First Place - Nouns or Verbs?

Are there bizarre facts about the Olympics?  Yes there are.  Here are some things I found out: In the 2004 Athens Olympics a new medal was distributed to winners at the Athens Games.  It replaced the long-standing design by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Cassioli that incorrectly depicted the Roman Colosseum rather than a Greek venue. Olympic medals now feature the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, one of the world's oldest stadiums and the site of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. This is a Reader's Digest article on surprising facts about Olympic medals.  Here are two more from the article: After Australia removed their one-cent and two-cent coins from circulation in 1992, thousands were melted to make bronze medals for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. These are brilliant uses for your spare U.S. pennies. Five art categories—painting, literature, music, sculpture, and architecture—were introduced in the 1912 Olympics as the “Pentathlon of the Muses,” and remained official events until 1948. Other artsy pursuits that could once earn you an Olympic medal: town planning, epic poetry, statues, watercolors, chamber music, and plaques. I scratched my head on this one - given how far the Olympics has travelled in the direction of sports, sports and sports. Back to the arts, the Word Lady is an expert on language and dictionaries who lives in Toronto.  She says there's a test of nouns vs verbs - which came first. You can do the test HERE.  It is fun. She says: "Oh, and by the way, if you're tempted to quote Calvin and Hobbes "Verbing weirds language" as someone always does when this topic comes up, please don't. Verbing enriches the language, and it's perfectly normal. Not weird at all".  The Orchid Show is on at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington this weekend.  Perhaps some of these will be on display - their common name is Pansy Orchid.