I am committed to earning my degree in architectural design from Stanford University and am on track to accomplish this at the completion of the spring quarter of 2012.Bully for him. It's nice to see that Luck sees himself as playing "college" football, rather than college "football." Of course, I'm in no position to speculate as to what ran through Luck's mind. Maybe he wanted to guard against the possibility of a single devastating injury completely killing his earning potential on the field. Maybe he didn't want to play for Carolina, who presumably would have taken him with the first overall pick in the draft. If so, I'm glad to see he followed the example of the elder Manning (who may or may not have wished to avoid the then dysfunctional Jets) instead of his brother (who publicly knocked the Chargers and A. J. Smith...wait, how did that turn out?). Maybe he wanted to see if he could get more money by waiting a year. Um...probably not. It didn't work for Jake Locker, and there's a good chance that the new collective bargaining agreement will have a rookie scale, à la the NBA. Whatever his reasons, Luck earns my respect for exemplifying the best that college athletics has to offer.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened across a story about Bristol Palin buying a house in Arizona. I don't have much use for or interest in anything the young mother chooses to do, but the particulars of the property and the transaction caught my eye. Five bedrooms for $172,000? On Long Island, I don't think you can purchase an outhouse for that sum. I looked in some recent open house listings in our local papers, and the lowest price I saw was $215,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bath - basically, a postage stamp.
Like the rest of the country, I hope Gabrielle Giffords makes a full and quick recovery. From what we know at this point, the shooter appears to be an unhinged wacko. That hasn't stopped the "corps of commentary folk" from decrying the political climate in the country. In particular, Keith Olbermann again exhibited his patented brand of unwarranted self-importance, adjudging Sarah Palin to bear some measure of responsibility. I've seen a couple of good responses defending the kind of "incendiary" speech at issue here, including Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast and Jack Shafer at Slate. But the best and most measured comes from Radley Balko at The Agitator. The post compares the events in Arizona with various standard operating procedures of the "War on Drugs." His last paragraph:
That said, I long for the day that our political and media figures get as indignant about innocent Americans killed by their own government—killed in fact, as a direct and foreseeable consequence of official government policy that nearly all of those leaders support—as they are about a government official who was targeted by a clearly sick and deranged young man. What happened this weekend is not, by any means, a reason to shunt anti-government protest, even angry anti-government protest, out of the sphere of acceptable debate. The government still engages in plenty of acts and policies—including one-sided violence against its own citizens—that are well worth our anger, protest, and condemnation.Hear, hear.
