Ah, basketball

College basketball is my all-time favorite sport. My fantasy is to be in Las Vegas and sit in a sports book and watch every game of the first round. High school basketball is a close second for favorite, though. In both college and high school, it sure would be nice if there were more free throws made. The Panthers just lost a one-point squeaker to rival N. Harrison. If they'd have made a couple more free throws they could have won. On the other hand, N. Harrison had a chance to put the game away at the end of the 4th quarter, but missed the front end of a one and one.

The other thing that I noticed in the N. Harrison game was that Corydon failed too many times to follow their shots. They'd take a 3-pointer and drop back to defend instead of going aggressively forward to be ready for a rebound if their shot didn't go in. Which happened too many times.

Still waiting to see how the girls adjust to Mr. Uhl's system. Seemed to work pretty well Thursday night when they hammered Scottsburg. Jeffersonville will be a test Saturday night.

Vote!

As much as I'd like to proselytize for one candidate this year, I won't, because I said when I started Life in Corydon that it would remain politically neutral.

So I'll settle for urging you to go to the polls. Whichever candidates you support, please go vote. They need every vote they can get.

Coverage

Ok, here's the deal. Why so many boys soccer games? My grandson is on the team, so I go to almost every game. And when I'm at the games, I take pictures, because that's what I do. So I can either run those pictures on the website or just let them sit around. Seems kind of silly to not run them. For instance, in this case (N.Harrison game), we wouldn't have put up anything new until Saturday when we plan to post the football game. So running Wednesday's soccer game gives us an update we otherwise wouldn't have had. Will we post tomorrow's game with Silver Creek? We might save that one for a slow day next week. As for how we choose what else we cover? We try to stick to home games, particularly since gas has gotten so expensive; but because we're a real small outfit, we can't cover all the home games in every sport. We also have to stick mostly to the major sports.

On Saturday, we'll be covering the Corydon volleyball invitational, the Lanesville Heritage parade and the second weekend of youth soccer.

That was fast

All of sudden, we're not only into the first sports week of the season, we're through it and into the second. Hard to keep up. I won't attempt to explain how we figure what to cover, but we do try to spread coverage around, and it's more likely we'll be at home games than away games. We'll do our best to post results as we find them, but it's a hit and miss affair to try to get scores in a timely fashion.

This week's biggest game of the year is against N.Harrison here at home Friday. Should be a good one.

Outpouring of love

Sadly, this week, world-renowned glass artisan Bart Zimmerman drowned while trying to rescue two fisherman whose boat had capsized in the Ohio River. Bart and his brother had carried on the glass-making tradition of four generations in their glass factory in Corydon. Life in Corydon does not publish news, but when this tragic event occurred, we were working on a frivolous slideshow about the midway at the fair, and somehow it didn't seem appropriate to run a happy picture of people on an amusement ride. So we've taken a short timeout to honor Bart and express our condolences to his family.

On Thursday, a gathering and celebration of his life was held at his church, the First Capital Christian Church. At 1 pm, the announced beginning of the event, the parking lot was nearly full and hundreds of people had already gathered in the main room at the church, queuing up to express their sorrow or share fond memories of Bart. This went on for six hours until the celebration of life service at 7, where more than 700 gathered in his memory.

Truly an amazing outpouring of love.

The fair

In my more rebellious days (read youth), I got tired of taking the pictures the newspaper wanted me to take for them and decided to do something all on my own. So I took two weeks of vacation and photographed the 1972 Harrison County Fair, from setup to teardown. A lot of things haven't changed much. The midway, where you can still spend $10 to win a prize worth $.50, the food stands where you can get any sort of food that's not good for you, the 4-H kids, who bring in their livestock and sleep with them (actually, now they mostly sleep in tents nearby.) The entertainment is a bit different. Porter Wagoner and a then unknown girl singer named Dolly Parton were the big name attractions, but there was a daredevil car show and an animal show and, of course, harness races. The harness races are about all that remains from the entertainment back then, but they don't draw much of a crowd anymore. Amazingly, they still use the old barns on the south side of the track, barns that looked ancient in 1972. So now we have demolition derbys and tractor pulls instead of the Joey Chitwood Auto Show and a karaoke contest instead of Dolly Parton. But times change, and it doesn' seem to have hurt attendance. The place was packed Thursday night, 4800 people in attendance. That's a lot of funnel cakes consumed. Tonight's the wrapup, with the big tractor pull, big tough machines that don't appear to be all that friendly to the environment.

Next year is the 150th consecutive Harrison County Fair, and there are a lot of plans to make it special. We'll probably do some kind of display of my 1972 pictures among other things. An abbreviated slideshow of them is online at Life in Corydon.

Happy Birthday to us

It was two years ago that the Life in Corydon website went public. We thought that the county fair would be a good week's worth of pictures to get us going. So we're still going two years later. If anyone actually reads this and if you have any suggestions, let me know. I'd like to start thinking about a military section devoted to the men and women who're off in a strange land serving our country. In the meantime, we'll keep doing what we're doing.

"The conscious part of me interferes as little as possible."
--Roger Waters, Pink Floyd