The stress of college football, International Talk Like a Pirate Day and weekend movie news

- You may or may not view college football as a big deal, but don’t tell me that college football coaches approach their craft as anything short of a life-or-death endeavor because I’m going to point you directly to Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio in that case. In a world of guys who operate under incredible amounts of (often self-induced) stress, work ridiculous hours, eat terrible diets and often don’t have time to get a good workout in, Dantonio has taken the role of stressed-out head coach to scary new heights. After his team pulled off a dramatic 34-31 overtime win at home against Notre Dame on Saturday night, Dantonio had a mild heart attack and was hospitalized Sunday morning. he certainly isn’t the first 54-year-old to suffer a heart attack, but probably the first to be rushed to the emergency room under these circumstances. Once there, he underwent surgery to put a stent in a blocked blood vessel leading to the heart and is expected to remain in the hospital a few more days. Offensive coordinator Don Treadwell will lead the team during Dantonio's indefinite absence, although I wouldn’t put it past Dantonio to eat up all of the daytime minutes on his cell phone plan to be linked in to every single practice that does on this week while he’s in the hospital. "This morning, in the very early hours, not long after the football game, coach Dantonio began experiencing some symptoms," said Dr. Chris D'Haem, who performed the relatively common procedure to restore blood flow. "Fortunately, his heart damage is very minimal. He's going to do very well and we're very optimistic he'll have a full recovery." Hearing this news less than 12 hours after the game and thinking back to all the comments made by the announcers about how exciting it was and how stressful it was for everyone involved, clearly no one had any inkling of how prophetic those words would be for Dantonio. After a win that put Michigan State in this week's Associated Press poll at No. 25, he found himself fighting for his life in what had to be terrifying circumstances. He follows in the shoes of Florida coach Urban Meyer, who was hospitalized with chest pains in December after his Gators lost the Southeastern Conference championship game to Alabama. So the next time you think that college football is just a game played be oversized dudes throwing around an oblong ball and grown men screaming at them for every mistake they make, remember this story………

- So Ben Affleck doesn’t need Matt Damon by his side to reach the top of the box office race - for one weekend at least. In its debut weekend, Affleck’s new bank heist film The Town, a Boston-based crime drama he stars in, co-wrote and directed, won the top spot at the box office with a take of $23.8 million. A cynic might wonder how a movie that showed so little appeal to women will do going forward, but for one weekend at least, Affleck is king. He won the crown by beating out the teen-targeted Easy A, which raked in $18.2 million for the weekend and yet has already made a nice profit because it was made for a measly $8 million. Easy A is the highest-ranked of five films Sony has in the top ten, so needless to say it’s been a good summer for the studio. In third place was the latest tank job for vastly overrated producer M. Night Shyamalan, whose horror flick Devil landed in a distant third place, grossing $12.5 million and earning terrible ratings from moviegoers. Right on its heels were Milla Jovovich and Resident Evil: Afterlife, which dropped off 60 percent to gross $10.1 million for a cumulative total of $44 million. That’s nothing compared to its success on the international stage, where the movie has grossed upwards of $100 million. Last in the top five was a relatively unknown film, Alpha and Omega. The animated flick from Lionsgate made $9.2 million for its opening weekend despite being the animated story of two wolves with the vocal talents of Justin Long and Hayden Panettiere. Perhaps the draw of hearing Dennis Hopper in his last role gave the film a boost. The rest of the top 10 was occupied by: Takers, which made $3 million in its fourth weekend, for a running total of $52.3 million, The American (No. 6 with $2.8 million and a cumulative total of $33 million, the running miracle that is Inception (moving up from No. 9 to No. 8 in its tenth weekend of release with an additional $2 million for an impressive cumulative tally of $285 million, The Other Guys (No. 9 with just under $2 million) and Eat Pray Love ($1.7 million in its sixth weekend in release for an overall total of $78 million). Next weekend, the latest recycled plot concept hits theaters when Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opens, along with Zack Snyder’s animated owl picture Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole. Should be……umm…..interesting……….

- Want a free office building? If so, the City of Columbia, S.C. has an offer for you. The city is giving away an office building for free - as long as you can move it. For any interested parties, the building in question is a 1930s-era building currently located at 2126 Devine Street. Originally built as an apartment building, it has since been remodeled into office space and boasts 3,784 sq, ft. of heated space, including two office suites upstairs and one downstairs. Why is it being given away? Because a new parking lot is needed for the city’s Five Points property and the site was identified in a recent study as one of the top three sites for surface parking in Five Points. The obvious answer to everyone’s problems would seem to be demolishing the stupid structure, but city officials would rather have someone relocate the two-story structure than demolish it. “One of the things about five points is it can't get any bigger," John Spade, the city's parking services director. "So we have to make due with what we got." What the city “got” is the idea to pawn the expense of getting rid of the building off on someone else rather than paying for its demolition directly. "We are offering it first to anyone who wants to come and move it and they can have it at no cost for the building, but they'll have to pay for the moving cost," said Columbia City Councilwoman Belinda Gergel. The parking lot is on hold until the building is moved or torn down and the city's engineers are anxious to begin work on the property. "And have the plan ready sometime in early spring and start construction on the full lot probably sometime in late May, early June," said Spade. What I find amusing is that the freaking parking lot hasn’t even been built and city officials and police are already talking about the lengths they’ll have to go to in order to make the lot safe and secure. Trees in the area will be trimmed and the open space will make police patrolling easier. "It's just not going to be a big surface parking lot, it's going to have a lot of trees, a lot of landscaping, very well-lit and we'll have security cameras those type of things in there," said Spade. Sounds like an awful lot to go through for just 100 new parking spaces, especially when moving the building would cost prospective buyers tens of thousands of dollars…………

- Times are tough for everyone these days, even hospitals. Nations around the world are struggling financially and it would be naïve to think that those economic woes aren’t impacting the healthcare industry. Bearing this in mind, hospitals are faced with some tough choices. Namely, to they operate (allegedly) a human organ trafficking operation that stretched from Israel to South Africa to Brazil. For a major South African hospital chain and its chief executive, the answer is yes. After police spent months and months digging into the case and accumulating evidence, police spokesman Vish Naidoo said Thursday that 11 suspects were ordered to appear in court in November. Among those receiving subpoenas on Wednesday was Netcare hospital chain chief executive officer, Dr. Richard Friedland. "The board has been advised that the allegations made are unjustified and that neither Netcare nor Dr. Friedland are guilty of any wrongdoing," a statement from the hospital said, explaining that Friedland would not be relieved of his duties pending trial. "The board fully supports Dr Friedland and expresses its regret that the prosecuting authorities have seen fit to press charges against him and Netcare, particularly in view of the unqualified cooperation which Netcare and Dr. Friedland have given to the investigating and prosecuting authorities to assist in those investigations.” Ironically, Netcare’s facilities are generally considered some of the best on the continent. The organ trafficking operation ran for several years, allegedly, and the first arrests were made in 2004 in Brazil and South Africa. The operation worked thusly: Brazilians who passed a medical checkup were flown to South Africa, where their kidneys were extracted for transplants into Israeli patients. Donors also came from Eastern Europe and all told, more than 100 illegal kidney transplants were allegedly performed at Netcare's St. Augustine Hospital in the eastern coastal city of Durban over a two-year span. Even after three people — a recipient and two "coordinators" — were convicted in 2003, the police probe continued. It involved investigators from several foreign countries and focused on the selling of organs, which is illegal in South Africa and most of the rest of the world for some odd reason. Kidneys are especially in demand because there is a high demand and small supply of them. Additionally, they can be taken from a living donor because people can survive with one functioning kidney. A worldwide black market for all manner of human organs has developed and kidneys are one of the most sought-after organs on the market. There are rampant allegations of poor, uneducated laborers in India being duped or forced into giving up kidneys to be transplanted into wealthy people who would come to India from around the world for the operations. Personally, I’m keeping both of my kidneys and it’s going to take an eight-figure offer to change my mind…………

- Arrrrgh! Shiver me timbers, mateys. In case ye missed it, today was International Talk Like a Pirate Day! So if ye be…..aww, screw it. There’s no way I’m making it through this entire story in pirate speak, but it was worth an attempt. Ever since 1995, September 19 has been International Talk Like a Pirate Day and the event has slowly been gaining momentum and support ever since. Yet every year, the question comes up by those not in the know as to how the day came to be. Well, you can thank John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and his pal Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers for this glorious day because it was they who began hurling piratical insults at each other on a YMCA racquetball court in Albany, Oregon and began to wonder why there wasn’t a day when everyone, everywhere could engage in the same type of shenanigans. So why September 19, you ask? Oddly enough, it was selected as the date for ITLPD because it was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, thereby making it easy for him to remember. But as with so many good things that ultimately because national or international phenomena, International Talk Like a Pirate Day didn’t catch on immediately. For the first few years, the holiday was nothing more than an inside joke between two friends and didn’t take on any added significance until they sent a letter to nationally syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry. Barry, who has since retired, liked the idea so much that he wrote about it in a 2002 column for the Miami Herald and promoted the idea so well that it went viral. From there, the day and the cause spread like a wildfire around the world and while piratey people around the globe will celebrate the day in a variety of ways, the underlying theme and spirit remain the same. So short of turning into pirate-speaking scallywags on an everyday basis, this would seem to be as close as we’re going to get to a return to the days of Blackbeard……..