Let’s do this. Friday at precisely 10:30, I will post on FrontBurner some football trivia questions. I’m calling it “FrontBurner Football Movie Contest Friday.” Catchy, no? First person to provide me with the correct answers to the questions wins a free copy of each of the top 10 football movies of all time (according to Blockbuster). Plus, you’ll get a free 30-day subscription to Blockbuster by mail. So consider this your heads-up. See you Friday at 10:30. Here’s hoping everyone plays hard and gives 110 percent.
That’s the plan, anyway. If you’re a regular visitor to the site, and I am, you may have noticed a distinct lack of founder Stoned Ranger. He explains his absence here (spoiler: he moved, to a location which, appropriately for someone generally only known by the handle Stoned Ranger, is unnamed for now), as well as rather vaguely laying out the future of the site — which I have adroitly encapsulated in the headline above. In short, soon-ish, We Shot JR will not only cover Dallas/Denton/Fort Worth, but a handful of other cities, too. Based on the list he gave me — but isn’t willing to share just yet — We Shot JR will be even more must-read. More TK.
Good column here from ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel about Patrick Witt’s decision to leave behind potential glory as the starting quarterback at football-mad Nebraska in favor of Yale and potential glory years after his playing career is over. A snippet:
Witt arrived at Nebraska in 2007 with 15 AP credits. He found a locker room, he said, where he heard the refrain “C’s get degrees.” He saw Nebraska players who graduated in 2008 struggle to find the kind of job that might appeal to him. He knew his brother Jeff, a quarterback whose Harvard career ended in 2006 with a shoulder injury, would graduate in the spring and head to a job in the financial sector in New York. …
What Witt wanted is the vibrant academic atmosphere he has found at Yale in classes such as “Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln” and “Comparative Welfare Policy in Developing Countries.” He wanted a locker room where the level of humor rose above towel-snapping. Girls are a topic of conversation, but so is health care.
“People would look at me as if I had three heads if I brought that up in the locker room out there,” Witt said of the latter. “And it’s not like we’re discussing these things all the time in the Yale locker room. … You can be talking about football one minute and launch into a debate about politics the next.”
After buying Plano-based Electronic Data Systems last year, Hewlett-Packard cut the EDS work force, slashed its employees’ salaries, and stuffed its top execs into tiny cubicles. Now the California company is delivering the coup de grace: getting rid of the EDS name. For sprout-eaters, those Golden Staters sure play rough.
This Friday evening, the Trinity Trust Foundation is throwing what it’s calling a “bridge fair” on the Continental Bridge to celebrate the progress being made on the Marget Hunt Hill Bridge (full release after the jump). Santiago Calatrava will be in attendance. The band Boys Named Sue will play, and the foundation promises other “delectable delights.” Tickets cost $150, a price point established, I believe, to keep Jim Schutze from attending. D Magazine is a media sponsor, so I’ll be there. Look for me wherever the delectable delights are located.
1. T. Boone Pickens has endorsed Rick Perry in the gubernatorial race. To make the announcement, Pickens held a press conference at his BP Capital headquarters, located in a fortress buried deep under an active volcano. When a reporter asked about his poor decision to side with Perry, Pickens simply stroked a white Persian cat sitting in his lap and said, “I have my reasons.”
2. The plot thickens in the lawsuit over the Bush library site. The judge who was presiding over the case has suddenly recused himself, for reasons that are unclear — though one leading theory has it that Dick Cheney became aware that the judge was set to rule against SMU, so he kidnapped the judge’s wife and locked her in an underground dungeon in the woods where he keeps several maidens chained up in a labyrinth of holding cells.
3. Why, God, have you foresaken us?! How can this be? No! First Dallas’ reputation was permanently stained by the Kennedy assassination, and now we’ve lost to Atlanta in a bid to lure the College Football Hall of Fame to our city. Please, Mary Suhm, put Mayor Leppert on suicide watch. Either that, or hit him with a dose of gamma radiation that will enable him to transform into a raging beast that can exact our revenge on Atlanta.