Decline never was defeat for Charles

RALEIGH After winning the men's national title in 2010, Duke's basketball players boarded an Elite Tours bus one April evening for the short trip to Durham Bulls Athletic Park, where they would be honored and throw out the first pitch.

Every person on that bus knew what it was like to win an NCAA title, including the driver.

Lorenzo Charles drove the Blue Devils to the baseball game that night, 27 years after he won a national championship of his own with N.C. State, collecting Dereck Whittenburg's desperation heave below the basket and dunking it to clinch a remarkable upset of heavily favored Houston. Charles died Monday night when he lost control of the empty tour bus he was driving on Interstate 40, not far from the arena where N.C. State plays basketball now. He was 47.

How he went from college basketball hero to college-team bus driver is a story of a man whose dream of basketball stardom never panned out, but who found happiness in a more modest life, even as he occasionally struggled with the financial demands of his middle-class existence.

For 15 years, basketball took him around the world, from Uruguay to Turkey and just about everywhere in between. By 2001, his knees and opportunities had run out, and he returned to Raleigh, where he had met his wife.

Without a college degree, his work options were limited. But once he started driving a bus, he found satisfaction in a new direction.

Most of the time, Charles led an ordinary life, an anonymous everyman, if a hulking one. Yet those who recognized him - passengers and future presidents alike - saw only a basketball hero and icon. His stardom followed him into his new career, and by all accounts, he never tired of talking about his moment and savored both sides of his dual existence.

"Everyone talked to 'Lo' about that shot," N.C. State teammate Ernie Myers said, "but he'd hardly talk about it unless someone brought it up first."

We know the NCAA tournament today as a monolith, an event CBS and its partners pay more than $77 million per year to televise. It's a monthlong diversion that saps productivity in offices across the country and dominates the sports world. There's even a name for it: Madness.

It wasn't so crazy in 1983. But N.C. State's dramatic string of upsets accelerated the NCAA tournament's climb to the phenomenon it is today.

In the championship game against a Houston team so powerful it had its own nickname - "Phi Slamma Jamma" - with the score tied at 52 and time running out, Whittenburg threw up a prayer from 30 feet that got nowhere near the basket. Charles, standing beneath the hoop, grabbed the ball and dunked it. Whittenburg, Charles and coach Jim Valvano raced across the court. College basketball changed forever.

Another View Through The Door, « The Midnight Observer's Blog

Erroneously we had started to think, because of our involvement in this field, we were passed the knee jerk, shudder reaction, that the strange should really not at this point have  caught us emotionally off  guard like it did.   Let’s be real about it, you don’t have to have seen every alien movie for the last 2 decades to have library of possible horrors in your brain attached to the subject.

Our own common sense can already assure us of the many negative, practical possibilities that would be associated with our  removal from our world . Removal, by entities that may be barely humanoid, and what of the place you may be taken to? Could the first breaths you take upon exposure to that place be just the agonizing beginning of a death brought on not by their tender mercies, but by their environment itself?  Who is to say the conditions within their ship would not be a prelude to it. That only if you weren’t already mixing in a vat with a lot of other folk picked for the same purpose, (what some abductees have claimed to see).

Personal health matters, for both Lori and I, establish a real knowledge that a separation from our meds for an extended period would mean disaster. The thought of being abducted for a lengthy time would almost certainly,for us, mean death.  So, why not just face the facts and stop this insanity before we exacerbate  the situation to just that, a point of no return.?

If you have that choice, if everybody, (everything) involved is in agreement, that’s great. We’d bid you a farewell with genuine wishes for the best to each of you, and we’re gone. We’re back to  reading the Good

Life,  and perfecting whats left of our love-making, our gardening , and hermitage skills.

Though we’d never forget, we would definitely  try to.   That’s not one of the options on the table.  These aren’t beings that say  “oh look, another couple , in the dark, Strays!”,  and have their way, then take off forgetting you in their zeal to make new friends . Some of these are beings with an elephant’s memory, an elephant that has centuries of memory. Some of them are probably just scientifically dedicated in their own unfathomable way, while others mark you from childhood or the moment of capture,(because that’s what it is, capture) involving you in processes for the length of your life, that you would never believe, and many of our minds couldn’t  house.

British medical journal

Journal of the Optical Society of America

Picture Theory, Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation

Principles of digital image synthesis

Boston medical and surgical journal