The Week in Meep: Upcoming Webcast, Columbo, and SUUUUUMO!
It's that time again!
First, I will be one of a panel of presenters for a free webcast on Friday, 18 July 2025:
Here is the event link: Hearts of Darkness: Frontlines Of American Death, Disability And Insurance
Join us Friday, July 18th at Noon ET for a Zoom webinar presented by Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives!
Discover the latest insights in this upcoming webinar featuring Mary Pat Campbell, Greg Henke, FSA, CFA, Steve Cyboran, Josh Stirling, JD, MBA , and Mitch Bagley. Together, we will dive into the latest mortality and morbidity trends and explore how proactive health solutions can change the trajectory of these trends and drive meaningful impact in the industry.
Check it out!
Just one more thing….
Some context: Missus is my middle child, and she has gotten into Columbo, as it’s currently on Prime:
So far, she’s gotten me to watch the first Columbo, which was a made-for-TV movie:
And the first episode of the TV series, which was directed by Steven Spielberg (and the only episode directed by Spielberg):
It’s fun watching Columbo for the location shots and the period touches, like smoking everywhere (and the boooooze).
The most fun bit, of course, is that Columbo “subverts” the whodunnit genre by turning it into a how-does-he-catch-them genre.
It was part of the 70s Love Boat/Fantasy Island production craze of being able to book has-beens as your guest star of the week. As the murderer.
“Hey! It’s that guy/gal!”
There are all sorts of Columbo drinking games and Bingo cards out there, but I liked this interactive one: Columbo bingo, which will generate random cards for you (also Poirot).
July Grand Sumo Tournament
It’s mid-month for an odd-numbered month, so that means it’s time for the Grand Sumo Tournament!!!!
I will not belabor the point, so merely link to my sumo substack:
For the sumo-curious, the easiest way to get started is to watch on NHK World (yes, yes, my fellow foreign (i.e. non-Japanese) fans, I know. Hush.)
NHK World has Grand Sumo Highlights, which is less than half an hour of the top matches, daily, 12:30pm ET & 7:30pm ET.
You can also catch it on-demand, usually the day after : Day 1 is currently up on the Grand Sumo Highlights on-demand page.
As a sport, it’s fairly simple… to begin with. You either get your opponent out of the ring, or have some part of his body other than the bottom of his feet touching the ground.
It can get complicated after that (that’s why the judges (shinpan) are sitting around the ring, and there’s a ref (gyoji) in the ring) — false starts, forbidden moves, dead body rule — but it’s usually easy to see who won and who lost. The matches can be over in seconds.
There are no weight classes in pro sumo, which is why my weight-height scatterplot for the top ranks looks like this:
You see small guys topple the big guys sometimes, and that’s super-fun. Ura, Tobizaru, and Midorifuji are among the smallest… and the most favored by fans. They’re a lot of fun.
GANBATTE!