And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that I have never believed in trying to lobby God for a better outcome of an athletic event. Never saw the odds of making a free throw increase after making the Sign of the Cross, for example.
Still I’m not above playing that game a little bit. I sing in the funeral choir, not because I sing well, but because very few others show up. There was an 11 a.m. funeral the Saturday of the Iowa-Northwestern football game, which started at 11 a.m. Okay, God, I thought, I will make the funeral, but please be kind to the Iowa football team. By the time I got to a radio, late in the first half, Iowa was ahead 16-0. Thanks God, I thought. But I had no sooner sat in front the TV but the score was just 16-10. Was I supposed to go back to church?
Anyway, it all turned out well for Iowa, and I was even able to watch those first 16 points scored thanks to replay on the Big Ten Network before Sunday Mass.
I sometimes wonder about some of my fellow humans.
For example, apparently a professional athlete (basketball, maybe, I am not a fan of professional sports) became an emergency transport to a hospital after being involved in what has to be the most ignominious trilogy of tasteless behavior possible for a man. He allegedly was high on cocaine, overdosed on drugs advertised as male sexual stimulants, while a client at a Nevada whorehouse.
Odom (I think that’s his name, (or maybe Oh! Dumb!) shortly afterward was being praised for his past life. I think any one of those three things would give me pause, and all three together would probably have caused a full stop in my admiration.
Reports note that he was once married to a Kardashian. No, that is not a resident of a Middle East nation, but rather one of a whole bunch of people with that last name who appear in what is called a “reality” show on television.
I don’t watch it. I happened upon the obscure network where it airs by accident once, and after five minutes tops felt peristalsis threatening my lunch, and have never gone back.
But isn’t that the same tribe in which once the world’s greatest male athlete, Bruce Jenner, suddenly discovered he had been female all along?
Apropos of the above, I learned that Playboy magazine is abandoning its nude centerfold spread. I have not seen a copy of the magazine in years, but it used to be pretty tame compared to its competition. Live nudity available in the movies and on television and the Internet made it obsolete.
Television listings confirm that, with shows about dating naked, surviving naked, and maybe just plain walking around naked as replacements.
Without the articles interrupting the nudity.