Archives for December, 2007
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
One of the books I received for Christmas was The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, a book where one of my favorite authors tackles my favorite sport. In the 1980s rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme (at about the same time Bill Walsh was reinventing offensives to make the quarterback more important) This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast outside linebackers like Lawrence Taylor, who you may have seen snap Joe Theismann’s leg before. To stop the unstoppable, you need giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.
The book is the story of Michael Oher, a kid from the ghettos of Memphis who somehow ends up at a private Christian school and is taken under the wings of a wealthy family and almost accidentally discovers football (his passion is basketball) and whose combination of strength, size, agility, and speed makes him the kind of left tackle that colleges and the NFL fantasize about. As a confessed NFL-aholic, I have to admit that I loved the X and O’s in the book but in many ways the book is a story of living out the faith.
A big part of the story is about the Tuohy’s. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy were wealthy white evangelical Christians from the south. They were Republicans and had a daughter in a prestigious private Christian school not known for having a lot of blacks. After Sean initially made sure Michael’s lunches were paid for (lunch isn’t free at private schools), the got more and more involved until on Lee Anne’s initiative they took a 16 year old kid who would not speak, had no social skills and in many ways had no hope into their home. There are a couple of memorable lines from this transition.
The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business — she had her own interior-decorating firm — turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.
“Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?” she asked.
“How big?”
“Not big enough.”
Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another — and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.
After the Tuohy’s decided that Michael would be moving in with them, there was one big problem where do you put a guy who a fifty-eight long is too small for.
As she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do–”it was ruining my ten-thousand-dollar couch”–but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or, if it did, it might collapse during the middle of the night and he and it would come hurtling through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. The day the futon arrived,s he showed it to Michael and said, “That’s your bed.” And he said, “That’s my bed?” And she said, “That’s your bed.” And he just stared at it a bit and said, “This is the first time I ever had my own bed.”
This line kind of blew me away.
From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. (”Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.”) Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn’t seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he’d been good enough of the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. “And if I figured if he wasn’t, I could make him good enough,” said Sean.
Of course the next year he discovered football and became dominant but his marks were too poor to get into college. That didn’t stop Sean or Lee Anne.
To get into the N.F.L., Michael Oher needed to first get into college. And to get into college, he needed to meet the academic standards prescribed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade-point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required G.P.A. Given Michael’s best ACT score, to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall G.P.A. He had finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance at the back end of his junior year, when he moved into the Tuohy home, raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That’s when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael’s senior year, she called all his teachers at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael had to do to earn at least a B in their classes. She didn’t expect them to just hand Michael a grade — though she wouldn’t have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking, a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.
Two days into his senior year, he came home, dropped his massive backpack onto the kitchen table and said, “I can’t do this.” Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning, she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that’s when Leigh Anne brought in Sue Mitchell, whom she met at a sorority function.
As a tool for overhauling the grade-point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her 35-year career she taught at several Memphis-area public schools. At Bartlett High School, just outside Memphis, she took over the cheerleading squad and whipped it into five-time national champions. She applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest rejected her out of hand because though Mitchell said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. (“The application did not have one question about education,” Mitchell says. “It was all about religion and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”) She wasn’t born again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”
Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Mitchell was relentless and effusive — the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war. And that’s what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss, her alma mater. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. “There were days when he was just overwhelmed,” says Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. “He’d just close his book and say, ‘I’m done.”’ When he did this, Mitchell opened the book for him. She didn’t care much about football, but she fairly quickly became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard and for so little return. “One night it wasn’t going so well, and I got frustrated,” Mitchell says, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.”’
His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”
A lot of people would have given up at that point.
Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.
From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!
The book is about football but it is also a story on what the Christian faith looks like in practice. I think many people would look at a Michael Oher when he was 16 and think twice about talking to him let alone adopting him. As Lewis writes the story, it isn’t just his salvation that Tuohy’s were interested in, it was about helping a person for the sake of doing the right thing (something they had a history of doing according to book).
A combination of work, the holiday season, and the book has had me thinking about how to tackle bigger societal problems. I understand what Sojourners is trying to do and I am a liberal and believe that the government has a role in the solution (and helps create problems as well) but I am under no illusions that by fixing the system, one can solve societal problems.
I grew up going to good schools and while there were many idiots there, everyone knew how to read and write. They had learned to learn over the years and while some chose not to, it was their choice. Working at the shelter, I found myself amongst many people who are not in the rat race but are simply struggling to eat and stay warm. That’s it. The system keeps them going one day more at a time and for many that is it for their entire life. Poverty has become a life sentence. Maybe it was caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, untreated mental health issues, abuse, or generations of indifferent parenting but it is going to take a long term effort to work itself out.
For FAS victims alone, they many experience secondary disabilities on top of the FAS.
- Mental health problems — Diagnosed with ADHD, Clinical Depression, or other mental illness, experienced by over 90% of the subjects
- Disrupted school experience — Suspended or expelled from school or dropped out of school, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
- Trouble with the law — Charged or convicted with a crime, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
- Confinement — For inpatient psychiatric care, inpatient chemical dependency care, or incarcerated for a crime, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
- Inappropriate sexual behavior — Sexual advances, sexual touching, or promiscuity, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
- Alcohol and drug problems — Abuse or dependency, experienced by 35% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
All of these make it extremely function within society which is combined with a relatively low income earning potential. So whose responsibility are those that can not function well in society? Canadians tend to default to the government (our social safety nets) but that only helps a certain percentage. Social workers tend to be overwhelmed since the budget cuts in social services in the mid-90s. Several churches I know have really tried to make a difference but many efforts are programs where the end result is the distribution of goods on a limited scale which can be a good thing but as David Fitch argues effectively in his book, The Great Giveaway it isn’t justice we are performing. We aren’t changing lives (although it is important to help a person continue on until help can be had). The solution isn’t to not help but rather go further and get more involved and work towards something better in community. Of course that sounds a lot easier than what it is to do which explains why it doesn’t happen more.
The church does get bashed unfairly at times because in many ways the inner city ministries and churches that are the most closely situated to the problem often have the fewest resources for dealing with this. Those that have the resources are often a long way removed intellectually and world view from those that have the need. That may make what happened in the book all the more remarkable, someone moved out of their comfort zone and at risk to their family and themselves and became intimately involved in that person’s life. Churches are often hindered by a classroom/lecture style of discipleship (the sermon and class) that is ineffective with people who have never been taught that style of learning (Saskatoon has around 1500 truant school kids according to several reports and when they grow up, I would imagine they would be very similar to Michael Oher and very hard to teach).
I don’t know in the end what to make that part of the book. It is an issue I wrestle with and wonder what I need to be doing to make a bigger difference in more lives. I see an awful lot of pain and suffering and my prayer every morning is that I make some positive difference in the lives I cross at the shelter and at home.
UCLA to regret hiring Neuheisel?
As Michael Ventre points out, there has been some integrity issues in Neuheisel’s past and for many coaches, those never, ever go away. I know the CIAU athletics is something completely different than the NCAA and isn’t even in the same league (now that I think about it, that pun is intended) but I am proud to be a University of Saskatchewan Huskie football fan. Part of that is because of the integrity that Brian Towris has run the program over the last 22 years. Yeah they win a lot but they win by the rules. For all of the winning, they have won within the rules. So have coaches like Joe Paterno. I hope Neuheisel can prove me wrong for the four or five diehard UCLA fans that aren’t cheering for USC but I fear that Ventre is correct.
Shreveport: Everything that is wrong with college bowl games
The sad thing is that I have watched this bowl game on more than one occasion.
The original recipe for bowl disappointment, though, comes from Shreveport, La.: The Independence Bowl, better known to you and me as the former Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl. The GMAC, the Motor City, the Meineke Car Care Bowl … they all owe a debt of gratitude to the Independence Bowl, which came along in 1976 and innovated the bowl scene by removing the requirement of being “a destination city” from the criteria.
Teams used to go somewhere for their bowl games; Shreveport proved that football fans were so desperate for games they were willing to ditch the requirement of a holiday destination to watch games between .500 teams playing for payouts barely covering their expenses (if they’re lucky).
Making the Transition to Division I
It isn’t fun making the transition to Division I, NCAA basketball.
Another way is to look at Presbyterian, which is one of about 24 colleges in the last decade to move up to Division I, the top National Collegiate Athletic Association level, in the hope of gaining exposure, money and a little bit of glory to help put their programs and universities on the map.
One day, Coach Gregg Nibert said, he hopes the Blue Hose will be able to go punch for punch on the court, at least with teams in the smaller Division I conferences like the Big South, which Presbyterian will join next year.
But for now, he is content to barnstorm, collecting $25,000 to $60,000 per appearance at Madison Square Garden-sized college arenas. After a season of predictable poundings, he will come home with about $650,000 for Presbyterian’s coffers.
The Assasination of Benazir Bhutto
The New York Times has a slide show of her assassination including the suicide bomb going off.
The Megapixel Myth
Ken Rockwell explains why megapixels are not a good indicator of how good a camera is.
Resolution has little to do with image quality. Color and tone are far more important technically. Even Consumer Reports in their November 2002 issue noted some lower resolution digital cameras made better images than some higher resolution ones.
6 Megapixel says that the more megapixels one has, the worse the image quality.
Netscape Navigator RIP
It was a lot of fun while it lasted but on February 1st, it all ends as Netscape’s browser is put to rest. Like almost everyone, I used and loved Netscape 2 and 3. Version 3 had a WYSIWYG editor built into the Gold edition which I used to make quite a few websites back in the day. I was an early adopter of Netscape Communicator (so incredibly slow) but quickly ditched it when the stand alone Navigator came out (4.08) and used Eudora as my e-mail client. The first time I ever saw it installed was years ago on a friends computer and it was so much cooler than Lynx which I was using via a shell account to get online back then. For years after that the only time I would use Internet Explorer was so I could download Netscape and then get some real work done. At work, I insisted that Netscape be installed on any computer I used and it wasn’t until IE 6 came out that I truly gave up on Netscape not seeing a major update (Netscape 6 under AOL was horrible). Of course by that time Firefox was around to give me hope and I never had to endure the nightmare that was Internet Explorer.
It’s hard to grasp that AOL paid $4.2 billion for Netscape back in the day. (Here was Wired’s take on it back in 1999) I don’t think they got their money worth.
It was fun while it lasted and I am sad to see one of the greatest products of all time come to an end.
What’s in a Name?
Steven Heller on anonymous commenters:
A rose is a rose, and a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty. For too long bloggers have been given license that is not tolerated in letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers and magazines (except in extraordinary circumstances). If one is willing to expound, exclaim, or critique it should be done under a real name and with links to a valid email or website address. If transparency on the web is the new black, then there should be no secrets.
Exactly.
Christmas 2007
So Christmas 2007 has come and gone. It was an odd one for me. I enjoyed it and Wendy blogged about it here (and she blogged about Boxing Day here). This is Mark’s seventh Christmas and he was the same age I was when my dad walked out a couple weeks after Christmas. I remember a lot about that Christmas, including what an ass he was that holiday and thinking how much better life would be without him. Those thoughts came to haunt me within a couple of weeks and he was gone and life was changed. I may not be the perfect dad but I made it this far. It’s an odd milestone to celebrate but it feels pretty good. As a friend of mine said, “You have to experienced it to really understand what this feels like.” I think the rest of you will think I am going crazy but that is okay too.
Christmas was a simple affair as it often is around here. I woke up early, went down to the Centre with Maggi to haul some televisions out for the guys and wish a Merry Christmas to the staff that was working. I was home by around 8:15 a.m. and everyone was just getting out of bed to open gifts. The big gift of the day was for Mark. A couple of months ago Lee said he wanted to get Mark a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. We phoned and phoned and no one had one (well done Nintendo. I wonder how many PS3’s were sold by people who could not get a Wii?). Somewhere along the way, Mark started to say that he wanted a Sony Playstation 2 like his Uncle Lee. We realized a) you could find them b) it was cheaper c) there were a lot of games to play for it. So Lee got him a PS2 and Wendy and I bought him the Guitar Hero I & II combo and the guitar controller. One thing we learned while opening the gifts is that Sony’s marketing hasn’t gotten to Mark. As he was opening the gift he said, “I see a P and part of a S. I wonder what this is?”
We played The Simpsons game for a bit before we took out the guitar and then the competition started. For the last two days Guitar Hero has been played by at least one of us and a lot of smack has been talked around here. I hate to admit it but both Wendy and Lee are better than I am and Lee is the reigning Guitar Hero of the household.
From the family, Wendy gave me Warren Kinsella’s book, The War Room. Mark gave me Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Mark and I have been watching Poker After Dark on Sportsnet and I am fascinated by it although I am embarrassed to say that I have no idea what is happening during the show. To help remedy that, he gave me No Limit Texas Hold’em Tournament Edition 2006 (with some help from Wendy). Maggi gave me Kanye West’s CD, Graduation while Santa Claus dropped off Shadow by Bob Woodward and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. Lee gave me one of the new Star Wars themed PSP’s. Until I was playing around with it, I had no idea it also had a RSS reader in it. Expect to see a PSP feed reader checking out your feed stats in the near future. Until I get a memory stick for it this week, I will have to remain content with fighting the Empire.
After we established I was horrible at Guitar Hero, we stopped in and saw the Pederson clan and then was off to the Reimers were we had a great supper with a large group of friends. Today was more Guitar Hero (Wendy and Lee were battling it out) and we managed to take Mark to the park to test out a used GT Sno Racer I got for him just before Christmas and his snowboard.
The only bad part of the holiday season is I have had a fever, chills and cold for most of it. Thursday I am back at work and hopefully this gets better than worse.
Contextless Links
- What happened to the Denver Broncos this year? Injuries, injuries, injuries :: “Oh, it’s the hardest season I’ve had since I’ve been coaching, there’s no question about that,” Shanahan said Wednesday as the Broncos began preparing for their season finale against Minnesota. What makes this harder than eight years ago, when the two-time defending Super Bowl champs went 6-10 in Shanahan’s only other losing season during his 13-year tenure? “Because we’re a better football team this year than we were in ‘99,” Shanahan said.
- Is waterboarding torture? One man decided to try it himself :: I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved. I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood. :: I know the current American administration disagrees but I would say it is in violation of the Geneva conventions.
- AKMA did talk about this years ago but Dave Winer brings up the issue of what happens to our digital world when we pass away.
- Fed up with the airlines? Employees are as well. :: Airline employees are fed up, too — with pay cuts, increased workloads and management’s miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience. A rich record of the employee discontent emerges from regular question-and-answer sessions held at US Airways, which is both the worst-performing big airline in the country and a company that encourages its 36,000 workers to direct tough questions at its chief executive, W. Douglas Parker. “Doug, I watched you on CNBC today,” said one e-mail message from a worker, sent on Oct. 25. “And I hate to tell you but the interiors of our plans [sic] smell bad and they are filthy. As an employee I am embarrassed to admit working for US Airways. When are you going to quit talking and do something about it?”
- As India modernizes, the profession of the “letter writer” slowly fades
- The best science and idea books of 2007
- Buildings made from business cards
- Emerging Church.info is down. Anyone know what is up with the site?
- My experiences with Vista were similar to Adam’s. I need a new computer but am not sure if I want to get a Mac but let’s be honest, Vista is a big step backwards from XP
- Willowcreek disagrees with me about Christmas pageants :: “In today’s world, the church must compete with movies and even restaurants for audiences. Everybody wants to be entertained,” said Susan DeLay, who handles public relations for Willow Creek. “People who might not go to church might come to see a Christmas pageant, and if we can share Christ through this, then yeah!”
- The Story of Stuff :: via
- The State of the Church in England (from 2000 - 2007) :: Wow, Anglican church attendance down 20%, Methodists are down 25%, Baptists are down 7% while Pentecostal attendance is up 23%. Church attendance is down to 2.x - 3.x % in a variety of places in England.
Happy Holidays
Well as I post this I am ready for Christmas. Every fall I start a spreadsheet and over the following months it gets refined and items picked up. We were done the bulk of the shopping well before the craziness of Christmas shopping hits and I actually made two trips to the 24 hour Wal-Mart to do some shopping. Last night Wendy and I set our alarm for 3:00 a.m. and went to the Stonegate Wal-Mart and wandered around a bit. It is amazing how the shopping experience gets better when there are only 20 other shoppers in the largest Wal-Mart in western Canada. The really odd thing is that on both trips to Wal-Mart I saw someone shopping in what was clearly pajamas. If I could be dressed to shop, surely they could be as well. Wendy and I only had a couple of things to look at but the problem with shopping at 3:00 a.m. is that you can’t really call anyone up and casually ask, “So do you have a deep fryer?”. I guess you could but Wendy wouldn’t let me.
Wendy struggled a bit with her shopping for me and blogged a bit about it. Her depression, self-imposed pressure, and firm deadlines don’t always go together. After reminding her that the perfect Christmas generally isn’t purchased, a lot of stress went away and the four of us are relaxing while listening to some Christmas tunes. Well actually Lee and Mark are having a Karate duel right now, Maggi is barking, and Wendy is officiating. It isn’t looking good for Mark or Lee while Maggi is holding her own.
Lee is off work as Case New Holland shuts down for a week over the holidays. While I am sure he has some skills working on the paint line, he just brought up some presents that look like they were wrapped by a man. Wendy is working at Safeway on Christmas Eve but for only the second time since we have been married gets Boxing Day off of work. The big question on Christmas Eve is how many married men will come in at 4:00 p.m. or later and ask Wendy where Safeway keeps the jewelry. They look so worried when she says they don’t sell it. I am putting in a half day at the Centre tomorrow and then am out of there at noon. I am spending the morning sorting out the stuff that we are giving to the guys on Christmas morning. Some churches have made gift bags for the guys as well as a lot of individual donations to be sorted. The photo to the right is just some of the stuff taking up every single square inch in my office. On top of that I have stuff stored all over the Centre. Last week I actually created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. We are renting some DVDs and offering up a lot of food as well, it should be a pretty nice day. If the weather improves Mark and I will take his GT Sno Racer out for a run. I had one as a kid and some of the most painful things I have ever endured came as a result of that thing so it should be fun. I just hope his injuries don’t affect his Christmas.
On Christmas morning, I am getting up early and helping set up things down at the shelter. Once shift change happens, I am heading back home to open gifts with the family. Sometime tomorrow we are heading to the Reimer’s to eat and argue. Today Gloria and I had a conversation where we both decided that we would rather just talk about the faith rather than live it out so all we have to do is argue 
I have a growing photo set on Flickr of Christmas 2007 photographs. I am sure more will be uploaded over the next couple of days but don’t expect anything here until I head back to work on the 27th.
Enjoy Christmas!
Contextless Links
- My life is complete. Zubaz pants are back! I’ll take a Michigan pair, a Denver Broncos pair, a Notre Dame pair… I have been waiting since I have been in grade nine for this day.
- Wendy has found the Grinch and she lives in Saskatoon
- Mike Birbiglia: I kind of feel like Rudy [Giuliani] thinks 9/11 is his birthday. He gets that excited look on his face and buys himself a cake and lights two candles and watches them burn down. And then he looks around and says, “What do I get?” And his advisors are like “$15 million in speaking fees!” and he’s like, “That’s even better than last 9/11!” via
- Pack an emergency kit for holiday driving :: Having driven to Spiritwood and back on many, many Christmas Eve’s, I had to stop more than once to help a stranded family. Each time with a new car and no emergency kit.
- Jon Armstrong has an excellent post on what it is like to live with someone with depression. While Wendy’s depression affects her differently than Heather’s does, it gives an idea of what life can be like around here at times. via
- Facebook for old people
- 37 Signals has a thoughtful post on self-promotion
- 101 Appetizers in 20 minutes or less
- J. Edgar Hoover had plans in 1950 of arresting 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty :: Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
- A fine resume can’t buy you electoral love :: Just ask John McCain
- Mitt Romney is finding that facts can be such awkward things :: Some of the instances when Mr. Romney has tripped up on his facts show that he is prone to exaggeration, taking what is essentially a kernel of truth and stretching it to bolster his case. :: Romney could learn from Tony Blair as the facts never got in Tony Blair’s way when he was in power :: Politicians are meant to be ruthless when necessary, and they are admired for it. Sometimes they are also “economical with the truth,” or make use of what Kipling called “The truthful, well-weighed answer / That tells the blacker lie,” or, in wartime, rightly employ the ruse de guerre, tactical deceit. But Blair gave new meaning to ruse de guerre with his elaborate campaign of disinformation about Iraq, designed not to mislead the enemy about the conduct of the war but to mislead his own people about its origins.
- Is Bill Clinton doing more to harm Hillary’s campaign than help it?
- Jon Birch on the problem with the “Just War” theory
- Steelers apparently hate their players and plan to go to an artificial turf to replace the real grass :: So who will be the first, second, third… player to blow out his knee at Heinz field.
The Transporter
On Friday, just as the kitchen brought some snacks down the hallway to munch on, I was dispatched by my boss to drive for the Salvation Army Christmas hamper distribution day. It was cold out and not everyone has a car so I spent the afternoon driving people home after they got their food hampers from the Salvation Army and Rock 102. I like to think I am as cool as The Transporter or the guy in the BMW Films although Friday I was driving a Chevrolet mini van so I kept the shooting and jumping to a minimum.
I had my camera on me and took a couple of photos of the warehouse.
I got there in the mid afternoon and a bunch of the hampers were already gone.
These are some of the 15,000 toys that were collected as part of the Rock 102 Toy Soldier campaign. The blue bags are full of wrapped toys that have been chosen for each family according to age. The unwrapped toys are ones that are given out for people who signed up late. This way their kids still get some cool gifts. They aren’t wrapped so people can figure out which gift to give away.
On top of the boxes of food, each family got potatoes, carrots, and Mandarin oranges. They also got to chose from a ham or turkey. Despite my preference for ham at Christmas, most people preferred the turkeys so what do I know?
When all was said and done, the hampers weighed about 100 pounds. It was freezing cold out Friday and it would have been horrible to have to take that big of hamper home on the bus so we drove anyone who didn’t have a car home. Many of the people I drove home could not carry the hampers so I made a lot of trips up apartment stairs and almost always to the top floor. While I didn’t mind doing it, my body was hurting by the last trip of the day. What made it worth it was a) the people I talked with really appreciated it and b) I realized I was being paid to get a pretty good workout.
It was my first visit to the warehouse and it was cool to see the scale of everything. A lot of time and hours go into making it all happen and it is kind of mind boggling to think about 1 of 15 people in Saskatoon donated a toy to the Toy Soldiers campaign.
I am working on a photo set of Christmas down at the Centre. You can find it here.
Contextless Links
- International Herald Tribune offers up it’s year in pictures.
- Who has the oil? I’ll give you a guess but even with our oil sands reserves, Canada is no Saudi Arabia (we have 1.4%). Speaking of oil, the first four minutes of The Kingdom has a good overview of Saudi Arabia and the United States.
- A national photo editor is talking about photography
- John Maeda will become the next President of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Best Photo of 2007
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The Agenda Inside the Clinton White House by Woodward Bob October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
-
Search
Recent Photos
