Read this! Quick!

A day in a chair. There was Olympics. There was sunshine. There was reading and, best of all, the fine company of a lovely lady. It was a day with not too much, but a day you’d do again.

There was this:

If I did business with Liberty Mutual I would strongly consider altering the transaction. I don’t know if anyone at the ad agency has ever been in life-changing environments, but the insurance agency has people that have been there. Everyone understands the urge to compare the Olympics with Your Product, whatever Your Product is. But letting a goal slip by against the Russians is hardly like losing everything in a house fire, is it? Missing the landing on your vault isn’t so traumatic as finding the place where you live and play and love so devastated by the weather that you can’t recognize landmarks, because there aren’t any anymore.

When I was in college this happened in the next little town from where I grew up. A huge tornado roared through in the darkness. When the sun rose everything was unrecognizable. The fire department had to go around spraying house numbers on shards of wood and jamming them into the sodden earth, as you would a mailbox, so they’d have a frame of reference in their life saving work.

Hardly a Kerri Strug moment.

And yet I feel for Kerri Strug and the Miracle on Ice guys, because they, of course, couldn’t know what would become of their legacy: a bad insurance commercial. I’d feel bad for Herb Brooks, but he’s dead. I don’t feel bad for Bela Karolyi. He should never have put Strug there. Also, there’s charming reading in the Bela Karolyi controversy section of Wikipedia.

Speaking of the Olympics. NBC gets a lot right. Visually they’ve really shown their A-game. But my word, do they get a lot of easy things wrong.

Other fine sports notes: I mentioned Tim Alexander here late last year. He’s got a rich and compelling tale, the kind of guy you can’t help pulling for. Well. He’s showing up again today. His UAB football team was running stadiums today. And then the new strength and conditioning coach decided Alexander, who is in a wheelchair, needs to be with his team. So he hoisted him on his shoulders and carried him. And then the team joined in.

The story does not mention how many walls they ran through after that.

The image folks from Westboro are after Michael Sam. Mizzou students solved the problem. That is a terrific school and was an inspired addition to the SEC, but I’m just starting to like them more and more now.

The World Press Photo of the Year. The picture is terrific. The reporting — the caption — is what makes it.

African migrants on the shore of Djibouti city at night, raising their phones in an attempt to capture an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. Djibouti is a common stop-off point for migrants in transit from such countries as Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, seeking a better life in Europe and the Middle East.

Things to read … because this hasn’t yet been enough.

I do not think you could make this up. And, previously, I would have not thought there would be someone foolish enough to try to actually do it. NYPD denies FOIA request for department FOIA guide:

Public records request service MuckRock asked for the document in late December. Last week a lieutenant in the department’s records unit denied the request, calling the guide “privileged as an attorney-client communication.”

Muckrock gets all the good and stupid ones.

Remington is coming to Alabama, reportedly bringing about 2,000 jobs. The official announcement is tomorrow. The disbelief is today:

Huntsville may be welcoming a major Remington Outdoors Co. gun manufacturing and development plant and possibly 2,000 jobs, AL.com reported today.

But would the city really welcome it?

It seems so, judging from an abundance of positive, pro-gun comments posted to the AL.com story this morning.

The author of that piece is from Atlanta. She attended school in Alabama. And she is surprised by the pro-gun, pro-job stance of her neighbors. This perplexes me entirely.

So now I have to read every story on the subject, just to see what other disbelief we can work into this story. Because gun factories are scary, I guess.

Lastly, this piece defies excerpting, but is wholly worth reading. It is titled Pastor offers 15 tips for raising kids: ‘Give them a chance to know God’ but a better title would be “A grandfather reflects on how he would raise a child.”

I’m not raising children today. I’m part of the “support troops.” I’m in the capital funding division. But if I were, I would be giving my children every chance to know about God.

If I were raising children today…I would be having fewer frantic activities and make more careful and deliberate choices. I wouldn’t buy them whatever they ask for—that’s for grandparents to do. I would be more present when they’re trying to talk to me.

I wouldn’t lecture as much and I would listen a little more. I wouldn’t worry so much about being their friend and more about keeping their respect as well as their love. I think I would listen for signs of God in their life and, like trying to start a fire, do everything I could to blow on it, but not too hard.

I would make sure they were around all ages of people, not just peers. I would pray for them with all my heart, and take most of my criticisms there. I would provide consistent discipline and accept that they will not always like me and know that the world won’t end if they’re mad.

It goes on and on, a suggested instruction manual from someone who thought, perhaps, about what they did right and did wrong. To do it all again, and this time from the cheaper seats, what an interesting idea from which to learn.

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