Letters to the Editor
catling
Published Letters: 37 Editor's Choice: 8
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There's more to a woman's shape than waist and leg length
[Read the article: Spain: Goodbye stick-figure sizing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Which makes for a problem that the men's style sizing just can't solve. The vast majority of men are 'apples'- they carry excess weight in their bellies. Women vary a lot more in terms of excess fat distribution and other fundamental shapes. There are many apples, but also a high percentage of pears- people who carry their excess fat in their legs and hips.
Most women's clothing seems to be deisgned for apple-shaped people. I'm pear-shaped below the rib cage, which means that if I try on pants designed for the apple-shaped, I have a huge gap at the waist in order to find pants that fit properly through my legs. (and a lot of time spent biking when I was a triathlete don't help in terms of leg fit either)
End result- the only place I end up buying pants these days is the Banana Republic/Gap/Old Navy family of stores because they're surprisingly good at meeting the needs of women with different kinds of body shapes.
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Dexter is one of those rare cases where the television series is better than the books
[Read the article: TV Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For all that the books were fascinating reading, they were slight reads. In the tv series, everything is fleshed out in a way that's both consistent with, and expanding upon the books. There's a really nice building up to the ITK killer storyline throughout the season, something that seems kind of abrupt in the books. And characters like Deb, Doakes, and even Laguerta all seem more three dimensional and complexly developed as they get some significant screen time.
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And for all that, it's still ridiculously simple to enter the US illegally
[Read the article: So long, Canada]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because of the Great Lakes. Take metro Detroit/Southeastern Michigan- huge numbers of recreational boaters (Michigan's normally in the top three states in terms of registered boaters and boats) and many, many private docks, canal communities, and small marinas. It's not like the Coasties can effectively cover all of Lake Huron or Lake Erie, especially during times of peak summer boat traffic. It just doesn't work.
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A number of types of broken legs in thoroughbreds are very fixable
[Read the article: Eight Belles' last run]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And it's common to see horses even make it back to racing after those kinds of breaks. There are splints and water rehab options and other types of therapy. Some types of breaks are borderline- the odds are maybe 50/50 that a horse will recover, but a horse has a nice enough race record and/or pedigree that it's worth the effort to try to save them for breeding duty. (And part of the problem today may come from allowing the kinds of horses that are fragile enough to break legs while racing to pass along any genetic fragileness, but that's another issue)
And then there are the catastrophic breakdowns- experience shows that there really is no effective way to stabilize and splint certain types of injuries. A horse is designed to put somewhere between 900 and 1200 pounds of weight on every leg. If they don't then blood circulation in that leg deteriorates, and that loss of blood circulation causes any number of extremely painful and frequently fatal leg conditions. In the care of Barbaro, it wasn't the broken leg that killed him in the end, it was the development of one of these conditions-laminitis- that led him to being euthanized in order to end what had become constant and horrible pain for the horse.
The odd thing about Barbaro is that, save for the unfortunate presence of Mr. Prospector three generations back, his pedigree actually leans more toward producing sturdy, sound horses than the kind of speedballs more common these days. Names like Roberto, Round Table, His Majesty, and Blushing Groom also show up in the first three generations, all of whom had a good reputation for siring sound horses. After Barbaro's Derby win, a lot of people were looking forward to his stud career because on paper he was the kind of horse who should have passed along soundness as a trait.
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The smaller schools are often willing to take more chances on athletes
[Read the article: NCAA academic penalties flunk sniff test]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A school like the University of Michigan is actually relatively picky about their student athletes, and it's common to hear of a possible recruit there being told that they couldn't pass muster with the admissions office and best of luck to them elsewhere. Same goes for a number of other top tier Director's Cup schools. They've got enough good athletes that want to come there that they can afford to do that.
The second tier schools are the one who are under constant pressure to move up. So they'll let in a student athlete who doesn't have the best grades, or who maybe has a bit or a rap sheet right along with other student athletes who would be considered to be overlooked by the big programs for one reason or another. Can't say I'm surprised if the kid who is physically talented but academically struggling in the classroom in high school continues the pattern in college.
And as someone who used to work at Tennessee-Martin, I can say that the football players and men's basketball players were indeed dumb as posts on arrival, and academic tutoring can only do so much when it comes to getting water out of a rock. (however the rodeo, tennis, rifle, and such teams tended to be brighter than the open admission general student body there)