Columbus, whose astonishing accomplishment we Americans are celebrating today, was a loooooooooong shot—and he brought home a winner. My dearly beloved Stanford, a woeful example of a Division 1A football team, went to Southern California as a 42-point underdog to the #1 ranked Trojans—and brought home a winner, snapping SC’s 35-game home winning streak in the process. North Carolina’s Appalachian State, otherwise known as “who they,” went to Ann Arbor at the start of the season to face #5 Michigan—and brought home a winner.
British explorer-madman Jason Lewis pedaled up the Thames and across the Meridian Line at Greenwich on Saturday, thus completing a 13-year, 46,000 mile circumnavigation of the globe using only his own power—bicycle, 26-foot pedal boat, kayak, and inline skates.
At a Saturday evening party on the Farm, leaves at VT peak, I gave a friend fighting a severe illness one of my newly acquired Appalachian State T-shirts. I told him I called it my FTO T-shirt. (F^&* The Odds.)
Long shots are long shots—but they do come in. To my mind, the essence of life is trying stuff you “have no right to try.” Consider this Wilde-ism (Oscar): “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
Amen!
Happy Columbus Day!
(Canadian pals: Happy Thanksgiving.)