More Odds & Ends

Mike Holder, the athletic director at Oklahoma State, has been discovering how difficult it can be finding someone to coach the men’s basketball program. Both Bill Self of Kansas and Chris Lowery of Southern Illinois have now refused Holder’s offer. I still think that forcing Sean Sutton to resign was a bad decision. It’s fortunate that Holder’s action is slowly coming back to haunt him. Sean, at least, will be getting $20,000 per month as part of his settlement with the university. The university cannot pay him what remains on his contract in one lump sum although it could offer Bill Self a six million dollar signing bonus along with a four million dollar a year contract. A clause to stop paying Sean if he were to get another coaching job was removed from his contract, fortunately.

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Some of you might remember that I mentioned the exorbitant amount of money that Amazon was charging for Marilyn Mazur’s CD Elixir. The cost of that CD has since been reduced significantly. An excellent review of this CD appears at All About Jazz . Not yet owning a copy, I cannot add whether I agree with the critic.

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The character development that I mentioned wanting in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was present in the novel. I just hadn’t reached that portion of the novel when I added my earlier comment. It’s actually quite a good novel and contains a lengthy climax, one that reveals an intimate awareness of Utah’s landscape.

I am currently reading Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel and enjoying this nonlinear narrative. More comments will follow.

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The magnolia blossoms where I live are slowly opening up. I hope to post photographic evidence sometime soon unless the high winds we’re having and the rain forecasted for Thursday and Friday destroy the blossoms. These blossoms, miraculously, survived the freeze that we had Sunday night/Monday morning.

Something, at least, has managed to escape those "thorns of life" that cause so many of us to apply pressure to our wounds.