Admit it. You laughed when Virginia got hammered by UMBC – that stands for University of Maryland Baltimore County for those scoring at home – in the opening round of last year’s NCAA tournament.
Back in the mid-1970s, I had an after-school job driving a delivery van for a small furniture store in my hometown. One of my co-workers was a man named Cliff, a conservative Christian. Since I was not yet one myself, I found Cliff to be a really, nice guy with some odd ideas.
There were a lot of events over the weekend and more this coming weekend. Please check out all the events by looking at our local happenings page and the display ads including the Crawfish Festival on Pensacola Beach
We’ve all heard of the two certainties in life, death and taxes. You only die once, but April 15 comes around every year! I don’t know anyone who enjoys paying income taxes. We do whatever we can to pay as little as possible. Humorist, Will Rogers, quipped, “The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.” The Jews in Jesus’ day cared even less for taxes; they were paid to Rome and were a bitter reminder of their subjugation.
Newspapers are the best place to work if you never want to feel like it is ground hog day – day after day – because every day is different and exciting. And, if you are a curious person, you get paid to be curious or as other people call it – nosey. I remember in Jr. High School, someone complained to the science teacher that I was nosey. And, he stood up in the class and said how important it was to be curious or nosey. The problem is – I’m curious about too many things. I have literally hundreds of how-to and other non-fiction books that I’ve started, and I don’t finish before I move on to the next – bright shiny object.
I covered the last perfect season in NCAA men’s basketball. I wrote a book about it as well, titled Perfect Run as No. 1, in case you are interested in reading it.
Last Monday was April Fools’ Day. The origin of this odd observance is disputed, but I’d like to thank whoever invented it. I celebrated April Fools’ Day religiously as a kid. What other day of the year could you get away with playing a prank on somebody simply by shouting, “April Fools’!” April 1, 1971, the year Canada began switching over to the metric system, a call-in show on a local AM radio station reported, in compliance with the new system of measure, they would now be giving the time in metric. They said something like, “The current time is 10.25 metric.” The phone lines lit up with angry Canadians! At the end of the three metric-hour show, the hosts shouted, “April Fools’!” and explained that it was all a prank.
