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When I was a kid, giants walked the earth, and I knew one of them. He was my junior high school football coach and on a warm September night in 1969, I made him very angry. His name was Bo Culbertson, and he was angry because I missed a block. Now, in my defense, I did block somebody, and it was a fine block. I was assisted by Ronnie Dalton, our right guard. Ronnie was blocking who he was supposed to block and I was helping, and we blocked that poor kid from Pulaski nearly all the way to the sideline. But the person I blocked wasn’t the person I was supposed to block, and the game we tied, we should have won, and would have won if not for me.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In the Tennessee of my youth, a football coach was one of the most revered people in the whole town. The first football coach who ever yelled at me was Coach Bo. I think he enjoyed yelling at me, because he did it a lot, but my dad assured me that what I was doing was good for Coach Bo, and therefore good for the team. I was his emotional outlet. He was a good coach, and for the two years that I played at Connelly Junior High School he had a record of 12 wins, 3 losses and 1 tie. Even though he is credited with the tie, that tie was really mine. I did it, all by myself. I know, people say it takes 11 players to win or lose a football game, but we all know this is something we made up so our field goal kickers won’t leave the team to join the French Foreign Legion after a chip shot sails wide right. One person, all by himself, can do a lot of damage to the team. Full story »

by Seth Michalak

Anyone who has spent even a little time watching American sports knows that Jesus is responsible for 95% of the good things that happen on the pitch. Players can be seen silently praying during pregame warm-ups, pointing to the sky after executing on a big play, or first and foremost thanking their Lord Jesus in a post-game interview. He ALWAYS gets credit for the good stuff.

But before yesterday, I never saw a player blame Jesus for royally screwing the pooch. Sure, we’ve heard “It wasn’t God’s will” from a losing team, but never before have we a seen a player straight-up call out the Man Upstairs like Steve Johnson of the Buffalo Bills did. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

Let’s run the numbers.

At approximately 2:00 a.m., EST, I finished the first draft of my novel for National Novel Writing Month. My word count came in at 50,390; NaNoWriMo’s word count validator clocked me in at 50,101 words.

I actually passed the 50K-word mark at 1:43 a.m. A few days ago, I was unsure I’d make it to the finish line, but over the past three days, I hammered out 15,539 words. That’s 31% of my novel. (What the hell kind of art is that, part of me still wonders. I’ll get to that in a future post.)

I average about 500 words in 25 minutes. I could write faster if I pushed and didn’t try to work the language too much. I could write slower, too.

Aside from the 50K+ words I wrote for the novel, I wrote another 10,071 words (so far) about writing the novel as part of my S&R coverage of NaNoWriMo. On top of that, I wrote another 3,510 words about it for my own blog. Fold in the 2,654 other words I put together for S&R over the course of the month, and that totals 16,235 words on top of the 50,101 I clocked on the novel—a total of 66,336 words for November (and that’s not counting some significant writing projects for work that I had to crank out).

I’m stating the obvious here, but them’s a lot of words.

My head’s still swimming, but at least this damn novel isn’t crammed in there anymore. Maybe there’s a little room for sleep.

Full story »

That is, six times the cost of the division of the Manhattan Project (to develop nuclear weapons during World War II) that was based in New Mexico. The heart of it — what later became known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Odds are, with the Cold War consigned to history, you couldn’t have imagined that a nuclear weapons facility of such immensity was still on the table.

Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which, since 1989, has been spearheading nuclear disarmament in New Mexico, and, consequently, the nation. Since 1999, it has concentrated on halting or, failing that, downsizing a building project at Los Alamos called the Chemical and Metallurgical Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR). The intended function of this facility is to increase the capacity to produce new plutonium pits. The actual site of the nuclear fission, they’re the beating heart of the warhead. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

If writing a 50,000-word novel in a month sounds like a crackpot idea, it is. So admits Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month and author of No Plot? No Problem! But Baty’s book also makes the idea sound like a total lark—and totally doable, too.

Baty and twenty of his friends, living in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, launched NaNoWriMo as nothing more than something to do to kill time. “My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this,” he writes: “Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in out mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.”

No Plot? No Problem! is not the book he set out to write that week. Full story »

by Joseph A. Domino

If that sounds twisted and makes your eyeballs vibrate, chalk it up to digesting the results of the midterm elections. Forget red and blue states. It’s red nation, folks (ironic since we once had the Red Scare—Communism). Everything in this country tilts to the right except a handful of university intellectuals who have no power and no influence—even on their own campuses.

We are not a centrist nation; we tilt to the right and often place ideology over our own interests: cutting social programs, education, for example. Right now the words ‘social’ (even without the ‘ism),’ ‘secular,’ ‘progressive’ and even ‘humanism’ are dirty words. Full story »

A WordsDay Special

It’s crunch time.

I’m about 8K words off-pace on my novel, and I only have a few days to go.

I’d like to say this update on my National Novel Writing Month project, which was due on Thursday, was delayed because I was hammering away at my novel, but no—I was giving thanks, just like most other Americans.

While I stuffed my face with turkey and sweet potatoes and collard greens (yes!), my novel sat, alone and lonely, quietly whispering my name and saying, “We’re falling so far behind on NaNoWriMo, we’ll never catch up. I thought you had this?”

NaNoWriMo’s website suggests that I should be at 43,334 words. I’m at 35K. That means I’m staring down a double-barreled 8K deficit. That means I have 15K words to crank out in four days. That means I have to average 3,750 words a day in order to win.

I got this.

I think. Full story »

We had a very nice Thanksgiving dinner at a Henrietta’s Table in Cambridge, and the grandkids were fantastic, contrary to earlier intimations. And we got to top it off with some fine pumpkin and pecan pies, after the cheese course. The cheese course had a pretty good selection—mostly Vermont cheeses of different types. What was disappointing was their blandness. Cheeses are supposed to complement a meal—these did not, sadly. Like much American food, it was the overall drabness, the lack of any particular flavor, that stood out.

As is my wont, I compare what I find in the US with what I find in Britain. Like much food we find in the US, there are few US cheeses of quality, and few kinds in general. Britain, on the other hand, is rolling in cheeses, and for many they have come to represent the resurgence in the production of local food in Britain that has occurred over the past twenty years or so. Full story »

Q: What’s the most effective way to piss off a journalist?

A: Lie to her.

Result: Moral outrage on her part – followed by determined, disciplined digging into why the lie and who benefits from it. And outrage, being an emotion, often leads to subjective judgments.

Finding lies and telling people about them are what good, progressive journalism programs must teach, even the programs with a conjunction and the word communication (mass, strategic or otherwise) in their names. Communicators, be they journalists, public relations practitioners, advertising agency executives, government or corporate representatives, or bloggers should not get away with lies. Or prevarications. Or evasions. Or deceits. Or no comment.

But we all know that someone with an agenda, someone who is willing to break the spirit or letter of the law, will lie to protect that agenda or advance it. It takes an experienced, well-trained journalist to detect the lie and find a truth in its stead. (Yes. I know: People who are bright and observant but who are not journalists can detect lies, too. But do they do it for a living? Make a career of it? For low pay and a lack of respect from the people who benefit from being told of the lies?) Full story »

2010? Not so good for some of us at S&R.

But we also recognize—not just today, for Thanksgiving, but all the time—that we each have much to be thankful for. As we Scrogues sit down for our Thanksgiving meals, wherever we are and whomever we’re with, we’ll be counting our blessings. And you, Faithful Reader, are among them.

Here are some of the things we’ll be thinking about: Full story »

We are building a retirement home in Bloomington, Indiana. David is the foreman. Last week he went coon hunting, for the first time, with the masonry crew.

They pulled up to the property in trucks, and the men started unloaded the dogs from the cages in the back. Dave watched as they attached bulky collars to the dogs and turned them loose. The men then pulled out small electronic gadgets from the pockets of their Carhartts.

“What are those?” Dave asked. Full story »

by Kate Torok

Dear Procrastinators,

Please stop waiting for the $8,000 tax credit to return. It won’t. The government has other concerns and debts to think about and the credit was simply a quick fix/PR lightbulb that helped ease the housing market pain for a short time. The good news is, if you do some quick math, you’ll realize that the interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in DECADES, and you will save far more than $8,000 in interest over a 30-year mortgage. So, really, NOW is the time to buy. And MY house is the one you want.

Thanks so much,

Frustrated and Homeless

Full story »

Freddie Mercury died 19 years ago today. If you’re a Baby Boomer you probably remember how you felt when John Lennon died. Freddie was my John Lennon.

I finally wrote something about his death a few years later. In truth, it’s not a very good poem at all, but I kept it around and treated it with reverence because it was about someone who was so important to my formative teen years.

So today S&R honors Freddie Mercury, even if the honor isn’t as worthy as we’d like. And please, enjoy the video at the end.

Supernova
– for Freddie Mercury

		Is this the real life?
		Is this just fantasy?

1. Concert for Life, 4/20/92

Dateline: Wembley.   Full story »

It’s the end of the world. At least it feels that way.

Back in September I noted that 2010 was shaping up as the worst year ever. My marriage fell apart and a lot of terrible stuff happened to people close to me. For instance:

• A close friend who happens to be one of the brightest guys I know got fired from his job last year. He recently hit the one-year-on-the-beach mark without anything that looks like a realistic prospect. He has a special-needs child and you can imagine the financial and insurance implications associated with that here in the Land of Plenty^®. If this guy is having trouble finding a gig, I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it is on the 99% of unemployed Americans who aren’t as talented as he is.
• Another good friend has been out of work for awhile, too. Completely different field, but he’s hard-working and off-the-charts smart. Literally. Oh, yeah – he’s recently been battling a worsening case of diabetes. Full story »

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Monday, November 22 is the forty-seventh anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

The weather in Dallas that afternoon could not have been more beautiful. President Kennedy, with the top down in his limousine, took full advantage of the sunshine and warm temperatures, waving to the throngs of people lining the motorcade’s route and flashing his winning smile. Camelot had come to central Texas.

Farther down the route, overlooking Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald waited, rifle at the ready. The scope on the gun was a little wobbly, the lens in the scope a little blurry, Oswald’s marksmanship skills a little questionable—but Oswald had his mission. Full story »