Hockey culture, love seeing it!

A beautiful surprise

The Iowa band fought back tears as they performed in honor of their bandmate Derek Phillips, who died last weekend after collapsing from the heat at the Iowa football game. My heart breaks for him, his friends, and family. Powerful night. #Hawkeyes Video by @dpcoon1

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating. So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual. They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive. More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground. That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something. The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her. She was the last. After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody. Nobody. Day after day. The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone. A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite. It was breaking them. An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next. They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers. The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in. Picture that. A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog. And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive. And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates. They called them mock finds. They did it for the dogs. They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for. One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors. But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur. One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers. Corliss asked where his friend was. The man pointed at the pile. "He's in there somewhere." He kept petting the dog. Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11. On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep. Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past. They draped her in an American flag on the way out. Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living. They found one. And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart. That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really. Nobody could save the dead. So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

Still hits the same

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Texas A&M coach Mike Elko received a written question from a fan on his radio show jokingly asking if the SEC voted LSU out of the league, would the Tigers go independent or go to the NFL? “This is a little bit like the son figuring out where the limits are until dad comes home and raises his voice, and then the son goes, ‘I was just kidding, I didn’t mean any of that.’ I think that’s what you’re seeing. “LSU will be in the SEC. LSU will be fired up when we go to Baton Rouge in a couple weeks. All of those things are going to happen. This is just a little bit of, parenting, going on right now.”

Thank you, as always, @12thMan 👍

Can we get a damn medical cart, this is embarrassing @12thMan, we are better than a gator.

LSU releases video welcoming NFL players to campus. presented by: @renasant

I miss the early days of @grok, you asked for information and Grok would provide it. Now you ask a question even slightly in a grey legal, moral, or ethical area and your lucky to get Grok to answer and if it does it’s vaguely related not useful and comes with a warning label.

Von Miller reveals after Texas A&M coach Mike Sherman suspended him, he packed everything he owned into his truck and started driving to Florida to transfer, when he called his he dad told him not to quit, so he turned around and led the nation with 17.5 sacks the next season “I had everything I owned in this blanket, and I went to my car. I threw it in the back and I’m driving home. I called my daddy. I’m like, ‘Daddy, man, I’m leaving. Coach Sherman kicked me off the team. I ain’t coming back until I do this and that.’” “I’m thinking my dad is going, ‘All right, we’re going to find something else.’ He said, ‘Pull that truck over, turn around, and go back to school. You’re not quitting.’” “I was like, ‘That was not the answer I was looking for.’ He was like, ‘You’re not just about to quit when it gets hard. You’re going to turn that truck back around. You’re going to go back to school and you’re going to fix it.’” “I had tears going down my face. I was like, ‘Man, this is going to be so hard to fix all of this.’ I turned around. We had a meeting. Coach Sherman told my dad the exact same thing that he told me, and my dad agreed with Coach Sherman.” “There was nowhere I could go. I just had to face the music. I had to face the truth. That spring was a hard one, but I got my grades up. I made it to all my classes. I went through the checklist of everything Coach Sherman wanted me to do.” “That following year, my junior year, was the best year that I had up until that day. I led the nation in sacks. I had 17 and a half sacks. My life had totally changed. That was all a testament to running straight through the storm. The shortest way through the storm is straight. I put my head down and I worked, and my life totally changed that offseason.”

Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse buff.ly/RoWlicU

Maybe I’m just not a humorous person, but I don’t get the humor nor point in calling Michelle Obama a dude… I never voted for him, but calling his wife a man is pretty lame.

NEW: Oklahoma high school principal seen charging at and disarming a school shooter in footage obtained by @SHumphreyTV. Pauls Valley High School Principal Kirk Moore is being called a hero after getting shot while stopping a school shooter. The suspect, identified as 20-year-old Victor Hawkins, was a former student who said he wanted to shoot up the school “like the Columbine shooters did.” While taking down the shooter, Moore was shot in the leg. He is expected to recover and says he is looking forward to returning to work as soon as possible. "I look forward to returning to work as soon as possible so that I may continue my life’s work educating the next generation of Oklahoma leaders. Until then, my thoughts are with our outstanding students, safe today in the arms of their families and friends," he said. Hero!

People can pretend or dress up all they want and that’s fine, but they can’t force their mental illness to be my new reality!

Did you know the @HuffPost was still in business? I had forgotten about it, guess good news, I was already on the right track:

Go fuck yourself

This gold medal was brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blue