We briefly digress from our regularly scheduled end-of-year rambling to offer up the following bits of potentially useful and/or entertaining information:

• Despite the many articles I’ve read that make it sound as if Mount Everest has turned into some kind of wacky Disneyland for outdoorsy types, there is still one death for every 10 successful attempts to climb the highest mountain in the world. Personally, I tend to avoid any sport that occurs in a place called the “death zone.”
• Ever wonder what exactly someone means when they get all panicky and start talking about the end of the world? Are they talking about a Mad Max scenario where society breaks down and we have to start dressing like refugees from a Duran Duran video? Or do they mean, as Admiral Kirk says in Star Trek IV, the end of all life on earth? Well, now you can take all the guesswork out of any discussion of the apocalypse by using this handy-dandy classification chart for “existential risks.” I shouldn’t be surprised that someone took the time to work all this out, but for some reason, I am…

That is all. We now return you to our regular mundane blogging topics.