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|Shane McSweeny won his
starting quarterback job back at Wesley after he was injured in
Wesley athletics photo by Rebecca Pennington
The problem facing both Maryville and Wesley going into camp was an enviable one.
They each had a question mark as to who would start at quarterback, but unlike many teams facing such a decision, these two squads had two-deeps that were already experienced, tested and ready to lead.
The competition at Wesley began back in the spring, between 2009 All-Region passer Shane McSweeny and Justin Sottilare, himself on the All-Region team in 2010. McSweeny, a senior, was injured on the opening drive of the opening game last fall, leaving many to wonder what would become of a team that anticipated the return of its quarterback who threw for 2,917 yards and 36 touchdowns the year before. In stepped Sottilare, who went on to set a school record with 38 touchdown passes in 2010 while complementing that with nearly 3,400 yards.
But coming into 2011, only one of them could be the starter.
"We kind of used that to stir competition," Wesley coach Mike Drass said in an interview prior to the team's surprise loss against Kean.
He explained to them that he was going to have to make a decision and that whoever was chosen as the backup could either spend the season in that role or recuse himself from the team and compete again for the starting job in 2012. Drass said the decision had to be theirs.
"That's not a choice of mine because we're not a scholarship school. … And that was all that was said," he explained.
Drass and his staff closely charted the two signal-callers, weighing their ability not just to be pocket passers but also to run with the ball. The edge? McSweeny.
"Going through camp, both of them performed extremely well," Drass said. "And we sat down and looked at the situation and really felt that, right now, Shane had an edge."
Maryville's coach Tony Ierulli was in the same situation as Drass, but the final decision was made for him.
Tim Conner, now a senior, put up 1,800 yards in his all-conference 2009 season. But during camp last year, Conner suffered a shoulder injury that ultimately required surgery. Enter then-freshman Dustin Williams, who brought with him 1,600 yards through the air.
|Tim Conner won a tough battle
for the starting quarterback job at Maryville, which then became
Maryville athletics photo
"It was a tough battle going back and forth between both guys," Ierulli said of Conner's and Williams' time in camp this fall.
Ierulli, whose team has started a disappointing 0-2, said having two capable quarterbacks was a good thing.
"Both guys pushed each other," he said. "Both guys were a better quarterback going into the fall. Both guys did a lot more than normal in terms of their off-season preparation."
And he said the Scots avoided some of the pitfalls that can damage a team. He said the need to pick one or the other didn't divide the team, which can happen.
"What can happen is that it starts to split the team a little bit, some pulling for this guy, some pulling for that guy," the coach explained. "That wasn't really the case here. The team really supported both of them and really worked hard for both quarterbacks."
Ultimately, Conner's senior leadership and experience began to set him apart. He had been in the system for several seasons, and he had a connection with the team's premier receiver, Wesley Idlette. However, Ierruli said he wasn't expecting to make a final decision until the Tuesday or Wednesday before the first game. It turned out fate made it for him.
Williams tore his ACL playing pickup basketball a few weeks before camp began. Ierulli said Williams was strong throughout camp but then got hurt during a pass play in the scrimmage against Birmingham-Southern.
"He threw awkwardly. He went down, wasn't touched by anyone," Ierulli said. No matter who the coaches were leaning toward, Conner became the starter. Williams, as a redshirt, is relegated to watching from the sidelines.
Back at Wesley, Sottilare himself will be watching from the sidelines as McSweeny takes the reins of a team that has started 1-1. But Sottilare's role is by design.
After camp, Sottilare came to Drass and said he'd prefer to step back from playing and take on a role as a student coach instead. The intent would be for Sottilare to return in 2012 for his senior season and a starting role on the team.
After McSweeny had to spend last year injured, Drass notes: "It's kind of like roles reversed now that Justin's on the sidelines."
Ode to the ODAC
Catholic's Friday night game led a barrage of Old Dominion matchups that saw all but one team come away with a 2-0 start to the season. A 1-yard run from Mike Pitsenberger lifted the Cardinals to a 45-41 win over Gallaudet (a team that came off another dramatic late-game loss, that time to OAC power Otterbein, in Week 1). The victory came despite the fact that Gallaudet led 41-24 late in the fourth quarter. CUA was helped by quarterback Greg Cordivari posting four passing touchdowns on the night.
That passing mark was bested in the conference by only one person, Hampden-Sydney's Travis Lane, who threw for seven scores and no interceptions in a dominating 56-17 win over N.C. Wesleyan. He now leads all of Division III in touchdown passes. Kyle Vance was Lane's favorite target, hauling in 170 of Lane's 389 yards. More ODAC domination happened in Greensboro, where Emory & Henry got behind 370 passing yards from Kyle Boden and nine tackles for loss to beat the Pride 38-0.
Running back Thaddeus Scrugg was the highlight of Randolph-Macon's narrow win over Averett when he ground out 173 yards on the field. At Bridgewater, the man on the ground was Darrin McKenzie, who found the end zone three times and plowed ahead for 186 yards in a nail-biting win over Shenandoah.
USAC's shining spot
Methodist, under first-year head coach Dave Eavenson, notched the conference's lone Week 2 win by toppling Guilford 40-22. The Monarchs struck early and struck fast, going up 17-0 by the end of the first quarter. Quarterback Travis Murphy passed for three scores and ran for another, while the Methodist defense benefited from interceptions by Jacob Hunt, Roderick Sawyer and Navahri Holden.
Elsewhere in the USA South, Christopher Newport suffered an unexpected 46-43 loss to first-year program Stevenson. How could such a thing happen you may ask? In part, because CNU had to face plays like this one.
Round-robin play begins
The 10-member Centennial began conference play after going a disappointing 2-8 in nonconference action. Susquehanna couldn't continue the momentum of its surprise win over Wilkes in Week 1 as the Crusaders were on the bad end of a lopsided 56-7 drubbing against Johns Hopkins, one of the conference favorites. The Blue Jays were the only team to score through the first three quarters of play and were led by rushers Jonathan Rigaud and Nick Fazio, who each had three touchdowns. Senior Ryan Piatek had a banner day on defense, pulling in two interceptions, including one in the first quarter that was returned to the end zone, kicking off the day's scoring.
McDaniel running back Joe Rollins, a sophomore, had an amazing day in which he matched a school record by plowing for 311 yards rushing, getting to the end zone three times along the way. Defensively, McDaniel lineman Sam Cox also had a stunning day, posting five sacks against Moravian.
A game that I had discussed in last Friday's Triple Take was just as exciting as I had hoped -- though I projected the wrong team to come out on top. A 32-yard pass from Kody Smith to Aden Twer as time expired lifted Gettysburg out of a tie with Ursinus and on to victory. (It was nominated as one of D3football.com's plays of the week.) Like last year, this year's 40-34 final was a high-scoring affair. The Bullets' Peter Hak notched 15 total tackles, 11 of them solo, while Mark Covington also hit double digits with 10 total. Smith and Twer were the offensive leaders, with Twer reaching 179 yards and Smith passing for 291 in all.
Contact me
I would be happy to hear from anyone who has questions or feedback regarding the Around the Mid-Atlantic column or Division III football in general. Please write to me at firstname.lastname@example.com or follow me on Twitter @D3MidAtlantic. I invite you to talk about players and performances on the message board's Around the Mid-Atlantic thread. Additionally, if there is an idea you'd like to see me write about, post it there or email me.


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LG's Windows Phone 7 Panther Played With
LG's Windows Phone 7 Panther Played With
So, Pocket-lint managed to get some hands on time with the LG Panther, a Windows Phone 7 prototype and reported that it was running very smoothly and that many of the features were already up and running. That seems like a good sign of things to come but with Android and the iPhone OS both very strong, will Windows Phone 7 be able to make as big of a splash when it finally arrives? We'll have to wait and see for now!
pocket-lint.com - One stand-out aspect dwelled upon in the demo was intuitive and seamless Facebook integration, with the phone automatically pulling contacts' updates when you access them via the address book. They're current status details appear alongside phone number, address, etc.
Full article here.

subset: commoncrawl


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Manchester United transfer roundup- defender move, Fonte close and more
Manchester United has had a very good transfer window so far having already signed Zlatan Ibrahimovic for free, Eric Bailey from Spain and Mkhitaryan from Germany and breaking world record transfer fee for Paul Pogba.
However, newly appointed manager Jose Mourinho is keen on a complete squad overhaul and is looking to make a couple of more changes to his squad in the coming days.
Here are the transfer speculations and done deals around Manchester United today.


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NORMAN, Okla. -- University of Oklahoma sophomore Axel Alvarez captured the men's singles title at the ITA Central Region Championships in Tulsa Monday.
Alvarez defeated Sooner teammate Dane Webb 6-3, 6-3 in the finals.
"Axel had a great tournament," OU head coach John Roddick said. "He played the best match of the tournament against Dane in the final.
"It was great to see two OU players in the final. With Guillermo Alcorta's runner-up finish at the All-Americans (Oct. 6), Andrew Harris' win in Mansfield (Oct. 20) and Webb and Alvarez meeting in the finals of the regionals, I think we have had the best fall we have ever had with another opportunity in New York. I'm really proud of our play and effort in the last few weeks."
Alvarez reached the finals after defeating Drake's Matt Frost 6-3, 6-1. Webb ousted Drake's Ben Lott 7-5, 6-2 in his semifinal matchup, pitting Sooner teammates against each other for the championship.
Sunday, Harris, a freshman, claimed the International Tennis Federation's USA F27 Futures tournament title in Mansfield, Texas.
OU next travels I-35 to Austin, Texas, to compete in the UT Invitational, starting Friday, Oct. 25.
For more on OU men's tennis follow the team on Twitter @OU_MTennis.


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Fire Damages "Deathly Hallows" Set (Updated)
Mar 21, 2010
DH Film
British tabloid News of the World is reporting that a fire broke out on the "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" film set on Friday evening. The newspaper cites "explosives used in action sequences" as the cause of the blaze, with firefighters from six fire engines taking 40 minutes to put the fire out. No one was injured and the explosives reportedly were being used to film the "scenes where Hogwarts gets blown up during the battle." The paper adds that Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) were not on set at the time, but the special effects crew are "devastated."
Update: This morning, Warner Bros. issued a statement regarding the fire which says:
"It was a big special effects scene. Unfortunately, there was a small fire as a result of that. As a precaution, as we had already mobilised our own in-house fire team who had it under control, the fire brigade was called and it was put out in under an hour.
"There was no damage to Leavesden Studios at all. The actual set was due to be rebuilt anyway. The scene was where the set was being destroyed and then it was to be rebuilt for a new scene, as part of a battle for Deathly Hallows part two.
"The idea that fire ripped through Leavesden Studios is so far from the truth, it's untrue. It was a very isolated incident. It was put out very quickly and with limited damage."
Thanks janspach, Bert, Patrick and Elliot for emailing in!


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Women, men and children in more than 170 countries and regions will celebrate World Day of Prayer today. The women of France, this year's writer-country, have chosen the theme "I was a stranger and you welcomed me."
This year's service at Oak Crest DeKalb Area Retirement Center will be held at 2 p.m. today in Bradt Chapel at Oak Crest. The service will be given by resident and community volunteers.
Plan to join in this worldwide ecumenical movement of Christian women of many traditions who come together to observe a common day of prayer each year.


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ATLANTA — R&B singer Usher Raymond is locked in a legal battle with his ex-wife arising from a custody fight over their two sons.
The 33-year-old testified in court on Tuesday that Tameka Foster Raymond spit at and tried to fight his girlfriend during one visit. He alleged that his ex-wife hit him during the dispute, but that he didn't press charges because "I didn't want the boys to know that their father put their mother in jail."
Tameka Raymond's attorney claims that Usher provoked her client and that his account is exaggerated.
The two were married in 2007 and divorced two years later. Tameka Raymond has since fought for full custody of their two sons while Usher Raymond wants more visitation rights.


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With more and more cities thinking about jumping the "Ban Plastic Bags!" bandwagon, the paper-or-plastic dilemma may someday be obsolete. But paper is an only slightly better alternative. The greenest option? Look in your closet and drawers for a strong, durable, reusable bag, and take it with you to the supermarket, mall, or your favorite takeout place. If you don't already own one, these picks made from recycled and ecofriendly materials -- everything from bamboo to juice boxes -- are the next best thing (pictured clockwise from center).
Adding Up
Alchemy Goods collects old advertisement banners from around Seattle to create Ad Bags. The handles, made from seat belts, have a nonslip grip courtesy of old bike inner tubes. thegreenloop.com
Pocket Pouch
A combination of bamboo and linen, this lightweight, foldable bag from Envirosax was printed with vegetable-based inks and comes with a small pouch, perfect for storing in your purse. envirosax.com
Cotton Club
Stewart+Brown, purveyor of a stylish line of organic clothing, saves cotton from rotting in textile mills and uses it in its line of graphic Surplus canvas totes. stewartbrown.com
Curtain Call
With the motto "from junk to funk," Allison Teich of Again NYC creates limited edition shopping bags from leftover bolts of fabric or old curtains. againnyc.com
Chill Out
Keep your eggs and milk cold all the way home by storing them in this insulated cooler from Bazura Bags, crafted out of discarded juice boxes by a women's cooperative in the Philippines. bazurashop.com
Sail Away
Once a sail has traveled as far as it can go on the high seas, Portland, Maine-based Hannah Kubiak and Beth Shissler of Sea Bags turn it into indestructible nautical-inspired totes. nivaterra.com


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SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge 347
Lucas123 writes "After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year. The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according IHS and other research firms. For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained "inflated" — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods, according to DRAMeXchange."


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Items where Author is "Caprais, M.P."
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Taylor, Huw, Rincé, A., Porter, J., Gawler, A., Gourmelon, M., Caprais, M.P. and Ebdon, James (2009) Aquatic management of catchments for health and environment (AquaManche): a collaborative European investigation into novel waterborne disease prediction methods In: International Water Association's Health-Related Water Microbiology Conference, 31 May - 5 Jun 2009, Naxos, Greece.


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I don't think J. Hud. was rude at all. She went somewhere else on her time. Unless she signed a contract saying that she was under the power of Oprah until the taping was over, she was fine. The nasty weather wasn't her fault. I think Oprah is being a Special Snowflake of the highest order. What seals the deal for me is that she told the reality show cameramen to keep rolling and tape her while she chastised Jennifer. I think she's a self-important drama queen.
Having experienced The Great Oprah and her entourage in person once in my building at work, I don't hold a lot of respect for her little tantrums. They tried to prevent me from getting to work, and it was not appreciated.
In the TV and movie world each minute kept waiting costs tens of thousands of dollars. It's not just someone kept someone waiting an extra hour to eat dinner, this is a fiscal nightmare. The fact that they knew they had to tape three shows that day (which would already put them into overtime) and then have to wait for her return a few extra hours cost a lot. Probably close to $100,000.So if I had someone that I was promoting on my show that is going to absolutely help their career and they decided to chance a flight in bad weather for a personal party and cost me that kind of money, well I might be a bit passive aggressive too. When you sign up for a show (any show, but especially one that airs daily) you don't get to take chances at their expense for a party.
QuoteHaving experienced The Great Oprah and her entourage in person once in my building at work, I don't hold a lot of respect for her little tantrums. They tried to prevent me from getting to work, and it was not appreciated.DottyG, I am dying to hear more about this!
i think that Oprah forgot that little thing about "praise in public, chastise in private" with one's employees. oh wait, J. Hud isn't an Oprah employee.
So, because Oprah was spending money, she gets to be rude? Nope, don't think so.
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The Connecticut Antique Machinery Association's 8th Annual Spring Power-Up is planned for May 5. Featuring antique steam engines – both stationary and powering small locomotives – as well as gasoline and diesel combustion engines and plenty of antique tractors, the Power-Up is a visual and aural feast for fans of vintage machinery and engineering at CAMA's Kent, Connecticut, location.
An all-volunteer organization, CAMA is dedicated to the "preservation, restoration and demonstration of antique machinery from our rich industrial and agricultural past." Their collection features industrial steam engines – including one with a 12-foot flywheel, a narrow gauge railway and a five-cylinder Wolverine diesel that was manufactured in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Just 150hp doesn't sound like a lot, but the engine is 10 feet tall and hits that 150hp mark at just 300 RPM.
Among other items that are often started for the power-ups are a variety of "hit and miss" single-cylinder internal combustion engines that do not fire on every revolution but only when the engine drops below a certain RPM. CAMA also maintains a collection of antique road-building and earth-moving equipment.
Admission is $5 for adults, $2 for children ages six to 12, and free for kids five and under. Directions to CAMA can be found here.
Nothing quite like watching and listening to old engines. The Texas Early Day Tractor and Engine Association has ground in Temple, TX. It was really something when they started this Fairbanks Morse that was out of an old cotton gin.
Now that Wolverine, diesel or not, really is "steampunk"!
There is usually a gathering of vintage vehicles from the area and a flea market on the grounds. Also there is a Mining Museum and the Sloane Stanley Museum of early American Tools.
Been there and love it. A beautiful setting in the Connecticut Berkshires and probably the only place you'll ever see a steam powered motorcycle.
It's a wonderful thing that there are people out there who are determined to keep those old workhorses alive. I never miss an opportunity to attend a show like that out here in the west. I wish I could get away and see what's happening on the east coast.
the second weekend in august they hold the 50+ annual threshing show in Almelund,Mn,about 16 mile's from my home.they have a huge fairbanks morse engine to power the50 acre site.this show last's three day's and they get a lot of tractor's to parade to the ground's a week before.some old car's and truck's are welcomed also.
There is a marine example of a one cylinder "hit and miss" (also known as a one-lunger) that sometimes can be seen and heard out on San Francisco bay. It's in some archaic craft whose purpose is a mystery to me. I've never seen it up close but there is no mistaking the sound and this one is loud. 150 years of maritime history and the gold rush and other mining business in California there must have been a lot of this stuff. I wonder how much has survived?
I am restoring a Harrington sliding bed lathe (c 1900). I am needing some parts. Can anyone steer me to a source?
Warm Regards, Robert Chappell.


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Manufacturer/Publisher: Image (Release Date: 10/23/2013*)
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ED BRUBAKER and STEVE EPTING redefined Captain America with the 'Winter Soldier' saga... and everything they've done so far has been leading to VELVET! When the world's best secret agent is killed, Velvet Templeton, the Personal Assistant to the Director of the Agency, is drawn off her desk and back into the field for the first time in nearly 20 years... and is immediately caught in a web of mystery, murder and hi-octane action. Sexy and provocative, with a dark twist on the spy genre, this EXTRA-LENGTH first issue by two of the industry's best-selling creators will knock you out!
Item #: 1303099 • Diamond code: AUG138244 • UPC: 70985301446100141
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Around the Interwebs: Kishani Perera
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Becky |
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Now I'm enjoying the most recent interview over at Balustrade and Bitters with Kishani Perera. I love the way she uses color!
OK, as soon as this laptop battery dies, I'm going to go clean out my desk and reorganize my inspiration board!


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Nashville Globe – 22 Feb 1907
The Johanna P. Moore Missionary Society will hold a meeting at 513 Mulberry street on the 25th of this month. The program contains an address by Rev. W.S. Ellington, and Dan Hackley Winston, Nashville's famous poet, who has contributed frequently to the columns of the Globe, is to read one of his poems. The meeting will begin at 8 o'clock pm and is open to the public.


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The Mudville Line: The legend of mud rubbing
By Doug Miller / 12/12/12 10:00 AM ET
I was blindfolded in the passenger seat of a black 1994 Ford F-150 on a 97-degree day in southern New Jersey, and after two minutes I was queasy.
The guy behind the wheel, Jim Bintliff, was laughing because I told him it felt like we were going 70 mph down his suburban street. He informed me that I was off by, "Oh, only about 50."
The object was to get me as disoriented as possible, so when we arrived at the sacred site, the origin of one of Major League Baseball's longest-running secrets, I wouldn't know where I was. How could I tell anyone else?
The truck, bedecked with bumper stickers that help define a curious man -- the Palin bottom with the McCain top cut off, Mr. Zog's Sex Wax for surfboards, "It IS FINISHED," hand-printed two years ago when he became born again -- kept bumping along on struggling shocks. Nine white, five-gallon hand-soap buckets pilfered from the print shop where he ran the presses on the overnight shift for 12 years were rolling around in the bed under the camper shell along with old towels and a tool chest. I asked Jim what might happen if a state trooper or local cop happened to drive by and see me riding shotgun with a blue bandana wrapped around my eyes. He laughed again.
"I'd get pulled over and asked why I was harboring a hostage, that's what," he said.
The truck kept going, speeding up on what I assumed was now Route 130, the main thoroughfare through this part of Jersey, across the Delaware River from the sprawl of Philadelphia, before he slowed and exited (or so my remaining senses told me). After a few more minutes he was executing a three-point turn, then he was backing into a parking spot, the tires settling into grooves of earth that I figured were about as friendly to him as a pair of old loafers.
"You can take off the blindfold now," he said. "Let's go get the mud."
Yes, the mud. The Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud. The only mud used to rub up baseballs before they're put into play. A baseball tradition, and part of Rule 3.01c, if you're scoring at home, for the last 75 years.
"The umpire shall inspect the baseballs and ensure they are regulation baseballs and that they are properly rubbed so that the gloss is removed," reads the rule, and a member of Jim's family has supplied the mud that removes that gloss since the edict was written. Before Jim, it was his father, Burns, who inherited the business from his father-in-law, John Haas. Haas had begun digging the mud with Lena Blackburne, the man who brought it to baseball, in the 1930s.
I took off the bandana and was greeted by green -- trees upon trees, with their overhanging leaves obscuring the trail into the woods like some hidden, magical door. The second thing I saw was another truck.
"Somebody else is here," I said.
"Yup," Jim said, nodding in solemn agreement as he grabbed the stack of buckets, a dirty shovel and a dolly.
"Gotta see what they're up to."
I. Lena and John
Picture an old man driving a wing-tipped Cadillac through the streets of his hometown, maybe for the last time. It's a late fall day in 1967, and the dying sun catches him for a moment through the windshield, lighting up his weathered forehead, his deep, dark eyes and his big German nose. In a few months, this man will die in peace near here, the place he loves. But today, he's enjoying one of his customary early-evening drives in Palmyra, a borough of Burlington County in southern New Jersey known for a bridge that stretches over the Delaware into the row-house enclaves of Northeast Philly, and probably known as much for this man driving this huge, obnoxious car through its streets.
Imagine the codger doing a slow roll past the stately brick of Borough Hall, enjoying the soft chill of the gloaming, and reaching out the window to tap the ash of an eight-inch cigar before waving to a father and son who walk to Legion Field to play catch. The dad might stop and point, grinning and making sure to tell his boy about the man driving the iron chariot.
"Son," he might say, "you need to hear a few stories about Lena Blackburne."
Like the one from 1910, when Lena become the first former member of the Palmyra Field Club to play in the Major Leagues. He's a 23-year-old rookie in the inaugural game at Comiskey Park, and although his team loses in front of 32,000 fans, the Chicago Tribune makes sure to note the next day that, "Up to the seventh only two [White Sox] hits were made off [St. Louis Browns starter Barney] Petty and Lena Bearcat Blackburne made all of those without getting to second."
Already this kid will be thinking that a hardscrabble slap-hitter born Russell Aubrey Blackburne, nicknamed Lena, and then somehow dubbed Bearcat on top of that is one heck of a character, and his dad might say something along the lines of, "Kid, you haven't heard the half of it."
June 28, 1927, Comiskey again. Lena, now a 40-year-old White Sox coach whose most recent big league plate appearance came in 1919, takes the place of manager Ray Chalk, who's been ejected from the game against Cleveland. The White Sox are trailing by a run in the bottom of the ninth with a runner on second. Lena puts himself in the game to pinch-hit, singles to tie it, and scores the game-winning run two batters later.
June 5, 1929. This time Lena's managing the White Sox, who are getting pasted by the Red Sox in Fenway Park. He's just watched his relief pitcher, Dan Dugan, give up 13 runs on 15 hits in 3 2/3 innings. There's one out left in the home eighth of a 17-2 loss. So once again he comes out of retirement in the middle of a game, and at the age of 42, he decides to pitch for the first time in his career. He gives up a hit but no runs, allowing him to retire, this time for good, with an ERA of 0.00.
Lena and the boys. (Courtesy of the Bintliff Family)
And then the big moment, nine years later, May 1938. Lena's hunched over, coaching third base for the Philadelphia A's at Shibe Park and third-base umpire Harry Geisel is telling him that we've really got to do something about these baseballs. Ever since Ray Chapman took a pitch to the head and died in 1920, players and umpires have been clamoring for something, anything, to take the slick sheen off the white leather of fresh-out-of-the-box "pearls." In fact, the rules of the game adopted this language that year: "The seal on boxes of new balls is not to be broken by the umpire except prior to game time and for the purpose of inspecting the ball and removing the gloss therefrom."
Nothing seems to work. Tobacco spit leaves stains, although you might hear pitchers say the ball can never be dark enough, especially during a night game. Shoe polish never did the trick. Infield dirt mixed with water? Crude and harsh, so much so that it cuts and snags the balls and makes them fly goofy through the air.
Lena thinks on what the ump has said for a moment and remembers his favorite summer swimming hole near Palmyra, where you'd sink into mud at least a foot deep. The muck would encase your feet in an airtight lair and you'd lose a shoe if you lifted up your leg too quickly.
"Harry," he says. "I might have an idea for you."
The next morning, Lena goes right back to that spot, digs up a sample and takes it home to the big house at the corner of Henry and Cinnaminson. He filters out the rocks and sticks, lets it settle so more water drains, adds a little something extra to give it a bit of a jiggle, like pudding, and tries it out.
John Haas in a 1945 campaign ad from Riverside, N.J. (Courtesy of Will Valentino)
Eureka. The mud takes the gloss and slickness right off a new ball. It doesn't smell. It doesn't discolor the horsehide so much that it'll offend pitchers or hitters or umpires. You get a great grip on it. It's perfect, really, Lena Blackburne thinks. Heck, it might be magic.
The next spring, Lena shows his creation to Geisel, who loves it. Soon everyone wants it. Now Lena's got a side business, and the profits add up to more than the beer money he makes driving a truck for Kenney's Flowers in Riverside, his regular offseason job.
Business is so good that Lena and his best boyhood friend, Haas, are packing the mud into silver coffee cans donated by Haas' neighbors in Bridgeboro. The old Field Club buddies and football teammates have worked out a system. They reach the bank of the waterway, the location and name of which they vow they will never reveal to anyone, by boat. They wait for low tide and then pounce, with shovels and buckets in hand. They go back until they have what they need, and they store the mud over the winter in garbage cans in Lena's basement to prevent it from freezing. Before Spring Training they ship it off, fetching $14 a can in an age when a regular job pays $40 a week.
But Lena refuses to sell the mud to the clubs of the National League. He's an American League man through and through, and that's the way it will stay.
John's family used to own the Haas Bakery in Riverside, serving the best cinnamon buns, cream puffs, eclairs and crumb cakes from Camden all the way up to Trenton before the lucrative business died in the Depression. He's OK now, having ended up with a job for Metropolitan Life and a dedication to improving Riverside. He's the mayor, a Democrat in the first of two terms. It started with service on the Township Committee in 1937, and now, in the early 1940s, he's overseeing the construction of Town Hall.
Not that anyone who knows him is surprised. While Lena likes to settle arguments with high spikes on the basepaths -- and, in the case of one of his former players, Art Shires, a well-placed fist to the face -- John attends daily mass and doesn't mind talking away problems over pints with Lena and the boys in the downstairs bar at the Riverside firehouse.
Lena and his wife, Grace. (Courtesy of the Bintliff Family)
A World War passes. Lena and John lose friends, but they stay together, bound by the mud. In the early 1950s, Lena relents and begins selling it to the National League. He figures it's about time. But give away the location? Never.
In 1965, 79-year-old Lena is visited by a newspaperman, and the ballplayer who once told The Sporting News that he was a distant relative of Raul de Black Bourne, a "man-at-arms who was knighted in 1348 for gallantry in battle" and told scribes looking for the source in the 1950s that he had hired a team of SCUBA divers who plummeted to the depths of the Delaware to retrieve it for him, shows he's still got a bit of that fight left in him.
"I can't be telling writers where I get this stuff," he tells reporter Joseph F. Lowry. "But I'll let you in on most of it, being as I'm a nice guy."
Lena puts on knee-high clam-digger's boots and takes poor Lowry out to the spot. The wrong spot.
Two years later, months from death and with John Haas already written into his will as the heir to his baseball rubbing mud business, Lena Blackburne is driving his big Cadillac down the streets of his beloved Palmyra, waving at his fans, steering toward the sunset.
Down at the mud hole, the tides come and go.
July 24, 2012
We walked down the trail. A hundred yards in, Jim stopped and pointed out a barrier in our path -- a massive fallen maple, its trunk, maybe a century old, rising a good foot off the forest floor.
"I hate this part," Jim said. "Slows me down."
Disappearing down the trail to the mud hole. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
I suggested that he bring a chainsaw next time. He laughed, pointing out that we were on public land and that he wasn't going to be the one to cut bloody gashes into the environmental sanctity of this greenbelt. My arms and ankles caught a few spikes of brush as we trudged forward. He told me to watch out for poison ivy. Seconds later, the walkway ended in light and water.
I scanned the tributary as Jim jumped down to the stony bank, orchestrating a well-rehearsed dance: setting his buckets by a huge piece of driftwood that now served as a bench, pulling off their caps, grabbing one by the handle with his left hand and the shovel with his right. He walked in silence to the mud, the 10-foot buffer zone of creamy brown separating the rocks from the tiny lapping waves. He didn't look over at the visitors -- a father and son, fishing. They looked over at him, though.
I'd resolved -- back at the Walmart where I'd purchased for $12 the low-top canvas sneakers I was wearing -- that I would go all out on this expedition. I stepped into the muck with something akin to care.
My feet sank into the wet chill until I was in to my shins. Air bubbles popped all over. It was clammy and raw and sucking at my legs. It felt right.
Jim seemed to glide through it. He hunched and moved the tip of the shovel along the top of the surface. He pulled it back inch by inch, shaking the shovel up and down just a hair to let the primo ooze collect onto the upturned blade. When it was full, he poured the nectar into the bucket.
"You can't dig down too deep," he said. "If you do, it gets fishy. Gotta stay on top of it."
He filled all three pails and I helped him carry them back to the bank. Each one had to weigh 50 pounds. Six more and we'd be done until tomorrow. Seven or eight more trips out here this summer and he'd have enough for the year.
The father and son looked over again. The father spoke.
"What are you using that mud for?"
Jim had told me over the phone that this was what people asked when he happened upon them here. He said his usual lie was that he needed the goo for his rose bushes. Sometimes, for fun, he'd say he was with the EPA, doing a soil study. One time in the late 1970s he saw two guys in Grateful Dead tie-dyes and told them he used it for plants that aren't quite as, well, legal, as rose bushes.
"It's for my rose garden," Jim said. "It works like a charm."
"That much?"
"Yeah. You'd be surprised."
"I'm sure I would."
The dad smiled.
Sinking into the slime. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
If he knew something, we weren't going to find out today. Jim grabbed another bucket, I grabbed two more, and we went back at it. He told me that I should beware of certain sharp-toothed reptilian nuisances under the surface. I didn't think he was serious until he said his grandmother, Jenny Bintliff, had been known for one of the "better snapping-turtle soup recipes in the Delaware Valley."
I asked him what occupied his mind while he was out there sweating and shoveling in stifling heat. He named pitchers, Hall of Famers, men who forged iconic careers because they were able to grip the ball. Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan. He said he thought about his father and mother, his grandfather. He said he thought about Lena.
The tide was coming in, and we were done packing up mud and ready to lug it back to the truck.
The boy caught a catfish. His dad took it off the hook and threw it back before glancing our way one last time and speaking, again with a smile: "It's the perfect mud, huh?"
"Yeah," Jim said. "It's the perfect mud."
II. Burns and Betty
It's December of 1985 in the Pot-Nets community in Delaware. Ronald Reagan is in his second term and the Kansas City Royals are World Series champions. The ring of the telephone cuts through the silence in the mobile home, and Burns Bintliff rises to answer it, letting out an annoyed sigh. It seems that he can't even find a way to relax in the place where he and his wife, Betty, just moved to retire.
Burns and Betty. (Courtesy of the Bintliff Family)
So who will it be? If it's a clubhouse attendant or an old umpire buddy, that's fine. He'll talk to those guys. Reminiscing about baseball is always fun. But if it's anyone else, he's probably not in the mood to talk. He's 67 years old, for crying out loud. He's done enough talking.
He picks up the phone and is greeted by an excited voice. Burns can afford only a few words, as always. He mumbles a bit. He says he'll think about it. He'll call back.
Burns hasn't seen the mud in a while. A few years ago it was still all around him at the house in Willingboro Township, stored in the garbage cans in the laundry room downstairs, along with the hampers full of dirty clothes that nine kids will inevitably produce. The mud would settle all winter down there to a soundtrack of whining and cracking from an old hot water heater. If he'd still been in Jersey, he would have been home from a shift as a carpenter on the Turnpike, sitting in his kitchen at the wooden picnic table his father made all those years ago, packing the mud into the used coffee cans the neighbors would leave on the wraparound front porch of the brown house on Bradford Lane.
But tonight, Burns Bintliff is on the phone, scowling, as Betty descends the stairs to ask who called. Burns tells her it was a producer from a television show, "Late Night with David Letterman". You know, the one that comes on after they watch Johnny Carson and go to sleep. The awkward guy with the space between his teeth. He seems mean-spirited. He's a bad comic, is what he is. Is that what passes for humor these days?
They want Burns to go on TV and talk about the mud. Maybe they want him to rub up a ball. Make a big joke out of it. They'll probably want him to spill his big secret and tell the viewing public where he digs it up. Like he'll ever tell anybody that.
It took him long enough to tell his own children. There were five boys and four girls, and he only took the boys to the spot once he was old enough to need their help lugging those buckets and once he could trust that they'd keep their traps shut about where to find it. He had married Betty, who was born Catherine Elizabeth Haas, all those years ago, and her dad, John, had inherited the business from Lena Blackburne himself. Burns married into it, and he loved baseball almost as much as Betty. She never had any questions that she'd keep the family side business going, and he never had questions that he would handle the tough parts of the job. Over the years, it had become a sacred family bond. You don't mess with that. He never would.
That's why he kept it quiet. He'd only harvest before Memorial Day or after Labor Day because the waterway was too crowded in the summer. Too many waterskiers out there. Too many people to wonder what he was doing.
So he doesn't advertise. Once, he got a letter from Japan asking him to ship mud overseas. He tossed it in the wastepaper basket. He and Betty have been fine with running the business the same way they ever did, making enough money from the mud to maybe pay for one vacation a year. It's a hobby, not a full-time profession, and they don't see any reason to change it. It's more about loving the game, about knowing that every time Burns goes to that spot with that shovel in his hand, he's digging up a little piece of history. Every World Series, every All-Star Game, every home run that's hit in every big league ballpark -- every ball has a little piece of Lena Blackburne, John Haas and Burns and Betty Bintliff worked into its hide. That's enough.
Sure, Burns has had his name in the papers and magazines. He remembers when the Army Corps of Engineers did a scientific analysis of the mud to pinpoint the location of the hole, using its geology as a marker. They got close, but they didn't find it.
The most high-profile article was in Sports Illustrated, in 1981. There were others, too, and somehow there's a bad taste left over. He remembers being misquoted, misled by writers. That's not going to happen again. You want to call him crotchety? Surly? A stubborn old man? Fine. Fire away.
But know that he served his country as a Navy parachute rigger in Korea. Know that he was an anchor at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Willingboro, starting the color guard and attending the parades while Betty was president of the local VFW Ladies Auxiliary. He did good things even if you didn't like the way he spoke into your tape recorder.
The mud is in Jim's hands now. In 1966, two years before an old coffee can of Lena Blackburne mud became a permanent part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Betty and 11-year-old Jim were out in the boat as Burns worked the bank. The only sound was the slap of shovel to surface. Betty looked at her son and told him that he would be the next in line. He'd inherit the business when his dad couldn't do it anymore. Jim wondered why he was chosen, but he never asked. He figured she went down the long list of siblings, narrowed it down, talked it over with Jesus for a little while, and got her answer.
Now Betty asks Burns about Letterman again. He shrugs, like always.
"Nah," Burns says, and that's all he needs to say. Burns Bintliff is a man of his word. He never goes back on it.
"I'm a Carson man."
July 24, 2012
We got back to Jim's house and went straight to the backyard. He wasted no time peeling off his Chase Utley T-shirt, throwing it on a summer chair, and jumping into the above-ground pool to remove the initial layer of grit that had spread from his ankles to his elbows. His 20-year-old daughter, Rachel, and two girlfriends sunbathed in bikinis on the deck. The Bintliffs' rescue pit bull, Rose, barked at me as I aimed the garden hose at my lower legs and let fly.
Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud Company World Headquarters. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
Nine garbage cans were spread out before us on the yellowing grass. Jim didn't even bother drying himself off before picking up one of the empty ones and dragging it to the middle of the yard. He pulled out a weathered, dirty metal screen and set it over the can to commence another part of his ritual -- pouring the fresh mud from the buckets into the garbage cans through the screen to take out the detritus. He said he wouldn't have enough mud until all nine 35-gallon cans were full. He had almost three more to go.
I went back to my hotel and showered because we had dinner plans at a seafood joint on the water. I was surprised to see that the mud didn't come right off once the jets of steaming water hit my still-filthy torso. The residue lingered, and I had to take a washcloth and really scrub to rid my body of it. I watched it swirl down the drain, and when I got back into the rental car and turned the ignition key, I looked at my fingernails. There was still mud in there.
I asked Jim and his wife, Joanne, why they did it. Why did Jim continue to bust his back shoveling mud in this oppressive humidity? Why did Joanne spend all those hours keeping track of the shipments, running the baseballrubbingmud.com website, printing up the "Got Mud?" T-shirts and logo golf towels and packing those jars into the Priority Mail boxes to make sure they got to the teams on time?
They didn't answer, so I asked again.
"Jim, why do you do it?"
He asked his wife the same question.
Joannne paused, looked up from her surf and turf, and could only muster a laugh.
III. Jim and Joanne
Jim Bintliff stares out at the water of the Puget Sound, dark like the October sky and spotted with the falling rain that seems to never stop pock-marking its surface. He looks down at his feet, planted in a foreign shoreline of rocks and dark dirt, not the sweeping sands of his New Jersey youth. He knows he has to go home.
It's 1975, Jim's almost 19 years old, and he's leaving Bremerton, Wash., headed back to Burlington County. He won't be a Navy man like his father and grandfather and two older brothers. He doesn't know what he'll do with his life, other than grow his hair long again and dig up the mud. He'll get a day job. He'll figure something out.
Freewheelin' Jim Bintliff, circa 1976. (Courtesy of the Bintliff Family)
Ever since he arrived from basic training there's been a burning in his stomach, restlessness he can't seem to pinpoint but knows he doesn't like. It was enough for an honorable medical discharge. Anxiety.
It's gray and damp and bleak here, and he needs to be around Jersey: the pounding breakers, those miles of ocean beach. Surf in the summer, ski in the winter. He remembers the long June days as a teen, months of light and warmth ahead, listening to Jan and Dean and Beach Boys records, driving out to Long Beach Island, paddling out from Wooden Jetty and doing the best he could to come back, preferably on top of his nine-foot longboard but sometimes being dragged through the pebbly silt.
Every wave is different. The solitude, the unavoidable collision with nature ... that's where it's at. When you're tossed around in the roiling Atlantic, you're singing high harmonies with the rhythms of the water, punch-drunk by the power of the tide.
And soon enough, his wish is true: He's back in Jersey, a mail clerk for the corporate office of Macmillan Publishers. Then he's a garbage man in Northeast Philly. He loves that gig -- good pay, easy hours, a daily dose of fresh air. He's the only one getting the mud now since his aging parents bolted for Delaware. He buys the Willingboro house outright. He gets married.
Fourth of July, 1986. Jim's on his way down to Cape Hatteras for a weekend in the waves. He's driving a new Ford Escort to Delaware to spend the night in his dad's trailer. It's late. He's straining to keep his eyes open. Only a few more miles.
He wakes up in the Christiana Hospital trauma center in Newark, Del., and finds out he fell asleep and rear-ended a dump truck. His right wrist, left hip and right ankle are broken. They tell him that when the police pulled up they thought he was already dead. The cops cut him out of the car and he fought with them. They stabilized him in a hospital in Lewes, Del., before putting him in the three-day drug-induced coma he just woke up from.
He's been on a respirator for 10 days. He'll stay here for a month, walk with crutches for a year, get an artificial hip put in after that, and spend another year recovering. He's got two kids now: Jason and Vanessa. He's getting a divorce. He hasn't even reached 30 and he's scuffling to stand.
But like the mud that replenishes itself with each high tide, Jim Bintliff gets back up. He marries Joanne in 1989 and they have two daughters, Abbie and Rachel. Joanne waits five years before Jim tells her the exact location of the mud hole.
Competition ebbs in and out. In the 1990s, Rawlings, the company that makes MLB's official ball, tries to get in the mud game, marketing its own product. On the jar, it says that Rawlings Baseball Rubbing Mud "rubs sheen off the ball, just like the pros." It never catches on. Rawlings discontinues it quickly.
Now it's the year 2000 and Jim Bintliff is 43 years old. None of the world's mainframes have conked out like everyone thought, but it is time for a millennial change at the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud Company.
Jim flies down to Largo, Fla., to see his father. Burns Bintliff is an old man, almost 80, and it's time to make it official. There's no need for a speech. The business is Jim's now. Jim will be the contact person for Major and Minor League Baseball. He'll do the shipping, the billing, and yes, if he so desires, the interviews.
Two years later, Burns passes away and Jim makes some decisions. He's no longer willing to pay for shipping the way his dad always did, forking over $400 a year just for the Major Leagues. He talks to his MLB contact, club relations senior vice president Phyllis Merhige, and arranges an acceptable price increase for the product. He's not gouging the big leagues, mind you, but he needs a bit more. That way he can make sure to answer those emergency Spring Training calls for replacement mud after a janitor unknowingly tosses the tubs into a dumpster. That way he can save a bit for his next surfing safari.
Joanne and Jim. (Courtesy of the Bintliff Family)
Jim is president and Joanne, who keeps the company books with a notebook and pencil, is his VP, or, as she likes to say, "The Mud Lady." Jim expands in ways his father wouldn't, bringing on high schools, colleges and Little Leagues. Anyone who might be interested. That includes National Football League teams looking for a better grip on the pigskin and a salon in downtown Philly, Ursula's About PHace, which buys up Lena Blackburne mud for its $76 organic "Philly Phacial" that mixes the mud with pureed sweet potatoes, Greek yogurt, oatmeal and olive oil to "absorb the toxins" in one's skin and serve as a "purifying natural exfoliant." Jim shows up one day at 17th and Sansom and gets one himself.
The Bintliffs aren't stuffing pillowcases with cash in their new house in Delran, but there are perks. Jim's invited to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to help Rawlings with demonstrations of how baseballs are made. The prop master from the movie "The Green Mile" sends the Bintliffs a mousetrap that appeared in the movie. Brad Pitt sends them an autographed ball after a can of the mud is used in the movie "Moneyball."
Down at the mud hole, though, he won't part with the past. The original shovel from his grandfather was the primary tool until the handle broke in 1995. Jim could have replaced it with a fiberglass model, but he didn't. It had to be a wooden handle. He's packing with the original spatula, too, but these days the mud is shimmied into plastic jars and tubs, not painted coffee cans. The Bintliffs even have a special logo sticker and catchy slogan: "Baseball's Magic Mud."
The mud has made it into the pages of National Geographic, in the October 2008 issue that also features bee-eating birds, India's superhighway and the Ozark Highlands Trail.
It's 2012 and Jim's a crew leader and a press operator for local hometown newspapers distributed around Philly -- auto trade magazines and penny-saver shoppers. Then corporate comes in and trades scalpels for hatchets, cleaning out the older union guys and going young and lean. Jim isn't surprised. He saw it coming.
He'd already been thinking about taking a one-year course to become a certified nurse's assistant. He can start making a difference in peoples' lives. He'll see if his limited Navy time can qualify him for Veterans Affairs aid to pay tuition, but it's tough out there.
"Right now," he says, "the mud's pretty much all I've got."
July 25, 2012
I woke up early on my last day in South Jersey. Jim was at a morning church function, so I decided to drive into Philly. I had an idea.
I'd been trading emails with one David R. Vann, Ph.D., the lab supervisor for the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I asked Vann if he might be able to take a sample of the Lena Blackburne mud, do some sort of scientific analysis of it, and maybe come up with an explanation for why it worked so well.
Maybe he could break down its mineral components. Maybe he could identify the secret final additive that Jim wouldn't reveal. And, most important, maybe Jim could take the information and use it in some positive way.
Vann's email had raised a good point: "If there are properties of this mud that people say make it the 'it' mud to use -- it has the right 'feel,' it is gritty, it spreads easily, etc., these would all be helpful clues to guide both the analysis and interpretation," he wrote.
Dr. David R. Vann, Ivy League man of science ... and Cardinals fan. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
"On the other hand, it could dispel some of the mystery and magic in one of the more superstitious sports. Do you want to go there?"
I thought of Jim one more time, wrote back, "Of course I do," and soon was on my way to see him. I drove past the jug-handle exits of Route 130 and strip malls, making it down to Palmyra to stop by Lena's grave. I went by the old Legion Field, which became Lena Blackburne Memorial Baseball Field in April 2012, the culmination of a passionate campaign by the Palmyra Historical and Cultural Society and its resident Lena expert, Will Valentino. Jim Bintliff delivered the dedication.
An hour later, I pulled up to Penn's urban campus and parked, emptying my pocketful of change into the meter and walking a tree-lined path through a quiet quad to stately Hayden Hall, a dark-red-and-black brick turreted castle of learning built in 1896 and named for Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, whose geological survey led to the creation of Yellowstone, our first national park.
The hallway snaked around into a tidy office, where rocks cluttered the shelves, papers flooded his desk, and Vann sat by a rip-roaring air conditioning unit. He wore a tropical shirt, shorts, glasses, a graying goatee and a smile. He said he'd grown up in Missouri and was a lifelong Cardinals fan. I congratulated him on the 2011 World Series, handed him an 8-ounce jar of the mud, shook his hand, shot the hardball breeze for a few minutes and went on my way.
The results of Vann's XRD (X-ray diffraction), XRF (X-ray fluorescence) and ICP (Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy) were a bit dizzying. It's possible that they were revealing ... to someone other than me. But if Rawlings or some entrepreneurial dirt farmer decided to give mud-making another whirl, they'd have to adhere to the following recipe, more or less:
Carbon content: 4.95±0.09 percent. Nitrogen content: 0.33±0.01 percent, with a C:N ratio of 15.1. Toss in 18.7 percent quartz sand, 53.4 percent silt and 29.4 percent clay.
"The sand allows for the gritty texture, and is responsible for most of the 'roughening' effect (like liquid sandpaper)," Vann wrote in the email I would receive after all the tests were completed.
"The clay content is the very tiny particles, most of which is likely responsible for the 'dirty' color left on the ball, working somewhat like pigment. The silt fraction, between the clay and sand size (all of these are very small particles), is likely providing most of the bulk of the mud, and provides a 'matrix' to carry the sand; a combination of the silt and clay gives the 'slick' feel, and lubricates the action of the sand."
And then the rest of the makeup: muscovite mica (potassium source), phlogopite mica (magnesium source), albite (feldspar, sodium source) with some oligoclase (calcium source). Total weight: 55.41 percent water, 44.59 percent dirt. Trace amounts of aluminum, arsenic, lead, copper, chromium and nickel make up the toxic or potentially toxic metals found therein. Not a trace of gold to be found, unfortunately.
"Rare-earth elements" include cerium, dysprosium, erbium and 10 more iums. Mix in some phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, iodine, manganese, iron and molybdenum. Dust with zinc, tin and antimony to taste. Stir. Serve.
Vann's final email included two charts identifying the XRF's spectral output and the rerun of the XRD. It was multicolored and detailed and baffling. I figured Jim would find this useful, so I emailed it to him.
"Here you go," I wrote. "Would love your thoughts."
He wrote back an hour later:
"Don't wanna eat the mud."
IV. Rachel and Zach
Rachel Bintliff sits in sixth-grade science at Delran Middle School. It's November 2003 and the bell has rung. The students are sitting in a U, desks along the sides and back wall of the room. Garfield -- the cat, not the president -- looks down at them from a poster and offers a motivational chestnut: "Don't wait for opportunities. Create them!"
Mrs. Sacca, the teacher, stands in the middle of it all. The kids are still talking. They're asking Rachel about the mud.
Rachel and Jim, muddin'. (Rachel Bintliff)
They've heard about it from their parents, who have just watched Jim and a blindfolded TV host, Mike Rowe, go to the mud hole on the pilot episode of Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs". It seems Rachel's the daughter of a local celebrity.
The kids are intrigued, and now Mrs. Sacca's intrigued. Why does Rachel's dad go around digging up South Jersey mud? Can Rachel please explain this to the class to begin today's lesson?
A blast of heat shoots through Rachel's stomach. Her face reddens. Action!
Rachel will repeat the story of her father and grandfather and a wily old-time ballplayer called Lena in classroom after classroom. She'll deal with the deluge until she graduates from Delran High in 2011 and finally gets away from hallways cluttered with mean girls and cliques she can't stand.
She takes a few positives from the experience, though. One is her boyfriend, Zach, whom she met through a mutual friend at the Moorestown Mall in late 2007. They went to see the movie "Juno" on their first date a few weeks later and have been together since. Their plan is to get married in a few years.
Another: being her dad's baseball buddy. Jim gets two seats and only two seats at Phillies games, first at Veterans Stadium and now Citizens Bank Park. Rachel didn't become enchanted by the intricacies of the game until high school, when she pitched on the varsity softball team and began going mudding with her pop, but she's hooked now.
Still, all along Jim knew she was the one. When she was 7 years old he told her, flat-out. And she understood. She doesn't remember any fanfare from the day he pronounced her the future heiress of the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud Company. The quiet assurance told her everything.
Thirteen years later, she's committed to staying in or around Delran for the rest of her life. She loves it here. She goes to Burlington County College. She wants to be a high school teacher. She'll specialize in American history.
She can see it now. The first day on the job, she'll tell her students that the best thing about history is that it's a puzzle. You look at what happens in the past and you piece it together. Maybe it helps you figure out what's going on in the present and what might happen in the future.
Zach and Rachel on prom night. (Courtesy of Rachel Bintliff)
But when Jim retires from the mud-mongering trade, she'll need to mix in some math skills: 30 Major League teams, about seven or eight dozen balls per game, 162 games a year, six weeks of Spring Training, the playoffs, more than 20 Minor League affiliates. Rachel will run the business. Zach, in the off hours from operating his dad's paving company, will take over the physical labor at the sacred spot. Jason, her baseball-crazy step-brother, will help out with the business. Abbie, her older sister who attends Rowan University, has dreams of owning a health club, and has always been grossed out by the mud, will not.
Chances are the new regime will take Joanne's rune-like pencil-marked notebooks and turn them into Excel spreadsheets and backup hard drives. Chances are they won't raise the prices too much, either.
"It's mud," Rachel says. "I mean ... you can only charge so much for mud."
And she loves that mud. Well, she doesn't love the fact that it's so dirty, and she's not crazy about the angry creatures that might be lurking in the murk. She could probably stand to get better at picking her legs up out of it, and she's not ashamed to admit that she's fallen headfirst in it more than a few times.
But she's always thought it was cool. How could it not be? It's her dad out there doing it, after all. He's the best guy she knows.
And he's the only one doing it.
July 25, 2012
We had a "nice little window" to get more mud, Jim said. He had figured low tide would go down an hour later than it was the previous day, so we backed out of his driveway at 1:45 and got to the site at 2 on the nose. Jim told me he was OK with me 86ing the blindfold.
"I trust you," he said.
A man at work. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
As I traced every track of his tires, logging the route in my head for posterity and not wanting to squander a second of this grand privilege, an odd thought occurred to me. Here I was, getting lost in Jersey and in my own head, knee-deep in the mud and in a family history written by protectors of priceless lore, and this guy was cool with handing me the key to it all?
In other words, was I even in the right place, or was this a semi-elaborate ruse? Was this Jim's plan all along -- to take me to the wrong spot, like Lena in his clam boots back in the day, and show me how to fill buckets of mud that he would never use?
I asked him, and he offered little more than a tickled shake of the head.
"I don't know," he said.
I wanted to press him on it, but I didn't have time, because before Jim's front bumper had reached the familiar gravel parking area, we saw a familiar truck.
And a familiar dad and his familiar son, packing up their tackle box to head home.
"Man," Jim said, shaking his head while wheeling his Ford around and backing in. "They're back for more."
We got out and said hello. The dad had a look of concern on his face.
"The tide's coming in fast," he said. "You're probably not gonna get much."
And the tide comes and goes. (Doug Miller/MLB.com)
Jim looked perplexed for a second but then confessed that he hadn't checked the chart. He had assumed we'd arrive for low tide, but you can't make assumptions this time of year, and Jim knew right then and there that his pop, Burns, would have let him have it over this careless slip-up. But what the heck. We'd try anyway.
"Might as well get as much as we can," Jim said.
He grabbed the buckets and the shovel and I pulled out the dolly. The father turned to us again.
"Jim, right?" he said, with the pleasure of knowledge curling up his lips.
Jim didn't hesitate, spitting a curt, "Who are you?" right back at him.
"I'm Mike," he said. "My Aunt Patti used to babysit for you in Willingboro."
The muscles in Jim's face relaxed.
"How about that?" he said. "That's a long time ago."
Mike smiled and waved goodbye.
"Take it easy," Mike said. "And don't worry. Your secret's safe with me."
I walked the trail for the last time and watched from afar as Jim scooted ahead through the trees. He wasn't wasting a second.
When I made it to the bank, I saw the water creeping in. There were maybe three feet of mud for us to work with. Jim ditched six of the nine buckets, took three out into the soup, and got to it. Fast.
I thought about waddling in there again, helping him finish up. I thought about what he might be thinking about -- his father, his mother, his grandfather, Lena Blackburne, his favorite pitchers and their greatest games, the millions of moments just like this one that he'd taken in right here while the world spun and his kids grew up and loved ones suffered in hospital beds and he kept shoveling and shoveling until he felt like he'd pass out, fighting against the tide, hoping for a good, quick, quiet haul, and doing it by himself, unseen, unheard. Keeping this history a secret.
As I retreated to the big piece of driftwood that doubles as a bench, now content to sit, stay clean and watch him work, I thought about asking him one more time, "Jim, why do you do this?"
The sunlight hit his brow and the strain etched lines into his face as the sweat gathered on his forehead.
I didn't need to say a word.


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Submission + - What's the Higgs boson of biology? (nature.com)
scibri writes: For a biologist, what would be the equivalent of discovering the Higgs boson? What fundamental discoveries in biology would generate the same excitment that packed a lecture theatre in Geneva last year? Nature has some ideas, including life on other planets, and the origin of life here, but what to slashdotters think?


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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 22nd Apr 2010 22:53 UTC
Yesterday Phoronix showed proof of Steam's Linux client existence via its Mac OS X launcher that is currently in closed beta, then this morning they showed further signs of Linux support. Since 2008 it was known that Steam and the Source Engine would come to Linux. As an update, they even pointed out the download link for the Steam Linux binary from their store.
Permalink for comment 420528
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RE[2]: Really?
by nt_jerkface on Fri 23rd Apr 2010 18:54 UTC in reply to "RE: Really?"
Well, more than .1% of computers run Linux. Many Linux users pay for other software. Many Windows users only use Windows because of the games. If the games are cross platform, what incentive is there to stay with Windows?
Have you ever seen the game collection direct2drive has for the Mac? It has some great games but it isn't nearly as large as the library available for Windows, especially for new games. Given that Mac has at least 8x the marketshare of Linux there will be even less incentive for companies to port. At most it will be like the Mac where you have a lot of high selling casual games like The Sims being ported while missing some of the best pc games from recent years like Stalker.
If you want an alternative to Windows gaming then you should get a console. It's not as if Windows gaming is exactly healthy these days with so many games going straight to consoles.


text:
That isn't even close to a competitive balance. What you've created is the big 12 divisions. The South who beats up on each other making it more difficult to stay in the NC picture and then you've got the North who plays 1 game each year and coasts to the championship game. I would think they would balance them more than you've come up with. If not I for one will be very disappointed.
What is the alignment if Michigan-OSU are not together?
Try to do this yourselves. When I do it, I can only find one configuration that works for me at all:
- "East" -- PSU, OSU, Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern
- "West" -- Michigan, MSU, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska
I really think this is what the powers that be have in mind. Think about it -- if you separate OSU from Michigan then you pretty much have to keep Wisconsin in the division. Nebraska has to stay with Iowa, so it's done. The divisions are in fact geographically contiguous. All major rivalries are preserved within the divisions except one, or maybe two if you count MSU-PSU.
One problem with this is the reality that the winner of OSU-PSU will almost always play for the conference championship. How often will one of the others break that stranglehold? Twice a decade? Less? You're taking the two programs from the largest and richest football recruiting states in the Big Ten, both without in-state conference rivals, and isolating them in a division by themselves. Yeah, that will work!
What are they thinking?
I'm going to guess that they are thinking that this will create a competitive championship game every year. They are right -- the champions of the West are likely to be a very good team. But they will almost always have more losses than the East champion, due to more parity within their division.
While it's fun, the point of the game is not to knock OSU out of the national championship every once in a while. That is so 1969. The point is to beat them and not just go to the Rose Bowl, but go onto the national championship ourselves. These divisions work against that ultimate goal. Indeed, any Big Ten divisional alignment that separates Michigan and Ohio State has this same fatal flaw.
I guess Dave Brandon would argue that the primary goal of conference play is to win the Big Ten championship, no matter how the Wolverines get there. That's true. But to play for the BCS championship, most years Michigan will have to win three games against OSU/PSU. Strength of schedule might allow us one conference loss along the way if the SEC champion isn't in the same predicament. That's likely to be the new reality, folks. Get used to it.
I really dont see this alignment happening because your West is way too strong.The Indiana/Illinois schools will have to be split in the East considering these are traditionally the weakest schools.
One problem with this is the reality that the winner of OSU-PSU will almost always play for the conference championship.
Bingo. And there's our new marquee conference game. It will be played at the end of the season, with title implications for one or both teams virtually every year. (Sound familiar?) For PSU, it's everything they've ever wanted. For OSU, it won't be exactly the same as playing the UM right now (less history involved, obviously), but it's a pretty close substiute. Ten years from now, OSU fans will be focused primarily on beating PSU. Kids that grow up in Ohio will come to look at PSU as the natural alternative to OSU.
And for us? Our end-of-the-year rivalry becomes either MSU or Nebraska. This is absolutely a losing proposition for us. Brandon is a fool to want to go along with this.
the last game of the season in a fake rivalry game, while we played OSU in The Game for all of the glory on National TV.
Now I feel sorry for us. PSU just stole our rivalry game and gave us their fake rivalry game.
I have to wonder if maybe you have stumbled on the real, hidden reason behind this: Could it be that the Big Ten brass have come to the conclusion that Michigan's glory days are over, and that the Wolverines will not return to the top echelon of the conference? If they did, they might want to build up an OSU-PSU rivalry.
It sounds crazy, but it would explain a few things...
I think that's entirely possible. The reality is that we are more dependent on out-of-state recruits than either OSU or PSU are. Nebraska is even moreso. And while we've lost to OSU six in a row (ugh - that hurts just to type it), PSU beat them in '05 and '08. If the conference truly wanted competitive balance, it'd split up the two schools with the biggest natural recruiting advantage - but it probably has recognized, from watching the examples of the SEC and ACC, that you don't split up rivalries. If the Big Ten has (privately) decided that its two biggest commodities are OSU and PSU, then their actions would make a lot more sense.
For OSU, in the long run, this might not really affect their competitiveness much. For us, this is could pose major problems down the road. We're in danger of losing arguably the highest-profile rivalry in the country (a great recruiting drawing card), with a team from a talent-rich state, and we'll have to make do with either playing our mediocre in-state rival or a team from a talent-poor state (Nebraska). We could lose our status as the de facto alternative to OSU for Ohio kids. Brandon should be going absolutely ballistic over this instead of rolling over.
If they thought that then why would they care if Mich played Ohio State in the last game of the season because the likelihood of them playing again the next week wouldn't be high??
The last week of the season is Rivalry Week. That's where you want to showcase your biggest rivalry. And you want your biggest rivalry to be intradivisional, not cross-divisional, so that the game not only determines bragging rights but also affects the division standings.
If the Big Ten is convinced that PSU-OSU would make a better rivalry than UM-OSU, then they'll want them to play then.
This sounds plausible at first, but the more I think about it it reminds me of UFO files on History channel. Which is a terrible show. Seems too much like a conspiracy theory.
This is wierd, it is sounding like we are "breaking up" with OSU and she is already flirting with someone else. I don't care if OSU/PSU would make a great couple!
I take it Nebraska is our rebound.
We'll probably end up making Nebraska dress like OSU, and then calling Nebraska "Buckeyes" when we're doin' it. Nebraska will brush it off, but deep down will really be hurt.
it looks like our rebound will be that psycho stalker MSU.
We let her do us a couple times here and there, and now everyone thinks we should be "together".
If this is right -- big if -- then the official explanation would be PR spin designed to pacify Michigan supporters, and maybe Brandon himself. Don't think for a second that these people aren't capable of a little white lie...
This isn't based on the last three years of Michigan football. You seem to forget that four years ago The Game was a 1 vs 2 game, that was very close.
Big time recruits are sitting out there now, watching, and waiting to see if we turn the corner enough that they can commit to a stable situation with a national stage and the potential to win.
This whole decision is about money, and competitive balance. The last Big Ten team to win the National Championship is Ohio State. The one before that is Michigan. Then there is Nebraska and Penn State. These four have to be split up, and yes the distance between Penn State and Nebraska is an issue. Then throw in the added hype and revenue of that second Game that we all wish we had in 2006.
Me personally: I am all for OSU and Michigan playing for one division on the last day, and PSU and Nebraska playing for the other. Then the winners of both playing for the championship most years.
That said, if I were anyone else staring at being in a division with both Ohio State and Michigan, I am screaming my head off about the unfairness, and selling "it won't really impact Tha Game" and the "added revenue" as hard as I can.
Pardon my salty language, but fuck this "Michigan's glory days are over" bull shit. This is about money, competitive fairness to the other guys, and distance for PSU.
3-4 historically strong teams - OSU, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa - while schools like PSU will only have to play 1-2 - OSU, and a possible protected rivalry with Iowa or MSU.
The only way to achieve "Competitive Balance" would be to move Wisconsin or Iowa to the "East", which creates its own set of problems.
Didn't the Big Ten come out recently and say that geography won't play a big role in divisions?
You've got 5 of the 7 (traditionally) strongest teams in one division and only TWO (OSU and PSU) in another division with 4 tomato cans! This would be the WORST!
I don't think this scenario will play out. I truly can't imagine The Big Ten being stupid enough to lump NW, Indiana and Illinois all together.
I think Northwestern-Illinois get split as well, which is no major loss.
I think they're going for:
UMich-Nebraska, MSU-NW, Indiana-Purdue
OSU-PSU, Iowa-Illinois, Minny-Wiscy
The dashed pairs are the last weekend rivalry games.
I still hate it, but it does succeed in their stated goals. Minus preserving the greatest rivalry in sport.
sorry, but I think that's way off. They're not going to throw Nebraska into a pool of 5 other eastern teams, without Iowa, Wiscy or Minny. Iowa-Illinois!?!?
I do agree with you that Ill-NW might get split, that you hate the split you think they are going for, and that Mich-OSU is the greatest rivalry in sport. Hopefully they don't destroy it be separating them!!!
I know Illini consider Iowa to be a major rival right now, which is why I put that. But anything else splits up Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin, which to me would say the new Big Ten cares nothing about the brand of our historic rivalries
problem that I keep coming across when forming divisions (whether OSU and UM are together or separate) is the seeming necessity to keep Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota together, which forces you to keep Wisconsin, as well.
Nebraska and Minn already have the most history, Nebraska v Iowa is a no-brainer (The Corn Bowl), and Wisconsin MUST play Minnesota, and really wants to form a big time, end of the year rivalry game with Nebraska (Bielema, Alvarez spoke about it also).
So, I got to thinking... if we are dividing the "big 4" in half, the decision must be made as to "who goes" to the other side between Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Iowa. It probably has to be Iowa, they lack any geographical rivalry with those 3 worth saving year to year. So, a protected cross-over with Nebraska would be a must. Also, if Mich and OSU happened to split and PSU was with Mich, then Iowa would continue their recent rivalry with the Lions.
If the big 4 do not get divided, splitting geographically with OSU, PSU, and Mich together, you get the other 3 of the "big 6" in the other division with Minnesota. Also, you get to keep UI-NW and IU-PU together.
Nebraska-Iowa, UM-MSU, Minny-Illinois
Wiscy-NW, IU-Purdue, OSU-PSU
Crossovers: UM-OSU, Minny-Wiscy, Illinois-NW, MSU-IU, Iowa-Purdue (by default), PSU-Nebraska
Still sucks
I have seen this split suggested by several others now, and I have to say that it is absolutely absurd.
Jim Delany said that the number one factor in divisional splits would be competitive balance.
I don't see who anyone could look at this and say it is balanced. It would be a blantantly obvious money-driven decision, and I have a hard time believing that Delany could sell it to anyone as something else.
What I don't understand is this, they can split up the biggest rivalry in the history of the conference/sports, but they can't split up Wisconsin/Iowa/Nebraska? Can someone explain this to me?
I am not too worried about this at the moment because I honestly can't believe it could actually happen. I'm in wait and see mode.
And if this does happen at some point, I will instantly become a fan of further expansion in the hopes that the system would be revamped again.
agrees. Check out what was posted on the College Football Home page:
Everyone except Brandon thinks this is a bad idea. Someone needs to knock some sense into that man.
And PSU every two years. Two years on, two years off. We could play 5 or more top 25 teams every year.
The alignment of the Big Ten if Michigan and Ohio St. aren't in the same divisions, is purely chaotic evil.
More like Lawful Evil. However stupid and harmful we think the divisions are with UM and OSU separated it is still a system with a plan. Think Devil (LE) vs (CE) Demon.
Did you just go all D&D on our dumb asses?!?
KBLOW you are my new hero,
although, once I start drinking and blogging I pick a new hero every hour,
so there's that...
a D&D ref. haha. nice.
I've been away from D&D too long, so very good reminder.
I had convinced myself that what I outlined is what they are going to do. Now I have my doubts. Thanks, I think!
For me, there is just no good way to do it if you split up Michigan and OSU. It always degenerates into absurdity once you start trying to manufacture competitive balance.
The considerations:
1. Competitive balance
2. Traditional rivalries
3. Geography
It seems most speculations about this have geography and rivalries in mind at the start, equally with competitive balance. I think #1 will be weighted much more heavily than #2 and #3.
If we group the teams in three tiers considering competitive balance:
Tier 1:
Michigan, OSU, PSU, Nebraska
Tier 2:
Iowa, Wisconsin, MSU, Purdue
Tier 3:
Illinois, Northwestern, Indiana, Minnesota
So, splitting these up, and now considering traditional rivalries and then geography:
1. Michigan/OSU are headed to separate divisions and will play a cross rivalry game; OSU/PSU and Michigan/Nebraska are two huge rivalries in the making.
2. There will be at least three cross-division games, eventually four.
North Division:
Michigan, Nebraska, MSU, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Northwestern
South Division:
OSU, PSU, Iowa, Purdue, Illinois, Indiana
Now, rivalries needing a cross-division game:
Illinois-Northwestern (Sweet Sioux Tomahawk/Land of Lincoln Trophy)
Indiana-Michigan State (Old Brass Spittoon)
Iowa-Minnesota (Floyd of Rosedale)
Iowa-Wisconsin (Heartland Trophy)
Michigan State-Penn State (Land Grant Trophy)
Minnesota-Penn State (Governor's Victory Bell)
If I had to bet, I think you've got it. They were talking about this alignment on 1130 this afternoon. It really makes the most sense if you're going to split UM and OSU up. People are stuck on the whole Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota together thing, but if they're willing to split up UM and OSU, those three can compromise too. Basically, Iowa is not going to get to play Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa every year. It just doesn't work.
So "rivalry week" at the end of the season would end up being...
Michigan - Nebraska, Minnesota - Wisconsin, MSU - Northwestern, Indiana - Purdue, OSU - PSU, and Iowa - Illinois.
If all goes back to "normal" you could theoretically have de facto semi-finals in the UM/Neb and OSU/PSU games.
while obsessing about this last night I analyzed the last 17 years and averaged out the final standings for all Big Ten teams. For Nebraska I used their all time winning percentage, which puts them third (they have a better all time average than PSU)
I had a chart and everything, but now you've ruined that.
Seriously though, this is how I see it as well, with the exception that either there is two weeks between the last regular game and the championship (which means no week off in the middle) or they schedule in a Hawaii like game just before the championship.
I think that people greatly underestimate the amount of hate between Ohio and Michigan, and that it started before they played football. Which is a long long time ago, since the first game between these two teams was played on October 16th, 1897.
PSU-OSU is NOT going to eclipse THE GAME,
I suggest everyone go to Amazon and grab a copy of "The 100-Yard War", and then you'll realize that not only do we Hate Ohio State, but as the Leaders and Best, we were the first bastards, and I quote from "The 100 Yard War"
"No one at Regents Field on October 16th, 1897 could have possibly known that the first meeting between these two football teams would inaugurate a series of unforgettable games, one of the greatest rivalries in sports, and a century of drama that would play out over the next hundred years and beyond. But what the fans who packed into the 4-year-old athletic field down on South State Street did know was this: Michigan kicked Ohio State's ass."
and how badly did we kick their 19th century asses?
"[at halftime] The game was already in the bag at 34-0 [TD's were 4 points, then]...when OSU came out in the second half, they were in for an even bigger surprise: disrespect.
Michigan not only took out their starting players, but they proceeded to punt the ball on first down on just about every possession. The next day the newspaper justified Michigan's actions by saying they needed to give their defense some practice...OSU managed nothing more than a 5-yard gain in the rest of the game..the final score was the same as the halftime tally: 34-0"
And you guys probably thought Woody started the hate with, "Coach, with the score 48-14 why did you go for 2 points?"
"Because I couldn't go for 3"
yeah, you guys are probably right, the tradition that lasted for over 100 years is all over because we're not in the same division.
oh yeah, and get off my lawn!
PSU-OSU is NOT going to eclipse THE GAME
If those two teams are in the same division, and they play on the last week of the season, it absolutely will - and much faster that you'd ever think.
A big part of the tradition of UM-OSU involves the two teams deciding each others' fate on that last Saturday of the season. If we're in separate divisions, that goes out the window. A loss in a cross-division game doesn't matter if you clean up within your division. OTOH, a loss to a divisional rival can be devastating. Consequently, those become your most important games. Cross-divisional games are almost nonconference games. They simply don't mean as much. We'll be playing OSU for pride. PSU will play them for the division title.
OU-Nebraksa turned into mush and nothingness (not because they didn't play every year but because it, ultimately, didn't mean much since they were in different divisions) and the OU-UT game grew to, arguably, the biggest rivalry in CFB (yeah, I know, if we'd just win a few it wouldn't be but over the past 5+ years that game has meant more, sadly, to the national landscape than OSU-UM has and, as they say, the mob is fickle so 5+ years is about all they can handle). Right now we're the equiavlent of UT-A&M, if you move that game to seperate divisions it won't mean much of anything because you can't ruin each others seasons and, ultimately, hate is one of the things that makes a rivalry strong.
It's the time off that killed NU/OU, not the divisional setup. Think about it: with a two season "off" rotation, that's three calendar years between games. It's hard to keep a good frothy hate going over that kind of time span. You would be correct to point out that the divisional setup caused the time off, but being in separate divisions was really a very secondary point.
What also didn't help was that each year since the inception of the Big 12, with the exception of 2000 and 2001, one of NU or OU was terrible - that had a bit of a dampening effect, too.
Amen Brother
But now add ND/Missouri/Syracuse/Rutgers.
So now naturally ND and Missouri needs to go in the South and Penn St has another temper tantrum because North should get Rutgers/Syracuse.
I'm still holding out hope of a straight geographical split with possible upcomming Super Conference.
Geographical contiguousness is a distant third consideration, from everything Delany and the ADs have been saying. Competitive balance is going to shift back and forth through the years. But start with splitting the Big Four, and splitting Wisconsin and Iowa. MSU is with Michigan; Gophers on the other side (making the Jug game that much more sweet when it happens). Finally, you put Purdue and Indiana on one side, and Illinois and Northwestern on the other (a nod to geography). If you don't worry much about contiguousness, there are a lot of ways to plan for competitive balance.
If all of the league's primary rivalries are set up as protected cross-division games, the divisions can look pretty even.
Michigan - OSU
MSU - Penn State
Nebraska - Iowa
Wisconsin - Minnesota
Illinois - Northwestern
Indiana - Purdue
This keeps all but one existing permanent rivalry (Nebraska - Iowa replaces Wisconsin - Iowa) and provides plenty of competitive balance.
I came to the same conclusion and posted after so I wanted to chime in and point you. Neb being the NKOTB has no say so k no w how. They need to get spanked and spangled hard the year/decade they enter the conference. Iowa and Wisconsin can see this in a plus in different ways--Iowa gets a marquis matchup and Wisco gets the Hopkins stare and waits for the coaches command to devour the cuptakes. Minnesota with its new stadium should have something to say about this thanks to Belimna. And I recall, this game is for the axe which is my favorite one that's not a MI tilt. Go Gophers unless it's us.
As you were, play ball.
But UM and OSU with a protected cross-divisional rivalry on the last weekend of the regular season is the way to go. A rematch a week later will only happen every 6-8 years at most, and would be sweet when it happens. But spoiling the others' season by knocking them out of the BTC game would happen much more often. NOT moving The Game is a no-brainer, or so one would think.
The other season-ending cross-divisional rivalries would be Nebraska-PSU, Iowa-Wisconsin, and after that, who cares?
When Notre Dame joins the Big "Ten," it'll be so much easier, because they'll naturally be slotted in as Michigan's first B10 opponent of the year.
Why cross-divisional? If it's knocking the other team out of the BTC that you're after, you should want the two to be in the same division, so that only one can advance. If we're in two separate divisions and we play the last week, a lot of times the Game won't affect the standings at all, since all the intradivisional games would have already been played. Division games are where it's at. That's where rivalries belong.
OSU/Mich split, then I have:
OSU, PSU, Iowa, Illinois, Indy, Purdue
Mich, Neb, Wisky, MSU, Minn, NW
If OSU/Mich stay together:
Mich, OSU, Iowa, MSU, Indy, Purdue
Neb, PSU, Wisky, Minn, Illinois, NW (essentially, you could mix and match the 4 Indiana and Illinois schools, 2 here and 2 there...)
one thing that has been missed by a few people when thinking of Tier 1, Tier 2, etc is that Iowa and Wisconsin stand alone as underneath the big 4 and above everyone else, so splitting them would be necessary for the best "competitive balance"
Join the Facebook group "Don't Mess with the Ohio State/Michigan Game!"
They have email addresses for Delaney, Brandon, Coleman and Gee and Smith (OSU). I sent my emails. Does this call for picketing in the streets? This really isn't my province, since I'm living in Atlanta, GA. Is this change in The Game all really likely? I'm disturbed.
Here's how I've imagined it. Form 4 pods of 3 (just for strength purposes)
These are for the most part based on the ranking of the schools, but some of them were moved around a bit to try to accommodate rivalries. Now, group any two pods together and you should have relatively equal divisions. Each team can then play one cross divisional rivalry from the same row.
Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, MSU, Purdue
OSU, PSU, Iowa, Illinois, NW, Indiana
Then when they go to 9 games, you play the last cross-divisional game in the same row
I personally like putting the Michigan and OSU pods together, but any of the 3 combinations will work.


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^ Wow......THAT'S a nice pair!.......
Bump. This thread just keeps getting hotter. It needs starting up again!
More pics & more stories.
A few years ago, I was at a friends sleep over and during the night everyone was asleep. My friend invited 2 more of his friends and his cousin so I sneaked up to the other friend of his who is in the same year as us at school and slowly pulled away the sleeping bag, revealing him in nothing but boxers. I carefully slid my hand over him and started jerking him slowly. I stopped after a few minutes just to be safe but the best part was, he had a boner so I got to feel and jerk his rock hard erection.
Never seen anyone going commando and I'd love to experience a situation where they end up hanging out with me and showing me their dick (maybe further than that).
Pictures like this one where the exposure is unplanned turn me on no-end.
I remember years ago being a friends place and playing cards. I noticed that he was commando, his cock head had slipped out of his rugby shorts, but I didn't know how to tell him without causing an awkward moment. In the end his girlfriend took care of it when she said "Your mouse has escaped the house about 20 minutes ago honey." He tucked it away and wore underwear whenever I was over there after that
I found it funny when his girlfriend and I were talking later that night and she said to me "I hope you spotted his dick before I told him to pack it away. I didn't say anything sooner cause I wanted you to see what I get to play with every night."
I also prefer unplanned. Or careless (straight) guys. Not posed. But the guy needs to be confident or very careless for that. And then to catch it on a picture is even more rare.
Staged and set or photo fucked sucks.
But even if the subject goes commando and/or is aware he might be 'showing',
but is just going on about normally, it is stimulating. I commando most of the
time, not as a viewing issue but a personal comfort one. Someone sees some
thing...well, they ain't seeing nothing they haven't seen in the lavatory, the
stem-sauna-hot tub or maybe the mirror.
Staged shoots suck, but, we still look huh?
Accidental or I don't care who sees are totally different, even exhibitionistic
can be naturally hot if not set up for camera...JMHO and let the thread roll...
I could sit across from this guy all day long... ...
Is there going to be any more of these?
I kind of like them...
keep this going, like ones where the guys is unaware rather then the posed ones
I have been freeballing for 25 years and have always worn loose fitting shorts and never worried whether anybody could see up the pantlegs and see my balls hanging there. Its always an added thrill knowing that at the right angle your balls have been seen
I have always worn loose baggy shorts and have freeballing for 25 years now. I have never worried whether anybody can see up the legs to see my balls hanging there. It feels awesome to know that your balls are hanging just above the very bottom of your shorts and if you stretch at all your balls are going to be hanging outside the shorts
- - - Updated - - -
Love this time of year, shorts are out and I'm looking!
Up! Up! Up!
is there anyone else here who does this purposefully around particular ppl?
A guy was doing some house work and I noticed he wasn't wearing underwear so I took a picture and made the area up his shorts brighter and sure enough you can see his balls! Not the best quality but it's authentic!
^ Beav!
You're such a PERV!
Keep smilin'!!
WISDOM is the Knowledge you've gained ... After you could have used it! _Me
This is such an awesome thread and it's so hot when it is unplanned exposure. Unfortunately, it's fall now in my area and the summer clothes are going away.....can't wait again for shorts weather!


text:
The notion of killing living organisms for sport--for sport--appalls and horrifies me. I will never understand it. Never.
Game, by Maxine Kumin
Before he diedArchduke Franz Ferdinand,
gunned down in Sarajevo
to jump-start World War I,
bragged he had shot three
thousand stags and a miscellany
of foxes, geese, wolves, and boars
driven toward him by beaters,
stout men he ordered to flush
creatures from their cover
into his sights, a tradition
the British aristocracy
carried on, further aped
by rich Americans
from Teddy R. to Ernest H.,
something Supreme
Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, pudgy son of Sicilian
immigrants, indulged in
when, years later, he had
scores of farm-raised birds
beaten from their cages and scared
up for him to shoot down
which brought him an inner joy.
What happened
to him when he was a boy?
[From Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, (c) W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.]
I am so grateful for my life, for the opportunity to live, and I assume that other living things feel the same. Insofar as possible I try to refrain from unnecessarily taking the life of even so small a thing a spider. I often capture them in the house and release them outside (although I have no compunction against swatting flies and mosquitoes, plus I eat meat, so, yes, I am a hypocrite).
What did happen to these folks when they were children?


text:
A LARGE for sale sign advertising a multi-million dollar building in town was hard to miss in the window of Port City Realty.
The 6000 square-metre building on Buller Street, rented by Country Energy for a lazy $1.5 million a year, almost sold.
The real estate agency had plenty of bites from Sydney buyers, with one going right down to the wire with a more than $12 million offer.
But, the owners turned the offer down and have decided to keep the asset.