Monthly Archives: July 2012

Jul28

Thoughts on the London Olympics Opening Ceremony

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The Olympics always bring memories to me. The earliest one I can remember was the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games. Papa Wham and I actually watched the “Miracle On Ice” when our ragtag group of amateur hockey players defeated the mighty Soviet juggernaut and for a minute, yes, we all DID believe in miracles. I also have distinct memories of Sarajevo ’84 and looking back at how beautiful the city was then it’s hard for me to imagine how devastated it would be fifteen years later.

I remember Mary-Lou Retton capturing all our hearts. I also remember little Kari Scruggs bravely vaulting on her broken foot to assure the gold medal for the women’s team. I watched Kurt Angle when he was a “real” wrestler; that gold medal he wears to the ring is real, you know. I saw the unbelievable happen as Roulon Gardner beat the unbeatable Alexander “The Experiment” Karelin to win wrestling gold.

In short, I really love the Olympics and getting to watch the opening ceremonies last night with Budge and the other half of our family at Deuce and Cam’s house was about as good as it gets. Long before the parade of nations ended, I thought about blogging what I felt, so here, in no certain order, are my musings on the XXX Olympiad’s opening pageant.

  • I quickly got sick of hearing how “No one could possibly top the scope and spectacle of Beijing.” Danny Boyle can stand proudly because this opening was every bit as spectacular and beautiful as ’08 AND he accomplished his vision all while dealing with labor unions AND volunteers who really were volunteers, not conscripted peasants worrying about getting shot if they messed up.
  • Was I the only one who — whenever anyone mentioned Danny Boyle’s name — kept wanting to belt out “The pipes, the pipes, are calling?”
  • Brazil does not produce ugly women. No female rating less than a 9 on the International Hottie Scale was walking in their entourage. I’m convinced the place is like ancient Sparta only instead of the elder warriors, a group of gorgeous supermodels are on call at the hospitals to inspect each newborn girl for completely overboard hottness and any who don’t measure up are sent to Puerto Rico.
  • Staying with the hottness theme, I don’t have a homosexual bone in my body, but Daniel “007” Craig is one fine, fine looking hunk of manhood.
  • Why does every other country’s costume show something to do with their culture or heritage or the way the world views them while OUR made in China United States costumes look a lot like military uniforms, right down to the fatigue pants and bere- . . . oh, I get it.
  • His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh looks extremely fit and well for approaching 92.
  • Speaking of the Royals, I think it was right sporting of Queen Elizabeth to go along with the festivities and allow an effigy of Her Royal Highness to skydive behind Mr. Bond into the stadium. Also, she’s not much for long speeches is she? “I now pronounce the Games of the XXX Olympiad open.” Sits. Poker face.
  • Those poor people banging on all those drums have GOT to have sore arms this morning.
  • I hope everyone sitting at home poking fun at the tiny delegations of countries like Burkina Faso and Tonga realized at some point those folks were IN THE OLYMPICS while they — armchair critics they are — never will be.
  • Anyone else wonder how many people soiled themselves when all the pyrotechnics blew up near the end? Worst part was just about the time you got your sphincter back on the chain, the bloody things went off again!
  • Whoever designed the Olympic Flame Cauldron needs to be knighted or raised to the peerage or something. That is the most beautiful flame holder in any Olympics I’ve ever seen. I just wondered how many times some guy was running around in the dark making sure all the “petals” were placed and attached correctly.
  • Anyone else think it was kind of Matt Lauer and company to cover Sir Paul’s quavering opening bars of “Hey, Jude” as being “choked up?” Paul isn’t a bass or a baritone and as anyone who heard Pavarotti or Domingo sing late in their careers knows higher pitched male voices don’t weather age as well as the lower registers. Still, “Hey, Jude” sung and played by the man who wrote it isn’t a sight to be missed. I hope Ringo was at the show and somewhere John and George were smiling.
  • Those youngsters need to brush up on their “na, na, na, NA, NA, NAAA . . . NA, NA, NAAAAA, Hey Judes!!” Sing it like you mean it kids and while you’re at it, learn if you’re a guy or a girl and sing at the right time!!
  • I’ve got to get some music by The Arctic Monkeys. That “Come Together” cover rocked.
  • BTW, where the crap was Sir Elton John? WTH?
  • Why can’t we Americans act like we’ve been somewhere before and walk in gracefully waving instead of lampooning around and snapping pictures non-stop on our cell phones? Really, people?! You’re in front of the Queen AT THE OLYMPICS for pete’s sake, show some respect.
  • How is it one of the probably four white girls in all of Zimbabwe has won 7 of the 8 medals in the country’s history? I may be wrong, but I’m betting she’s an immigrant or, worse, a colonial left over.
  • Why did so many of the countries have a taekwondo fighter, a judoist, or a shooting sports participant as their flag bearers? Were they afraid someone was going to run out and take the Armenian flag or something?
  • Speaking of the flags, Glastonbury Tor — the little green hill with all the flags on it? It’s a real place. Google it.
  • Finally, was it just me, or did anyone else hope the whole time the steel workers were “forging the ring” someone would pull a master prank and project a huge red eye on top of one of the smokestacks while hacking the sound system to boom out “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them …” After all, J.R.R. Tolkien was about as British as they come even if he was born in South Africa.

Enjoy the Olympics everyone! They really are one of the few times the best things about this crazy world actually come to the front and displace all the violence and sadness we see in the news every day.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

Jul23

Julius Caesar Act III scene ii

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One would have to be in a coma or outer space to have missed the monumental scandal surrounding Penn State’s football team. In brief, for my sub-rock dwellers, former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused, then convicted of multiplied multitudes of sexual assaults on young boys who came to Penn State’s campus to participate in Sandusky’s Second Mile football camp. If every accusation against Sandusky — not just the ones he was convicted of — is true, he is likely to be one of the most prolific pedophiles since Giles de Rais.

Sandusky preyed on these young boys for two decades, but in the end, he is not the only monster in this scandal. Penn State’s athletic director and the school president were found by an independent investigation to have covered up the accusations and kept the entire series of events under wraps for that same twenty year period. As a result of their complicity, the NCAA today imposed the most severe penalties on a university sports program since Southern Methodist University received the “death penalty” in 1985. Penn State — one of the proudest and most storied football programs in the history of collegiate football — is banned from post season play (no bowl games) for four years, is fined $60 million dollars ( roughly the gross receipts of one year of Penn St football), loses 20 scholarships for four years, must spend five years on probation, and, most crushingly to the school’s historical legacy, must void 111 football victories. Essentially, the NCAA is saying in the eyes of the record books, Penn St went 0’fer for the last 14 years. The final penalty — voiding the wins — does something even more painful to the Penn St family, it drops legendary coach, the late Joe Paterno, from the #1 position of all time Division 1 wins.

Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer (or a broken heart)  in January, was a football coach at State College of Pennsylvania for 61 years, over 40 as the head man. To put that in perspective, he was coach for more years than my parents have been alive until their next birthdays. JoPa was more than a coach; he was an institution. Over six decades, he made his mark by “winning the right way.” Penn St was never seriously investigated by the NCAA because no one saw a need. The entire country knew that JoPa ran a squeaky clean program. Other massively famous college coaches such as Bear Bryant, Barry Switzer, and Pete Carroll are all known to have cut corners in their programs so they could consistently be on top. JoPa made his reputation by NEVER cutting corners. In 61 years, Paterno graduated more of his players than most other big time football programs. He always claimed he was more interested in molding young men in to adults of character than he was wins and losses. When he became head coach in 1966, he announced his “Grand Experiment” to blend academics and athletics in ways no other major college sports program ever had. In large measure, he was wildly successful and through the years, his players and former players breathed his name like something holy.

Besides being the winningest coach, JoPa was also known as a tremendous benefactor and philanthropist for the university. Over his years as coach, Paterno and his family gave MILLIONS of dollars to Penn State, not just for sports, but to further academic excellence as well.  In 1997, Penn State recognized Paterno’s contributions to the university’s academic programs by renaming the school’s library — the heart of any academic institution — after the coach.

Unfortunately, none of that matters anymore.

See, JoPa wasn’t just a coach, he was an educator, and educators at all levels from preschool to undergraduate college live by a code. Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have the oaths before the Bar Associations. Teachers have a three word phrase — in loco parentis — Latin for “in the place of parents.” Educators are given charge of parents’ most important and beloved possession, their children. We (and I say we as I taught for 15 years) are supposed to guard those young people as if they were our very own. In many cases, we spend more time with those young people than the parents do. For coaches, this is especially true.

For all his speaking of a Grand Experiment, for all his claims of “winning the right way,” and for all his wonderful acts of giving, Joseph Paterno — head football coach extraordinaire — forgot in loco parentis. As a result, AT LEAST 56 young men lost their innocence to a predator on his watch. He kicked the can on down the road by telling his boss the AD and HIS boss the school president what he knew, but educators have a higher calling. We don’t just WIN the right way, we DO THE RIGHT THING. He did what he thought was all he needed to do — he fired Sandusky and told what he knew, but that’s where he stopped. Once JoPa saw his information had been ignored, he had a DUTY to tell that story until someone listened and acted. If that meant going to the police himself, that’s what his duty as an educator demanded, but he didn’t.

Sadly, for all the good Joe Paterno did, none of it will likely be remembered and what is, will be forever tainted by the scandal. All his good is now eaten up by ONE bad call. A generation of players will remember him fondly, but the lasting legacy he had worked so hard to set up is dashed. His beautiful statue was ripped off the wall of Beaver Stadium and placed in cold storage, perhaps forever. He is no longer the winningest coach. A lifetime of good undone by a wrong decision. JoPa was a good man who made a bad choice.

I fear that Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar may ring true for JoPa as well:

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Love y’all, and keep those feet clean.

Jul12

They Say It Never Rains In Upstate South Carolina

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Actually, what “they” say is, “Seems it never rains in Southern California.” Still, I think it’s apropos, especially considering the rest of the chorus of that Albert Hammond one-hit wonder goes

Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours man it pours

Well the last three weeks, it has POURED. Literally and metaphorically. I’m talking frog-strangling, log-floating, fish-choking deluges of biblical proportions and at the moment, Father Noah is awol and they’s nary an Ark in sight. I mean, I’ve been through some rough patches in my life. It happens to us all. I understand that. The Bible says the Lord makes it rain on the just and the unjust alike. We all take our turn in the barrel as the old crude joke punchline says. Here lately though, I think I’m getting my rain and someone else’s monsoon to boot.

Let me give you, my beloved readers, a quick rundown on the last three weeks around Chez Wham.

  1. I lost or misplaced or had my iPod stolen. It was old, but it was mine and it had all my iUni podcasts on it.
  2. Budge’s pool, or as I like to call it “that godforsaken swamp in my backyard,” has eaten chemicals like I eat wintergreen Lifesavers. I hate that pool.
  3. Daddy had to go to Charleston to have a heart cath because his last nuclear stress test wasn’t what it should have been. Turns out he has a touch of heart damage at the bottom of his heart so he’s going to have to add some heart medicine to his daily regime.
  4. My nephew, Mason, had a horrendous allergic reaction to an antibiotic he was taking and for three days, Nick and Sissy though they were going to have to hospitalize him. He was head to toe red welts. He’s better now, but it was terrifying.
  5. Mama’s home healthcare nurse sat her down and explained that her C.O.P.D. has reached the terminal stages. She’s not going down without a fight, but I’m afraid most of the fight has gone out of her. I’m looking at life without my Mama sooner instead of later.
  6. Budge has been gone for two weeks this summer in the midst of all this mess going on and anyone who knows me KNOWS how well I do when I don’t have my Budge around to moderate my moods for me.
  7. Our DSL and phone lines had to be replaced because they were slowly giving up the ghost. Some people might say home internet is frivolous; those people are not teachers.
  8. The pastor on staff at church whom I was always closest to and would have turned to in the midst of all this mess was dismissed from the staff for good cause. To quote Forrest, “and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
  9.  I got a surprise from the IRS in the form of a tax bill to cover a mistake I made two years ago. Uncle Sam wants about $3000 of “his” money back. People in Hell want ice water, too. One more payment a month.
  10. Three of four tires on my beloved Honda Element have picked up nails or screws in the shoulders beyond the range of the tire company’s ability to safely patch them. The fourth tire was already patched. I don’t have road hazard protection on them. Lately, I’ve been riding around with an air compressor in the back.
  11. The back porch at the Ancestral Manse (Mama’s house) caught on fire and burned 1/4 of the structure. It’s now unsafe to walk on, much less get Mama’s wheelchair up or down. Estimated cost to replace? Somewhere in the $1K to $3.5K range depending on lumber costs.
  12. JUST LAST NIGHT, I was washing clothes and the sink and both tubs started gurgling like a demon had possessed them. I went in our bathroom to see what was wrong and met an inch of water standing in the floor with more coming from the porcelain throne. It was all thick with lint and suds. Septic tank’s full after 16 years. Cost to get it pumped? At LEAST $350. Might as well be three million.

Now I didn’t tell you all that to get pity and I don’t want anything from anyone. I just had to get all this off my chest or I was going to explode. I’m a talker and sometimes I just feel better getting everything out. Kind of like squeezing a boil.  It has LITERALLY been from one thing to another this entire summer. Like I said before, poop happens. I know everybody’s got troubles. I also know that misery loves company and, sweet brothers and sisters, I could use some company right along now.

Still love y’all and try to keep those feet clean!