“One of the most grueling records in American endurance sports fell late Saturday night in northern Georgia. Tara Dower, a 31-year-old ultrarunner and long-distance hiker born in North Carolina and based in Virginia, reached Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, at 11:53 P.M. She completed the arduous southern thru-hike of the iconic trail, crossing 14 states and 2,197 miles, in 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes. It’s the fastest known time for hiking the iconic trail in either direction.”
Unfortunately there isn’t a good view, just overhead and dodgy phone camera shots.
It doesn’t look like they’ll get this fixed before Carlisle are supposed to play there in three weeks. It took us a month and a half to reopen when we were flooded last time, and we didn’t have sinkholes in the pitch.
There are some predictable outcomes, like Northwestern University’s study which found that legal sports gambling depletes household savings by $2 for every $1 gambled, and economists at UCLA found that legalization increases the risk a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent.
But there are even darker consequences that come with a wave of highly addictive betting apps that sports leagues have made inseparable with their product, like how Oregon economists found that legal sports betting leads to about a nine percent increase in intimate-partner violence. Men’s Health conducted a poll of men in 2023 where 58 percent of respondents said sports betting has affected their mental health, 43 percent say it has affected their physical health, and 18 percent say it is “destroying [their] life.”
Eighteen percent is almost thirty million American men.
How about banning Yankistani football for cruelty to humans, huh? I can’t understand how a game that has killed children and crippled grown men is allowed to continue.
I remember a science fiction story I read as a child - Terrafied by Arthur Tofte - which involved a spaceship captain’s bringing a young alien girl to Earth. The captain had a son and daughter whose ages were similar.
The son put on a football game, and the alien freaked TF out. She’d never seen so much violence. “Is this what you call ‘war’ ?!” she asked, shocked. The human kids laughed at her, and explained that it was a game humans enjoyed playing and watching.
