How about that Rose Bowl, eh?
I spent a big chunk of the game going mildly crazy. From that first almost-interception on the opening series to the muffed punt near the end of regulation, I could barely stay in my seat.
Don’t try to reach me Monday night. I will be glued to the TV for the championship. I almost scored tickets via the Veterans Ticket Foundation (affiliate link) in a lottery, but missed the draw. Such is life.
Genealogy
Every now and then in genealogy research, you find a unicorn.
Most of the time, you’re just digging. You search Ancestry or FamilySearch, and tug on a thread here and there to see what it’s attached to. You might find a hint somewhere and pursue it only to find out that a couple of generations back, someone grabbed the wrong John Smith and connected it to your tree.
Occasionally you’ll find a connection without sources, and when you try contacting the owner of the tree, they usually don’t respond.
Then there’s Friday. I was looking for something about my mom—I think I was searching for her 1950 Census record—when I found a reference to her in another tree. That’s not unusual, especially given the number of Smiths we have a couple of generations back. I didn’t recognize any of the names on the tree, nor did I have any of them in my database, so I contacted the tree owner through Ancestry.
Those messages, in my experience, rarely get an answer, and I’m not sure why. I’d guess that sometimes the person on the other end has passed away because genealogy is not really a young person’s hobby. And maybe they haven’t logged in recently, or they don’t see the notification on their Ancestry dashboard. I get it.
But this time, the lady responded in less than half an hour with stunning news for me. She’s my 8th cousin, descending from a branch I had no clue about. She mentioned the common ancestor, her 6th great-grandfather.
I have cousins in Yorkshire.
This is going to be a really exciting time for me. Her tree has over 111,000 people in it, and I can’t wait to trace the connection.
The hard part about discoveries like this, at least for me, is the waiting. She’s in Yorkshire, five hours ahead of me, so it was later in her evening when we first spoke. I’m chomping at the bit to learn more about the connection because her data on the Baldingers stops at my grandfather. But I have to be realistic; genealogy researchers have lives away from the trees and branches.
Football
Last week I mentioned Florida State’s poor showing in the Orange Bowl; they lost 63-3 to Georgia. Both teams had a substantial number of players forego the bowl game because they’d declared for the NFL draft or entered the transfer portal. There was quite a bit of discussion on /r/CFB about how many players across the NCAA skipped their team’s bowl appearances. Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr in theory waited until the last minute, making his announcement the day of the game, even though he traveled with the team to Dallas. I thought that was a little tacky on his part. It was an open secret that he wasn’t going to play, so why should he be allowed to partake in all of the pageantry and benefits of a game he’s not playing in?
I wasn’t the only person with that thought.
Nick Baumgardner shared a video clip of Georgia’s coach Kirby Smart in his post-game presser, and Smart makes some good points.
Baumgardner asked his followers for suggestions on how to fix the problem. One of the overwhelming suggestions was to push back the opening of the transfer portal until after bowl season. It currently opens the day after the College Football Playoff bracket and bowl games are announced and runs for 30 days. The most common suggestion was to have the portal open after bowl games conclude. That way, in theory, players can’t opt out of the bowl games without facing some sort of penalty.
Mike Farrell had some other ideas, which make more than a little bit of sense to me. Now that NIL is such a big deal for players, let them know it cuts both ways. I don’t know that student-athletes should have to pay back the entire year of tuition and board, but certainly make them responsible for part of it.
Some sort of contractual obligation needs to come into play as well, whether that’s tied to scholarships or NIL or both.
I understand why players declare for the draft and opt out of the bowl games, especially if they’re not playing in the CFP. They don’t want to risk getting hurt in what amounts to an exhibition game and screwing up their NFL careers. But one big aspect of team sports is putting your teammates ahead of your own interests. A balancing act that needs to happen there, and everyone needs to start working on it for the coming season.
Reading
What makes a murder?
Generally, murder involves the intent to harm someone. You have to mean to kill the victim. But a legal doctrine known as felony murder allows a murder charge against someone who wasn’t directly involved in the killing. One example comes from Oklahoma. In 2017, Elizabeth Rodriguez drove her boyfriend and two others to a house in Broken Arrow. She waited in the car while the boys broke in. The 23-year-old son of the homeowner fired on the boys, killing all three. Rodriquez was charged with three counts of murder because she drove them to the home knowing they were going to break in (and possibly telling them to). She pleaded guilty and is currently serving three concurrent 32-year sentences.
There’s no question that she drove the boys to the house—it was their second time to burglarize that particular residence—or that two of them were armed. It’s reasonable to assume in Oklahoma that a homeowner could be armed and willing to resist a burglary with violence. So it was completely foreseeable that someone could be injured or killed during the burglary. Rodriguez should have known of the risk.
I don’t have a huge problem with the basic idea of felony murder charges, especially under circumstances like this particular case. But what happens when the person who’s charged was in police custody at the time of the death? Literally sitting in handcuffs in a police car?
In 2012, Sadik Baxter and O’Brian Oakley were breaking into cars when one owner started caught them. Baxter surrendered to the cops, but Oakley fled in his car, eventually crashing into two bicyclists, killing both of them. Authorities charged Oakley with two counts of first-degree felony murder and two counts of vehicular homicide.
So was Baxter, even though he was miles away, cuffed in the back of a police car.
There’s no question in my mind that Oakley should have been charged with vehicular homicide. He shouldn’t have run from the cops. His actions directly led to the deaths of two people.
But how did Baxter contribute to the deaths of Dean Amelkin and Christopher McConnell?
Could Sadik Baxter have reasonably foreseen that Oakley would flee from the cops, get hit by another car, and crash into two innocent people? If not, then he shouldn’t be charged, I think.
Sarah Stillman at The New Yorker took a closer look at the concept of felony murder and how it’s applied in various states. The results are troubling. In some states, Blacks are 23 to 39 times more likely to be convicted of felony murder than whites. The Felony Murder Reporting Project lists almost two dozen cases where people were charged with felony murder because police officers killed someone. I’m not suggesting that none of those cases warranted charges because I haven’t read up on all the cases. But I’m certainly curious about the stories behind each case. I can’t quite wrap my mind around the idea of charging one person for the actions of another who was killed by a cop. Read Stillman’s story here: Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away | The New Yorker (archive.ph)
Words For The Week
“The end of the world is on people’s minds. We have the power to destroy or save ourselves, but the question is what do you do with that responsibility.”
“If you’re really special, meaning you’re doing something unique and original, it could scare people.”
“Don’t lose the best thing in your life just because you are not sure.”
“Nobody ever thinks clearly at the airport.”
“I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I’m reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.”
“The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you’re at the center of the universe – if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.”
—Nicolas Cage, born 7 January 1964.
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