Thursday

Hard to believe that we're already a week past Thanksgiving.  I need to find a Readi-Med to pull these stitches out.

This used to be the time of year when I would meet my pal Wally in Vegas for a weekend to argue about the college football bowl games.  In the mid '80's, there were only 10 or so bowls and the line-ups were pretty much determined by conference champions.  Wally and I would sit in the Sports Book at Caesar's or the Tropicana and just have day-long, friendly arguments on different games.  We'd each pick a game and a team on an alternating basis.  $5 per game was the standard bet.  I don't remember either one of us making a lot of money off the other.

In those days, Wally and I would almost always talk by phone on Saturday mornings to pick one college and one pro game for the weekend.  Again, we'd alternate choices, $5 per game, and the bets would roll over week to week. 

I vaguely remember betting sheets back in my college days that would circulate around each week.  I'm thinking that there were definitely local "bookies" who ran those sheets and most towns had an underground betting system.  I know that there were some arrests in Iowa in the late '80's when the FBI did a "sting" on some guys in the IC area who were a little too active for the Feds to ignore.  Fortunately, I never participated in the organized (illegal) schemes.  My $5 bets with Wally were all that I could afford!

Thanksgiving weekend was also a time years ago when I ventured out to LA in alternating years (3-4 times, I think) to attend the ND-USC football game that would be played that Friday or Saturday when it was USC's turn for the home game.  I never got out there when I was a student.  I know I met Wally there a couple of times, and I remember that one of the games was played in steady rain that created a flow of water down the Coliseum rows of seats.  (I remember being impressed with the sophistication of some of the tailgate parties in the parking lots...and the rundown areas around the stadium.)

For the record, Margret has been placed in Winter storage over on Century Heights.  I just checked my records, and confirmed that I bought the car in June 2002.  That was a while back.

Not much else from here.  A cold front came in over night and we had a dusting of snow.  Looks like we may have seen the last of the 50 degree days for now.  Make it a Good Thursday.

BCOT