A good, old fashioned notes dump like the old days.<\/p>\n
There was a lockdown for about an hour at Cathedral yesterday. Apparently someone called 911 claiming to be inside the school with a gun. About a million cops showed up and no person with a gun was ever found. We live in wonderful times, friends.<\/p>\n
Our girls seemed more annoyed that they had to stay and finish the day after the all-clear than worried\/scared by the threat.<\/p>\n
M\u2019s roommate from UC came for a quick visit Monday and Tuesday. She lives in Toledo and M visited her last summer for a weekend. Because of her holiday schedule she was only able to come down for about 24 hours. But M showed her around our area and introduced her to a few high school friends, although they mostly hung around with other UC kids.<\/p>\n
A funny thing about M\u2019s friend group at school is one of her best guy friends grew up less than a mile from our house. He went to the rival high school and never knew each other, but they had mutual friends. The past several days their local group has been gathering either at his house or ours.<\/p>\n
It was a little weird getting M home last week. My first thought was, \u201cOK, it\u2019s Christmas break!\u201d Then I realized her sister had almost THREE full weeks of class left before they were done for the semester. M did a lot of sitting around that first week, but most of her friends are back in town now and her social activity has started to pick back up. She\u2019s also done some babysitting and has several days blocked off to watch either nephews or other kids between now and her return to school next month.<\/p>\n
M\u2019s arrival has messed up my mind regarding the holidays in more ways than one. I was a little surprised to realize Monday we were two weeks from Christmas. The first half of the Christmas season seems to have raced by. I think a lot of that is because of L\u2019s game schedule, which has kept us very busy the past two weeks.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it was a bit of an alarm to make sure I am focused over the next two weeks to get all my holiday movies and shows knocked out. I haven\u2019t watched Elf<\/em> or Christmas Vacation<\/em> nearly enough (one full time each, several partial viewings thrown in as well).<\/p>\n Man, what a mess. An American icon that has been crumbling for years likely had its final downfall a week ago when it was discovered that the magazine was using AI to both write articles and labelling those articles with AI-generated writer names and headshots.<\/p>\n SI was an integral part of my childhood, and then remained essential deep into adulthood. The arrival of each week\u2019s new volume on Thursday was one of the biggest moments of your kid week. My copy remained in the folder I carried to class until it was dog-eared and nearly memorized, not replaced until the next one came.<\/p>\n Magazines everywhere are dying. It feels like SI could have survived as it was generally more of a high-level view of sports, one which can still be relevant in the Internet age. The magazine, and its publishers, have made about a million bad choices in the past 20 years, though, and it was already an insignificant blip on the sports journalism map before this scandal.<\/p>\n And then they gave the Sportsman of the Year award to Deion Sanders, which seems absolutely asinine on every level. Given how ultra-commercial his whole deal is, my first thought was that he, or his publicists, paid for the honor. Or exchanged it for access. Something classic SI would not have engaged in.<\/p>\n Should he have been in the issue somewhere? Absolutely. But whatever waves he made this year were more because of the work his handlers did to create his story and image than anything he actually did. Many people had a bigger impact on the sports world than Deion.<\/p>\n As one college football expert said recently on a podcast, Deion deserves immense credit for what he\u2019s already done at CU. But the fact is that team got worse each week of the season, there was all kinds of internal turmoil in the program, and Deion proved that if he really wants to deliver on all the promises he\u2019s made, he has a lot to learn about coaching and running a power conference program. That expert has confidence that Deion is capable of making those jumps. But you can\u2019t give a student an A+ for a project that was turned in incomplete missing required elements.<\/p>\n It has begun\u2026\ud83d\udea7 pic.twitter.com\/sp2PgiMDki<\/a><\/p>\n — Kansas Football (@KU_Football) December 11, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nSports Illustrated<\/h3>\n
\nMemorial Stadium<\/h3>\n
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