Powerball, Jeremy Lin and the lake of the lost

 

Five people have a story to tell because they matched five numbers in last night's Powerball drawing, but not the one that mattered.    With no big winners, the Powerball jackpot has soared to $310-million for Saturday's drawing.   It's the biggest jackpot since Powerball changed the game and upped the price to $2 per ticket.   Yes, we'll be playing so if there's no trend report on Monday, you'll know why.   Meantime, those five people, including one from Jersey, who matched five of the numbers last night take home a cool million dollars for their unfortunate luck.

(AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Jeremy Lin may not have hit the lottery, but it appears his ship has come in.  After getting passed over in the NBA draft in 2010, released by two teams in 16 days this past pre-season and banished to the D League, Lin is hearing chants of MVP at the Garden.   Lin scored his first career double-double with a 23 point performance in the Knicks third straight win on last night.  He's scored 76 points and added 25 assists in just three games.  If you think Lin is just lucky, his high school coach told ESPN.com that Lin's success is hard work and perseverance.   "He gets one opportunity, one shot on the big stage and the question is, 'Is he going to make the most of it?' And he does," Peter Diepenbrock said.

Love and romance are in the air as Valentine's Week is underway.   On the third day of Valentine's Week, Chocolate Day is celebrated.  

(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

The 9th of February is dedicated to everything chocolate, and it is suggested that you gift chocolate to anyone important to you on this day - spouses, parents, kids, neighbors and friends.   You can even treat yourself to chocolate (which I do daily, so why should today be any different)!   It's also an occasion to give the one you love a gift of chocolate.

Louis Vuitton condoms sparked a trending conversation and plenty of jokes on Twitter overnight.    The condom, complete with the label's well-known brown packaging with raised lettering, sells for $68.   That's for one.   As it turns out, Louis Vuitton has nothing to do with the condom, but it's actually the creation of an architect Irakli Kiziria who designed the condom as part of  a project last year to raise money for amfAR, The Foundation For AIDS Research.

Roland Martin's Super Bowl tweets have gotten him in hot water with his employer, and made him the top search on Google.  CNN suspended Martin over a pair of tweets that he said were intended as jokes.  Instead of laughing, the tweets provoked protests from gay and lesbian organizations, which viewed the tweets as advocating violence against gays and lesbians.   CNN called the tweets " regrettable and offensive" in announcing Martin would not be back on the air "for the time being."

A father's decision to force his son, dressed in underwear and sneakers, to run and do push-ups in freezing weather for five minutes has sparked internet outrage.   According to the Shanghai Daily, the boy named Duo Duo was visiting New York from China.   His 44-year-old father uploaded the video and dubbed it the "eagle dad" parenting approach, according to the Yangtze Evening News.    The idea being young eagles learn to survive through cruel tests, such as when their mothers expel and drop them from their nests on cliffs.  Duo Duo's training includes swimming, mountain climbing, bicycle riding and martial arts. His father told the newspaper these schemes started after his son once went hiking with him for 14 days, with a daily walking distance more than 10 kilometers.

 

You may not have heard of Lake Vostok, and getting there has taken 20-million years, but the Russians say they have done it.  Lake Vostok is buried under the Antarctic ice, Russian experts drilled down 800 miles and finally reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake this week - an achievement likened to placing a man on the moon.   The lake could hold living organisms that have been locked in icy darkness as well as clues to the search for life elsewhere in the solar system. "In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life," NASA's chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said.   The burning question, of course, is how did anyone even known that a lake was buried under 800 miles of ice for the last 20-million years?  Long ago, in the 19th century, Russian scientist and anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin theorized a lake existed under the Antarctic ice. Russian geographer Andrei Kapitsa noted the likely location of the lake and named it following Soviet Antarctic missions in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn't until 1994 that its existence was proven by Russian and British scientists using radar and other data.

 

The hot trailer today is for the new Bourne movie The Bourne Legacy, which has nothing to do with Jason Bourne, but rather is about a new renegade superspy played by Jeremy Renne.

 

A young man named Joey from Phoenix demonstrated a giant marshmallow launcher for President Obama at the White House, and the video has gone viral.

 

This 16-month old wants mommy and daddy to play Powerball.

 

Finally, a wolf pup and a grizzly bear cub playing together six years ago is a trending video this morning.   About :30 into the video, there's a picture of the two as they are today.  Looks like they are still best of friends.

 

That's the trend!

Have a great day,

Bob