Random thoughts of a random mind

COLLEGE STATION, Texas- The Texas A&M football team finished the regular season with a 38-30 victory over No. 11-ranked Texas on Friday at Kyle Field.

The Aggies (7-5, 4-4 Big 12) have consecutive victories over Texas for the first time since 1991-94 under Franchione's predecessor, R.C. Slocum.

Stephen McGee threw for a career-high 362 yards with three touchdowns and scored on a hard-driving run. Kick-holder T.J. Sanders got his only career TD when he capped A&M's 95-yard drive with a 5-yard TD run on a fake field goal and the defense forced three turnovers (two fumbles, interception) by Texas quarterback Colt McCoy.

Texas (9-3, 5-3), which after its first 0-2 conference start since 1956 had won five straight games, still has an outside shot of making it to the Big 12 championship game if 10th-ranked Oklahoma loses to Oklahoma State on Saturday.

• Senior Earvin Taylor celebrated his final game at Kyle Field by matching his career high with seven catches for a career high 113 yards. It was Taylor's second 100-yard receiving game (103 vs. Oklahoma, 2004).
• Sophomore Mike Goodson's six catches surpassed his career high (5 vs. Miami and Missouri, 2007) and his 82 yards and two touchdowns were career-bests. Goodson produced 154 all-purpose yards (previous best was 142 vs. Oklahoma, 2006).
• Junior Stephen McGee's 362 passing yards on 25-of-36 passing were a career high. His only other 300-yard passing game was 318 vs. Louisiana Tech in 2006.
• McGee's 209 first half passing yards were easily a career halftime best for him. His previous first-half high was 187 yards (on 16-of-23 passing) against Louisiana-Lafayette on September 9, 2006 at Kyle Field. Ironically, McGee finished today's first half 16-of-23 in the air as well.
• Today's game marked the first time that McGee has thrown more than one interception in a game.
• With 48 first-half receiving yards, junior Martellus Bennett broke Richard Osborne's school record for career receiving yards by an Aggie tight end. Bennett now has an even 1,200 yards on 101 career catches which passes the 1,181 yards by Osborne from 1972-75. Bennett's 101 career catches are just four behind the end tight school record of 105 set by Rod Bernstine from 1983-86. Bennett is the seventh Aggie in school history to surpass the 100-catch plateau.
• The five-yard rushing touchdown by holder/backup quarterback T.J. Sanders on the fake field goal was the first of Sanders' career.
• Senior linebacker Mark Dodge wore "Thomas" on the back of his jersey to honor two relatives on his mother's side who passed away recently. Thomas is Dodge's mother's maiden name. Dodge missed the Missouri game while attending his maternal grandmother's funeral, and his aunt passed away last week.
• Game captains were seniors Red Bryant and Cody Wallace, who were also voted this season's Permanent Team Captains by their teammates.
• Junior Nick LaMantia (Mission, Texas) was the Aggies' 12th Man for the 14th straight game and the 23rd time during his career, which matched the school record for career 12th Man starts originally set by John Ray from 2003-05.
• Jorvorskie Lane's 22-yard catch that kept the first drive of the game was a season-long
• The Aggies' 17-3 halftime lead was the Aggies' biggest lead over the Longhorns since 1997 when A&M held a 21-6 lead in the third quarter and went on to a 27-16 victory and the Big 12 South crown.
• Junior Pierre Brown's four catches for 51 yards equaled or surpassed career highs (previous bests were four catches for 49 yards vs. Nebraska, 2007)
• The Aggies wore their new adidas gray pants for the first time this season. It is the first time A&M has won gray pants since approximately 1986
• Senior Chris Harrington's third-quarter fumble recovery was the fifth of his career.
• Senior Marquis "K" Carpenter's third-quarter interception was his fourth of the year and the eighth of his career.
• Sophomore E.J. Shankle's 48-yard kickoff return was a career long and just the second kickoff return of his career.
• Quan Cosby's 91-yard kickoff return for a touchdown was the first kickoff return touchdown given up by the Aggies since 1990 when Texas Tech's Rodney Blackshear returned a 92-yarder for a score at Kyle Field.

STATEMENT FROM DENNIS FRANCHIONE: "Kim & I have arrived at the decision to step down as head football coach out of respect and love for our players, for this University and its football program.

I've always said that coaches exist for only one reason-the players. We have an outstanding group of young men on this team and especially great people. We want them to know that we love them, feel blessed for our time together, and will miss them.

We appreciate the opportunity we have had at this great institution to work with this administration, the people throughout this department and campus, and the former students. We have made many lasting friendships.

We also need to say a special appreciation to a loyal, tireless and dedicated group of assistant coaches and their families, who have given so much to this program. This includes our support staff and every individual who has been a part of this team.

We have enjoyed 35 years in coaching, and we will consider our time in Aggieland to be a rewarding part. We wish the best to everyone here.

Thanks and Gig' Em!"

STATEMENT FROM TEXAS A&M DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS BILL BYRNE: "I want to express my respect and gratitude to Coach Franchione for his courage in making this decision, and putting the interests of his players and this institution ahead of his own interests. Coach Franchione is a fine man, and a fine coach, and I consider him a friend. We wish him well and will do anything we can to assist him going forward.

One thing I would like to say at this juncture concerning the private email incident. We now have reviewed all of the information available, and have taken what we think are appropriate actions on behalf of this institution. With regards to Coach Franchione, we are now convinced that he did not intentionally, knowingly, or directly participate in actions that were inappropriate or in violation of rules or policies. We do believe that Coach Franchione was guilty of inadequate supervision and oversight.

We wish Coach Franchione the very best moving forward, and we are grateful for all of his hard work and effort while he was here at Texas A&M."

TEXAS HEAD COACH MACK BROWN: "I want to congratulate Texas A&M. I thought they did a great job. I have tremendous respect for the school and the corps and all that they stand for. I thought both teams played really hard. It was a physical game. It was a really good football game but our team didn't play consistently well and that comes back to me. We dropped passes, we didn't protect well all the time, we didn't tackle well, we gave up too many big plays and we had some mistakes in the kicking game. I love the heart of our kids. They continued to fight, they came back and gave us a chance to win at the end but I've got to do a better job. Congratulations to Dennis and their staff and their team. Again, I thought it was a great atmosphere and a great football game. I'm proud of our kids for fighting back. I thought we tried hard but didn't play well."

TEXAS QUARTERBACK COLT MCCOY: "Offensively, I don't think we were as consistent as we should have been. At the end of the game, we put our offense together but it wasn't enough. We were inconsistent up front. In the second half we got a little more consistent and it put us back the game. They gave us a lot of trouble in the first half. This week in practice we worked a lot on staying in the pocket. They bullrushed and rushed on the outside. That threw us off. Losing's hard and everyone deals with it differently."

TEXAS DEFENSIVE LINEMAN FRANKLIN OKAM: "We had a tough day being down so much and having to fight back to make it a close game. They're a good team. I have to give them a lot of credit. We gave ourselves a chance at the end. It was a shot, but a little one. We have to do a better job on third and we were a little inconsistent on tackling. There's a lot of improvement to be made. We'll take that in stride and get ready for our bowl game."

"Kim & I have arrived at the decision to step down as head football coach out of respect and love for our players, for this University and its football program.

I've always said that coaches exist for only one reason-the players. We have an outstanding group of young men on this team and especially great people. We want them to know that we love them, feel blessed for our time together, and will miss them.

We appreciate the opportunity we have had at this great institution to work with this administration, the people throughout this department and campus, and the former students. We have made many lasting friendships.

We also need to say a special appreciation to a loyal, tireless and dedicated group of assistant coaches and their families, who have given so much to this program. This includes our support staff and every individual who has been a part of this team.

We have enjoyed 35 years in coaching, and we will consider our time in Aggieland to be a rewarding part. We wish the best to everyone here.

Thanks and Gig' Em!"

"I want to express my respect and gratitude to Coach Franchione for his courage in making this decision, and putting the interests of his players and this institution ahead of his own interests. Coach Franchione is a fine man, and a fine coach, and I consider him a friend. We wish him well and will do anything we can to assist him going forward.

One thing I would like to say at this juncture concerning the private email incident. We now have reviewed all of the information available, and have taken what we think are appropriate actions on behalf of this institution. With regards to Coach Franchione, we are now convinced that he did not intentionally, knowingly, or directly participate in actions that were inappropriate or in violation of rules or policies. We do believe that Coach Franchione was guilty of inadequate supervision and oversight.

We wish Coach Franchione the very best moving forward, and we are grateful for all of his hard work and effort while he was here at Texas A&M."

Just thought this was interesting.  I enjoy Thanksgiving.  We should take time and give thanks more often then one day out of the year.  But even if "tradition" has changed, it is still a lovely tradition to keep.  My tradition that I have known since I was born is on Thursday (live at home still) we would fight for the shower first get all dressed up ofcourse after greeting everyone in the house iwth "Happy Thanksgiving" and heading over to my  grandparents.  Now that I am no longer living at home, I no longer have to fight for the hot water but lil man and I wake up get ready, make a phone call to my mother and some family members, head over to my mothers not quite sure the reason bc we are going to the same place lol but still it is just something we do and it is in enjoyed, we give hugs load up in the car and head a few blocks away to my Grandmothers house that the tables have now grown with more people adding to the family.  We all stand hand and hand at the table as we say Grace, give Thanks and then b-line it into the kitchen for all the goodies.  We even have a tradition of only one person is now allowed to make the greenbean casserole.  Long story but its just that a memory a story, a tradition.  After we eat we all kick back and ask ourselves why we ate to much then soon after that we head across the street for pie.  Then unbutton pants and ask why we still ate to much.  Load up with left overs and head back over to my mothers for a nap or head home for a nap.  Then go back for more later.  It's not much but its what I look for every year.  So it's not the same as it was in the 1600's but as time as gone by time changes.  We now create our own traditions, our own memories.  And that is the best Thanksgiving I could ever dream for and hope my the way my family does Thanksgiving never changes.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - When Americans sit down on Thursday to eat stuffed Thanksgiving turkey, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes, followed by a slice of pumpkin pie, many think they are upholding a 400-year-old tradition.

They aren't.

The meal which settlers from England shared with native Americans in 1621, which has come to be known as the first Thanksgiving, probably didn't feature many of the culinary favorites that grace tables at present day Thanksgivings, and almost definitely did not happen in November, a food historian told AFP.

Indeed, 1621 wasn't even a festival of giving thanks, but was "clearly a harvest festival," said Kathleen Curtin of the Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, where a 17th-century farming village set up by English colonists on native American tribal lands has been recreated.

"We know that the meal in 1621 included venison, brought by the Wampanoag Indians, and wild fowl -- probably geese and duck hunted by the settlers," Curtin told AFP.

"They didn't have stuffing. They didn't have cranberry sauce because it requires too much sugar. And they probably had pumpkin but no flour or butter for pie crust," she said.

"We don't think there was much alcohol because the settlers' barley harvest wasn't very successful, and they didn't have time to brew anything," she added.

Curtin also stood another tradition on its head by saying the first Thanksgiving happened in September or early October rather than late November.

US President George W. Bush on Monday cast more doubt on whether the 1621 dinner in Plymouth marked the first Thanksgiving, as he recalled a group of English settlers who prayed at what is now Berkeley Plantation in Virginia two years before then.

No feasting took place at the Berkeley Thanksgiving, as Bush called it -- but then the idea of a massive feast is another myth.

"Thanksgiving was a religious event the English settlers had every fall, which was followed up with feasting. We know it was marked around New England in the late 1600s," said Curtin.

"Over time, the feasting became more important and the religious part became less and less important.

"Finally, we got football and something had to go -- it was the church service."

Today's Thanksgiving dinners are often digested in front of the television, while a football game is aired.

The reason why a big to-do is made over the dinner of 1621 is that historians believe it was the first time native Americans and English settlers celebrated a harvest together, said Curtin.

Adam Fortunate Eagle Nordwall, a tribal elder on the Fallon Indian Reservation in Nevada, agreed.

"Native Americans were having harvest festivals forever, and so were the English back in England. They did it together in 1621," Fortunate Eagle told AFP.

But he and Curtin differed over who hosted whom in 1621.

"The native Americans were being generous hosts and sharing their bounty with the pitiful English. It was the generosity and the sharing of the native Americans that made it possible for the settlers to survive in the new world," Fortunate Eagle said.

"The English would certainly have been playing host ... but they were in the middle of the Wampanoag homeland, and Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag people, would certainly have expected that he would be welcome," said Curtin.

Thanksgiving officially moved to late November in 1863, when president Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the bloody civil war, proclaimed the fourth Thursday of the month as a day for giving thanks.

Even Native Americans have got "sucked into the tradition of holding Thanksgiving in November," Fortunate Eagle told AFP.

"We have a feast down at the tribal hall," said the former activist for native rights.

"Everyone's welcome to join in, but, oddly enough, very few white people come from town to share with us.

"Those lousy pilgrims ... 400 years later, they still haven't been able to say 'thank you' to the native Americans who helped make all of this possible."

Thanksgiving meals at the Plimoth Plantation feature many of the foods and drink that did not grace the ground -- they didn't have tables -- in 1621.

Fortunate Eagle, too, will be giving thanks, surrounded by family at a heavily laden dinner table on Fallon reservation.

"We're having turkey and ham," he told AFP.

"Ham -- we got that from the Europeans and we thank them for it," he said.

Umm?  Ok I didn't read the whole thing BUT I'm just shaking my head.  I LOVED Sesame Street.  What is so wrong about it?  Some people have to much time on their hands to hand pick out each and every tiny little thing and turn it around into something so horrible.  Just my thoughts, what are yours?

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist. Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole. Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing. The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings. I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.” Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said. Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict. The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm. Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Points of Entry

Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?

The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.

Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times

Ok, some of us are not a huge fan of Andy.  Thinking he is a trader and  all that.  Well last Thursday, I saw him.  It changed my views for him.  I am from Deer Park, the town he grew up in.  He what I thought HAD a home about 3 blocks from me.  I knew he attends the highschools baseball games, active in his chruch but I thought all of that moved when he moved.  I was wrong.  Even tho he no longer plays for the Astros, his family still lives here.  I went to my sons school to eat l unch with him Thursday.  As a few parents are waiting in the hall way for our children, I turn and see a big man wearing jogging pants tshirt and baseball cap didn't pay any attention to him just standing there waiting like everyone else.  A few mins later, he walks past me to his childs lunch line and low and behold it was Andy.  Going to eat lunch with his child.  When you go eat lunch you have a choice, move to another table, eat at their table or go to a conf room.  He sat at his childs table and ate lunch.  Now, some of us might not think that is a big deal.  But that changed my views on him.  He has decided to not uproot his children, still goes about his everyday life as a person and not as some big shot baseball player.  When he was done he got up kissed bye and left. 

That is all

This isn't easy for me, but here goes.   I found out a few months back that my father has Hep C.  They caught it early but has to take 2 pills a day plus a round of chemo each month.  He is expected to have a full recovery.  Well yeah that sounds all fine and dandy but I am scared out of my wits.  He is the 3rd child out of 5, the middle boy and now the only boy and the middle child period.  With the mens family history this doesnt sound fine and dandy to me.  This is a man that I have NEVER heard complain of a simple head ache, never heard him get sick or complain of being sick.  Everytime I've asked how ya been it was always great with great news.  Now when I call to check on him I actually hear it in his voice along with him actually SAYING IT, "I'm not doing so good"  The chemo is kicking his BUTT, BIG TIME.  I am scared.  So I am asking for some prayers for him, for my family, for my Grandmother who has had to watch her oldest and youngest boys laid to rest.  I pray for strength for him and my family to get through this.  To beable to take it when he isn't feeling well, to beable to be strong for him when he needs it.

Thank you