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DrW

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Posts posted by DrW

  1. 4 hours ago, ArdmoreRyno said:

     

    I have a question for you... my youngest daughter graduated from high school in Oklahoma in 2021. One of the best public HS's in the state. Her credentials... 

     

    Top 10 in her class (finished 3rd out of 120 or so)

    4.18 GPA

    29 ACT

    Academic All-State cheerleader

    Member of the National Honor Society

    Established debate team at her high school

    FCCLA 

    Class President

     

    • Outside school, she established a foundation (Lauren's Lemonade Stand) when she was in the 4th grade and raised money every year to help wounded veterans. Managed to work with people like Miranda Lambert, raised THOUSANDS. Did this every year up to graduation.
    • Member of the Chickasaw Nation (she has a CDIB card) 

     

    She applied at Michigan... denied. Texas.... denied. University of Chicago... denied. Yale, Princeton, Cornell... all denied. Got into Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Ole Miss (where she is a 4.0 pre-law student). 

     

    Why did she get rejected by so many? Was in just because of the the post-covid year? I was following a parent on a FB page where their kid spent his whole life wanting to get into Purdue. 4.2 GPA, 32 ACT, everything. Got rejected by Purdue. 

     

    Still shocked my little one, who is technically a minority with such a strong academic record, got rejected to schools like Michigan and UT. 

     

     

     

    While there are many things wrong with Texas (a very recent example: Ken Paxton), one thing they got right: a quota for gifted students, whatever their color may be. If your kid graduates in the top 10% of his/her high school class, every Texas ***** university has to take you (well, UT Austin got an exemption: they only need to take the top 7%.) Couple that with in-state tuition of about $6,000 per semester even for the best universities (such as Austin), and you have a real bargain.

  2. To me, a paddle board seems to be ideal for spontaneous, relatively short-term excursions on quiet water. When my then girl-friend, now-wife and I lived in Rochester, we preferred going downstream on fast creeks and very easy white water, mostly with a canoe, but sometimes when we had a third person with us, I would switch to kayak. But that requires lots of planning most of the time and using two cars. But we had lots of fun in the Adirondacks, the Alqonquins, and the Finger Lakes (the most daring trip was down the Canisteo). Sadly, here in Lubbock the boats are just hanging in the garage.

    • Like (+1) 1
  3. 10 hours ago, SoCal Deek said:

    The Social Compact: I was going to start a thread on this topic but I’ll bring it up here. It seems to me we’ve lost sight of the Social Compact that civilized societies struck many many years ago. Here in the US we had the days of the Wild West in which people protected their lives and homes and property on their own. Law enforcement was virtually non existent. As a society we decided to trade away that system for a system of taxation in which we now pay others (police) to protect and serve us. In parts of Europe that social compact has gone so far as to completely disarm the citizens. The result is that the entirety of personal protection has been ceded to the State. Now we appear to be in a precarious tipping point in which criminals no longer fear that enforcement, and/or when some demand that the enforcement mechanism stand down in lieu of enforcing it. What happens next? 

     

    Interesting point from a historical perspective. However, the George Floyd aftermath seems to show that a general population which is allowed to carry arms is not able to prevent such riots.

    • Eyeroll 2
    • Agree 1
  4. 2 minutes ago, Buffalo716 said:

    I think you get DQd for knocking them over so they might not of gotten the points 

     

    good on her

     

    From the NCAA rules (the IAAF rules are similar):

     

    Can you touch hurdles in track and field?

    In short, the answer is yes. Athletes can’t deliberately knock down a hurdle in a race, but they can touch the hurdle.

    So, if an athlete is running a hurdles race and attempts to clear the hurdle while jumping over it in a “hurdling fashion," but clips the hurdle or even knocks the hurdle over, they can continue running. The athlete wouldn’t have deliberately knocked over a hurdle in this case, as they are genuinely attempting to clear the hurdle and complete the race.

    Now if an athlete knocks over the hurdle in a race, without attempting to clear it at all, it would be deemed a non-hurdling action, which is deliberate and a violation of hurdling rules.

    • Thank you (+1) 1
  5. Just last weekend, at the European Team Championship in Track & Field, both Belgian 100 meter hurdlers were injured, and they needed a replacement to prevent the team from being disqualified. A shot-putter/hammer-thrower volunteered. She needed more than twice as long as the winner, but she got two points for the team and saved them from disqualification.

     

     

     

    • Like (+1) 4
  6. 1 hour ago, Einstein said:

     

    Mahomes vs playoff teams without Anuromo: 33.1ppg

     

    Mahomes vs playoff teams WITH Anuromo: 23.5ppg 

     

    That is a MASSIVE difference.

     

    Visit the Chiefs forum and you will see a fan base that shudders at the mention of Anuromo’s name. They fear him like we feared Belichick for 2 decades.

     

    He is your favorite but can't even get his name right? His name is Lou Anarumo. And was there not just another long thread that we should not again hire a defensive guy as HC?

  7. Last year I suspected that we might have a pair of curve-billed thrashers nesting in our backyard. Finally, about a month ago I saw them bringing little sticks and other nesting material into the largest tree in the backyard, a live oak, and found the nest.  

    • Like (+1) 2
  8. 24 minutes ago, muppy said:

    now this I really like. JJ Cale is just COOL. always has been always will be. Fun cover. Eric Clapton sitting in. Look at his guitar. I cant even imagine how many guitars a guy like that owns. Rooms full.

     

    My favorite JJ Cale song: "Same Old Blues", here performed by Cale and Leon Russell.

     

     

    There are a lot of cover versions, including Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bryan Ferry, and ... Captain Beefheart.

     

     

    • Awesome! (+1) 2
  9. 14 minutes ago, WhoTom said:

    How long does it take a genius to win his first Nobel Prize?

     

     

    That by itself is a very interesting topic. If we just take into account the "hard" sciences, chemistry, physics, and physiology/medicine (the Nobel Peace Prize was once awarded to a 17-year-old, Malala Yousafzai), the youngest one was Lawrence Bragg in physics at the age of 25. The oldest one was also a physicist, Raymond Davis Jr. at 88. The one who had to wait the longest was another physicist, Ernst Ruska. He built the first electron microscope in 1933 and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize 47 years later in 1980.

  10. One of my favorites of the Beatles near the end of their career as band: "The Ballad of John and Yoko"

     

     

    This song actually had a sort-of sequel in Lennon and Ono's (otherwise pretty forgettable) album Some Time in New York City, called "New York City". The tempo is much faster, and it has some nice guitar (1:30) and piano work (3:00). The backing band Lennon and Ono were using at that time was a NY band, Elephant's Memory.  While Elephant's Memory on their own never put out anything remarkable (back in Germany, I actually found one of their LPs in the bargain bin of a record store, and the song-writing was thoroughly disappointing), but they had some excellent instrumentalists (Wayne Shorter on Guitar, Gary Van Scyoc on bass, Adam Ippolito on keyboards, and Stan Bronstein on sax). Interestingly, for a short time at the end of the 1960s, Carly Simon had been a member of EM.

     

     

  11. 5 minutes ago, Big Blitz said:


     

    Lol what?  I wanted to post the tweet about the song.  I knew what attendance for the game was I included tweets in context re what happened pre game.  
     

    That post was not a “look how few people showed up” post.   

     

    Well, then next time you should make this clearer. Your post essentially contained 4 tweets, and the one you claim was most important to you was buried as number 2 our of 4.

  12. It often amazes me how unfairly bicyclists are treated. Here is a clip from the under-23 Giro d'Italia where you can see the bicyclists helping cars and motorcycles up a steep mountain pass. Can you imagine that they were all disqualified?

     

     

  13. 40 minutes ago, B-Man said:


    Their Friday Night attendance is always higher than the other nights 

     

     

     Well, this is true. I will even acknowledge that the attendance last night was less than Pride Night a year ago or the regular attendance on Friday nights; these numbers are around 52,000. Thus, the attendance yesterday was about 6% less than normal. However, the pic shown by right-wing bloggers and in Big Blitz' post suggests that there is less than 10% attendance while the stadium "should be packed". And this is clearly propaganda.   

  14. 17 hours ago, Big Blitz said:

     

     

     

     

    Well, you fell here in some right-wing propaganda trap. From Forbes, regarding the Pride Night game:

     

    "The Dodgers recorded an attendance of 49,074, slightly higher than its league-leading average of 47,800."

     

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2023/06/17/dodgers-pride-night-draws-usual-turnout-mostly-empty-stadium-claims-prove-false/?sh=16bbdaae37ef

    • Eyeroll 1
  15. 1 hour ago, redtail hawk said:

    fantastic! Was this from a movie.  If not, whose idea was pajamas?

     

    Very impressive. This is from the musical comedy movie "The Ghost Goes Gear", released in 1966. This means that Winwood was about 17 when it was filmed.

  16. 1 hour ago, Doc said:

     

    Sorry but telling LBGTQ+ they can't whip out their junk or use dildos in a parade isn't an "effective ban" anymore than removing pornographic material from age-inappropriate libraries is.  And there is still no proof that children "are being allowed" at nude beaches, either with photographic evidence or outside of some people breaking the law.

     

     

    From the official description of Haulover Park:

    https://www.miamidade.gov/parks/haulover.asp

    "There is also a world-renowned clothing optional beach section that is family oriented and staffed by well trained volunteers who provide information about beach etiquette." (bold by me)

     

    From the "beach etiquette" guidelines for Blind Creek Beach:

    https://www.treasurecoastnaturists.org/beach-etiquette

    "Please exercise common courtesy with cameras.  Do not photograph people without their permission. Practice politeness by asking first. Never photograph any children but your own."  (Common sense should tell you that they would not have this rule if kids were not allowed.)

     

     

    • Thank you (+1) 1
  17. 13 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

    Let me ask this again….since nobody knows what the heck Juneteenth means, why don’t they change the day to Emancipation Day before this gets rolling. I have no problem with celebrating the occasion but this is an utterly ridiculous title for it. 

     

    From: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/

     

    The name comes from the date June 19, 1865:

     

    "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865

     

    And the name "Juneteenth" has been around for more than 150 years:

     

    "Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866."

    • Like (+1) 2
  18. 1 hour ago, Chris farley said:

    its interesting how fast this moved to being a thing/Holiday 

     

    10 years ago, no one outside the inner cities had a clue. 

     

     

     

    This is incorrect. From Wikipedia:

    "In the late 1970s, when the Texas Legislature declared Juneteenth a "holiday of significance ... particularly to the blacks of Texas,"[45] it became the first state to establish Juneteenth as a state holiday.[61] The bill passed through the Texas Legislature in 1979 and was officially made a state holiday on January 1, 1980. Before 2000, three more U.S. states officially observed the day, and over the next two decades it was recognized as an official observance in all states, except South Dakota, until becoming a federal holiday.[4]"

  19. 44 minutes ago, Ed_Formerly_of_Roch said:

     

    OK. my view is so they call it something else next year, loyalty reward, etc.  Or they don't offer any discounts and quickly find out the price point that people are willing to pay.  At $489 Reddit starts to look good again.

     

     

     

    Let's hope so!

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