Never too old to party

	James Hilston, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image.

Pittsburghers may notice thousands more people over age 50 in the area this month because of the Summer National Senior Games-The Senior Olympics, and one way they'll make themselves known, evidently, is by hard-rocking, beer-guzzling, non-stop partying. Michelob Ultra, one of the games' sponsors, is distributing flyers to the 10,400 athletes telling them to "come out and celebrate" at Sports Rock, the Hard Rock Cafe, Bar Louie, Hooters and Margarita Mama's. On its Web site promoting the games, the Pittsburgh Local Organizing Committee makes vague reference to city amenities before stressing that Pittsburgh is "The City that Rocks!" The PLOC notes the city's No. 1 ranking from Esquire magazine for our "thriving and energetic music scene." So if you think of rock music and alcohol as satanic influences, you may want to tell your college-aged kids in Oakland to steer clear of the three centenarians and other aging athletes. This concern should come as no surprise, since many of the rock stars coming to Pittsburgh this summer could have qualified long ago for the Senior Olympics, headed by Mick Jagger (61), John Fogerty (60) and Jimmy Buffett (58). No word in yet to The Morning File on whether Hooters is adding extra staff to accommodate the Senior Olympic influx.

From the AP
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His own special olympics

Based on the preceding item, it's hard to believe that 60-year-old Dan Freeman of Brooklyn isn't competing here. He's apparently too tied up, however, in his quest to visit 1,000 bars in a year. The Associated Press reported that he's at the halfway mark, chronicling each stop at www.thousandbars.blogspot.com. Last Thursday in New York, for instance, he visited Havana, Blaggard's and Mulligan's, noting the latter contained "a merry crowd of older gentlemen sitting at one end of the bar singing ditties." Some bartenders and patrons now recognize Freeman instantly, based on the publicity he's received, and have their photos taken with him. He generally has one drink per visit, with a one-day high of 12 bars in 12 hours during a Mexican vacation. "Some days it's like work," he said. "You look up and it's, 'Ah, 1 p.m., I'd better go hit my five bars.' It's really more fun than anything, going around and talking to people." He was described as a smiling, gregarious character. Yeah, guess we'd be cheerful, too, if we had his job.

See you at the reunion

Freeman will have some great stories to share, no doubt, at his next high school reunion. That would be if he were among the 80 percent of people who intend to attend their next high school reunion, as noted in a Classmates.com survey. That percentage is absurdly high, obviously, mainly because the respondents are registered with the online site, instead of a random cross-section of the public. The survey found 85 percent will attend because they want to reconnect with an old friend, 46 percent will get a tan and buy a new outfit for the reunion, 14 percent want to see who looks better or worse, and 31 percent still have nightmares that they forgot to study for a big social studies test and showed up in their underwear (just kidding about the latter percentage -- it's probably higher). About 8 million Americans attend high school reunions each year, according to Classmates.com. Its survey suggested 10 percent "might consider lying about their personal life including family, marriages, kids or divorce." If some guy boasts he's been to 1,000 bars in a year, though, no reason to doubt him.

Spam in space

Some forward-looking, far-ranging entrepreneurs aren't content to bother Earthlings with unsolicited sales pitches. The June Popular Science reports that two privately-owned satellite companies are beaming want ads into space, in case someone out there is in the market. Craigslist.com, a Web-based classified-ad service, bid $1,225 for the right to be the first to let aliens know about apartments for sublet, used sofas for sale and lonely people looking to get hooked up. A 23-minute transmission on March 11 sent more than 138,000 such postings into space at 5.945 gigahertz. The Morning File isn't sure how to compute gigahertz, but 5.945 must be strong, because we've started receiving replies from Uranus to our query Thursday concerning where people are actually from, considering confusion about local post offices and municipalities and such. Rita Galoopnikspicz, from one of the planet's five outer moons, writes: "I'm from Miranda, which is much more visible than any of the inner moons discovered by Voyager, but people commonly assume I'm from Titania, because it's larger. And my UPS packages keep getting dropped off on Ariel, supposedly because it's brighter. It's annoying as hell."

You call this sarcasm?

Brain researchers in Israel have figured out that people with prefrontal-lobe damage just don't get sarcasm. Seriously. Psychologist Simone Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues at the University of Haifa and Rambam Medical Center detail their anatomy of sarcasm in the May issue of Neuropsychology. A group with prefrontal-lobe damage didn't understand the intended meaning of a sarcastic statement described to them, while those with posterior-lobe damage and another healthy group got the joke. The prefrontal cortex had a reputation as being important to language and social comprehension, and this just cements it. "Understanding sarcasm requires both the ability to understand the speaker's belief about the listener's belief and the ability to identify emotions," the authors wrote. The language gets a lot more technical and the words a lot longer in their article, "The Neuroanatomical Basis of Understanding Sarcasm and its Relationship to Social Cognition." The Morning File thanks the researchers for providing the first opportunity since 1999 for the Post-Gazette to use the word "neuroanatomical."