thenarrator asked:

I’ve got a question: In most states you’re limited to four years of high school “participation.” Small schools are allowed to play 8th graders, but if they do, they need to miss one year of high school (in Michigan they’d need to miss one full year-every sport, but in other states just in that sport). I assume Minnesota allows a high school athlete to play as many years as she/he wants?

Here’s the rule as stated in the MSHSL Eligibility

16. *SEASONS OF PARTICIPATION — No student may
participate in more than four (4) seasons in any sport while enrolled
in grades 9-12, semesters 1-8 inclusive.
17. *SEMESTERS IN HIGH SCHOOL — A student shall not
participate in an interscholastic contest after the student’s eighth
semester in grades 9-12 inclusive. All eight semesters shall be
consecutive, beginning in the 9th grade. The attendance of 15 days
or more in one semester will count as a semester in administering
this standard.
18. JUNIOR HIGH PARTICIPATION — Participation in high
school interscholastic programs is limited to students in grades 7-12
inclusive. Students in grade 7, 8 and 9 may participate if enrolled
in the regular continuation school for the educational unit and if all
other eligibility requirements of the League have been met.
Elementary students in grades 1-6 are not eligible for participation
in any MSHSL-sponsored activity; B-squad, junior varsity or
varsity level.

I was wondering the same thing and I looked it up on the MN State High School League site. Yes I think one can play as early as seventh grade (my bosses daughter was the #1 runner for a big school in CC this year as a seventh grader, many of the top girl CC runners are very young). I know April Calhoun played at our HS from 8th grade on. Didn’t seem to hurt her much, she’s an Academic All American with a 4.0 average at the Carlson School of Business.

I think there may be a problem with the system that produces these young phenoms, but like I said, it wouldn’t be much fun for anyone to make a player like Tayler play with kids her own age, so I think you really have to advance them. Seems like our culture is producing world class athletes that are younger and younger, tennis, swimming, golf, gymnastics and now hoops. One of the problems is specialization too early. That wasn’t April’s problem, she lettered in four sports, was all conference in three. I’m not saying I like it or that it’s right, but it is a fact.

You should see the hockey in this state, many kids leave home to play Junior A because they don’t feel that high school is played at a high enough level of competition. Wow, have you seen MN high school hockey?!? I think that parents are a big part of the problem, too impatient for their kids to develope into top athletes. There is a proposal in the state legislature to remove sports from schools and have them be community based. I don’t like that either.

It might be wise to limit the out of season club participation that forces kids to make a choice of which sport to specialize in at too early an age. Some of the parents I know joke about how it’s too late to get into hockey when you’re five. I think others aren’t joking. Elite teams are also a problem. The three sophmores on the Gopher Women’s BBall team all played together on the same AAU team the won the national under 17 title. Kelly Roysland is from Fosston, which is about as far away from the cities as you can get in Minnesota, while most of the other players were from the city. I will say this for club soccer, our local organization has supported 3 teams at Quinn’s age level all the way through U17, which gives 50 girls the chance to play a team sport. On the other hand they have a girl that was on the State ODP (Olympic Developemnet Program if you can believe that) was playing up a year on a Premier team and just quit soccer completely because it was consuming too much of her life.

And yet, the whole thing is kind of like nuclear proliferation. No one wants to blink first. Fifteen or twenty years ago the Gopher hockey program which was famous for winning national championships with home grown talent suddenly went on a draught. “What’s happening to Minnesota hockey?” was the cry. They’re producing more and better players in Michigan and Massachusetts, we have to keep up. So now hockey is a year ’round sport and you pretty much have to play it exclusively. Guess what, we’re back to winning championships. It all goes back to when the Russians started whipping us in so many sports, it became a national priority to keep up. So, yes, I think the problems largely come from too early and too much emphasis on winning. When I coached, we’d always give the parents the spiel about not being too competitive and emphasizing fun over winning, but as soon as you lost some games, you’d start getting the remarks and suggestions and the questions about what’s wrong. I’m conflicted about youth sports, I love them…I hate them.

I’ll stop rambling now. Tayler’s team lost today. She scored 19. I’ll keep you posted on her career.

Tayler Hill is an eighth grader. She’s 5’9″ and plays for the Minneapolis South Tigers. She was selected as a first team all-metro player. She lead the City Conference, averaging 21 ppg. She’s also cute as a button. She’d look great in Maroon and Gold!

She’s in the State Tournament as are the two Gopher recruits for next year, Katie Ohm, from Elgin-Millville who broke the all time Minnesota career scoring record this year and Ashley Ellis-Milan a 6’2″ power player last year got 24 rebounds in a game against a very tough Minneapolis North team.

I love March!

After watching the Gopher Women beat Ohio State in the Big 10 tourney, I needed to get out on this beautiful day, so I drove over to the campus to shoot some shots of the river.
Some views of the UofM from the West Bank and a railroad bridge turned foot bridge across the Mississippi. The shiny building is the Weisman Museum of Art.

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After a couple of weeks the hillbilly got off and was replaced by a younger, much taller mate, who probably had been to college and not prison. I’m sure he considered himself pilot material and was just biding his time. He was much more relaxed about the working conditions, but I managed to have my run-ins with him as well.

On my off-watch, when I wasn’t sleeping, I spent time drawing the mechanical parts of the boat, mostly down in the engine room. When the captain and the mate found out that I could draw they started asking me to do some drawings from the numerous softcore porn mags in the crew lounge. I think I did one and they came back with another assignment for me. At that time drawing from photos was beneath me (now I think drawing from photos is better than not drawing at all) I considered the whole thing ridiculous and had not yet perverted my art to do anything so crass as an assignment. I refused to do anymore, telling them that it wasn’t really the kind of art that I was interested in. The mate towered over me and was probably in his late twenties and fit. He got angry. He insisted. I continued to refuse. He told me that he could put me out at the head of the tow (it was late November) and make stand out there as a “lookout” for the rest of my trip. I looked him in the eye and said, “Are you threatening me? ‘Cause if your threatening me, go ahead, put me out there, I don’t give a shit because I’m not going to draw your fucking nudie pics for you.”

I think I must have said the magic word, because he immediately replied, “I wasn’t threatening you!” And he repeated that declaration about five times in five minutes, making sure everyone heard him. Now I must say that in spite of what I think about unions now, the International Maritime Union probably saved my ass that day. Or at least my artistic integrety. I think that unions are most important in dangerous jobs like that.

Those of you who know me in the analogue world probably are chuckling over my claim to even having artistic integrity. Today the first words out of my mouth would be, “What’s in it for me.”

Check out this series of photos. That’s about the size of the boat I was on. But we never did anything like that! Although we did get a call one night that a couple of barges had gotten loose on the river and we needed to go corral them. We had to pull one off a bridge abuttment that it was stuck against sideways to the current. One of my big adventures.

Click here for: The Wonder of Me

When I worked on the river, well it really wasn’t the river, it was the Chicago Area Sanitation Canal, fondly referred to as the Shit Ditch, I worked on a team that consisted of the pilot, the mate and two deckhands. We worked six hours on and six hours off. I was a deckhand, both of us were on our first trip. Our mate was this little hillbilly who had spent time in prison. Lot’s of river rats had, the union hall is in Joliet after all. Stories had it that he had once stormed the bridge an beat up the pilot. Many pilots packed heat in those days.

Other than cleaning the kitchen, we only worked when we were going through a lock or making or breaking tow. That is picking up or dropping off barges. Our job was to rig them, wrapping line and wire (rope and cables) around bulkheads and tightening them with giant come-alongs, using a pipe for increased leverage. The mate took pride in working fast and that meant getting to work quickly after the boat got into position. Getting into position meant sliding a tow of several gigantic barges into a tight area. That meant crashing into the bank (often a cement wall) or other barges. The impacts were heavy and put incredible stress on the rigging. The mate always wanted us to jump out and be ready to start working as soon as we came to. If a wire or a line snaps under that sudden incrediible tension, it could decapitate you so fast that it would make your head swim.

So picture two twenty two year old kids cowering behind the cover of the barges superstructure, being cursed by a red faced forty year old with the reputation of a violent lunatic. Each of us was about twice his size, but we were terrified of him. We were actually doing what we were trained to do, and we stood our ground. But I like to think we cranked like hell when things settled down enough to get to work.

I’ve given up. A couple of years ago I quit playing hoops. Not only because I’d lost so many steps that I couldn’t even keep up with the other old guys that I was playing with, but also because an hour of ball would result in four days of pain. I thought I could continue playing tennis, but recently it’s become apparent to me that that’s not true either. My knees are just too shot. I don’t have a slow first step. I don’t have any first step. I think I wouldn’t be walking in a couple of years if I continued. So, I’m done. At least until I get the knee replacement surgery.

I really wanted to play tennis with my daughters, but when they got good, they didn’t want to play with me anymore. And now it’s over. And I walk like Gabby Hayse.

I didn’t see much of the Oscars last night, but I did see Hilary Swank get her award. Did you get the impression that if they would have tried to get her off the stage before she was done with her speech she would’ve taken someone’s head off. I was also surprised to see that those are her real teeth. And did you notice the tall blonde that was the stage escort. She had to be six-five! Was it Lauren Jackson?

This morning when I got up I noticed that my printer was jammed, which could only mean one thing. Q had been up late working on a paper and the printer had jammed and she didn’t have what she needed for an assignment today. I felt pretty confident that she wasn’t getting anything done a day early. Usually clearing a jam is pretty easy on my little HP Deskjet, but this one was stubborn. I could see the paper from the front, but I couldn’t get a grip on it to pull it out. I found a door in the back, opened it and pulled the paper out from that side. That’s when I saw that there was also a CD jammed in the printer. The night before I’d taken a CD out of the computer and set it on the paper in the feeder on the printer, so when Q printed something from her basement lair, the CD went along for a ride. This put me behind schedule getting to work, so I was trying to zip through traffic when, just as I exited from the short freeway leg of my route, my oil light started flashing. Two quarts down. Now I’m really running late. Not a big problem, but I wanted to get some work done in the morning because I knew I had to leave early for a dentist appointment. I was verifying my payroll and found two people had screwed theirs up…pain in the ass for all involved. And then I went to the dentist and found out that my little accident with the wasabe pea a couple months ago wasn’t just a filling giving way, it was a chipped tooth. I need a crown. An eight hundered fucking dollar crown. I wonder if they do twofers? A crown and a knee replacement. That’s it! Maybe I can find a coupon!

I’ve reclaimed my balls. Reclaimed my balls and upped my C.I. by one. You know, cylinder index, the number of pistons in the internal combustion engines one owns. It’s directly proportional to ones machismo rating. This puts me at 16. Admittedly some guys hit 16 with just a their car and their pickup, but it took me three cars, a lawn mower and now a snowblower to hit that level. But it’s a new high for me.

The reason I say I’ve reclaimed my balls is because I bought the blower against my wife’s wishes. She did not see that this was a great investment. One of MM’s nieghbors is moving to California, where he won’t be needing a snowblower (at least until the state breaks away and drifts down to the Antarctic) and he had this beauty for sale. Seven horse, 24 inches of snow spitting power! He bought it last year and only used it twice, there isn’t even any paint worn off the auger blades! He was letting it go for five hundred bucks, just a little more than half price. It’s pristine.
I’ve been thinking about buying one soon. I think I’ve developed an alergy to shovels. Everytime I get near one I start to sweat, get short of breath and suffer from back, knee and shoulder pain. I used to look at shoveling as a good workout and kind of scoff at guys that needed to use machines to move their snow. But let’s face it, guys my age have heart attacks shoveling snow and real men have motorized toys.

When I conferred with Becky about the purchase she wasn’t too excited about the deal. I think most guys would just buy the thing without consulting their wives, but the truth of the matter is that at our house there’s little doubt about who’s in charge. So I decided to pass up the deal. Last weekend we got a moderate snowfall and on the way home from the basketball game Sunday, I indicated that I wanted Beck to help me shovel. She blew me off, so I was out there on our steeply inclined driveway with my knee aching and swearing under my breath when she and Q came out to get in Q’s car and go shopping. I had to finish digging out behind Q’s car, (good luck getting her to help) which meant I had to dig through the berm that the snowplow leaves when it goes by on the street. Which is the hardest shoveling there is. They stood and watched. That was the last straw. When they got back I looked my wife in the eye and said, “I’m buying the snowblower and you better not say a word.”
That felt great. Maybe I’ll just go out and buy a boat.

Fear and Loathing.

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself. Really, could it have ended any other way. Gonzo was a folk hero in my social set, we were all trying to emulate him….vying for the reputation as the craziest. I was a contender. Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas was one of the most influential books of my youth. What does that say about me?

Thompson is forever connected in my mind with one of my very favorite artists, Ralph Steadman who gained fame with his illustrations of Thompson’s work in Rolling Stone. His crazed style captured perfectly the booze and drug driven insanity that was fear and loathing. Those ink spatters (a little graphic trick I’ve stolen for myself) just seemed to say that we were walking the edge of psychotic violence.

While some of my contemporaries read Siddartha and Casteneda, I was most influenced by Joyce Carey’s The Horses Mouth,the story of a wastrel artist, Thompson, and Dharma Bums.

The late sixties and early seventies…ok all the seventies are a blur.

Steve Gilliard writes an excellent tribute to the founder and greatest component of Gonzo Journalism which includes this eulogy of Richard Nixon.

Rolling Stone
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
‘He was a crook’
Jun 16, 1994