Friday

Hello Summer!

Lots of stories in the papers this week about the Summer Solstice, including midnight baseball in Alaska. These are wonderful days with all the daylight. Now it's the slow march to the shorter days.

Hope the get-together in Minnesota goes well. Drive safe.

The Indy cars are over in Newton, Iowa for the first major race at the new track this weekend. The track is a 3/4 mile oval with a road-course also cut into the venue. The Indy cars will run the oval. Danica Patrick and all the names of the recent Indy 500 are there for the event. This is open-wheel racing compared to the stock cars of NASCAR. (The track is not too far away from the I-80 motel that we would stay at when we made the trips to Adventureland.) The owners dream for a major NASCAR race, but they'll be lucky to get the Busch cars for a weekend.

I see where Tim Floyd has offered a basketball scholarship to USC to an Illinois kid who just got done with 8th grade. I guess this is the second year that he has made such an offer. I always liked Floyd, but this sounds fishy at best.

We had a tree service come in and do some thinning out of damaged trees on the West side of our office park. The combination of age, disease, and storms had brought on the need. The owner of the business said that they had stopped providing service on the Illinois side for fear of bringing the ash bore into Iowa. That's an insect that has been destroying ash trees in states East of here. And will likely be in Iowa in a year or so. Mom has three ash trees in her back yard. The cynic in me puts the over/under on her getting the ash bores at four years.

A couple of yahoos on ESPN radio, Mike & Mike In The Morning, had the one Mike payoff his NCAA basketball bet to the other Mike yesterday by milking a cow on the show. You can imagine the hype and the double entendres for the event. From a dairyman's perspective, my reaction is, "So what?" Just another example of why sports talk radio guys are only a centimeter or so above slugs in the genus system. (The fact that one of the Mike's is an ND grad gets them no points. He probably took the same Underwater Basket Weaving classes that they serve up for the student/athletes in IC).

Genus was not misspelled above. Actually, in the sentence as presented, it could be genus or genius, and the gist would be the same. Think about it.

Speaking of sports, it appears the a D-1 baseball player can change schools and not have to sit out a year for the transfer. There was a least one player in this year's College World Series who was there last year on a different team. I know that they have issues with the modest number of scholarships that each school can have (11.5, I think), but unlimited transfers is a bit risky. Where the NCAA is involved, rules do not have to make sense.

Off for the evening. Maybe a little ride and then some Tuscan red.

Be careful out there.