A cold, snowy February has come down upon us, much like the Februaries we used to have in Illinois, only nobody here is really quite used to it. 82 accidents in one weekend; a 15-car pileup on the Marsha Sharp, and more snow expected tonight leaving everybody on pins and needles about whether the whole town will start up at ten, like we did the other day, or whether it's up and running at seven as usual, with or without a huge snow dump.

I tell everyone stay off the Marsha Sharp; hills are the hardest. Hey, people in Iowa and Minnesota don't know how to handle those glazed hilly on ramps either. Staying off them is the best way.

They shouldn't have messed with the groundhog, I say. I'm very superstitious. You diss the groundhog, what is he supposed to do? Six weeks of winter, that's not proper punishment, that's just the usual. But a couple of ice storms will go a long way.

Ambulances, medi-vacs, those guys are having a field day. But spring is around the corner - and what does that mean, dust?

Charles Whitman Day

I'm opposed to Chris Kyle Day. I have no feelings, really, about Groundhog Day, even though I spent some time growing up in Pennsylvania. I'm opposed to Charles Whitman Day, too. Charles Whitman was an American sniper, but he shot people from the UT bell tower, and didn't care too much who he killed at the time. To me, that's nothing to be proud of.

So the Governor thought Chris Kyle was worth glorifying. He grew up in Texas, went off to fight in the Iraq War, and became a high-powered sniper. He justified killing all those people because he felt he was saving American lives, and because he was pretty sure that the US had every right to be there doing what it was doing; in other words, we were the good guys. But he also came to see the enemy soldiers as animals, inhuman, and he even said so. After you killed one, all the rest were easy. He didn't really have a problem with it.

When he came home, he bragged about getting on the New Orleans Superdome and sniping away at looters down in the city below, around the time of Katrina. He also bragged about killing two guys who tried to steal his car on a highway outside of Dallas. What people say is that there's no evidence that he actually killed people randomly around the US and got away with it; more likely, he just told a good story, and got caught up in the fact that people liked to hear about a successful sniper. They could relate to the idea of good guy / bad guy and they pretty much decided that he was a good guy.

That was Governor Abbott's idea. If he was American, and all those guys he killed were Iraqis, then he was a good guy, and everyone he killed was a bad guy. That's a pretty black and white world, one could say, and it doesn't account very well for the fact that some of those guys had families, cared about their homes and cities, and may even have felt like they were defending their home against invaders.

The groundhog lives in Punxatawney, Pennsylvania, and by the time winter is over, everyone has forgotten what was supposed to happen, based on the fact that he saw his shadow or didn't. It's a kind of ritual, with an imaginary connection between animal behavior and cold weather, and I think that if he really wanted to sleep all along, they have to bait him out, either by offering him an irresistible treat, or putting a stick down in his hole to poke him until he comes out. But he's a groundhog; he doesn't kill anyone, randomly or not, unless he intends to eat them, and even then he's kind of lazy. But I'm sticking with him, because I don't go for this random killing idea, where you just go out and pick people off, because you've lost touch with their humanity.

I've kind of left out this guy who went bonkers and killed Chris Kyle himself. The thing is, I don't know too much about him, or why he'd go off and just kill somebody randomly. He apparently killed another guy, too, a friend of Kyle's, and is now on trial for it. May justice prevail, is all I can say, and if this guy isn't stable enough to be trusted with a gun, put him somewhere where he won't have access to one.

But don't go saying that all there is is good guys and bad guys, and since he killed a good guy, he's a bad guy. I just don't think it's all that simple. 

So the Raiders had another terrible loss, this time to Texas, but it was momentous for one reason: a third-string quarterback named Vinny Testaverde got to play. Now I'll be the first person to admit, I don't know the whole story, I'm not even sure this was the first time he played. But when I heard his name, I said, I've heard that name before, and sure enough, his father was once a quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, among other teams. Like father, like son. Son gets on the Tech team, walks on, gets to play quarterback. I wish him a successful career.

I almost went over to the Cowboys for a while there. I come from a territory where it was pretty routine to hate the Cowboys, not only if you were from the DC area, but also if you were from the vast NY area, everyone hated the Cowboys, and they hated them even more if they won or were successful more than a couple seasons in a row. You'd see them every Thanksgiving, for example, and they were an example, to me, of something you didn't especially want to see with your turkey. But hey, down here I find out they're God's team. And, they have a nice blue star and everyone wears that star. And, they're kind of middling, they blow it a lot, they are definitely not the Man U of football. So I begin to soften up, and say, if I take on the Cowboys, then I'll have two teams the Cowboys and the Indians, the Indians being the number one team on account of I love baseball, and I was born in Cleveland. Being born in Cleveland, I've taken on all the teams, Browns, Cavs, Indians, whatever, and in the end, I decided to stick with them, because, for what it's worth, doesn't matter if you have Jonny Football, or Bernie Kosar, or what. If you're a Browns fan, you stick with the Browns, good or bad. No Cowboys for me.

Now the Tech team, that's a different story. I work for Tech, I wear the red and black everywhere, I'm going to be for them on the weekend when Texas comes to town. People wear orange for Hallowe'en, and I said to them, how do we know you're not for Texas? Different kind of orange, they say, Texas Longhorn orange is kind of burnt orange, dark orange, whereas Halloween glorifies a kind of brighter orange. The Longhorns apparently weren't playing their best; they're not so good this year, but at least they weren't as horrible as we were. But what happened? Maybe our first two quarterbacks got injured, or just got exhausted. maybe they got the wind taken out of their sails, is how we used to say it.

What surprises me is the way Lubbock lives and dies for this stuff. People notice and care, who's quarterback, who's injured, what are our chances for any of our last games, do we really have a chance against Oklahoma, etc. Maybe some people have moved on and taken on bigger issues, like how to get dinner tonight, but for many people, it's a big deal. This is bye week. So, the paper is full of how we'll reconsider, move things around, practice a lot, etc. Nothing is happening. We get to watch all the other college football games this weekend. And the Cowboys, of course. The Cowboys are doing ok, apparently. Maybe they have a chance. Tech certainly doesn't.

You can be pretty bad, and still get a bowl game. That happened the first year we were here. Tech was bad, but it got into some bowl, and won, and everyone was in a pretty good mood all during the spring and summer when it seemed like the team was getting better, and had hope, and had a chance. I don't think we'll be in such a good mood this year. We won't even make it into a bowl.

Unless, of course, Vinny Testaverde catches fire. You figure, he grew up with football, his father was in the Hall of Fame (didn't win too many games, but racked up pretty good stats?)...anyway, what if he just does really well? I'd say, there's always a chance. It's his chance to go pro, and he'll want to. So I think, on some level, he's got the ability too look at that chance coldly, and rise to the occasion. There's hope.

So says the perpetual Browns/Indians/Cavs fan, who has seen season after season of disappointment.

it happens everywhere

Oklahoma St.: Misconduct allegations 'unfounded' but 3 possible Level II violations found, Fox Sports

OSU-SI timeline: A look at how the Sports Illustrated investigation went from magazine cover to NCAA ruling, Tulsa World

Oklahoma State football: Sports Illustrated's dark cloud dissipates for Joe DeForest, The Oklahoman

Oklahoma State players arrested after falling asleep in drive-thru, Sports Illustrated

stillwater runs deep

I've become somewhat obsessed with Oklahoma State recently, not so much because they beat us, as they always seem to do, but more because they were cleared of all charges, by the NCAA, relating back to last year or the year before, when I first got here, that they'd done all kinds of inappropriate things with recruits like give them free call-girls etc.

Now this was the racket. T. Boone Pickens, an eccentric billionaire, had already given them hundreds of millions to spend on the football team, and it didn't matter; he'd given hundreds of millions more to the school itself so the library wouldn't go wanting for books. These hundreds of millions, of course, they spent recruiting Texan kids to come up to Stillwater and then turn around and beat those Texas teams where all their friends had gone to play football. There was a serious grudge any time an Okie team played a Texas team and they play big and rough and everyone knows this is serious business in both places. So, if you're good at this stuff, and you're able and willing, they'll court you big-time and you can come up, have a free education Oklahoma-style, whale on those Texas boys, and nobody'll be any the wiser. Somebody told the NCAA, obviously some sore loser, so now they have to spend a couple million more trying to get everyone to shut up and especially let people know this kind of stuff happens at every school, they've all got a few million when it comes to getting a better coach or making sure the NCAA boys are happy.

Meanwhile back in Texas, we're like, how come these boys keep beating us every time, we need to raise $800 million for football only, not to forget the library of course, but it's time we can compete ourselves for our own Texas boys and make sure that coming here is at least as attractive to them as going to Stillwater or some such place. Now it's true, as they say, everyone is giving these football players stuff, free cars to use, free hookers, night on the town, whatever. That might look a little different in Lubbock than Stillwater, or Austin or Fort Worth or wherever, but the key word is free and remember it's a four-year deal, by the time you're done you go pro and then you have a few million of your own, provided of course you still have a collarbone and interior fibula. That's your job. You work out, take care of yourself, take whatever you need to take to make sure the pain goes away and come the weekend, you can get out there and bash some head.

Remember they do this stuff at every school. They're all in competition for the best players. This means making class look easy and the education look valuable, the time available to practice and work out and live a little, whatever. So this Ok-State cornerback was passed out in the drive-through of the Whataburger, 4 am the other day, and they finally released him even though their other cornerbacks are injured, they have to look to the NCAA like, we're following the rules now, we promised, we're not going to tolerate any of this night-on-the-town wildness that somehow ends up in charges and lawyers in court eating up whatever's left of that four hundred million or whatever. You going to mess around, get caught, stay up all night during football season, you're out of here. This is serious business, this football, and we don't need any of this crap.