Past, present and future

So we're going to hit a few topics briefly in this blog as I've got some real work to do.

First,

Past

As many of you know prior to taking my current position at IMG, I was a sports reporter/editor.

In that job I dealt a lot with high school sports. Recently the Ohio High School Athletic Association has put forward a proposal to help "level the playing field" between private and public schools and, of course, I've got an opinion on it.

The general thought is that this needs to be done because between 1999 and 2010, 43 percent (146 of 340) of the state championships in selected team sports were won by non-public schools, even though non-public schools make up only 17 percent of the total membership of the OHSAA.

I wish I had the time and energy to see what percent of schools from north of Columbus win state title compared to what percent the represent. Or what percent of schools that wear orange win compared to their total percentage.

Admittedly, being a private school has it's advantages. The kids at privates schools are often but not always better disciplined, better educated and come from better socioeconomic backgrounds.

What anti-private school fans say is that the real advantage lies in being able to draw kids from all over a region instead of a small area as many public schools do. This was once true.

Now, a school can have open enrollment and to use Scioto County as an example, you can just about go anywhere. In the last three years one kid went from Portsmouth, to Wheelersburg and back. Another kid went from Portsmouth to somewhere in Columbus and back. Yes private school Notre Dame picked up an athlete from public East High School but on the other hand a pretty stellar football star who lives (or at least grew up) in the Northwest school district played his four years at West.

Yes the private schools can draw from all over but don't be so jaded as to think that an idiot with no money can attend a private school just because he can dunk. If the kid has the grades, there is academic scholarships and if his parents are rich there's no problem. The financial and academic restraints however at least partially cancel out the lack of having a district to draw from.

The real issue though is this. While I am all in favor of fair play, making it harder on private schools as the OHSAA proposal (viewable here http://tinyurl.com/OHSAAPDT ) will do simply cheapens any state title won by a public school.

Once these rules are adopted and a title is won by a public school, the kids will still enjoy and a community will still be happy but it will be a little less special. In sports kids learn that to be the best, you have to beat the best.

I guess in the OHSAA world to be the best you only have to beat the best you're required to face after implementing rules to reduce your competition....doesn't have the same ring.

Present

I am settling into the hours of my new job a little better. I was a little late today because of an alarm clock mixup but it's all good. I used to get up around 11 or noon each day and now it's 6:15 sharp every morning. Not easy.

I am building the America East Conference basketball tournament championship program as my first project and it's going along.

Last Kelli had a job interview today and if that works out, I might be able to pay back all you people I owe money.

Future

You guys remember the movie Jurassic Park? Cloning dinosaurs and what not.

Check this out

"A group of international scientists believe they are about six years away from being able to resurrect the mammoth.

Scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States have extracted a tissue sample from a mammoth carcass that has been preserved in a Russian laboratory. They hope to take DNA from the sample and insert it into the eggs of an African elephant in the hopes of producing a mammoth embryo.

The mammoth last lived on Earth about 10,000 years ago and roamed in parts of modern-day North America and Eurasia."

That's right we're bringing back the mammoth. While these herbivores aren't likely to go all angry velociraptor on our butts, maybe it's time we as a society sit down and talk this over. How far are we willing to go? We clone mice and sheep and other things so I guess a mammoth isn't that big of a deal as long as we just make the one.

But it's not a far cry to get from making one to trying to repopulate a species. When animals die off, it's for a reason. I'm not sure we should be messing with that.

Also in the future

We better get flying cars. Just saying. It's a long overdue promise.

What if God was one of us.... we're talking religion sorta

So today we're talking vaguely about religion and we'll start with the topic of 90 percent of all facebook statuses yesterday.

The Zodiac

Apparently some people think their zodiac signs changed and some people say they didn't and some say they did in the east and some say who cares because we use the west and bla bla bla bla bla.

All of that gets a mostly disinterested "hmm" statement from me. What is very interesting however was the reaction.

The crazy knee jerk flip out even effected me. Just last night I said F*** being a libra, I'm a scorpio. My wife Kelli was intrigued as well.

Why did so many of us react this way? I'm Catholic, Kelli is Christian, at least one of the posters on my feed was an atheist.

Outside of the new age crowd, no one believes that your sign has anything to do with anything. On the other hand I cannot disprove astrology just as much as one of its followers cannot disprove God but I digress.

We all seemed to really care. I have seen news stories come and go about possible findings of Noah's ark's landing site or the real final tomb of Jesus and facebook doesn't light up like that. Tell a taurus they might be something else however, they'll say you're full of bull.

Santo Subito

That's itallian or latin for sainthood now. That was the cry of thousands in April of 2005 after the death of Karol Wojtyla, better known to the word as Pope John Paul the Second.

Seen as a man of the times, he was a major factor in the cold war, he was a force for dialogue between different faiths, he survived an assassination attempt, brought the church up to date on evolution, upheld the sacrament of marriage while simultaneously maintaining the inherent dignity of gays and died with the utmost dignity, he may soon be recognized as a saint.

John Paul II (JP2) is one of my all time favorite religious people. He was the rock star pope, the athlete pope. He brought a 2,000 year old church into the new millennium with class.

The recent announcement that the Vatican that JP2 will be beatified the Sunday after Easter made me very happy. JP2 canonized more saints than all his preceding popes to 1598 or something like that combined because he wanted more modern saints on the ledger. He wanted saints that young people today could look to for strength and conviction.

It's all well and good to consider St. John the Baptist as a role model but in this day and age running out to the country in sack cloth and dunking people in a river doesn't resonate.

The confirmation of a nun's miraculous cure from parkinson's disease after praying to the late pontiff was the catalyst for beatification. One more miracle from JP2, who suffered from parkinsons', must be confirmed before he would be officially recognized a saint.

It is important to mention here that the church and the pope do not make saints, they merely give official recognition to those where it can prove it. In the Catholic Church, canonization involves a decree that allows veneration of the saint in the liturgy of the Roman Rite throughout the world. If JP2 is was to be a saint, he was or was not at the moment of his death.

Anyways, I hope that churches around the globe celebrate his beatification and pray that his eventual (I hope) sainthood energizes a church that needs some energy right about now.

A book anyone with a serious interest in religion should read

Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times is a great book by journalist Peter Seewald.

It is an interveiw over the course of a week with current pope Benedict XVI and Seewald doesn't pull punches.

Among the questions:

What caused the clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church?

Was there a "cover up"?

Have you considered resigning?

Does affirming the goodness of the human body mean a plea for "better sex"?

Can there be a genuine dialogue with Islam?

Should the Church rethink Catholic teaching on priestly celibacy, women priests, contraception, and same-sex relationships?

Should there be a Third Vatican Council?

Is there any hope for Christian unity?

Is Christianity the only truth?

Can the Pope really speak for Jesus Christ?

How can the Pope claim to be "infallible"?

And more... If you are a student of world religion, an interested catholic or just a global minded person with an interest in what the spiritual leader of 1 billion people thinks about different things, read this book. Kudos to my lovely wife who bought it for me for Christmas.

False Phrophets

The Westboro Baptist Church, also known as those idiots that protest soldiers funerals, will not protest at the funeral of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green who died in the Arizona shooting last week. They also won't protest the funeral of a judge who died in the same event.

In exchange they got live radio interviews on several stations. Guess we've changed our tune about not negotiating with terrorist...I exaggerate. Seriously though, if we all just ignore them, they really might just go away.



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Good lunch, and good day.

Remember when the F-word was funny?

While there were several good suggestions for blog topics today, there was no consensus so I made up my own.

Remember when the F-word was funny?

Ok maybe if you didn't believe it was funny you at least remember when it meant something. The F-word was like the last frontier in taboo language. It was the holy grail of words we coudn't say as kids.

Now outside of professional settings you can't go 10 minutes without hearing it. It doesn't bother me that people curse, hell I curse. What bothers me that we ran the F-word into the ground so bad that now we need to come up with a new profane statement.

But let me back up to the funny part.

In the 1995 movie "Casino," the F-word is said 422 times. Goodfellas is up there too. According to Wikipedia, a documentary on the word itself has the record with 824 mentions.

Both of those are good movies and the gratuitous use of the f-word made sense in them, but it didn't have any oopmh.

The comedy (discounting those you haven't heard of) with most usages of the f-word is actually the Big Lewbowski, a personal favorite. Even Lebowski though makes the F-word just another word.

In another personal favorite movie, "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," if I recall the F- word was used once — here.

"Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no. We're all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We're gonna press on, and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye. And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse."

And that one use in a movie that didn't use it often made it really work. Now the only taboos are PC words. The great thing about the F-word was that it on some level used to offend everyone. So when it got used it seemed funnier.

MASH was one of the first mainstream films to use the word. Who can forget the line in Blue Velvet "F*** you, you F****ing F***!"

What was once taboo is now something our parents say. Crazy. Used to be we all had the friend with the guts to say it in front of his folks and we'd all have a good laugh.

And even though we've diluted the F-word down to nothing you still can't say it on daytime tv or radio and if you put it in a film it will effect your rating.

I haven't even typed it yet because you never know who reads what online and I just don't need to take flak from anyone.

We need to create an organization for taking back the coolness of what used to be a pretty bad ass word. In fact the organization could be about fixing the entire language

We could call it Fostering Understanding and Care for the King's English.

Eh?

F*** it I'm going back to work. :)

Shootings, shame and the situation of American Politics

By now I hope everyone is aware that Arizona Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was shot and nearly killed by a deranged young man during the past week.

While she was hit, several, including a 9-year old girl, were killed during the rampage.

The media is always trying to sensationalize what it can to get ratings. I don't begrudge them this, if they don't make money, they won't exists. Nevertheless, the way the media jumped on this shooting as an example of the polarization of American Politics was premature.

We know a few things about the shooter, Jared Loughner. We know he was alienated from friends, was rejected from the military for a failed drug test and that he had two minor run-ins with police several years ago.

What we still don't know is why he shot and killed several people. Some friends have called him a nihilist, some said he believed that dreams not reality we what mattered. None have said that Sarah Palin, Glen Beck or on the other end Keith Olberman had anything to do with it and shame on the media for jumping to that conclusion.

Contrary to what it seems most people think, most in the media really aren't out with an agenda. They want to get the facts right. In this instance, NPR actually reported that Giffords was dead and everyone jumped on the blame politics bandwagon.

But here's the thing. They could be right about politics. Until Loughner speaks or more evidence is released, we don't know why he did it.

We are in fact living in a time of political craziness. In Iran right now Christians are being rounded up for their beliefs and in China, a political dissident recently just "disappeared." In Mexico they can't seem to keep a mayor of police chief alive for more than 24 hours because of drug violence.

When you look at all that I guess we're doing ok. But just because it's not the worst here doesn't mean it's not bad. What good can come when we are governed by a system that allows something like 8 months of governing between election cycles. What can come from a system where beating the other team beats helping those you represent?

Hell what good can come from blogging about it? Even if you showed this to everyone on earth it's just stuff they already know. And knowing it, most still believe that one side is good and the other bad. So please read one of the following statements depending on your political views.

1. Newsflash for the hippies: Barrack Obama and the Democrats aren't saints, George Bush wasn't satan and sometimes the right answer is on the other side of the aisle. Keith Olberman is an idiot.

2. Newsflash for Neocons: Regan didn't rise on the third day and that's ok. Obama is an American and he's not going to eat your children. Sometimes we have to pay taxes and making the rich pay more is ok. Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh are not reliable sources of information.

I think a common theme of these blogs will be me saying I don't know how to fix the problems I blog about but I think that's good. Today everyone thinks they have the answer. Well I don't but I'm willing to think about it, and to think for myself using information provided by those who know more than me, not by talking heads on tv and radio.

So again I don't know how to fix the political climate. We can ban idiots from talking, that's unconstitutional. We can't force people to become intelligent, that goes against the idea of freedom.

So since I don't know what to do I will leave you with the wise words of a movie that came out in 1976 and rings true today. The film is Network and the man speaking is Howard Beale played by Peter Finch.

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be........I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting] 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

A thought about Millennials

The second post of what will be my weekly lunchtime blogs. I do not have time to edit, sorry for the errors.

A thought on Millennials

Millennials is a term used to define people of my generation. By some estimates it can range from people born in the late 1970s to those born in the early 2000s and while this is a wide gap, there are significant similarities for all.

I don't want to delve into what a Millennial is however as much as I want to point out two things I noticed in a news article I read earlier this lunch.

The article was about an out of work recent law school grad with a quarter million dollar debt who works odd jobs and really doesn't even bother trying to pay all his bills and it made me think a little.

First, to many of our generation, at least those of us that went to college, debt is a way of life. Most kids I knew growing up had parents with second, third and fourth mortgages and those kids without great GPAs went to college on loans with the idea we'd get jobs. And most of us did find jobs.... but instead of paying 35,000 to 40,000 out of the gate we were making 20,000 to 25,000.

Second, we shouldn't have bothered in the first place, but we have huge egos. Millennials weren't without parents and other older folk warning us about loans. Most of those who went into dying fields (journalism anyone) or fields with undergrad degrees bereft of marketability (art, history, psychology) ended up for the most part with no decent paying job option just as they were warned. A handful of course always make it.

But that's the great and terrible thing about our generation. We believe that we will be the one who makes it. I had a teacher in high school tell me as kindly as she could that newspapers weren't likely to be paying much when I graduated college. I thanked her and said "Yeah but they haven't met me."

What hubris.

We all have our own personal stake of blame for our situations if we're not doing well, but some of our attitudes and ego issues go back a generation. It was the later end of the Millennial generation that started getting trophies just for showing up. Our parents often struggled for loving support from their more reasonable parents, so with the best of intentions they told us to chase our dreams. Look where that got us, eh?

So if we had all moved back in with our folks and not gotten married, then in about 15 years from graduation we could probably start our lives, but Millennials wanted more than that and so we didn't wait.

What that does now is leave most of us in a world of debt. I read that 65.4 percent of students from 1999-2000 borrowed money for school (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2619/) and while I don't have data handy, I bet that number has gone up.

And without the well paying jobs we expected, we're broke. Broke, broke, broke, broke, brooooooke.

Like the law student I mentioned earlier, many have turned to simply ignoring creditors. I pay my student loan faithfully because a family member was kind enough to co-sign and I don't want to mess up their credit, but old hospital bills and other creditors trying to find me, If I don't have the money, I don't answer the phone.

It's not a lack of responsibility either that leads folks like me and the law student to this point. If I could afford it, I'd pay every debt I owe right now. But it is more important to keep the rent payment up to date, to keep car insurance and pay for gas so I can get to work to at least pay for those things.

I don't know what the answer is. Allowing grads to declare bankruptcy on their student loans would be disastrous for the loan companies so that will never happen.

All I know for certain is that I made mistakes in how I chose to finance college and in the major I went in to. On top of that the economy went bad and I was raised with slightly unrealistic expectations. Put it all together and it means things suck right now.

But I mentioned millennials have a high self confidence and I fall squarely into that generation.

I'll figure it out eventually. I'm sure most of you will too.

Lunchtime with me

Ok so the new plan for this blog is for me to take about 20-25 minutes of my daily one-hour lunch to blog about whatever comes to my mind that day.

This first one I guess we'll start with an about me section.

I think a post or two back I did the same thing so we'll be quick. My name is John Stegeman, my wife's name is Kelli. I was born and raised in Cincinnati, graduated from Shawnee State, worked as a sports writer/sports editor for six years and just recently became a project manager at IMG College in Lexington, Ky. where I build and edit sports publications for the NCAA and a whole bunch of major colleges.

My favorite sport is pro baseball but given my new job I've decided to become a college sports fan again.

See as a sports writer it's kind of tough to be a fan. When you look at the game objectively, you don't think you're team was screwed on every call by the refs and watching the way your fellow fans act is a turnoff. Also, when you cover sports 8-10 hours a day, the last thing you want to do when you get home is turn on the game.

But I've been out of the sports writing game for a couple weeks now and I can already feel the interest in sports starting to come back.

The question now is do I root for UC, Xaiver or OSU, or embrace the bluegrass and root for UK....

More on this to come. Thanks for reading, just a little more than four hours til quitting time.

Back to work.

still active

I am posting to reiterate my belief that I will one day soon use this blog.

Stand by til then I suppose.