Happy Anniversary!

This is our anniversary!

I love you, Michelle. Why you love me, I will never know....but I bet the regular showers help....LOL

Pitt in the ACC?

Not exactly earth shattering but still a head turner!

The University of Pittsburgh, along with Syracuse, and possibly UConn, are bolting the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

I have never been a big college football fan but now it seems I don't have an excuse. Getting a master's degree at East Carolina makes me a Pirates fan and now with Pitt in the ACC, it is getting harder to ignore college football.

I used to say that Florida State was my favorite ACC team but that is going to change apparently.

I would have thought that if Pitt was going to ever leave the Big East, they would naturally go to the Big Ten with former arch-rival Penn State. It is hard to see Pitt in the same conference with NC State and Duke.

But it is going to happen in 2013 or 2014.

The ACC raided the Big East back in 2004, snagging Miami and Virginia Tech (Boston College too but they had contractual obligations that kept them in the BE for another year), and now i seems intent on absorbing the rest of the conference. I think they should and rename it the East Coast Conference. I will send a memo. Maybe I will get a form letter back.....

Pitt was an independent for the longest time along with Penn State. Notre Dame still is though they play a lot in the Big Ten. Back when I was a kid, I had hoped for Pitt to join a conference and I had even created an "Eastern Conference" (sometimes "Northeastern Conference") for them, consisting of Penn State and Notre Dame at the nucleus along with Temple and Rutgers. I thought Army and Navy would be good additions too along with another natural rivalry. Boston College would have probably fallen into that orbit too.

It looks like part of that has come true.

The other part is that I get to see Pitt play here in NC against at least four opponents.

I'll take it.

Now let's see if East Carolina wants in too!

Happy Byzantine New Year!

Could be either September 1 or September 14, depending on which calender you are using but still a good excuse to celebrate....

The Byzantine Empire, although no "Byzantine" ever referred to himself with that description, lasted from 476 to 1453 (with a small inturruption from 1204 to 1261 thanks to the Fourth Crusade). Although it was the East Roman Empire running solo, the language and ethnic basis was not Latin but Greek. The Crusaders and Europeans in the Middle Ages often refered to the Emperor as "King of the Greeks." Since the Emperor was called "Emperor of Rome and King of Greece", they were half right. It did not keep the various Emperors from being offended that their noble Roman connection was ignored resulting in some serious cussing out of said Crusaders in, uh, Greek....

Tenth Anniversary...

September 11, 2001

Jumping Stingrays!

Michelle and I spent most of the week down at the beach and for some reason, every single day, we saw stingrays jumping out of the water!

The first one looked pretty big even from fifty yards out but they just kept jumping...maybe we were watching some sort of aquatic football game?

Stingrays usually jump to make time....water is 800 times denser than air, so they can mover greater distances by doing this...but constantly?

There is a plot afoot by the stingrays!

I am not too worried about them...its the idiots in the Department of Homeland Security I am worried about...they will screw up any operation you put them in charge of and waste gobs of taxpayer money in doing so....

I like the stingrays better :-)

Wild Weather!

Blizzards, hurricanes, and earthquakes (?!)

East NC was shaken by an earthquake and bashed by Hurricane Irene all in one week. Let's not forget the blizzard in January...we can honestly say the temperature ranges for 2011 have been from 0 to 100. Actually, 105 back in July so now you can add heatwave to the list of climate catastrophes....alliteration is alive and well in my world.

The East Coast usually does not have earthquakes. The last major quake on the East Coast was in 1886 in Charleston, South Carolina. I am not sure what the Richter scale reading was on that but I have read that experts, whoever they might be, estimate it somewhere between 6.6 and 7.3. You have to go to 1811-1812 for the last quake before that east of the Mississippi...that was the New Madrid fault that is, still active occasionally, and located near St. Louis.

I didn't feel the August 23 quake. I have felt tremors before in Greece. I remember seeing rocks sliding off of hillsides and some waves rippling across the Bay of Argos so this one could not have been too bad. I have not heard of any damage.

Now, I can talk about Hurricanes....Hugo 1989 in Charleston when I was at the Cesspool by the Sea, and Fran here in NC back in 1996. Floyd in 1999 did a number on the northeast quadrant of the state but missed Fayettenam. I was in Wilmington, NC in 2008 for Hurricane Hanna. The storm itself was actually rather brief but I remember most of all the attempted price gouging gas stations embarked on until several thousand phone calls to the Attorney General's office put a quick stop to that. No attempted gouging this time.....due to the storm at any rate.

I can tell you a lot about blizzards too. The big difference between a Pennsylvania and Saskatchewan blizzard is that in Steel Town, the wind can be blocked by the hills but at the same time channeled down one of the three rivers and into your face. On the Canadian prairies , there is nothing to break the wind for five hundred or so miles. Temperatures in Canadian blizzards are worse but it is so bad, your body doesn't even bother noticing so you are actually colder in Pittsburgh even though the temperature might be 20 degrees warmer. If the temperature is -40, does the wind chill even matter?

Of course, on the East Coast, winters tend to be cold and wet whereas the Canadian Midwest's winters are cold and dry. That might make a difference.

The blizzards in NC don't really compare but they can still be pretty bad. Very wet and the roads freeze up quicker because the DOT, although they do an outstanding job, simply does not have enough salt to toss around the tenth largest state in the Union.

Worst of all, the wet snow is terrible for making snowballs.....

I end this post on a note of irony....In 2006, the Carolina Hurricanes won the Holy Grail of hockey--the Stanley Cup.

Think about it.....