One of the most important and consequential trials in American history is now under way in New York City. A former president is on trial for making payments to a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair and then falsifying business records to cover it up. The general pubic will not be allowed to see any of it. It will be followed by three more even more important trails. The general public will be allowed to see the one in Georgia state court where Donald Trump is being tried for trying to overturn election results including a threatening phone call to the state’s Secretary of State. Federal courts do not allow cameras. So we will not see the case in Florida federal court where Trump is accused of stuffing secret government documents all over his estate in Florida, including piling them up in a bathroom. And finally, the most serious case of all in WashingtonDC federal court where Trump is accused of trying to over turn to 2020 election results that led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

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Will it ever stop? The pounding rain across the country is holding us all hostage. The rain is bad enough, but there are parts of the middle of the country being destroyed by tornadoes. People’s homes gone in an instant and changing their lives forever. As I write this, Tornado Watches were issued for parts of Delaware. The northeast never used to get tornadoes. Times have changed. We’re in our third straight day of pounding rain with more coming tomorrow. This past Saturday, Philadelphia got 3.09 inches of rain, a single day record. In March, Philadelphia got double the rain it usually gets in March.

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Giving up is something you never want to do in sports and most anything in life you’ve worked hard to achieve. College basketball is in the middle of the first weekend of March Madness. With two more weekends to go, millions will be watching and betting on their school if they managed to get into the tournament. St. Bonaventure University has a long history of basketball tradition. As members of the Atlantic Ten Conference, the committee usually takes only the conference champion and offers one or two at large bids. The Bonnies finished in the middle of the pack and won two A-Ten tournament games to reach the semi-finals where they lost to Duquesne the eventual champion. The Bonnies finished the season and playoffs with twenty wins. Not quite good enough to get a NCAA tournament bid.

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The first book ban in America is believed to be in 1637 in Quincey, Massachusetts. No surprise, the intolerant Puritans didn’t like the book. “New English Canaan” was a three volume work by Thomas Morton. It was about the history, beliefs and practices of Native Americans and the poor treatment they suffered at the hands of the Puritans. These are the same Puritans who ran the Salem Witch Trials years later. There is a long history of attempts, some successful, to ban books that certain people think are offensive especially to children. Most are politically conservative and religious and believe they know best about what is suitable for everyone else and their children.

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Are you ready? We are all getting an extra day this year. There is a long history. Some of it is true, some of it created out of the mist of history. No less an authority than The Farmer’s Almanac says a leap year is evenly divisible by four and century years that are divisible by one-hundred. Century years also have to be divisible by four hundred. 1900 didn’t make it. 2000 did. Enough math. How did this happen? A day is measured by how many days it takes the Earth to circle the sun. It’s a little more than the 365 days. It’s really 365.2421 days. The Roman Emperor Julius Caesar started leap year by adding an extra day every four years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII made some tweaks to work in Christian holidays. So the Gregorian Calendar is the one we have today.

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It’s happened in schools, in churches, in malls, in supermarkets, in nightclubs, in movie theaters and, yes parades. It happened again yesterday. A million people turned out for the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl Parade. It was a chance to show community pride. Get a closer look at your sports heroes. The Super Bowl is national day of anticipation and coming together. Sharing food and rooting for a team even if your team isn’t playing. But if your team is playing, it can be a very emotional experience. If your team wins, it becomes a life long memory of a great day. A couple of days later, people skip work, some schools even close and you welcome your team back to town as they show off the Lombardi Trophy and share their joy. Everyone should go home happy. That didn’t happen yesterday.

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We’ve done it for a few years. We take a trip to Florida to get out of the cold, damp, and mostly miserable weather in the northeast for a few weeks in January and February. The hope is we’ll enjoy warm, sunny weather to sit on the beach or by the pool, or play golf. But there are no guarantees when it comes to weather. There is really no other reason to go to Florida. Besides the beach and the ocean, there is no other interesting landscape or geographic feature. It is flat, with one strip mall after another. The multi laned streets seem more congested than not and red lights are too long. There are a lot an old people. So the obvious question is why do we go? Again, back to our original intent. A warm break from the cold weather. But the weather doesn’t always cooperate.

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He looked about three years old. He wore a green life vest and matching green plastic goggles held in place with an elastic band. It was a beautiful, breezy beach day in mid-January in West Palm Beach. It was only the second beach day we had enjoyed since we arrived here over a week ago. He caught my eye as soon as I walked to the ocean’s edge. He ran in short, choppy steps as all little boys do running on the sand. Little girls always seem more graceful. He was charging in and out the water. Jumping the waves. He would get knocked down and jump up for more. He had a big smile on his face. He would lift his goggles up to look out at the ocean as if to say this is real and it’s all mine.  He had no fear. He was like millions of little kids who meet this force of nature greater than themselves. He had what I assume was an older brother, maybe about six years old, who was jumping around a little farther out in the water. Their mother was watching from her chair on the beach. There was also a little girl who was running in and out of the water and an older teenage boy buried in the sand. He got up to walk their small dog.

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The new year may bring us one of the most dangerous years in history. The racist and anti-Semitic language of two of the people who want to be the next president should snap us to attention. Donald Trump has done little to hide his racist beliefs. I could recite a long list. But his most recent remarks are so shocking and ignorant it shows us the depths to which our political discourse has descended. In a recent speech, Trump took aim again at immigrants and why we should keep them out. He said, “They are poisoning the blood of our country.” That should make us stop in our tracks. He did get some criticism, but his devoted followers continue to cheer him. He than got the chance to explain himself.

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I know you’ve been waiting for a follow-up to my blog two weeks ago about the stolen van loaded with ten-thousand Krispy Kreme donuts in Australia. The story gained world wide interest. A woman was seen on surveillance video at a gas station in Carlingford outside of Sydney jumping into an unmarked white van at 3:30am while the driver was inside paying his bill. We still don’t know when the woman discovered the van was full of donuts.

This just in, police found the van abandoned at a car park a week after it was stolen. They describe the donuts as “destroyed”. Not sure if that means spoiled or something too terrible to describe. A twenty-eight year old woman was arrested at St. Mary’s Railway station. She’s charged with vehicle theft and driving while disqualified. She has been refused bail and is sitting in jail.

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