University of Alabama Football Report for 10/21/2011

“I have wasted my life.”

The last line of James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” has always frazzled me.

Is he talking about the moment itself? Unlikely. His life is elsewhere. Lying in hammock is a moment of leisure, a departure from life as it must be lived. Plus, there’s barely a speaker at all in the majority of the poem, just an eye:

University of Alabama Football Report for 10/14/11

Ninety-nine years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt by being both a protracted speaker and a total bad-ass. TR was to deliver a speech on the campaign trail explaining his split from the Republican Party when he was shot by a .38 slug that drilled through fifty pages of notes, dented his spectacle case, and lodged just shy of his right lung.

And deliver it he did!

University of Alabama Football Report for 10/07/11

News this week of Missouri's Board of Curators (curators? Like a museum? O... K...) considering leaving Texas's Big X(II) in favor of another athletic conference, presumably the SEC, garnered little excitement and a fair amount of smug derision. What does Missouri offer the Southeastern Conference other than yet another team with a tiger mascot? Does Mizzou football, which is what this is really

University of Alabama Football Report for 9/30/11

“Many of the 223 Hispanic students at Foley Elementary came to school Thursday crying and afraid. . . . Nineteen of them withdrew, and another 39 were absent.”
--Rena Havner Philips, Mobile Press-Register
One of the needling concerns I have for this country--slotted somewhere between third-world-style oligarchic rule and zombie apocalypse--is the future health of college football. Now, I’m not

University of Alabama Football Report for 9/23/2011

Well, you know, I don't get any hot dog at halftime. I don't. I don't even drink a Coke. I coach the team at halftime. You get your little halftime break, and then you have your little ass back in your seat ready to go when the next half starts.
--Nick Saban from his radio show, 9/22/2011
Corporate beverage sponsors and hard-working concessions vendors aside, not many people will take issue with