This, That and a Mystery

By all means, check out this photo from Saturday's game. Recognize the fellow in the baseball cap?

You didn't skip past that photo, did you? Don't. I mean it. Don't.

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From Dartblog, a little reality check:

Praise should be given to Buddy Teevens ‘79 for working persistently to get UNH and Colgate removed from the football team’s schedule. He saw that problem the minute that he took the head coach’s job. Had we played those two powers this year, the Green would be 0-2 right now, and we’d all be singing the blues.

The Daily Dartmouth has a feature about freshman running back Dominick Pierre, who topped the 100-yard mark against Sacred Heart in his first collegiate start. From the story:

When looking to play in college, Pierre said he almost committed elsewhere until he visited Dartmouth.

Wanna guess what the other school was? Don't guess. Check out the end of his bio, and expect Saturday to be very interesting for him.

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Penn coach Al Bagnoli talking about Saturday's game on the weekly Ivy League teleconference:

As we look forward, we are playing against a much improved Dartmouth team. Obviously they are much more mature, older and more experienced and certainly have gotten off to a terrific start. So they are coming in, I think, with a much higher level of confidence having two victories under their belt already. So we will have to play well.

Penn has been playing without its regular starting quarterback and now will be without its leading rusher against Dartmouth. The Daily Pennsylvanian writes about forced movement on the Quaker depth chart.

Also, check out a lengthy football post on the DP blog, The Buzz, which details the move of two Penn running backs from offense to defense this year.

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There have been a lot of stories about former Dartmouth defensive coordinator-turned-CEO of TD Ameritrade the past few years. One in SI.com might be the best. It is headlined, Nebraska's billion-dollar assistant. Reading it, I can't help but think there's a school out there, somewhere, that really should take a flyer on Moglia after this season.

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From a blog posting by veteran (Pennsylvania) Morning Call sportswriter Keith Groller, who thinks the Patriot League needs to seriously consider football scholarships:

... (I)f you want to just have a football team for the sake of having a football team and be like the Ivy League and just play amongst yourselves and not worry about competing on a national level -- then, by all means -- keep going with this flawed, financial-aid model.

However, if you want to compete against the best and be among the best -- as Lehigh once thought it was in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade -- and if you want to put more than 8,000 people in Goodman Stadium more often than just when Lafayette visits every two Novembers, then you have to go the scholarship route.

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The Dartmouth marching band could have used the "legacy" in this story. The Dartmouth basketball team could use him even more. And check out the bio of the tuba player extraordinaire, who incidentally graduated from the same Texas high school as Dartmouth football players Brad Dornak and Chase Womack. (Thanks to a regular reader for the tip ;-)

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And finally, something totally off the wall but kind of fun. For the past few years we've put a 15-foot lighted star at the end of our driveway at Christmas. I fashioned it from small trees I cut down in the woods, attaching three or four lengths of those old, heavy-duty colored Christmas bulbs to make the outline of the star. It's become a sign of the season here on the mountain. One year when we didn't put it up we heard about it from the neighbors because on a dark and heavily wooded dirt road where there can be a half mile between houses, people enjoyed it.

Back to my story. Given its size, we can't keep the star in the garage or basement, so I tuck it into the woods and out of site for 11 months each year. (Living in the woods has its benefits. Try that in Evanston ;-)

Anyway, this year I put the star in a different section of the woods. I discovered that was a mistake when Cooper, our golden retriever, led me into the woods near the star. I couldn't believe what I discovered.

Every last bulb on the tree was gone. Vanished. So were the receptacles the bulbs screw into. What had once been three lengthy green strands of bulbs was now a series of six-inch pieces of green wire with nothing on either end. It was like that the entire way around the perimeter of the star.

I'm assuming there are some chipmunks who are going to have one heckuva Christmas party this winter, but I don't know for sure. I just hope the neighbors don't complain if I'm a little late getting the star up come December.