Time Travel

You'll have to excuse me if I'm not thrilled. Penn has announced that the Ivy League opener on Oct. 2 between Dartmouth and the Quakers will kick off at 3:30. The good news for fans from afar who know someone who has a VCR in Philly (as well as highlight film makers) is that the game will be carried on Comcast Philadelphia. (Story link and Penn schedule link)

The bad news if you are someone who will be writing two stories after the game is that there's simply no way to get back to the Upper Valley on Saturday night. The game won't be over until 7 or so (given TV timeouts) and you have to figure in another 45 minutes or so for the postgame press conference. That means it will be going on 8 p.m. by the time you get on the road. Escaping the city to find accommodations at a reasonable price probably means 8:45 or so before even sitting down at the keyboard. Argh!

Now the question becomes whether to risk making the long drive down the day of the game or forking over the dough for two nights on the road for the second game in a row. (There's no choice at Bucknell ... but at least there's a campground in Lewisburg with wi-fi. Maybe I ought to find an Official Sponsor of Big Green Alert on the Road ;-)

The last time Dartmouth played a late-afternoon game for TV purposes was at Columbia two years ago in a monsoon. Don't even ask people who drove home from New York City after that game what it was like. If you do, be prepared to hear it was about as scary a hydroplaning drive as you could imagine. Combine that with a disappointing loss and it was a rough, rough day.

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Speaking of our friends in West Philly, they get mentioned in a Dallas Observer story headlined, "At SMU, Winning On The Field Is Being Sacked By An Unwillingness To Accept The Academically Less Gifted." From the story:

... (I)t took offensive lineman Ben Gottschalk—who was accepted by Ivy League member Penn, for crying out loud—two appeals to earn admission on the Hilltop (SMU).

Wouldn't you like to know the back story on that? (Thanks for the link.)

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And finally, we saw the debut of the Top of the 10th inning of Ken Burns' latest baseball effort at the Hopkins Center last night. (Link) It's a terrific film that will be on PBS in late September.

A T-shirted and relaxed Burns helped introduce the film and then popped out at the end for an extended Q&A session. He did a nice job of explaining his filmmaking methods and offering thoughts about baseball and baseball players.

The Bottom of the 10th inning will show tonight and Burns promised Red Sox fans in attendance that if they returned they would like what they would see. (BGA's grandfather was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and he used to turn off his hearing aid when he was in front of the TV if Navy was losing the Army-Navy game. I don't use a hearing aid but as a Yankee fan – sorry about that – I may wish I had one so I could pull the battery tonight.)