Wednesday

One of my objectives with this entry is to evaluate Blogger from the laptop.  That experience yesterday morning when I was finalizing the post about the fair racing was just bazaar.  When I added that pic of the midget racer, the system wouldn't free it from the cursor...it was just going wherever I drug the mouse.

No similar problems tonight.   Welcome to technology.

Toby Keith brought in an estimated crowd of 28K last night.  (They really don't have an accurate count as entry into the fairgrounds does not necessarily mean that everyone will go to the concert.)  I wonder how long it took people to exit the place.  Josh Turner tonight.

The Pope has been visiting Rio de Janeiro to celebrate World Youth Day.  This pic of the crowd on the beach is impressive.  I'm guessing that they didn't have an exact count on attendance there either. 

When Pope John Paul visited Iowa in 1979, Mother and Daddy made the trip to Living History Farms in Des Moines for the outdoor Mass that he celebrated there.  The records that I was able to access this evening suggest that the crowd was North of 300,000, perhaps close to 350,000.  Mother had a commemorative book of the Pope's visit that she kept on the coffee table for years.

The only pictures that I found that captured the size of the Iowa crowd were like this grainy aerial shot.  I know that they shut down the roads and just Interstate-parked the hundreds of buses that brought the people in from across the Midwest.

(I may have noted here years ago that the Pope was in Chicago prior to his visit to Iowa.  We called it "Pope-fest" for the crowds that gathered wherever he went in the city.  That being a play on "fest" terminology used for all of the various events that C-town hosts each year.  From my un-openable office window 24 floors up from street-level, I could hear the roar of the crowd as he stepped from the "pope-mobile" and walked into a downtown church one evening.  It was really a little surreal.)

Moving on...

For that Augie basketball trip to Rio that kicks off next week, Coach G is taking his family...wife and three sons...two now going to Drake and one still in high school.  The high school kid is doing an Eagle Scout activity on the trip...giving out T-shirts that he has collected to needy folks in areas that they will be visiting.  Hearing about the project, @srh4, my pal Bill and I all added a bag of extra tee's from our supplies to the effort.  Here, Here for this Eagle Scout!

Now off to bed to get shut-eye.  That early ride tomorrow won't be easy.  It was dark and foggy this AM.  This time of year, you get that heavy, dewy morning air.  My glasses never cleared-up on the ride.  This evening, I tried to buy a head lamp at the bike shop on Devils Glen, but the store was closed, and the clerk, who didn't know I was a friend of the owner, had no interest in re-opening his cash register.  So it will be another morning of the first 30 minutes in the pea soup.

Thanks for reading.

BCOT