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Name a football player everybody forgot was elite.

Complete self-aggrandizing fiction

BREAKING: University of Florida board leadership is breaching protocol to push Stuart Bell, former president of U of Alabama, as the SOLE finalist for the UF Presidency. It's a blow to UF’s reform record as Bell founded the DEI office at Alabama and refused to fire DEI officers even when the legislature banned it. 🧵🧵🧵

I don’t know what the Braves did to the baseball gods to never field a completely healthy lineup but I don’t like it

🚨 UVA Graduation Becomes Another Jefferson Struggle Session This is Kenyon Bonner, UVA’s Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer, using graduation to take the now-standard UVA swipe at Jefferson. Bonner said Jefferson’s “ethically corrosive claims about human capacity reflected his ignorance and his hubris,” adding that “ignorance precedes injustice.” That is a pretty sweeping charge to make from the graduation stage at Jefferson’s university, especially when Jefferson’s actual record is more complicated than the flattened campus script allows. Jefferson corresponded with Benjamin Banneker, the Black mathematician and astronomer, and wrote that “nobody wishes more than I do” to see evidence that Black Americans had “talents equal” to others. By the standards of his era, Jefferson showed more intellectual openness than many of his contemporaries. UVA should be the last place beating him with the hammer of presentism. The irony is that Bonner eventually admits the obvious. Jefferson’s blueprint for an educated democracy was “compelling, transcendent, and transformational.” Exactly. That is the point. UVA exists because of Jefferson’s vision and the American university system was profoundly shaped by it. Maybe the Chief Student Affairs Officer who all but rolled out concierge service for the encampment crowd should be a little more careful before turning graduation into another Jefferson struggle session. That’s my two cents. It would have made this clip too long, but this moment was preceded by the usual UVA land acknowledgment, because apparently that has to come before the Jefferson-was-bad acknowledgment.

Did you know that "New England" got its name thanks to Captain John Smith? And then the Puritans didn't let him come along because they thought the old mercenary a disreputable rogue... Here's the tale: After having to leave Virginia because he had made enemies of all there, but with a heroic reputation related to his past wars with the Turks and sole ability to manage the Indians, and even more important reputation as a great cartographer (his map of Virginia remained in heavy use for a century, and archeological use for centuries more), Smith set about finding something else to do It took him a few years to scrounge up enough funding for future trips, but he managed to do so by 1614. He set out for what was then called "Northern Virginia," thanks to the king's very broad grant of territory So, he sailed to the north of America with two small ships, arriving on a rocky, wind-swept coastline, the fish and fur resources of which the merchants who backed the trip were eager to exploit While his crew engaged in the lucrative but mundane work of catching whales and trading for beaver pelts with the local tribes, Smith took to a small boat to perform the work he loved best: exploration and cartography. He mapped the entire rugged coastline from Cape Cod all the way to Nova Scotia with the same commendable precision he had displayed in the Chesapeake, a rarity in his day. Upon his return to England, Smith presented this masterly new chart to Prince Charles, the young heir to the throne, and requested permission to systematically strip away the native and French names from the landscape, replacing them with English alternatives It was during this presentation that Smith formally coined the term “New England” for the region, forever altering the geopolitical vocabulary of the continent. His map meticulously laid out landmarks that would soon become famous across the globe, including Cape Ann, the Charles River, and a small, sheltered harbor he christened “Plymouth.” Yes, that Plymouth In 1620, when the separatist Puritans (the Pilgrims) were preparing their voyage to the New World aboard the Mayflower, they reviewed Smith’s published books and charts, upon which they heavily relied for the voyage and for savely navigating the waters around Plymouth. But they explicitly rejected his personal services as a military commander, viewing the rough, controversial mercenary as "not a good fit" for their pious religious community, choosing the more compliant Miles Standish instead. Still, they relied heavily on his maps, and were quite open about doing so, and so Smith watched from London as another English civilization grew thanks in large part to him.