Some Brief Notes

Just a few quick thoughts, none of which is worth a full post all by itself:

• I’m flying to Toronto on business tomorrow, and it still feels really odd that I now need a passport to do that.  It’s like needing a passport to go to Denver, or Minneapolis.  We went to Hawaii last year, and that felt a lot more like a passport-worthy trip than Toronto does.
• By the way, I look like a white-collar criminal in my passport photo.  Not a hard-core, knocked-off-a-liquor store criminal.  More like an  ”embezzled $342,000 from some old lady’s retirement fund” kind of criminal.  If getting a passport wasn’t such a time-consuming process, I’d be seriously tempted to try for a do-over.
• Despite hitting several buckets of balls, I still have not played a round of golf this year.  It looks like I may finally get in a round this coming weekend.  If Memorial Day weekend is the first time you play a full round of golf, then you either live in Juneau, Alaska, or it’s time to admit that you’re not a real serious golfer.
• So let me see if I’ve got this straight: One of Darrell Arthur’s grades MAY have been changed when he was a freshman in high school.  This allegation comes from a fired teacher at that high school, who may have violated academic privacy laws by keeping his old grade book and revealing its contents to a Dallas television station.  The grade, if it was changed, was changed by a couple of adults at Arthur’s old high school in Texas, not by Arthur himself.  The alleged grade change happened in 2003, while Bill Self was still the head coach at the University of Illinois, and while Arthur’s preferred choice for college was Baylor University.  The high school later submitted Arthur’s academic record to the NCAA in Indianapolis, where an independent clearinghouse ruled that Arthur was, in fact, academically eligible to enroll in an NCAA institution and play college basketball.  Now, what does any of this have to do with The University of Kansas?
• After a weekend of heavy shopping, I’m beginning to suspect that my wife intends that we will eventually spend more money decorating our new house than we spent on the house itself.  Heavy sigh.