January 29th, 2010
Sports Illustrated wakes up to Northern Iowa basketball
Building on a historical foundation of teacher education, the University of Northern Iowa now calls itself, with some justification, a full-fledged university. And it now has a nationally ranked basketball team that got a four-page writeup in the January 25 issue of Sports Illustrated. The piece begins with a bit of snobbery about movies being the only winter entertainment in Cedar Falls, Iowa for its basketball stars (while all others are what, clubbing with rock stars?) but soon warms up to the high level of achievement of UNI’s coach and his players, who have fostered “a clock-chewing, screen-happy offense and a lockdown defense that turns many games into brickfests for the opposition.”
That opposition included Indiana State, defeated 62-40 to add to a winning streak of 15 games for the Panthers. What shines out is the calm coaching style of Coach Ben Jacobson, and “a tight-knit quartet of seniors who provide a balanced scoring attack.”
They have some distinctly Iowa attributes. Seven-foot center Jordan Egsleder traveled just a hundred miles to college, from Bellevue, Iowa, and another Heartlander, Kwadzo Abelegbe from Minneapolis, says of the shooting attack: “We just have that bone in our body where everyone’s unselfish.”
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January 25th, 2010
This wonderful airplane, the British-made turboprop Viscount, flew out of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa airport in the 50s and offered one of the fastest, quietest, most comfortable trips available. Or maybe I’m just remembering it in contrast to its Cedar Rapids predecessor, the Douglas DC-3, which while “legendary” due to its length of service was unpressurized and damned uncomforable.
At any rate, here it is in the boneyard at the Pima Air Museum, near Tucson, where I saw it in 2002 and lingered awhile, noting that the reassuring brass engines-by-Rolls Royce engine plate we used to see out the oval window of the Viscount had been ripped off for somebody’s collection.
So: nostalgia over an airplane. Or maybe it’s just the memory of the Arizona sun on one’s back on a day of wind and snow here in Iowa.
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January 21st, 2010
We’re reading the manual that came with a new coffeemaker, and that’s how the section on how to brew great coffee begins. Choose Arabica beans, of course, not the other kind, the kind served in the truck stops, where a study showed the amount of caffeine is completely ineffectual in inducing a higher state of alertness. So that’s why the checkout station has all those stay-awake products for truckers. And that’s why you have to pay ten bucks for a pound of the good stuff.
Anyway, beans of all kinds are important. At the end of Casablanca, Bogart tells Ingrid Bergman that the plans of two little people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” But the real truth of the matter didn’t arrive until Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, when Frank Drebbin delivers the same line to Priscilla Presley, and adds: “But this is our hill—and these are our beans.”
So choose ‘em wisely.
By the way, kids, see both movies, but by all means see Casablanca. It was shocking to see a kid on Jeopardy who had never heard of the movie.
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January 18th, 2010
Route to mindfulness?
Buddhism has never been foreverguy’s cup of tea, but it has its attractions, namely its power of positive energy and its humor.
On occasion I’m drawn to the Shambhala Sun, a magazine loaded with both, including ads for happiness projects of one kind or another.
And in last July’s issue (Buddhist publications are not at the top of my magazine pile), John Tarrant had a remarkable statement titled “Return to the (Political) World,” in which he notes that we can avoid politics “and call ourselves pure if we dare, but that’s not as interesting, or even as kind, as the world of delusion within which politics has its being . . . .”
“To consider politics is to open yourself . . .to a tsunami of lies, humbug, drivel, false promises, masquerade, hypocritical piety, prejudice, greed, murder, and fattening food. To consider politics is to dive into this Hokusai wave of inauthenticity and to say, ‘Hmmm, this seems like a situation I can work with.’”
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January 17th, 2010
This last fall we achieved 20 years of sobriety, thanks be to the people around me at that awful time back then. Whatever that spark in them that led them to stand by me and help me work my way out of a pretty awful hole—that’s my idea of the Higher Power.
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