Dear Phil

Dear Phil,

Thank you for your letter.

I appreciate that you are disappointed with the University of Tennessee 2005 football season. I agree that the results are simply not acceptable.

Last night I watched UT enter the field in a blaze of orange and white and crush their opponents mercilessly in a 70-3 walkover of a conference championship match. I was wearing orange and I was happy, but yet there was a bitterness in my heart. It was not my UT victorious. This year, I will not be putting up my orange and white Christmas decorations, for us this year football is over.

As I sat in the bar where some 100 US alumni watched post-regular season football, I saw a former University of Colorado linebacker and fellow American expat congratulate the Texans on their win and say it was a good game, and I had a revelation. In your letter, you state that the pride and the passion of Tennessee fans are what makes us unique. But I must beg to differ. We do have pride and passion, but what makes us special our is orneriness. Our arrogance when we win and our somber sullenness when we lose. We are not always the best sports. We draw dislike from many other fans, and they like to rub it in good when we lose.

I, as a Tennessee fan, will not be changing my sporting attitude, so I’m sure you appreciate why we really, really need to have a winning football team.

Looking forward to next season (but sullenly),

-Vol Abroad

Squirrel madness

A pack of squirrels in Russia have attacked and killed a dog. And there are unconfirmed reports of cat harassing herds of chipmunks.

Russian scientist says: “…things must be pretty bad in our forests.” Yesss…see this photo from the Eastern forests.

Dispatch this kid quick.
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• I’ve been squirrel hunting, once, with this guy, but we never managed to see any, much less shoot any.
• At a Royal Horticultural Society show recently, I overheard a woman say that she had squirrel problems in her garden. In a cut glass accent, she said “I catch them in a humane trap. And then plunge the trap into a water-filled trough. They drown very quickly.”

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Rex L Camino needs to get on the case, kinkajous and rabid ‘roos, evil squirrels and chipmunks, too.