Mid-Daily Item: 'Bear'-ly suppressing a wince

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John Finnerty August 06, 2007 12:37 pm

— I bet the bear didn’t think it was funny. But the story in the paper tells us: “One contestant, a 14-year-old boy, hit the bear twice in the crotch, prompting chuckles from his fellow competitors.”
Luckily, it was a wooden bear.
This is the kind of humor one finds at a Mountain Man competition.
The event kicks off the West End Fair near Laurelton. The fair continues all week.

-- I make fun of dumb criminals fairly regularly. So today, let’s give props to a smart one. A guy in Denver had the bright idea of getting library cards using fake names. Then selling the items he borrowed.
Brilliant! To quote a beer commercial, as it were.
He apparently checked out 300 items. Under each of the seven fake names.
Which ends up being a lot. A librarian estimate their loss at $35,000.
So how’d he get busted?
Someone who bought books from him noticed that her acquisitions were actually library books. And she blew the whistle.
Too bad our hero didn’t anticipate that development.

-- I don’t know much about football. So I was surprised to learn that a college might actually not admit a football player who had been offered a scholarship. But it happened in South Carolina. And the coach, it seems, is a little annoyed . And who can blame him? Obviously the kids can play football, otherwise he wouldn’t want them on his team. So what right could the university have to say they cannot enroll? How backwards can you be?
Oh, and by the way, the incident has led to some murmuring that the real problem is that South Carolina offered more scholarships than it had available. But Steve Spurrier, the football coach at South Carolina is adamant: “That is not true.”

-- That got me a-wondering how the poll-voting people expect Penn State to do this year. Turns out, Penn State is ranked 18th in the USA Today preseason poll.

-- Turns out, Yao Ming’s wife is very tall. Which might be fortunate because Yao is very taller.
Mrs. Yao is 6-foot-2. Her husband is still well over a foot taller than her.
Yao, you might know, is the center for the Houston Rockets. He is 7-foot-6.
The AP tells us, they have been romantically linked for a while.
“The ceremony and banquet were attended by about 70 friends and relatives,” The story tells us. It was such a small ceremony, that there were more reporters (100 fhem! Yikes!) waiting outside than people allowed inside.

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