Telling the Truth

From George Neumayr in The American Spectator 

Barack Obama threw his mom under the parish van on Tuesday, describing her as formlessly "spiritual" while casting himself as the self-made convert. "I am a Christian by choice," he said at a campaign event in New Mexico this week. In 2007, he said the opposite: that he became a Christian through his mother. "My mother was a Christian from Kansas...I was raised by my mother. So, I've always been a Christian," he told a voter who had inquired about his Islamic background.

I'm pretty sure this is what my mother had in mind when she admonished us to always tell the truth. It's easier on the memory.

Funny T-Shirt Contest

Here is a possible entry. It is better if these are worn by members of the male persuasion, especially if you are a slow reader.

Small Towns Cultivate Pro Athletes: Really?

How can that be? It doesn't seem to make much difference as to NFL, PGA, MLB etc. They all seem to show a remarkable and significant difference between towns of less than 50,000 and more than 5 million. I wonder if that would hold up when comparing say 50K and 500K? There aren't that many USA cities over 5M are there?

To the left is the article as it appeared this morning, 20 September, in the Sports Section of the Wall Street Journal.

When I try to remember back to my own childhood in a small town, <5K, in the 40s/50s in rural Wisconsin, I come up with memories of playing baseball all the warm months of the year and basketball all the cold months of the year. Maybe for a month or two in the fall we played tackle football without pads but this usually led to injuries so we would quickly switch to basketball. Adults were not present at our games until high school by which time we had seen and caught many thousands of hooking or fading wind-blown fly balls. On the other hand, most kids had fathers in the small town I grew up in. Even then we had a suspicion that if you didn't play catch with your dad at a young age, you probably were not cut out for baseball.

I'm not sure where this study was published but it surely was the most interesting article in the paper today. I doubt that the final answer is given here but it is interesting to think about possible answers.

Climate Change Prognosticator

From Watts Up With That  Very Funny.

Ruffin Prevost Explores the Surreal World of Bear Management

A well-written article in today's Gazette, that is, Wednesday 15 Sep, caught my attention. Going along with the idea that the really interesting story is not the original piece of news but rather the media's reaction to that news, this nicely written mini-essay documents the story of a bear killing a botanist back in June and then the aftermath of the media trying to get some information on the case.

Prevost mentions all the players from local sheriff's offices to the highest reaches of our federal agencies specializing in supporting the grizzly world of the Greater Yellowstone eco-system. One wonders exactly how many people and how many bears are actually involved, and if those numbers move in synchronous ways.

This article reminded me of the popular NCIS series in which a prominent feature is always one federal agency grating on another's overlapping jurisdictions. Have a read.