Cleaning out the Inbox

   The cleaning of the inbox is a bit overdue and we start with a note from Denise Nicarry, who informed me that Fruit Stripe gum is being discontinued after a sixty-four-year tenure.

Fruit Stripe and its iconic zebra mascot date back to 1960 and its parent company Beech-Nut Gum, with its striped stick with flavor that would give the chewer a few-second blast of strong flavor before almost completely disappearing.

After that jolt, Fruit Stripe was just another chewing gum but for those few seconds, it was Nirvana for the chewing gum user.

The recent retirement of Nick Saban from Alabama saw several articles on the man who has a case for the greatest college football coach in history but I found this one interesting from ESPN.

There are fewer coach shows than there used to be and even fewer that will allow callers to call and speak with the coach himself.

This article looks at the show, Saban's personality and willingness to do the show, and his number one caller who always starts the show with questions about the offensive line.

Space.com writes of the twentieth anniversary of the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landing on Mars on two different dates in January 2004.

The pair were supposed to be able to work for three months on Martian soil but lasted years longer with Spirit lasting until 2010 and Opportunity an amazing fifteen years before losing contact in 2019.

The rovers made numerous discoveries during their Martian excursion including finding the first meteorite on another planet and proving that Mara at one time did possess water.

Omaha.com writes of the history of their now-demolished racetrack Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward) and the final resting place of their namesake racehorse.

Omaha won the Triple Crown in 1935 and had been buried at Ak-Sa-Ben in 1959.

The monument marking the spot of his grave was moved in 1974 to expand the grandstand but the remains were not moved and when the track was razed, no one actually knew where Omaha was buried.

The article thinks they have figured out the answer and shows the monument to Omaha where it stands near the campus of Nebraska-Omaha.

Cleaning out the Inbox

The inbox needs cleaning and this is mostly a non-sports edition as most of the items that have accumulated are non-sports.

First, though, I wanted to take the time to thank the one person (no names this time) that loves the PPM.
The PPM started as a throwaway column to notch my picks for the season and used to feature a lottery machine as the face of the series- hence the name "Pigskin Pickin' Machine" before one day for a reason that I cannot even remember, I decided to add a picture from social media (I don't even remember the platform) of ESPN's college football reporter Heather Cox at Clemson with Frank Howard's rock.
This was in 2013, we've had a different "host of the PPM" each year since and the six various hosts certainly have brightened up the PPM and added a different variable to the series.
The race for the 2019 host has left the gate and three candidates are well ahead of the others.
I'd be surprised if next years host wasn't among those three, but one never knows what that committee will decide!

The article of the week for me arrives from the New Yorker, where Robert Caro, who is still working on the final volume of his series on Lyndon Johnson, writes not just of Johnson, although his life is the center of attention, but of Caro himself with the focus on just how the author arrived at the topic, how he managed to cajole information out of people that didn't always want to give such information out and at the end, Caro addresses the big white whale- his age and whether or not he will not only finish a memoir of his life, but also the final book of the LBJ collection.
It's a terrific read and I couldn't do anything else until I had completed the article- it was that interesting.

We move to the New York Times and their opinion columnist Frank Bruni where Bruni writes of "The Loneliness of the Moderate Democrat".
Much of the article centers around centrist Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, her policies and
how they don't always mix with an increasingly left-shifting party.
As someone that considers themselves without a party in many ways, I found it intriguing as each side of the fence seems to hate anything remotely resembling working together.

Vanity Fair writes of the 1980 Democratic presidential primary between sitting President Jimmy Carter against the challenge of Senator Ted Kennedy in an excerpt of a new book that looks at that race.
Jon Ward's book on this battle seems to be well researched and I wonder if we could see another challenge of a sitting President in 2020?

The Atlantic writes of the human aspect in the demise of spacecraft as it seems the Martian rover Opportunity may be finished with an inability to recharge its batteries.
The rover, which landed on Mars in 2004, is suspected to have had its solar panels covered in dust last June and has been unable to restore contact since.
The article is not only focused on the craft but on the people associated with machines that ended their time before their time was scheduled to be complete.

A higher return rate for Legos than stocks or gold?
Vox says so and as one usually should when dealing with the value of collectibles, read between the lines to realize the actual truth, but still, Legos have to have a strong market as a collectible.
Legos never go out of style, always has a built-in age group with new infusions of users as others leave and has some appeal to the adult market as well, so I can see special Lego sets having value, but again, read between the lines- you aren't getting rich buying the 4.95 Lego set at Target in a few years.

I'll wrap with the only sports note as SABR's Chip Greene writes about the baseball history of Three Rivers Stadium.
I learned a lot about how the stadium was built and the problems getting an agreement to build Three Rivers in the 60s.
It's a SABR article, so it's about the Pirates history there, so if you are looking more on the football side, it's a little light there.