New College Football Alignment Idea

One major problem with Pac-12 teams joining the Big10 is the travel. The Big10 now pretty much covers the northern part of the continental United States plus Los Angeles. Rutgers is in New Jersey but they year they will be traveling to Seattle to play the University of Washington Huskies in football. Conversely, the Huskies will be traveling across the nation to play Maryland at home. And last year, teams that had to travel more than two time zones to play tended to lose.

So I've been toying with the idea of just having regional conferences that all have between 10 and 15 teams. Well, someone did that. It wouldn't totally reconstitute the Pac-12, but it's close. The one problem I see is some of those divisions such as the "Mountains + Southwest" wouldn't have any major media markets in it (there is Denver but that's not very big compared to Los Angeles). So that conference would likely have problems getting large media payments. And media money is what drives college football now (unfortunately). 

That's what killed the Pac-12. When USC and UCLA announced they were going to the Big10 (for more money), it deprived the Pac-12 of its biggest media market: Los Angeles. So the networks weren't willing to pay as much for the media rights. It got so bad that AppleTV was bidding for the Pac-12 media rights.

But I have an idea for that, too. How about NCAA Div I FBS football negotiates media rights like the NFL: all at once for all conferences. "You want LA, you also have to take Boise." That could solve that problem.

So then all we'd need to fix is NIL and the transfer portal.

What do you think? Good idea or not? Let me know in the comments below.

Electronic Notepad

 I bought one of those electronic notepads a while back and tried it out. They had a free-return policy if I didn't like it. 

When doing freelance writing, I was tired of searching through my hand-written notes to find something. The notebook was supposed to turn my writing into text that was searchable. I thought that would be great.

I did like a lot about it. The feel of it was just like writing on paper. I could store my notes as a PDF on my computer and not have them in my physical files which I then clean out occasionally.

But the problem was, it couldn't read my writing. To paraphrase Gandalf, "There are few who can." Sometimes I have trouble reading my writing. Here's an example of me trying to write neatly:

So you can see they the electronic notebook had issues.

So I sent it back for a refund.

Have you tried any electronic devices to make your writing easier? Let me know how it worked in the comments below.

Beautiful Cars

Lamborghini Countach

I was admiring a very expensive car and I called it, in my mind, "beautiful." 

And then I got to thinking. Why do I (and other people) call these mechanical devices "beautiful"?

We call paintings and books and sculptures and other man-made things beautiful. So why not cars? Just because they are also functional, doesn't lessen their beauty. If you Google "beautiful car" you get a lot of images, some that are more beautiful than others.

As. the saying goes "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." There are probably people who would never find a car beautiful. I remember a long time ago I was with my parents in Monterey, California, and there was a white Lamborghini Countach parked on the street. And my mother said, "What an ugly car." But I found it beautiful. But my opinion might have been swayed by knowing it had a V12 engine that sat behind the driver. 

And, in general, what is this penchant humans have for finding inanimate things beautiful: mountains, lakes, trees. Or animals. If someone pointed out a beautiful horse to me, I'd have to take their word for it. But a pretty cat, I'm all about that (since our family got a cat seven years ago). 

Why do you think humans call so many diverse things "beautiful"? Let me know in the comments below.

Wolves and Humans

I sometimes think about the relationship of humans and wolves throughout the ages. For example, why are there sayings about wolves:

• Keep the wolf from the door
• A wolf in sheep's clothing
• Throw you to the wolves

 Those are the ones I could think of. There may be more. There's also the "Big Bad Wolf" in the Little Red Riding Hood story. The wolf and the three little pigs, also. 

At some time in the distant pass, humans and wolves started living and working together. And modern dogs are descendants of those wolves. But a lot of wolves stayed feral. And still are.

I think that in Europe, especially in the middle ages, wolves hunted humans and humans were ill equipped to handle them. Especially wolves in packs. And that's why we have sayings such as "Keep the wolf from the door." You didn't want to step out of your hovel and be attacked by wolves. Although it probably happened.

I read an article about a couple living off the grid in Alaska. They run into wolves. The article said they are "braving encounters with wolves." So the wolves must make them nervous, at the least.

Wolf attacks on humans have happened as recently as September 2024.

Do you think wolves hunted (and hunt) humans? Or am I wrong. Let me know in the comments below.