Walking on a trail in a scrub forest

    I round a corner and to my surprise. There is a gator lying in the trail.   Not a little gator. This is a very big gator.   Usually I see them in the water like this.   It turns out there is water within about a hundred yards of where I came across this beast.  Not knowing that at the time though, I was totally surprised by this find.  I have to say that finding an alligator on the same trail I’m walking, is significantly more intimidating than seeing one in the water from the safety of a boardwalk.   I decided to walk a different trail that day.  

Football

  Watching college football on Saturday, I was amazed to see a kickoff returner signal for a fair-catch at his own 2 yard line.  Why would he do that; make a fair catch at the 2 and pin his team there, instead of letting the ball careen into the end zone for a touchback?  Then the television broadcaster announced that the receiver had elected for a touchback.  What?  How was that a touchback and not a fair catch?   It turns out, over the off-season, they made up a new rule in college football so anywhere inside their own 25 yard line, the kickoff receiver can signal for a fair catch which is then treated as a touchback and the ball comes out to the 25 yard-line; and no one even checked with me, or informed me!   Who knew?   I had to look it up.  This is part of the overall effort to reduce high speed head-on collisions in football.  

Medicine in the U.S.

  What is wrong with this picture?   Amount charged        $11,000 Medicare approved   $  1,000   What a strange game to claim ten times what you know you can collect.  Do they have to do that to get paid the right amount?  If they had charged $1,000, what they expect to collect, would Medicare have negotiated them down to $100?  If we didn’t have any insurance would this have cost us $11,000?  

American redstart

  The Redstart I just sent pictures of, is a migrant warbler.   It only passes through Texas briefly in the spring and fall.   There’ll be a quiz on this later.