When we drive Grandpa Milo to church, we have time to talk with him. It is a lot of fun and we always learn something. We have to talk about things that happened a long time ago because his short term memory is not so good. Our talk yesterday, as usual was a gift to us. We talked about when he played sports in elementary school and high school in Cottage Grove, Oregon back in the 1940’s. One of my favorite stories that I have heard often was when his high school basketball was doing well, but not as well as the coach desired.
The coach gathered the team around and asked the question in what, I suppose was a rhetorical way, “Are you here to have fun or are you here to win!?”
That was probably the wrong thing to ask a bunch of extremely hard working farmer and logger boys whose brothers had just come back from fighting World War II. Sports were definitively not anything to be taken seriously. No one believed then that the “courage” and “sacrifice” required to participate in sports were a good way to build character. Nor did they believe the exercise they got playing them was anywhere close to the physical duress they experienced when working on the farm or in the woods. So, the idea that it was a builder of character was transparently wrong. That left sports as something to do for fun and, to a much smaller extent, exercise.
Grandpa answered for all of them, “We play for fun. As soon as this quits being fun, we will quit playing basketball.”
Maybe we ought to get back to thinking that way about sports again in our day.
Betty Blonde #489 – 06/21/2010
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The People of the Lie
Late last night, Christian sent Lorena a Snapchat that reminded me my mind is not as able as it used to be, In some ways, I think that is a good thing–there are lots of good things I can still learn without hurting my brain. He was genuinely excited about it and, having seen this before, I know he will actually read the thing and to the bulk of the exercises. What a great thing. It inspires me to dive back into a learning project or two. In that regard, I found a new Predictive Analytics tool this weekend called 
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Lorena is off to Seattle again to give Kelly a hand while she is in the race up to the delivery of an oral presentation of a big paper based on her research. I am stuck here by myself to steam over the election. I am glad I have too much stuff to do to pay much attention to the politics. All the news people who made unequivocal statements about what would happen at the Iowa Caucuses are now making just as unequivocal statements about what will happen at the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina. They were completely wrong about Iowa and continue to double down by making a bigger deal out of the third place finisher than the winner who got the greatest amount of votes in Republican history of the event. We will see what happens next, but I am pretty happy I am so busy I cannot pay a whole lot of attention.