Now that the season for college football bowl games and championship tournaments is underway, raising interest in college foot ball to a high pitch, I want to revisit a college football scandal that has been bothering me. While the Penn State sexual abuse scandal was a high water mark of how big college sports programs corrupt almost everything it touches, there are other abuses that are less high profile. One that is endemic, especially at those colleges with big sports programs, is the pressure to let athletes slide by academically with lower expectations in order for them to retain their eligibility.
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Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the day Baxter the Wonder Dog joined our family. The first photo was taken two days after his arrival when he was just a puppy and the one below is a more recent one, after he took charge of the place.
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International governing bodies like FIFA for soccer and the IOC for the Olympics are notorious for their corruption and the arrogance and greed of its executives. The Olympic games may have gone too far in its demands for perks to consider nations to host its winter games because countries are not stepping forward to make offers.
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Some time ago, I linked to a video of an utterly inept driver trying to get out of a tight parking spot. It was excruciating to watch. But that driver was an expert compared to the person in the video below.
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For people who arrived in the US as adults, as I did, Thanksgiving does not carry with it the childhood associations that it has for those who are native-born and initially it left me rather cold. But over time, it has become of my favorite holiday for many reasons.
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The video below is of some kind of competition to see which dog can race down a track fastest. The catch is that on both sides of the track are placed distractions in the forms of treats and toys and it takes a certain single-minded focus to ignore those and proceed straight ahead. Not all are successful.
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I earlier gave step-by-step directions for how to parallel park perfectly every time that I found on the internet that seem to work as advertised. But Han Yue just broke the world record for parking in the tightest spot that had just 8 cm clearance.
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Once in a while I feel a sense of guilt that my blog focuses too much on the things that are wrong with the world. So to compensate and help restore our sense of a common humanity, here is a story that I think you will enjoy.