Practice starts tomorrow. Here’s a look at last year, a fine photo gallery put together by Oregon Live before their Ducks faced Auburn in the BCS Championship game.
Thirty-something days and counting …
In professional camps, Cam Newton is getting positive early reviews with the Panthers. As always on a sports post, read the comments at your own risk.
There’s other stuff, too, National Night Out, where our neighborhood said “Dude. This is August,” and just recalled that they met people last year. Even the police didn’t bother to cruise through the neighborhood handing out the campaign literature. Now, if someone had been out offering ‘Smores and lemonade …
Speaking of lemonade, there’s the intent of the law and then there’s the intent of the law, and you can add this to your list of communities to avoid — or flock to, as you like — when reading this story:
Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville last week, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.
An officer told Abigail Krutsinger’s father Friday that she couldn’t run the stand as RAGBRAI bicyclers poured into Coralville.
And here’s another one, same town:
A mother of six also said her kids had their lemonade stand on 18th Avenue shut down after just 20 minutes.
Bobbie Nelson said she laughed when a police officer told her that a permit to sell lemonade would cost $400.
“The kids were devastated,” Nelson said. “They just cried and didn’t understand why.”
[…]
Mitch Gross, a member of the Coralville City Council, said he believes the city will learn a lesson from this. Gross said he expects future ordinances to apply only for vendors who set out to “make a profit.”
“It was never our intent to shut down kid’s lemonade stands,” Gross said. “We never really thought about it.”
That’s refreshing of the councilman, who admitted openly that he and his colleagues did not think through the two-day ordinance they passed in order to capitalize on a visiting bike tour’s tourist influx. Err. I mean looking out for people. So which is it? Money-hungry or nanny statism? So hard to choose sides somedays, isn’t it?
Do read those comments, where the people are throwing lemons back at the city.
And, finally, what space shuttles and horses have in common:
When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track …
That’s as fun a tongue-in-cheek mini-essay as you can read today.
That’s enough for one sitting. Try to stay cool out there. The heat index here today was 102.
