When attendees at a Memorial Day weekend softball game were told there would be no anthem sung - they lifted their own voices.
Organizers of a high school softball tournament in California say they are going to play the national anthem before every game, and not just before the first game of the tourney's session.
The announcer at the Central Section Championship Softball game in Fresno told the crowd the anthem wasn't going to be played before a game on Friday. Fans took the matter into their own hands and shortly after the announcement joined to sing an a cappella version of the national anthem anyway.
The event coordinator told the "Fresno Bee" that national protocol dictates the anthem is played before just the first game, followed by the playing of the rest of the games. He said he thought the show of patriotism was a "wonderful thing." See it for yourself on the right.
Source: Fresno Bee
Yawning is a mystery of the world.
(UPI.com)
We've all "caught" yawning from other people, but why that happens is unclear, according to a psychologist who has researched the behavior.
"In short, we don't know why yawns are contagious," said Meredith Williamson, a clinical assistant professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine. "Researchers used to think that yawning was only signaling a need for sleep, but now they believe that it can communicate a shift in alertness or boredom."
One theory is that contagious yawning is related to empathy, and that people with higher levels of empathy yawn more often when someone else yawns, compared to people with lower levels of empathy or those with a mental disorder.
"Researchers have seen that yawning may not be as contagious to people with autism or schizophrenia," Williamson said in a university news release. "More research is being done to determine the cause of this."
She also noted that children under the age of 4 and older adults are less likely to yawn in response to somebody else yawning.
Yawning may be an unspoken form of communication, but it's not unique to people, Williamson added. Some species of primates and canines yawn in response to each others' yawns, and dogs will even yawn after a person yawns.