of reckoning flavor right now.

First, I ran across this quote which increased the significance of my next birthday exponentially.

“Technically speaking, if you’ve passed age 30, you’re already dying. That’s when cell death begins to outstrip cell replacement, but there are sufficient reserves in most major organs to keep us going decades longer.”

It's actually from a pretty good article on aging and retirement, which you can view here.

Then I saw this, which points to tomorrow (6/6/06) as the possible date of the apocalypse.

So if the world does indeed end tomorrow we can likely blame it on my decision to actually follow the World Cup which begins on June 9th. According to estimates, I have likely spent upwards of 44,000 hours watching TV during my lifetime. Thus far, I would guess that 10 minutes of that time has been spent watching soccer and most of that was either by accident or due to low batteries in the remote control.

I have no idea what led to this decision. Perhaps it is having a former soccer player as a girlfriend or maybe it was seeing the passion of my roommate during my IMG internship, as he set his alarm to wake him in the middle of the night to catch the U.S. games in 2002. But no matter the reason, so far, I’m going all out. I saved the World Cup preview section from the Houston Chronicle and even glanced at ESPN the Magazine’s coverage as well in order to acclimate myself to all things soccer.

In spite of all that research, however, my favorite soccer finding remains the following:

“Soccer players who head the ball 10 or more times per game have an average IQ of 103. Those who head the ball once or less per game have an average IQ of 112”.

While I've read quite a bit about the neurological damage that soccer and heading can cause, my hunch is that those players who head the ball less were actually more intelligent to begin with.