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I think I first remember hearing about it on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. And most people listening are going, "Say what?" Yeah, we're talking the 1950s, and it was a show that most teenagers watched. And I of course, was only two at the time. But it was predictable that a teenage show was going to have as their primary advertiser a company called Clearasil.
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Now, as a good football coach prepares his high school players for the season, he's going to bring up the dangers of what he will call playing tentatively. I know no one's anxious to get hurt, and so there's a natural tendency to hold back a little in a contact sport; to hold back when you hit, when you block, when you tackle. But the coach is going to tell you that the best way to get hurt is to play tentatively, half-heartedly. Either give it all you've got or don't play.
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I was reminiscing with my son the other day about when he was four and learned to play baseball. He was standing there in his little shorts, and he had his Wiffle bat and his Wiffle ball. (I mean when he was little; not the other day.) And I stood just a few feet away from him and I gently threw the ball underhanded. And he would sort of chop at it like an ax, and I didn't know if he'd ever learn to play.
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I never heard the words till I got to college. You start talking about Senior Panic. Yeah, well, if you didn't have a prospective mate by your senior year, it became pretty obvious that the odds were working against you and time was not on your side. Sadly, there were some people who got somebody in their desperation, but time began to show they got the wrong somebody. I guess you don't have to be a senior to begin to panic over your singleness. In fact, you may very well fear deep down inside never being married or never having anyone again; that you're going to be stuck eating frozen dinners alone a lot of nights for the rest of your life. In your anxiety, you can make a terrible mistake. I think I've got some good news today!
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I had the opportunity to spend 24 hours of my life in the city of Athens in Greece. I was on my way home from a teaching mission, and if I only had 24 hours, well, I knew what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the Acropolis, and there it was on a hill that just dominates the entire city. That's where the ancient Greeks built a temple to their goddess, Athena, after whom, obviously, the city was named.
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People become like the environment they spend their time in. At least that's what I've heard. For example, if you work at IBM, you become amazingly well-organized for some strange reason. If you live in a college town, or if you work around a college, it's amazing how your vocabulary can change; sometimes increases. Oh, and your clothing? Yeah, it becomes a little bit more collegiate. You know?
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The attack on the USS Stark was really a double tragedy. It happened during the Iraq War, and an Iraqi pilot fired a missile into the side of our missile frigate, the USS Stark. And 37 American sailors died in an awful inferno that followed. Actually, one of the reasons for the tragedy wasn't even so much the missile. It appears now that someone had turned off a vital alarm; one that actually could have alerted the crew in time to respond. Well, there's the double tragedy. The American sailors died, yes. But none of them had to. An attack was underway and the alarm was off. Well, wait a minute! Let's be careful, because you and I might be making that same mistake.
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So an angry girl named Sandy came storming up the Eastern Seaboard - the largest Atlantic hurricane ever up to that point. It was sort of like a Halloween snowstorm that happened the previous year that dumped a crazy two feet of snow onto Connecticut, where I just happened to be. And Sandy, then, did what "Snowy" had done the year before; made a whole lot of folks change their plans.
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It was one of those really special 90-degree days, when it is very humid and I was just finishing about eight miles on my bike. I was feeling all fit, and then I passed Tom running all ten and a half miles around that lake. Well, I realized that Tom did that every day. Nobody knew; nobody noticed actually.
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Our garage had gotten to the point where it was scary. Yeah, it was so scary my son used to have nightmares about it. He'd wake up and realize the nightmare was real! It was so messy there really wasn't much walking space. You could crawl around, but that was even tight. See, it had been a busy year, and we really hadn't any time to clean it up. It wasn't that it was all our mess; we had been storing things for other people too.
