Death by football: Remembering a college friend 10 years later

It is not news to anyone who follows professional sports that the National Football League has some serious problems, including issues with domestic abuse, banned substances and players suffering debilitating and life-shortening injuries with all-too alarming frequency.

While this crisis seems to some a recent phenomenon, it’s not. The light has only been shined on it with greater intensity recently.

I remember when I got my first real inkling that something was wrong – really wrong – with professional football. It was perhaps 18 or 19 years ago, while watching a game involving the Pittsburgh Steelers. I don’t remember who the Steelers were playing, but I do remember a specific play which was run toward the Steelers’ sideline, where Pittsburgh players not in the game were standing.

As one of the opposing players slowed up as he ran out of bounds at the end of the play, a Pittsburgh player standing along the sideline took the opportunity to deliver what in football parlance is known as a “forearm shiver,” clocking his opponent with a forearm to the head. As the opponent, not surprisingly, wasn’t expecting a blow, it had a powerful effect.

I remember the network catching the infraction and showing it again, and highlighting the culprit. It was Justin Strzelczyk, a grizzly bear of an offensive lineman. The incident was shocking not because of what happened – most every NFL game has cheap shots and late hits – but because of who committed the offense.

It stunned me because Strzelczyk, who I’d known in college, had been one of the most easygoing individuals I’d known during my time at the University of Maine. He may have been a 6-foot-6, 250-plus pound football player, but he was a genuinely good-natured guy.

I’d actually met him during his recruiting visit to Maine in 1986, when he was still a senior in high school. My dorm room was across the hall from that of one of the captains of the football team. Recruits are paired up with current team members when they visit campus and Strzelczyk spent the weekend of his recruiting visit across the hall, when he wasn’t out getting his first taste of college life.

That weekend, amid the beer, girls and good times of college, Strzelczyk was in hog heaven. I wasn’t surprised when he opted to attend Maine. We remained friends and would chat whenever we  bumped into each other on campus up until I graduated in 1988.

Strzelczyk continued to improve and was a starter and standout during the latter part of his career at Maine. The last time I saw him, ironically, was in April 1990. I’d gone back to Maine to visit some friends still in school and it happened to be the first day of that year’s NFL draft.

While walking on campus we saw each other and talked briefly; I asked him if he thought he’d be drafted. He replied that he hoped so, but he’d have to wait and see. He still had an easy way about him, despite the fact that he was hours away from learning what the future held for him.

In the end, the Pittsburgh Steelers picked him in the 11^th round, No. 293 overall. Normally, 11^th round draft choices don’t have much of chance of making it in the NFL, but Strzelczyk, who had size, aptitude and desire going for him, made the team.

Over the next nine seasons, Strzelczyk would play in 173 games for the Steelers, starting 75. He was versatile, starting at every position on the offensive line except center. He even played in Super Bowl XXX.

His career came to a close, as nearly all do in the NFL, because of an injury. He suffered a quadriceps tear during a game in 1998, and then was hurt the following year in bar fight. Finally, he suffered another injury during a celebrity hockey game in 2000 and was shortly afterward released by the Steelers.

Without football, Strzelczyk’s life seemed to come apart at the seams. He and his wife of eight years divorced in 2001; he was arrested for drinking and driving in 2003; and his behavior became increasingly erratic.

Efforts underway to conserve South Carolina’s oldest book

The state of South Carolina is seeking funding in order to conserve its oldest book.

Titled Records of the Secretary of the Province and the Register of the Province of South Carolina: 1671-1675, the work contains records dating from just after the founding of the colony by English settlers in 1670.

The earliest record listed is a property deed recorded only months after the first settlers landed at Albemarle Point on the Ashley River, according to the SC Department of Archives and History.

The book is in serious need of restoration and the South Carolina Archives and History Foundation is in the process of raising money for the effort.

“Last conserved in 1944, the record book’s pages are now acidic, dirty, and falling out of their binding,” according to the department.

South Carolina’s concern for preserving its government records dates back to the very beginning of the colony.

“Joseph Dalton, the first secretary of the province, worked hard to get ‘an orderly method’ to record keeping in the fledgling settlement,” according to a 1995 work South Carolina Begins: The Records of a Proprietary Colony, 1663-1721.

Records of the Secretary of the Province contains key documents from the colony’s founding, “including evidence of early support for the colony by Barbadians; wills by Governor William Sayle and Henry Woodward as he was preparing to explore the ‘hazardous and dangerous’ wilderness; and two complete inventories, including the names and terms of indentured servants, for a plantation established as a partnership,” according to the Department of Archives and History.

The goal is to send the record book to the Northeast Document Conservation Center, regarded as one of the best conservation facilities in the country.

There the 54-page volume will be conserved and housed in a period binding and a specially constructed case. In addition Archives and History staff will create digital images of the restored volume to make its information more widely available.

(Top: Pages from Records of the Secretary of the Province and the Register of the Province of South Carolina: 1671-1675, South Carolina’s earliest book.)

Australian searchers may have located long-lost submarine

The latest effort to locate the Australian submarine HMAS AE1, lost 100 years ago this month, have proved tantalizing but inconclusive so far.

Earlier this month an Australian navy vessel searching for the submarine, which went missing Sept. 14, 1914, with 35 men on board, reported “a contact of interest” in the Papua New Guinea search area.

The loss of the AE1 in the opening weeks of World War I took place after the Australian fleet sailed to New Guinea to capture the Germany colony on Britain’s behalf. The objective was to take out telegraph stations providing key communications for the German Pacific Fleet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

“We need to get more detailed analysis. That is what we are doing at the moment,” according to a source with the Australian defense department. “Different sources, not only military, need to see if it fits the submarine’s profile. We have found items here before.

“If you look on the chart it is one of the most wreck-strewn areas in the region.”

The AE1 was the first submarine to serve in the Royal Australian Navy and was lost after less than seven months in service.

The disappearance was Australia’s first major loss of World War I.

Military historian and author Dr. Kathryn Spurling told Fairfax Media she believed the submarine stumbled across a hidden German boat.

“It didn’t even have to be an armed German boat,” she said. “The submarine was so small it would only have to be rammed by the German boat to go over topsy-turvy and it would go straight down.

“The only way the submarine could protect itself or attack the German boat was to submerge and as a submarine just goes beneath the water it is incredibly vulnerable and unstable, especially if you have a bad engine, which they did,” Spurling added. “I think that is the most logical way it was lost.”

(Top: Image showing HMAS AE1 in 1914, shortly before it set out on its final voyage.)

Researchers claim volcanoes can become active in short time

Researchers at a pair of Western US universities report they have uncovered a key factor in predicting volcanic eruptions.

Geologists from the University of California-Davis and Oregon State University have found that in order for a volcanic eruption to occur, molten rock under the volcano must be sufficiently mobile. This occurs when the temperature of rock below the volcano rises to more than 1,328 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers developed their findings by studying Oregon’s Mount Hood, located in Cascade Range, about 50 miles east of Portland.

“The team found that the magma located roughly three miles beneath the surface of Mount Hood has been stored in near-solid conditions for thousands of years,” according to RedOrbit. “However, they say that it takes just a significantly short period – perhaps as little as a few months – for said magma to liquefy and potentially lead to an eruption.”

The belief that there is a big reservoir of liquid magma under an active volcano is not always true, said Kari Cooper, lead author and an associate professor at UC Davis.

“The study team said that mobility of the magma depends on the amount of crystallization,” according to RedOrbit. “When it is more than about 50 percent crystalline, it becomes immobile. Crystallization, in turn, depends on the temperature of the rock.

“If the temperature of the solid rock rises to more than 1,328 degrees F, which can happen when hot magma rises up from deeper within the Earth’s crust, an eruption may be imminent,” the online publication added.

“If the temperature of the rock is too cold, the magma is like peanut butter in a refrigerator,” Oregon State University professor Adam Kent said in a statement. “It just isn’t very mobile. For Mount Hood, the threshold seems to be about 750 degrees (C) [1,328 Fahrenheit] – if it warms up just 50 to 75 degrees above that, it greatly increases the viscosity of the magma and makes it easier to mobilize.”

Mount Hood has had at least four major eruptive periods during the past 15,000 years. The last three occurred within the past 1,800 years. The last of these took place around 170-220 years ago, shortly before the arrival of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805, according to the website www.mounthoodhistory.com.

For the study, researchers studied rocks ejected from Mount Hood’s previous eruptions. By analyzing the radioactive isotopes and the distribution of trace elements, the team was able to reconstruct the history of the rocks and the conditions they were exposed to before the volcano erupted, according to RedOrbit.

The results of their findings could make it much easier for volcanologists to assess when a volcano is ready to explode. If eruptible magma is indeed relatively rare, then when it does appear, the risks of an eruption are much higher, Cooper noted.

(Top: Oregon’s Mount Hood, part of the Cascade Range.)

Investigating the rich history of Lowcountry rice farming

When one thinks of antebellum agriculture, one typically thinks of cotton. Indeed, by 1860 Southern farms and plantations supplied 75 percent of the world’s cotton, and Gossypium hirsutum was the dominant agricultural crop from the Carolinas to Texas.

Cotton was such an important part of the pre-war South that the Confederacy believed it would be the ultimate instrument of its independence.

Much less well known today is the princely standing held by another Deep South crop during the days before the War Between the States – that of rice.

Rice was introduced to the United States in the 17th century and is reported to have been cultivated in Virginia almost as soon as the first settlers landed at Jamestown, but it was in the marshy, humid regions of Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia that the crop flourished.

Rice planters couldn’t have succeeded without the forced labor of slaves, particularly those from the Senegambia area of West Africa and coastal Sierra Leone.

At the port of Charleston, slaves with knowledge of rice culture brought the highest price and were put to use on rice plantations around Charleston, Georgetown, S.C., and Savannah, Ga.

A new book by Richard Dwight Porcher Jr. and William Robert Judd detailing the once-great Lowcountry rice industry states that nowhere else was an agricultural crop so intimately tied to status and its associated wealth and influence as rice was to the Lowcountry.

The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice: An Illustrated History of Innovations in the Lowcountry Rice Kingdom is an extensive account of the rice industry in Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia.

“… the real strength of this book is the author’s documentation based on extensive field research of fifty rice plantations, mill sites, museum and archival collections and travels to investigate foreign connections to the Lowcountry rice industry,” according to a review by the Charleston Post and Courier.

The work, published by University of South Carolina Press, which contains “meticulously rendered line drawings depicting the mechanical devices of the rice industry, lend a startling clarity to the written explanations of how they actually functioned and what part each played in the crop’s journey from the field to the consumer,” the publication adds.

The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice identifies the inventiveness of Deep South planters, recognizing that the U.S. Patent Office granted substantial numbers of antebellum patents to South Carolinians for inventions or improvement for rice harvesting and milling equipment alone.

It also recognizes the contributions of slaves “whose blood and sweat transformed inland swamps and riverine marshes into the remarkably dynamic hydraulic systems that composed the sweeping rice fields of the Lowcountry,” according to the Post and Courier.

The book doesn’t gloss over the fact that slaves worked in brutal conditions, explaining “that tidal river marshes were an extremely harsh environment just to exist in, let alone to work in. As it proved, an enslaved work force was the essential element in the survival of the Rice Kingdom, for without them the days of glory were over.”

(Top: Image showing the unloading of rice barges on a 19th century South Carolina rice plantation.)

Monet discovered among art hoard collected during Nazi era

A German art collector who came about his works partly through his father’s questionable dealings during World War II managed to smuggle a Monet with him into a hospital where he was admitted earlier this year.

The hospital sent the suitcase containing the work by the famed French Impressionist to the executor of Cornelius Gurlitt’s estate on Sept. 2 after having kept it in storage for several months following Gurlitt’s death, according to The Art Newspaper.

Gurlitt had some 1,400 paintings, drawings and sketches – believed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and including masterpieces by Picasso and Chagall – in his apartment in Munich for decades.

During the Nazi era, Gurlitt’s father Hildebrand was tasked with selling works taken or bought under duress from Jewish families, and avant-garde art seized from German museums that the Hitler regime deemed “degenerate,” according to Agence France-Presse.

In the final days of World War II, Hildebrand Gurlitt had loaded his family and the artworks into a truck to flee Allied bombing, ending up at a baron’s castle in Bavaria, according to the Wall Street Journal.

After the elder Gurlitt died in 1956, his son assumed the collection.

Gurlitt apparently brought the Monet to the hospital in southern Germany as his health worsened earlier this year. Gurlitt went home shortly before he died on May 6, but the work was left at the hospital, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Experts have determined that around 450 works in the Gurlitt collection are suspected of being looted art, while another 380 may have been confiscated “degenerate” works, Agence France-Presse added.

Independence movements around globe watching Scotland

With a week until the people of Scotland vote on independence from Great Britain, separatist movements around the world are watching closely.

“From Catalonia to Kurdistan to Quebec, nationalist and separatist movements in Europe and beyond are watching the Scottish independence referendum closely – sometimes more so than Britons themselves, who seem to have only just woken up to the possibility that Scotland might vote next Thursday to bring to an end a 307-year union,” writes the New York Times.

“A curious collection of left and right, rich and poor, marginal and mainstream, these movements are united in the hope that their shared ambition for more self-determination will get a lift from an independent Scotland,” it added.

The Telegraph reports that a record-breaking 4.3 million have registered to vote in Scottish referendum, the highest number in Scottish electoral history, and recent polls show the pro-independence movement gaining steam as the vote nears.

As of yesterday, the No campaign had a slim lead over the Yes campaign, 47.6 percent to 42.4 percent. But when the 10 percent who said they were still undecided were removed from the equation, the survey suggests that the Yes campaign would win, 53-47, according to The Telegraph.

The referendum is gathering attention around the globe.

“Busloads of Catalans, South Tiroleans, Corsicans, Bretons, Frisians and ‘Finland-Swedes’ are headed for Scotland to witness the vote,” according to the Times. “Even Bavaria (which calls itself ‘Europe’s seventh-largest economy’) is sending a delegation.”

“It would create a very important precedent,” said Naif Bezwan of Mardin Artuklu University in the Kurdish part of Turkey. Across the Iraqi border (or “the Kurdish-Kurdish border,” as Mr. Bezwan puts it), where a confluence of war, oil disputes and political turmoil has renewed the debate about secession, Kurds pine for the opportunity of a Scottish-style breakup, the publication added.

It ain’t a party til someone gets naked, busts out windows

Further evidence that people who get naked in public aren’t the sort of folks you want to see naked in public.

Over the weekend, Tina Robinson, 40, of Anderson, SC, was charged with criminal domestic violence of a high and aggravated nature after deputies were alerted that a naked woman was allegedly busting out vehicle windows.

Authorities said the incident stemmed from a domestic incident.

Deputies said a 54-year-old man claimed he and Robinson, his wife, had been arguing about her “being on dope and being gone for days” when she punched him and then went after him with a knife that she ended up plunging into the wall near him, according to WYFF.com.

When she learned he had called 911, Robinson punched out a window of their house and the windows of their vehicle before departing.

Witnesses told deputies a naked female was later seen busting out windows in the neighborhood and had visible injuries.

Anderson was taken into custody after K-9 units were called in to locate her.

Methinks there may be bigger issues here than public nudity and a few broken car windows.

(HT: Waldo Lydecker’s Journal.)

NC woman, born the daughter of a slave, dies at 91

A North Carolina woman believed to be one of the last residents of the Tar Heel State with a parent who had been a slave has died at age 91.

Mattie Rice of Union County was the daughter of Wary Clyburn, a former slave who died in 1930 at about age 90, when his daughter was 8.

During the Civil War, Clyburn ran away from his plantation in Lancaster County, S.C., to join his master’s son, Frank Clyburn, initially a member of Company E of the 12^th S.C. Infantry Regiment, working as his bodyguard and cook.

Rice recalled her father speaking proudly about risking his life to save Frank Clyburn, dragging the officer to safety after he had been wounded in battle, according to the Charlotte Observer.

According to the Compiled Service Records, Thomas Franklin “Frank” Clyburn (1843-1896) joined the Confederate Army as a first lieutenant in the summer of 1861 and rose to the rank of colonel, eventually taking charge of the 12^th S.C. Infantry.

He saw action at numerous bloody battles, including Second Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.

Frank Clyburn was severely wounded on May 23, 1864, in Virginia.

“In December 2012, Rice helped dedicate the marker in Monroe to her father and nine other Union County men. Nine of the men were slaves and one was a free black man, all of whom served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War then received tiny state pensions for their service late in life,” according to the Observer.

The granite marker at the Old County Courthouse is believed to be the first of its kind to honor black men who worked, willingly or not, for the Confederacy.

The marker sparked some controversy and raised questions about elevating so-called “black Confederates” while downplaying slavery’s role in the War Between the States.

Rice ignored such criticism, spending decades “pursuing her unusual family history,” according to the Observer.

Before the 2012 ceremony, she told the publication, “A lot of people ask me if I’m angry. What do I have to be angry about? There’s been slavery since the beginning of time. I’m not bitter about it and I do not think my father would be bitter about it.”

Earl Ijames, a curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, praised Rice’s persistence over the years in highlighting her family background, work that illuminated a long-forgotten chapter of state history.

Rice’s father settled in Monroe, N.C., after the war, and is buried in Hillcrest Cemetery.

(Top: Mattie Rice, seen in 2012, in Union County, NC. Photo credit: The [Monroe County] Enquirer-Journal.)

Persian literature exhibition winding down in Washington

If you’re in Washington, D.C., over the next couple of weeks you can catch the tail-end of an exhibition exploring the literary tradition of the Persian language during the past millennium.

“A Thousand Years of the Persian Book,” at the Library of Congress, includes an array of works, from illuminated manuscripts to modern-day publications. The exhibition focuses on the literary achievements of not just Iran, which is recognized as the birthplace of Persian, but also the Persian-speaking regions of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Central and South Asia, and the Caucasus.

The exhibition, which runs through Sept. 20, features 75 items drawn primarily from the Library of Congress’s Persian collection, part of its African and Middle Eastern Division.

“The Persian language gained prominence as a literary and common cultural language about a thousand years ago,” according to information from the Library of Congress. “Since then, a rich and varied written and spoken heritage has developed in the Persian language, elevating the visibility of the Persian civilization among world intellectual traditions.

“That tradition is particularly strong in the fields of storytelling, poetry, folklore, and literature, with important contributions in historiography, science, religion, and philosophy,” it adds.