Month: September 2005

SDSU football: year 2 of I-AA

South Dakota State gears up for the 2005 football kickoff[*1] :

South Dakota State will open its 108th football season by hosting Wisconsin-La Crosse in the 40th Annual Shrine Game Saturday (Sept. 3).

Game time is 7 p.m. at Coughlin-Alumni Stadium.

SDSU faces a team it hasn’t played since 1955, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. SDSU and La Crosse met three times in the early 1950s: SDSU winning 35-7 in 1951 (SDSU was 8-1-1) and 20-0 in 1955 (SDSU was 6-2-1), and La Crosse winning 13-6 in 1952.

While SDSU in its second year of transition to NCAA Division I-AA, Wisconsin-La Crosse is one of the top teams in NCAA Division III, favored to win its fourthstraight Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship this fall. UWL returns 39 lettermen from last year’s 7-4 team which finished 5-2 in the WIAC.

Dorothy’s red slippers stolen

The red slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz have been stolen from a Grand Rapids museum[*1] :

Investigating officers observed that a window on an emergency exit door had been broken out and the glass display case that contained the ruby slippers was broken into and the slippers were removed. The incident is being further investigated by Grand Rapids Police Investigator Gene Bennet who said there have been five leads as of Tuesday.

There’s no place like home.

Nationwide meth busts net 400

Boston.com[*1] :

Police around the country have arrested more than 400 people in the first nationally coordinated operation aimed at producers and sellers of methamphetamine, officials said yesterday. Police in more than 200 cities and the Drug Enforcement Administration took part over the past week in Operation Wildfire, which also resulted in the seizure of more than 200 pounds of the drug and 56 labs where it was made.

Four indicted in L.A. – terror cell

From the Seattle Times[*1] :

The 15-page indictment accuses Kevin Lamar James, 29; Levar Haney Washington, 25; Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21; and Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, of plotting the attacks, using guns and explosives, to “maximize the number of casualties to be inflicted.”The six-count indictment names all four in a conspiracy to levy war against the U.S. government through terrorism and says the plot was hatched by James, an inmate at the California state prison in Sacramento and founder of a small prison gang of radical Muslims called Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS.

Radical Islam in our own prisons. Will it take another 9/11 for some of us to get serious about the threat?

Over 950 die in Iraqi shrine panic

Report from the Salt Lake Tribune[*1] :

More than 950 people were killed and hundreds injured Wednesday morning when rumors of a suicide bomber provoked a frenzied stampede in a procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge in northern Baghdad, government and hospital officials said.

Terrible tragedy, almost unimaginable. This is a horrible week for the entire world.

Katrina and global warming

James Glassman[*1] has an opinion:

My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.

Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.

That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

“It is what it is.” While there appears to be an emerging scientific agreement that global warming is occuring, it is by no means decided what the probable cause is. Increased solar activity is a much more likely mechanism than is human-generated greenhouse gases.

Royals 1, Twins 0

Twins get 13 hits, don’t score against otherwise hapless Royals[*1] .

Emil Brown drove in the game’s only run with a one-out RBI single past third base after the Twins spent nine innings proving the Royals aren’t the only club capable of turning the national pastime into low comedy.

Royals need to go 20-11 to avoid 100 losses.