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ebcf592
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I'm gonna party, see how intoxicated I can get and how many rules I can flaunt. That's my motto.
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party
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H.G. Bissinger |
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51ca504
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Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don't apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it's over and the harsh reality sets in, that's the real joke we play on people. . . . Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It's Camelot for them. But there's even life after it.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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7c7f34d
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I work not only for the gathering and assimilation of knowledge, but also to teach the fact that one can be brilliant without being arrogant, that great intellectual capacity brings great responsibility, that the quest for knowledge should never supplant the joy of learning, that one with great capacities must learn to be tolerant and appreciate those with lesser or different absolutes,
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H.G. Bissinger |
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ef14005
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This must not be planet earth," Cone told his partner. "This must be hell." But it wasn't. It was just Odessa."
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H.G. Bissinger |
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92e353e
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Let each of you discover where your chance for greatness lies. Seize that chance and let no power on earth deter you.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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46a5eaa
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Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe that they were the creators of it.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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bf93621
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He firmly believed that football, like other sports, used blacks, exploited them and then spit them out once their talents as running backs or linebackers or wide receivers had been fully exhausted. For a few lucky ones, that moment might not come until they were established in the pros. For others, it might come at the end of college. For most, it would all end in high school.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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fe10186
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If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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6c135b3
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She said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was regurgitate.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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ba7dc7d
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He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults' living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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a222fc1
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It was hard not to think that wherever he wound up, it was not going to be good. He drank. He drugged. He regarded life with devilish disdain. I could never see him turning it around. Which is why I have also learned that the worst predictor of future behavior is high school behavior.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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9862480
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J. D. Cone, when he came here from Oklahoma in 1948 to become a family practitioner, went on house calls with a thirty-eight pistol stuck into his belt after the sheriff told him it was always a good idea to be armed in case someone got a little ornery or disagreed with the diagnosis.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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efd89d0
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There were also those who had grown weary of it and the oft-repeated phrase that what made it special was the quality of its people. "Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself," said Warren Burnett, a loquacious, liberal-minded lawyer who after roughly thirty years had fled the place like a refugee for the coastal waters near Houston. "Nothing could be sillier than we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of asshole..
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H.G. Bissinger |
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f8cbf6f
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you'll be all right," said Hanson. "As long as you don't rock the boat, then they think"
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H.G. Bissinger |
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4d838bc
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the solemn ritual that was attached to almost everything, made them seem like boys going off to fight a war for the benefit of someone else, unwitting sacrifices to a strange and powerful god. In
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H.G. Bissinger |
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df909ba
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The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had been a new system of grading that would encourage students to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school's notoriously high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight was given to clas..
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H.G. Bissinger |
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b899382
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I just felt something pulling at me, nagging at me, a soft voice telling me to do it, to see for myself what was out there and make the journey before self-satisfaction crept in for good.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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0610a51
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But "love" is the most empty and overused word in the English language after "brilliant."
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H.G. Bissinger |
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54204c2
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The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a "chinaman," refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman." --
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H.G. Bissinger |
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1683678
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We don't have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don't have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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d3998a2
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Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country--pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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49aa29b
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saw no great social motive in the desegregation effort. It had nothing to do with true assimilation of the races and everything to do with percentages--how many whites, how many blacks, how many browns--little numbers that could be written down and submitted to a judge as proof that there was no longer any racism. "There's no integration," said Moore. "There is desegregation."
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H.G. Bissinger |
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15a5425
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He and his teammates were the Princes of the City, only they were high school kids instead of New York City narcotics detectives,
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H.G. Bissinger |
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d55ccea
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The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a "chinaman," refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman. For"
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H.G. Bissinger |
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d672280
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What do Dukakis and panty hose have in common? They both irritate Bush. What's twelve inches long and hangs in front of an asshole? Dukakis's necktie.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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0c63ac2
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I don't want him to turn out like I turned out. That's my worst fear. I don't want my son to go through what I went through. It was horrible. I don't want that for him.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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311d408
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They clearly saw their town as the one exception in an area of the country once described as having enough ignorance to support not simply a four-year university but an eight-year one.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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3639769
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In Texas, no man was more of a coward than the one who was chicken shit with his money.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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fde1c28
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He lost the testicle but he did make All-State.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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901d052
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Will Bates was drummed out of Carter and reassigned to teach industrial arts in a middle school. He was given an unsatisfactory evaluation rating, placed on probation for a year, and had his salary frozen. And, of course, he was forbidden to teach math to prevent further threats to the sanctity of football.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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16a811e
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how could they be expected to accept the harsh reality of studies showing that of the thirty million children taking part in youth sports in the United States, only about two hundred would go on to become professionals in any given year?
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H.G. Bissinger |
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181fc5e
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On the SAT exam, boys who took the test during 1988-89 at Permian had a combined average score of 915 (433 verbal, 482 mathematical), 19 points below the national average for boys. Girls had a combined score of 840 (404 verbal, 436 mathematical), 75 points below their male counterparts at Permian and 35 points below the national average for girls. Of the 132 girls who took the test during the 1988-89 school year, there wasn't one who got ab..
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H.G. Bissinger |
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e2e1555
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And because she was intelligent (she graduated from Permian in 1986 and went on to become an honors English major at Swarthmore College), she also felt ostracized.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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3a20d27
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under the right circumstances, the demon wins the heart of the most steadfast soul, and the nemesis always becomes a lover. Permian
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H.G. Bissinger |
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92a1acb
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They knew their economic livelihoods were completely at the mercy of OPEC and that it was all but impossible to have much say in the matter when the average American well produced 13 barrels of oil a day while the average one in Saudi Arabia produced 6,881 barrels a day and the average one in Iran 27,233 barrels.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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8f6944b
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relationship with Shayla, he saw them only sporadically, but at least they spent Thanksgiving that year with him. They were around eleven at the time. But they have since moved to Houston, and Boobie hasn't seen them in four months. He's tried to call them, but they're never available. I know many things about Boobie,
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H.G. Bissinger |
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7883515
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Odessa eked out a living from the livestock trade, all dreams of Utopia gone forever when the town's first sheriff, Elias Dawson, decided that the ban on alcohol constituted cruel and unusual punishment and became the proprietor, along with his brother, of the town's first saloon.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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47285d1
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Nothing about living in Odessa was easy. Finding a scrubby tree that could barely serve as a Christmas tree took two days. Even dealings with cattle rustlers and horse thieves had to be compromised; they were shot instead of hanged because there weren't any trees tall enough from which to let them swing.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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834f101
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In 1982, the thirty-seven murders that took place inside Ector County gave Odessa the distinction of having the highest murder rate in the country. Most agreed that was a pretty high number, but mention of gun control was as popular as a suggestion to change the Ten Commandments. A year later, Odessa made national news again when someone made the fateful mistake of accusing an escaped convict from Alabama named Leamon Ray Price of cheating ..
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H.G. Bissinger |
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655ce76
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Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, described Odessa as an "armpit," which, as the Odessa American pointed out, was actually quite a few rungs up from its usual anatomical comparison with a rectum."
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H.G. Bissinger |
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cd734c2
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Absconding resembles swarming, except that no bees are left behind in the parent colony. The entire colony leaves its hive. Before
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H.G. Bissinger |
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1653a79
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pollen pickle.
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H.G. Bissinger |
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6d9a55d
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Alarm pheromone is the scent that bees emit to alert other bees to danger. It's worth noting that alarm pheromone smells a lot like banana oil, and you should avoid eating bananas in the bee yard. Any
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H.G. Bissinger |
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7a928b8
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fruits, nuts, and vegetables are highly dependent on insect pollinators, especially bees. Bees will always play a valuable role in our food system. Food
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H.G. Bissinger |