Calvin & Hobbes explain the bailout
First appearing around 15 years ago, this Calvin & Hobbes comic was prescient in explaining the intricacies of the current financial bailout.
2008 in review from JibJab
Baby New Year ‘08 takes you on a tour of all of the good, bad, and worse the past year had to offer, all in just over two minutes. Enjoy!
Happy New Year to all!
Friday, December 26th, 2008The birth of Jesus as told by the Jubilee! teens
The re-enactment of the birth of Jesus by the Jubilee! teens as it might happen today in Asheville. If you take your religion really seriously, you may find this video a bit irreverent. Well, OK, highly irreverent . . . maybe even blasphemous . . . but hilariously entertaining nonetheless.
Filmed and posted on YouTube by Jim Brown.
I was a teenage college football player
Recently my friend Mary sent me a couple of articles from the Knoxville News-Sentinel about University of Tennessee football—a piece about Phillip Fulmer’s final game as head coach and another titled “Faircloth signaled end of era” about UT football in the early ‘60s, the period when I was on the squad.
In 1961 I was a starter at end on the freshman team (at that time freshmen weren’t eligible for the varsity squad), and it seemed that the coaching staff had high hopes for me. One day during practice, my freshman coach came up to me and said, “The General wants to see you.” As it turned out, the legendary athletic director Robert Neyland hadn’t come to the freshman practice field to talk with me, merely to have a look at me in the flesh. And after I’d loped out to display myself, he turned without a word and ambled back up to the varsity practice field.
At the end of spring practice in 1962, as a rising sophomore, I was listed as the #3 tight end on the varsity squad, and since we went both ways (playing offense and defense), that meant I was one of the top 33 players on the team. If things had taken their normal course, I would have been the starter by my junior or senior year.
However, destiny stepped in. I was spending the summer of ’62 lifeguarding and drinking beer when one evening in late July I got a call from UT head coach Bowden Wyatt:
After a minimum of niceties, Wyatt asked, “You been running, Mulkey?”
“Yes, coach, I have,” I replied, trying to sound like I wasn’t under the influence.
“How much do you weigh?”
“220, coach.”
“Hell, you haven’t been running much!” (a pretty fair assessment since I’d put on 15 pounds over the summer)
Coach Wyatt then informed me that he wanted me to report early for fall practice and to get myself to Knoxville within a 
few days.
When I arrived, I found myself among three or four other players who were practicing surreptitiously in the old gym. It seems that a shortage at fullback had developed when one player at that position failed to recover from an injury and another got kicked out of school for stealing and selling textbooks for beer money. So we were being trained to fill in. I also found myself on a salad and steak diet.
Having never played in the backfield, my switch to fullback was unsuccessful. But by the time the coaches had determined that, the regular season was about to begin. So I was redshirted and watched players at my former position move ahead of me.
Though football was more like a tedious slog at UT than a passionate athletic pursuit, life on the redshirt squad was pretty laid back. While the varsity did calisthenics at the beginning of each practice, we disdainfully did wacky warm-ups of our own. Then we spent most of practice simulating the next opponent’s passing attack against the varsity defense, completing most of the passes thrown. To join in the fun, I moved myself back to end. When a play was called on which I was the primary receiver, I inserted myself into the lineup. Otherwise I let a player further down the pecking order run the route.
In addition, we redshirts entertained ourselves by calling plays in the huddle such as “Get Downey” (or whatever other varsity player had fallen into our disfavor). When the ball was snapped, everyone on the redshirt team except the ball carrier threw ourselves at Downey, knocking him down and piling on until the whistle blew. It was a riot (literally and figuratively), though the coaches didn’t seem to be laughing very much. Especially when our target was Pat Canini, the 
starting varsity fullback, whose jaw was broken during a similar escapade.
The fact that the coaching staff would tolerate such tomfoolery was symptomatic of the declining fortunes of the UT football program. General Neyland had died on March 28, 1962, and Coach Wyatt wasn’t hired as athletic director because he lacked a college degree. Wyatt was rumored to have a drinking problem and when he shoved a sportswriter into the swimming pool at an SEC meeting, he almost certainly precipitated his termination as head coach. And a losing season certainly hadn’t helped matters. Running the outdated single wing offense and predictable 6-2-2-1 defense, Tennessee had gone 4-6 that season, beating only weak sisters Chattanooga, Wake Forest, Tulane and Vanderbilt.
Disillusioned with football at Tennessee, especially under these conditions, I drifted toward fraternity life—dating, drinking and gentlemen’s C’s. But I missed life on the gridiron as I had known it in high school—the joy of playing the game and the team camaraderie, as well as the status it provided. So eventually I transferred to a small men’s liberal arts college where those elements were still present and where we won our conference football championship both years I was there. But that’s a story for another time
* * *
From the Knoxville News Sentinel:
Faircloth signaled end of era
November 29, 2008
By Tom Mattingly
The single-wing offense, a staple of Tennessee football since the ascension of Bob Neyland as head coach in 1926, took its last breath this weekend in 1963, as the Vols beat Vanderbilt 14-0 on a cold, wet Saturday on Shields-Watkins Field. It was the final game of a 5-5 season.
Mallon Faircloth, a senior from Cordele, Ga., earned the plaudits of history as the last single-wing tailback, running for 179 yards, including a 72-yard touchdown run. Sophomore Stan Mitchell got the other score after a fumble recovery by sophomore linebacker Frank Emanuel. It was also the final game as head coach for Jim McDonald, hired in June after Bowden Wyatt was let go.
No one billed the game as “Tribute to the Single Wing Day,” but events leading up to and during that weekend made it clear the times were definitely a-changing football-wise on the Hill. (more…)
Saturday, December 20th, 2008The wisdom of Dilbert
Today I’m thankful for Woody Allen
“They wanted in Hollywood to make the definitive spy picture. And they came to me to supervise the project, you know, because I think that, if you know me at all, you know that death is my bread and danger my butter - oh, no, danger’s my bread, and death is my butter. No, no, wait. Danger’s my bread, death - no, death is - no, I’m sorry. Death is my - death and danger are my various breads and various butters.”
–Woody Allen on his classic 1966 spy movie “What’s Up, Tiger Lily.”
Thursday, November 27th, 2008Dave Barry’s birthday
Today is Dave Barry’s birthday. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dave, for 25 years he wrote a syndicated humor column that appeared in more than 500 newspapers nationwide. Some wisdom from Dave on his special day (the first two quotations via The Writer’s Almanac):
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.
I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
Happy birthday, Dave, and have a glorious Independence Day Eve as well!
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008Lady Vols win 8th NCAA women’s basketball championship
I only follow one sports team these days: The University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team. And last night I joyfully watched them convincingly win their second national title in a row and their eighth altogether. From the Knoxville News-Sentinel website:
TAMPA, Fla. - Tennessee spread its wings and soared to the grandest heights Tuesday night.
“That’s what’s called the metamorphosis of a basketball team,'’ UT assistant coach Dean Lockwood said. “The cocoon broke and the butterfly was in full bloom, colors flying.
Before a crowd of 21,655 at the St. Pete Times Forum and an ESPN national television audience, the Lady Vols emerged as the team they intended to be all along: Defending national champions.
The emphasis was on defending.
The Lady Vols parlayed a ferocious effort into a 64-48 victory over Stanford, winning the program’s second consecutive national championship and the eighth overall.
The feeling was fresh for senior Alberta Auguste, who was holding the national championship trophy in her hands afterward in the locker room.
“It’s like a new-born baby,'’ she said.
Tennessee (36-2) brought the Stanford scoring show to a stunning halt, holding the Cardinal to a season-low point total that was 37 points below its tournament scoring average. The Lady Vols also had an aggressive hand in 25 turnovers, twice as many as Stanford’s NCAA average. The turnovers resulted in 26 Tennessee points.
All of UT’s starting five completed their collegiate sports careers last night; four of them were among the first 20 selections in the WNBA draft today, Candace Parker the first.
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
