Angry American alligator - Animal Pictures - Pictures
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Tommy Zbikowski: Baltimore Ravens' Tommy Zbikowski wins by TKO - latimes.com
Tommy Zbikowski: Baltimore Ravens' Tommy Zbikowski wins by TKO - latimes.com
With the NFL in labor limbo, Baltimore Ravens safety Tommy Zbikowski returned to pro boxing Saturday and produced a first-round technical knockout over a flabbier foe, Richard Bryant.
The 25-year-old Zbikowski pounded a left hook to Bryant's belly, and the 235-pound man lost his breath and slumped to the canvas.
Bryant was so out of wind that referee Russell Mora stopped the fight at the 1:45 mark of the first round.
"I knew I hurt him," the 193-pound Zbikowski said. "I love that I got a body shot for a knockout."
Zbikowski was able to strike a $10,000 deal to fight Bryant with bout promoter Top Rank as the Ravens' restricted free agent awaits signing a tender with the team.
Top Rank Chairman Bob Arum said he projects another Zbikowski event March 26 in Atlantic City, and also in late April in a casino resort outside Dallas.
Zbikowski hadn't fought since his 2006 pro boxing debut as a Notre Dame player and admitted, "I was a little rusty … he was a tough dude."
Bryant, who clearly expected some punishment by entering the MGM Grand Garden Arena to Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," called the decisive body shot "tremendous."
The charismatic Zbikowski now has an open schedule with the NFL's labor strife and was visibly excited about spending the time away from football in boxing, a sport he's called his "first love."
"I just want to keep it rolling as much as we can," he said.
In the pay-per-view opener, International Boxing Federation lightweight champion Miguel Vazquez (28-3) of Guadalajara, Mexico, affirmed his belt worthiness with a pure display of boxing class to defeat the more eager but less polished Lenny Zappavigna (25-1) by unanimous decision, 117-111, 118-110, 118-110.
The card also featured an impressive display of brawling by New Jersey's Pawel Wolak (29-1, 19 KOs), a Poland native who hammered former world super-welterweight champion Yuri Foreman (28-2) so severely that referee Kenny Bayless waved off the fight on the advice of the ex-champ's corner with Foreman on his stool after six rounds.
With the NFL in labor limbo, Baltimore Ravens safety Tommy Zbikowski returned to pro boxing Saturday and produced a first-round technical knockout over a flabbier foe, Richard Bryant.
The 25-year-old Zbikowski pounded a left hook to Bryant's belly, and the 235-pound man lost his breath and slumped to the canvas.
Bryant was so out of wind that referee Russell Mora stopped the fight at the 1:45 mark of the first round.
"I knew I hurt him," the 193-pound Zbikowski said. "I love that I got a body shot for a knockout."
Zbikowski was able to strike a $10,000 deal to fight Bryant with bout promoter Top Rank as the Ravens' restricted free agent awaits signing a tender with the team.
Top Rank Chairman Bob Arum said he projects another Zbikowski event March 26 in Atlantic City, and also in late April in a casino resort outside Dallas.
Zbikowski hadn't fought since his 2006 pro boxing debut as a Notre Dame player and admitted, "I was a little rusty … he was a tough dude."
Bryant, who clearly expected some punishment by entering the MGM Grand Garden Arena to Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," called the decisive body shot "tremendous."
The charismatic Zbikowski now has an open schedule with the NFL's labor strife and was visibly excited about spending the time away from football in boxing, a sport he's called his "first love."
"I just want to keep it rolling as much as we can," he said.
In the pay-per-view opener, International Boxing Federation lightweight champion Miguel Vazquez (28-3) of Guadalajara, Mexico, affirmed his belt worthiness with a pure display of boxing class to defeat the more eager but less polished Lenny Zappavigna (25-1) by unanimous decision, 117-111, 118-110, 118-110.
The card also featured an impressive display of brawling by New Jersey's Pawel Wolak (29-1, 19 KOs), a Poland native who hammered former world super-welterweight champion Yuri Foreman (28-2) so severely that referee Kenny Bayless waved off the fight on the advice of the ex-champ's corner with Foreman on his stool after six rounds.
Friday, March 18, 2011
WISE WORDS
WISE WORDS
"Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it."
- Sir William Haley
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Well-Written 'Letters': Saul Bellow Shows Us How : NPR
Well-Written 'Letters': Saul Bellow Shows Us How : NPR
If you're a lover of prose, someone who knows how to savor the taste of a scrumptious sentence, then you'll find morsels aplenty to set your eyes rolling to the back of your head in indecent pleasure.
These 700 letters to friends and enemies, to multiple wives, ex-wives, and lovers, to the famous and to those made infamous by Bellow's own treatment of them in his novels, are full to the brim with the insights of a man who was always taking in the world with abundance, only to give it out again in wonderful words.
So, for example, in a letter to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and Bellow's colleague at the University of Chicago, (also, posthumously, the eponymous subject of Bellow's last novel, Ravelstein), Bellow describes a trip to Dominick's to buy salad oil:
Now I dragged myself over to the east side of Broadway, and a woman of ninety advanced toward me on a four-pronged cane — tiny, a construction worker's yellow hard hat pulled over her forehead ... and then some people affably talking to themselves, and then a nice police dog chained to a parking meter, wearing a cast on his broken leg and barking. He may have been asking to see the humanity in relation to which he was supposed to be a dog. We were at one in this. My tired intelligence found no trace of the hierarchy.
Here are the layered concoctions for which Bellow was famous, his flair for mixing things like salad oil and moral philosophy. He sets off for Dominick's and gains purchase on the human condition.
And also if you're a writer — or someone who aspires to be a writer — then you must read these letters, arcing from about the age of 17 to about a year shy of his death at the age of 89, so that you might see what goes into such a being's being.
Be instructed on a writer's humility: "I tend to think of a book just completed as something that has prepared me to do better next time." Be instructed on a writer's unapologetic audacity: "I know how to transform common matter," he lashes back at one of his old friends, who is in a snit because Bellow has appropriated an incident from that man's life for use in Humboldt's Gift. "What you fear as the risk of friendship, namely that I may take from the wonderful hoard, is really the risk of friendship because I have the power to lift a tuft of wool from a bush and make something of it."
And above all, if you are a student of human nature, if you are dismayed and disgusted and delighted by the infinite modifications on the human theme, then read the letters of a man who welcomed the newborn daughter of the poet John Berryman with these words: "This is to greet and bless Sarah Berryman on her arrival in this gorgeous wicked world which has puzzled and delighted my poor soul for 56 years." Such capacities for puzzlement and delight made for a wonder of a man, and they make for a wonder of a book.
You Must Read This is produced and edited by Ellen Silva with production assistance from Rose Friedman, Lena Moses-Schmitt and Amelia Salutz.
If you're a lover of prose, someone who knows how to savor the taste of a scrumptious sentence, then you'll find morsels aplenty to set your eyes rolling to the back of your head in indecent pleasure.
These 700 letters to friends and enemies, to multiple wives, ex-wives, and lovers, to the famous and to those made infamous by Bellow's own treatment of them in his novels, are full to the brim with the insights of a man who was always taking in the world with abundance, only to give it out again in wonderful words.
So, for example, in a letter to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and Bellow's colleague at the University of Chicago, (also, posthumously, the eponymous subject of Bellow's last novel, Ravelstein), Bellow describes a trip to Dominick's to buy salad oil:
Now I dragged myself over to the east side of Broadway, and a woman of ninety advanced toward me on a four-pronged cane — tiny, a construction worker's yellow hard hat pulled over her forehead ... and then some people affably talking to themselves, and then a nice police dog chained to a parking meter, wearing a cast on his broken leg and barking. He may have been asking to see the humanity in relation to which he was supposed to be a dog. We were at one in this. My tired intelligence found no trace of the hierarchy.
Here are the layered concoctions for which Bellow was famous, his flair for mixing things like salad oil and moral philosophy. He sets off for Dominick's and gains purchase on the human condition.
And also if you're a writer — or someone who aspires to be a writer — then you must read these letters, arcing from about the age of 17 to about a year shy of his death at the age of 89, so that you might see what goes into such a being's being.
Be instructed on a writer's humility: "I tend to think of a book just completed as something that has prepared me to do better next time." Be instructed on a writer's unapologetic audacity: "I know how to transform common matter," he lashes back at one of his old friends, who is in a snit because Bellow has appropriated an incident from that man's life for use in Humboldt's Gift. "What you fear as the risk of friendship, namely that I may take from the wonderful hoard, is really the risk of friendship because I have the power to lift a tuft of wool from a bush and make something of it."
And above all, if you are a student of human nature, if you are dismayed and disgusted and delighted by the infinite modifications on the human theme, then read the letters of a man who welcomed the newborn daughter of the poet John Berryman with these words: "This is to greet and bless Sarah Berryman on her arrival in this gorgeous wicked world which has puzzled and delighted my poor soul for 56 years." Such capacities for puzzlement and delight made for a wonder of a man, and they make for a wonder of a book.
You Must Read This is produced and edited by Ellen Silva with production assistance from Rose Friedman, Lena Moses-Schmitt and Amelia Salutz.
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