Posts Tagged ‘detroit’
Got kicks? Every Detroit student who shows up on the cash-crucial Student Count Day will be able to answer “yes” thanks to a donation from Bob’s Classic Kicks in midtown.
BCK, 4717 Woodward, made an arrangement with the school district to give away a free pair of black leather Nikes to every student who comes to class on Oct. 3, the day when students are counted and their numbers used as the basis for per-pupil funding from the state and federal government.
The more bodies in class, the more money schools have all year.
source: CBS Detroit
Where do you even start with a story like this?
I guess you could start with the positive, which is a local shoe store willing to pony up 14,000 to 17,000 shoes for the neighborhood kids. When I read the headline, I assumed it had to be Nike themselves footing the bill for enough shoes to cover an entire school district, but for a single-location shoe store to offer that? I can’t even imagine how one store can afford to do that, but that’s pretty awesome to see a local business willing to give that much to the community.
On the idea of a thing called “Student Count Day,” I can barely put into words what an incredibly stupid idea I think it is to tie a school’s funding to a single day that’s publicly announced beforehand. Student Count Day was born to be rigged like this, an opportunity for a district to blatantly game the system. Yes, I know, some will say, “But it’s for the kids!”
Yes, but they’re taking a bigger share of the pie from the other districts. Aren’t we supposed to be against cheating in school? This is cheating just as surely as if the district decided they were going to count everyone twice (maybe once for each of their feet) which is probably roughly the spike they’ll see for attendence on Free Nikes, er – Student Count Day.
Reality is, the US spends more per child than any other nation. Period. It’s not a problem of not spending enough, it’s a societal and cultural problem more than anything. Next time you hear the teachers’ unions arguing that the problem is that we don’t spend enough and we need more money because “It’s for the kids,” realize that the majority of every dollar spent on education goes to bureaucrat and teacher salaries and pensions. All I know is, some explaining needs to be done when we spend more per child than any other nation and see our kids’ test scores falling farther and farther behind.
A few last thoughts . . . It would be interesting to see how they coordinate the exchange of 14,000 – 17,000 vouchers for new shoes in all sizes. It would seem to me just about all the kids would want to get those new shoes just as soon as attendance is counted and the vouchers passed out. (Staggered redemption dates on the vouchers, perhaps?) Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into some chaos like some of the mega-hyped releases of top dollar Nike Air Jordan retros.
They’re not giving out the retro Air Jordans for sure, but for a brand that typically starts around $80 to get into, I’d imagine most the kids will be feeling pretty good about themselves in their new shoes.
It begs the question though – when everyone at your school has their own pair of Nikes, does that whole Nike shoes as a status symbol thing go out the window? Regardless, let’s just hope that when everyone has their own Nikes, kids will no longer get killed over their Nikes.
They say he has the intangibles, the heart of a champion, he has all those things you can’t quantify that makes someone a winner. His winning itself is so unexplainable, they’ve taken to calling it “Tebow Magic” because it seems like you can only explain it as something supernatural, something not of this world, so I ask myself maybe, just maybe, has Jesus Christ become a football fan? Has Jesus taken an active interest in this man, Tim Tebow, the most overtly devoted worshiper of Christ in football history?
Tebow's eye black, Ephesians 2:8-10 reads, 'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works, so that no one can boast.'
The Tebow phenomenon is the story of how a man who had been slighted, doubted and disparaged by most analysts came in to take a hapless 1-4 team going nowhere and turn it into a 7-5 team headed for the playoffs. The story is also of a player who has put religion into the forefront of the discussion about football and how Tebow has become a lightning rod in the debate as to whether his overt displays of his faith are somehow inappropriate for the football field. It’s a story so improbable, he’s become a man so polarizing that the Tebow phenomenon has become a bigger story in the NFL than the Packers themselves, a 12-0 team in pursuit of perfection and a Super Bowl repeat.
Never has a player had so many doubters . . . from Tebow’s FRS energy drink commercial, self-described, but a career summary few would deny:
They said I couldn’t be a high school quarterback, they said I couldn’t get a [division 1 college] scholarship . . . that you can’t make it, you’re not good enough, you’re not skilled enough . . . they said I couldn’t win a Heisman, they said I couldn’t win a national championship, they said I wouldn’t be a first round draft pick, they said I couldn’t play in the league, ‘ppreciate that.
Source: Official FRS Healthy Energy Fuels Tim Tebow Ad
And yet at every level, despite all the doubters, Tebow just kept doing everything they said he couldn’t do.
It didn’t stop when he made the NFL. After the Broncos got off to a 1-4 start, the Denver faithful were clamoring for Tebow to get a chance to play, chanting his name, and in what looked like a throwaway season, the greatest Bronco of all, John Elway gave into the fans, probably thinking he’d just throw Tebow to the wolves and be over it. You see, John Elway thinks you need a great pocket passer to win championships (you know, a guy taken straight from the mold of John Elway himself) but sometimes, being a great player does not make you a great judge of talent.
In Week 5, after being put in the 2nd half with his team down 23-10 to the Chargers, Tebow almost pulled off a furious comeback.
The next game was his first start. Down 15-0 and with the game on the line, Tebow suddenly injected life into an offense that had been sputtering all game, throwing a TD with 2:44 to go in the 3rd and then another TD with 17 seconds on the clock, and the entire game came down to do or die, a 2-point conversion to tie, and Tebow did. Tied at 15-15, the game went into overtime, and Tebow led the team down the field to an overtime win. Both a game-tying 4th quarter drive and a game-winning overtime drive in his first pro start.
With a hiccup – getting clobbered by Detroit in his second start – Tebow Magic then went on to roll for five straight wins:
- two road game victories against divisional rivals at the Raiders and at the Chiefs
- beating the Jets with less than a minute to go on a memorable game-winning 20-yard TD run by Tebow
- on the road against division rival San Diego he lead two more drives to add to the collection: a 4th quarter game-tying drive and a game-winning drive in overtime.
- at Minnesota, he showed clutch passing in coming from behind twice in the 4th quarter, a game which the Broncos won on a game-ending FG.
As Tebow was leading his team to these victories, the cameras would cut to shots of Elway in the team suite and as he clapped somewhat artificially Elway’s face looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. You could almost read his thoughts, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, I was willing to give into the clamor of the fans and put this guy in and watch him flame out so we could be done with the whole Tebow experiment and go back to finding ourselves the kind of pure passing quarterback the Broncos deserve.”
They say he can’t throw a pass, how he’s got the worst mechanics of any NFL QB we’ve ever seen and I’ll readily admit that he’s thrown some of the worst looking passes I’ve ever seen watching pro football, but here’s a stat that overrides all of that, I call it “the Tebow 4th quarter clutch factor”:
Ugly as he can look in the first three quarters, through seven games, Tim Tebow has a quarterback rating of 109.7 in the 4th quarter and a rating of 120 when his team is within 7 points. To put that in perspective, in an 11-year Super Bowl winning career, Drew Brees has logged a QB rating of over 100 for the season only three times, with the highest at 109.6.
The scary thing is, I have a feeling that if Tebow can do it in the 4th, one day he’ll figure it out and learn to play with the same mindset and passing accuracy in the other three quarters, and when Tim Tebow learns to take his Tebow Magic and spread it across all four quarters . . . look out NFL!
As a Raider fan, even when the Broncos were too far back in the standings to worry about them, it was still such a strange thing to feel my Raider heart rooting for this Tebow kid in a Bronco uniform, but now that the Bronco team that was a hapless 1-4 have come storming back to win 6 out of 7, tying the Raiders for the AFC West lead at 7-5, it’s time to recheck my allegiances.
I’ll say it right now – Tim Tebow, I predict you will win every game to finish out the year and make the playoffs, I predict you will beat each team you meet in the playoffs and I predict that you, Tim Tebow will win the Super Bowl and be awarded the MVP.
This is Raider fan and yes, I just put the jinx on you, Tim Tebow.
May Jesus have mercy on me.
Political Rehab, Day 21: This is my ninth post from political rehab, so I’m well off the pace of 30 non-political posts in 30 days, but I feel I’ve done quite well keeping it off the politics. Sure, I talked a bit about the Bin Laden kill, but managed to avoid any political ranting at all. Kudos to me and my self-restraint.
As the procession of factories and jobs has been leaving Detroit over the decades, the exodus of people has followed. Where once a vibrant city had a population of 1.8 million in 1950, the population of Detroit had dwindled to 714,000 in 2010, dropping 26 percent in the last decade alone. It becomes a vicious cycle, less jobs equals more crime, residents leave the crime-ridden neighborhoods, larger sections of the city and suburbs begin to resemble ghost towns, property values decline further, providing more incentive for people to get out of Dodge while they still can.
Well, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, the Mayor of New York offered up this innovative idea for revitalizing the Motor City:
“Take a look at the big, old, industrial cities, Detroit, for example… the population has left. You’ve got to do something about that. And if I were the federal government, assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agreed to go to Detroit and live there for five or ten years. Start businesses, take jobs, whatever. You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here,” Bloomberg said. “We still are the world’s greatest democracy. We still have hope that if you want to have a better life for yourself and your kids, this is where you want to come.” – Mayor Bloomberg
source: Fox News
The first thing that comes to mind is the Castros in Cuba opening up their prisons again, giving all the released prisoners one-way tickets to American shores, so it couldn’t be a complete free for all, but this is a pretty brilliant idea, really.
All y’all illegals in Arizona, don’t want to worry about getting asked for papers when you get pulled over? Just move to Detroit, you’ll never have to worry about them rednecks again!
And while illegals get most of the headlines, for the millions looking to immigrate to this country by legal means, it is a long, long line, with many applicants waiting for years before they finally are given the chance to come over. You want to cut to the front of that line? Detroit awaits, my friends! All you have to do is agree to be a resident for five or ten years.
Of course, for the city with the largest Muslim population in America, I’m sure many would see Detroit becoming a magnet for Jihadists were we to open up the immigrant floodgates, but it would come down to a matter of having the proper screening, really. Maybe that and a few undercover agents in all the local mosques, but it’s not like the city could get much more dangerous than it already is.
Given a chance to prosper in the land of opportunity, there is no group of people with more drive to succeed than the first generation American immigrants. If Detroit could tap into the energy of a million or two people like that, there’d be no stopping a Motor City Comeback.