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A Woman's True Confession: I Finally Understand the Male Obsession with Football...
Football season is here, which means that for the next several weeks - 90% of the male population of the US will spend an enormous amount of their "free time" watching games on TV (the bigger the screen, the better), attending football games...
Contact Lenses A Better Vision Option
There are over 34 million contact wearers in America. The idea of contact lenses has been around for hundreds of years. It is said that the first person to conceptualize the idea of contact lenses was Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500's. It wasn't...
Listen - The Crack Of The Bat
The other day, as I watched my daughter take batting practice from her new batting coach, my eyes shifted to another batter that was being coached by another teacher. Her swings were slow, the ball was glancing off her bat and trickling into the...
THE SECRET TO LEGS WITH SIZE, STRENGTH AND ENDURANCE
There are countless Leg workouts in magazines and books that promise big results. Many are good workouts, but the secret to continued progress is to keep your muscles from adapting, while building on what you have already done. What I mean by...
TOP T.E.N Myths Surrounding the Montreal Expos
10 - That the Expos lost its fan base after all the English left in the early 80’s. The Olympic Stadium continued to average over 18 thousand visitors per game until 1997. While they were not leaders in attendance by any stretch, it was still a...
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World Series In Russia – Huh? What?
As we watch the Astros choke or White Sox perform valiantly depending on your point of view, I am reminded of my baseball experience in Russia.
World Series
I always find it interesting that most of our professional sports call the championship round the World Series or some similar variation. Clearly, there are games being played elsewhere, so how can it be the world championship? With baseball, the arrivals of Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners and Tadahito Iguchi of the White Sox certainly suggest baseball in Japan must be of a high quality. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that some sports aren’t even acknowledged in other countries as I found out in Russia.
Siberia does not have cable television nor can one pull up anything other than CNN. This made watching the World Series a bit difficult. Resorting to my usual tactic, I started hitting up my students for inside information on any parents that might own a satellite dish and could get the games. To my astonishment, not a single person knew the World Series was on or much of anything about baseball. Nobody had even heard of the Yankees! A few students had heard of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which was unbearable for a person from San Diego. It was time to set these innocents right!
The classrooms I taught in were pretty large. Everybody stand up! Desks were moved to the walls, books were placed in the appropriate places and the rules were written on the board. Forget constitutional law, we were going to play some baseball!
Institutions of higher learning are sacrosanct in Russia. It is serious business where deep thinking occurs, everyone studies like mad and the teacher is obeyed at all costs. For example, the students all stand
up from their desks when a teacher enters and leaves the room. Serious stuff.
The game was proceeding nicely. Everyone was getting the hang of it, the rolled up paper ball was surviving and the broken desk leg would’ve put any bat to shame. And then the Dean walked by the door. And stopped. And stared.
The University Dean, Tatyana, was a great person and I liked here a lot. In turn, I am pretty sure she thought I was a raving lunatic, but didn’t seem to mind since the students enjoyed my classes. Alas, I thought I had crossed a line with the baseball game.
The Dean opened the door and entered the room. Simultaneously, students looked for places to hide and I tried to come up with some reason why playing baseball was critical to the education of future judges. Tatyana took the bat from the hand of a student, looked at and stared at me. It was one of those stares where you could tell she was considering sending me back to San Diego. There would be no chance of explaining this one away.
After what seemed like minutes, but was probably five seconds, she did the last thing I expected. She took her stance.
The game was on!
About the Author: Rick Chapo is with http://www.nomadjournals.com - makers of writing journals. Travel journals are great travel accessories and travel gifts for student travel, family vacations and adventure travel. Visit http://www.nomadjournaltrips.com for more travel articles.
Source: www.isnare.com
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