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Al_4_ISU

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Everything posted by Al_4_ISU

  1. My freshman year of high school (1999-2000) was pretty trying. In November of '99, I was sitting around with some of my buddies in the lobby after lunch. We got an hour for lunch, and after you were done eating, everyone would just hang out in the lobby until 1PM and classes started back up. We got yakking about how the town next to us got a day off of school because someone called in a bomb threat. About 5 years earlier, someone called a bomb threat into our school and they just sent us outside to play all day. As a bunch of 14 year olds, we all thought this was hilarious and we should do the same and get a day off of school. So one by one, we all went into the bathroom and wrote something on the wall of one of the toilet stalls about some kind of bomb. I kinda chickened out, and wrote "if this is erased before October 31, the school will blow up". I felt like I'd done my part to go along with it, but hedged by putting a past date which would make it obvious that this wasn't a real threat. This was on a Thursday and we had Friday off for conferences or something. Next Monday, riding the bus to school, we hear that once we get to school everyone is getting sent home because they found a bomb threat in the school and SWAT teams and dogs were there. My heart absolutely sank. I had no expectation that anyone would take this seriously. Keep in mind this was before we had school shootings in America every week. As soon as I got to school, I went into the principal's office, took responsibility, told them what had happened, and that this was just a prank no one really thought would get taken seriously. They immediately had me questioned by the town cop, and asked me to indicate the other people involved. I refused to give anyone else up. I was immediately suspended for the rest of the semester, and my case was turned over to the juvenile court system. I spent my suspension working on the farm. We were pattern tiling (essentially plumbing crop land to help water drain off it) a lot in those days, so I was out in the elements (November/December on the IA/MN border) working 50 hours a week as a 14 year old. After the juvenile court officer processed the case, he recommend to the county attorney that I be placed on an informal probation. His conclusion was that I was a good kid who did something stupid, owned up to it, and no one got hurt. The county attorney took that recommendation and wiped his ass with it. He charged me with Terrorism, a Class D Felony in Iowa. He said the reason for this was to send a message that this wouldn't be taken lightly, but it was obviously a combination of my refusal to roll over on the other kids, and my last name. My grandpa was the State Representative for our county at the time, and a political rival of said county attorney. I was allowed to go back to school for second semester, and the trial was slated for the end of February. Because of what a hoopla the whole thing had become, and due to some other trouble I'd gotten into (parents had caught me drinking the previous summer, and some petty vandalism that I was never criminally implicated in), they decided to have me try doing a semester at the Catholic high school in Rochester, MN where my mom worked. No one there would know or care anything about the case I was involved in, so I was all for it as I felt like I had become a complete pariah. At the trial, the judge almost laughed the county attorney out of court. I was convicted of 5th Degree Criminal Mischief, a simple misdemeanor, for the act of vandalizing the bathroom wall. My punishment was 10 hours of community service, which I completed by mowing the lawn of our church a handful of times. In the end it amounted to absolutely nothing, but the whole experience was absolutely terrifying, emotionally draining, painful, and ultimately it steeled me into the person I am today in many ways. I loved going to school in Rochester, and spent the rest of my HS career there. Leaving my high school in a podunk town of 800 people with the same 30 kids I'd had class with my whole life and going to school in a much larger setting exposed me to all sorts of new ideas, and definitely got me to think beyond a small town mentality. I learned that being honest and taking your lumps when you fuck up tends to lead to a better outcome in the end. If I had kept my mouth shut, I'd probably have never gotten caught. They claimed they could do handwriting analysis, but they never figured that out on the other guys. Over the years, every single one of the other guys has come up to me and apologized for not taking their share of the blame. Some of them honestly seem truly guilt-wracked over the whole deal. Having to spend that month and a half out working like an adult was an extremely formative experience as the working conditions were often miserable (cold and muddy). I almost never lose my shit in truly trying situations, and this experience is absolutely the reason why. It just gave me a really unusual perspective that's benefitted me more often than not. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I'm better off for having been through it.
  2. Yup. From as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to them. I had a road map of the state of Iowa tacked to the wall above my computer station in my apartment in Ames. One day one of my buddies stopped over and came in kind of quietly. He said he watched me look at the map for 5 minutes before I realized he was standing in the hallway.
  3. Damn. That last paragraph is myself to a T. Must be a small town kid thing.
  4. They were. I gotta make up calories somewhere
  5. Continuity issue: in episode 3, Brownie talks about growing up with Cookie. By Season 3 he’s a contemporary of Mabel
  6. Sautéed pork tongue and shishito peppers, scrambled some eggs on top of it, and made breakfast tacos, topping it with candied japs and a pepper sauce.
  7. There are probably 50 posts from you about how the new Big 12 wasn’t really worth what they got and it was a bribe, etc. Not participating in the backslapping would be simply ignoring it, like most posters. It’s also hilarious to me that you view the Big 12’s collective sense of relief as backslapping.
  8. It’s out there that ESPN and Fox viewed the Big 12 sans OU/UT and the Pac 12 as essentially the same value, but were only giving one of them a contract. The Big 12 had time zone geography and competent leadership on their side, and that’s why they won out. Yormark moved quick, and they liked having Eastern, Central, and Mountain options. Statsman has an axe to grind against us leftovers
  9. I was listening to that album this AM and thought WVU would be crazy to not use that song for the stadium entrance
  10. He could lose out and not be on the hot seat with our AD. I think he needs to win 5 to keep fans engaged.
  11. Defense is still pretty good. Early in his career he would adjust the offensive scheme to fit his talent, and now he’s stubbornly insisting on “his” offense even when it no longer works. Our special teams cost us a lot of games too. They were better earlier in his tenure too. He just really started to believe he was the smartest guy in every room and lost his self critique. This is what happens with too many yes men.
  12. Oh, excellent. I totally thought the was the end.
  13. I was just improvising with what we had available and it slammed and went hard. Surprisingly solid the next day.
  14. My exact thoughts. Fuckin’ Kenny Boy bout made me cry.
  15. He probably is. There's been absolutely no rumors whatsoever of him doing anything inappropriate off the field, and the guys who play for him seem to universally love him. I know a guy who has worked for ISU football since 2006. That's McCarney, Chizik, Rhoads, and now Campbell that he's worked for. He's emphatically said Campbell's the best human of those 4. He's acting more and more like a bitch during games, and I get why other fanbases would want to dog pile on that (I would if I was a fan of another school) but I've seen absolutely nothing to suggest to me he's a bad person.
  16. We bought into it because it looked we were winning with lesser talent, when the reality in hindsight is that Campbell's probably a little underrated in his ability to spot talent. His first bowl team seemed like they had exceptional culture, because they'd been so shitty the last couple years of Rhoads, and came off like a squad of try-hards that overcame the odds. In reality, there were quite a few guys that would go on to play in the league, and a couple of them (Lazard and David Montgomery) have been pretty fucking good. Campbell's a good recruiter and talent evaluator who thinks he can and has manufactured some superior culture, and that appears more and more delusional of an idea with every passing week.
  17. You remember wrong. I've always thought he would take one of those if offered. When Kelly left Notre Dame, I was very much sweating it. I'm no longer concerned about a better job even wanting him at this point. From my cheap seats it looks like the typical story of someone being told he's God so long that he started believing it himself. 5 straight winning seasons at ISU isn't a fluke, but something broke in his brain after the 2020 season, and it's hard to tell if he ever gets out of it. Either way, he's fine. He's making a shit load of money and has an extremely long leash with his current employer.
  18. Michigan, Notre Dame, or Ohio State. Those were the jobs he was waiting for I think.
  19. Recruiting has actually got better on paper. I really don’t know. Seems like Campbell started reading his press clippings to me.
  20. If they give me nothing else this year, they gave me that
  21. I’ve been getting annoyed by Campbell’s smugness, but I’m pretty close to being out. I’m actually glad that he flipped out on that guy. I was starting to wonder if he cared at all. That dude is like 6” shorter and 80lbs lighter than me.
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