opening day is thursday
And there’s no crying in baseball.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPqYnC-SW5w&w=640&h=390]
And there’s no crying in baseball.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPqYnC-SW5w&w=640&h=390]
Hilarious.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PCN7A0QWDc&w=640&h=390]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRxFINZ24X4&w=480&h=390]
Just for fun and since I’ve not been writing much at all lately, the next few days (until I get bored with it), I’ll be posting some of my all time favorite movie scenes, in no particular order. This is classic; I cackle every time I see this.
Questioning Campus Safety’s Gun Policy The following is an opinion piece published in The Bethel Beacon, the student newspaper of Bethel College, Indiana, my alma mater as well as where I currently teach. Bethel students, staff, and faculty with a valid Bethel email can access and comment on the article here. Others will have to simply leave their comments below. http://cramercomments.blogspot.com/2011/03/questioning-campus-safetys-gun-policy.html
The Sunset Limited
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0MSitTAYyA&w=640&h=390]
Pull out my phone and turn on the “sneaky fart” app.
Ya, my daughter thinks the thirty or so different and very realistic sounding fart noises are hilarious. You do what you gotta do in the morning.
http://www.freeware4android.net/sneaky-fart-download-25819.html
Is it possible to get a back ache just looking at your driveway on a morning like this?
Prediction: two more big snows before spring.
Readers of this blog will see I’m not very good at predicting anything weather related.
Later today, if I don’t actually end up with a debilitating back ache, Morgan and I will take a walk in the woods.
It is not necessary to have more than one sentence in any paragraph, nor does a blog entry need a true central focus. Thesis statements are overrated, you know.
Ok, my intuitions were proven incorrect like two minutes after I posted the previous blog.
Daytime classes are all cancelled tomorrow at Bethel.
Noon hoops is on.
At 9 p.m. this evening, Jeanie got the text announcing no school tomorrow. We should all be so lucky. Alas, I will get no such text tonight, and I’m betting I will find myself in front of a class full of students who, having banked on a snow day, will have not read the assignment for the day. Ok, I wouldn’t bet my next paycheck or anything. Let’s just call it an intuition.
By the way, I did p90x, chest, shoulders, and triceps tonight. Guess what I’m bringing to the party?
Driving home last evening, I noticed something on the western horizon. The sun. The time: 5:45 p.m. It’s a small thing, but the early sunsets of winter are slowly coming later and later, and that makes me happy. I don’t measure winter in degrees or inches of snow. I measure it in daylight. I can handle more cold days and more snow days, and who knows how many of these there will be.
But one thing I can count on–the days will get longer, sun will set later. I’ll take it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Qw3S7ukzA?rel=0&w=480&h=390]
Lord willing, I’m going to China! (I hate exclamation points–too much like laughing at your own joke; but I felt that sentence warranted one.)
Anyhow, I’m going back to China. Last trip was Spring of 2004–the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Wong Fu Jing, Silk Market, etc. Best part is hanging with the Bethel students, though.
Worst part is the nearly crippling jet lag that hits upon your return.
Worth it, though.
Some rule changes needed in both college and the NBA:
1. Eliminate media timeouts.
2. No live ball timeouts. If the ball is in play, you cannot bail yourself out of lousy play by calling timeout. The only time a timeout can be called is either when the clock is stopped or after a made basket before the ball is inbounded.
3. Each team would be allowed 2 full and 2 30-second timeouts per half.
4. Halftime reduced to ten minutes.
p.s. And though it’s not a “rule” change, in college, the officials need to do a much better job of protecting shooters by calling the foul when there is contact. I don’t mind that they let some contact go un-whistled when the offensive player is clearly initiating the body contact, but it’s gotten bad, and the quality of basketball in college has declined dramatically in the past ten to fifteen years in part because of it (and mostly because of AAU–but that’s another story).
Some ways to improve the NFL:
1. 10 minute quarters.
2. Each team would be allowed a 20 man active roster.
3. To be eligible to kick a field goal, a player must have played in the previous offensive play. (effectively eliminating kicking specialists).
4. Deepen the end zone to twenty yards, goal posts stationed at back of end zone.
5. All games played outdoors on natural grass.
6. Eliminate 2-minute warning.
Tune in next time for rule changes that would improve basketball.
Something happened to my hip while playing basketball today. I don’t know if it’s possible to sprain your hip, but that’s what it felt like–the awful tweaking of a joint when it twists or extends in a direction it should not.
It does not hurt sitting here watching free NBA league pass on television, but it’s torture walking up the stairs. So I will stay here under my sleeping bag, fire roaring a few feet away, Steve Nash torching the Wizards on TV.
Jeanie says I complain too much about my aches and pains. She has the highest pain threshold of any person I have ever met.
To write 300 blog entries in one year, one must average 25 entries per month, or about 5.8 entries per week.
I shall have to pick up the pace. Should I write more about “everything” or more about “nothing,” and under which category does this particular entry fall?
My office is nearly twice the size it was for most of last semester, and I cannot begin to tell you the difference that space has made for my state of mind. I hadn’t realized how crowded and cluttered I had felt until now, having been given room to stretch out and air to breathe these past several weeks. I felt this same way when we moved out of a house that was crammed in between two other houses a few years back. It is cliche to say that you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of a boy, but there may be something to it in my case. In the country there is space, and I have realized that I need the room to bloom and grow.
I mean no metaphor, here. I am simply thankful for a bigger office in which I feel much more at ease entertaining the visitors who happen to drop in. Perhaps I am more hospitable now, which is good, since I am sure that I have entertained angels unaware.
I sure hope so.
“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average."
-Derek Walcott
I’m thinking of a possible new topic for a seminar in literature next fall. I’d call it “Bethel Favorites” and have a dozen different faculty, staff, and recent alumni pick a favorite literary work. The seminar members would read and discuss the work, but the faculty, staff, or alumni would come and present a guest lecture on how and why they “love” the piece of literature, how it speaks to them, how it has enchanted or mentored them over the years.
The implicit thesis of a course like this would be that our favorite works say something about what we are. “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.”
The kind of sleddding/tubing–ours are neither sleds nor tubes but more like the things you see in the picture–that produces the most ecstatic laughter in my four year old daughter involves great crashes at the bottom of the hill. Sydney lies on her inflated “Rudolph the Reindeer” sled and I plow into her full bore, sending her and Rudolph hurtling, powdery snow showering us both.
Her riotous laughter, contagious.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL4WxTqHzw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
