Josh Benner

Author: the Josh Benner Blog

  • Is my family weird for doing this?

    I’ve been debating writing about this for awhile. My family has a reunion every year, and to me, it’s always seemed weird.

    Here’s the question: if your family has a reunion, is it setup as a meeting?

    What I mean is that it is setup like a formal organization meeting. There is an agenda, there are minutes. They always read the minutes from the previous year’s reunion.

    There are committees that have budgets, there is a president.

    That’s weird, right?

    Do other families do that? Or is it just mine?

    This was on my mind today, because the annual reunion was today. This event has been going on for decades (of course). I was unable to go to this year’s reunion because I had a prior committment, but it has always been amusing to me to see just how formally this reunion runs.

    While I may sound like I’m making fun of it, I will give credit where credit is due. It is run effeciently. I would be very interested in hearing any comments.

    jrb

  • Peter Falk’s greatest role: himself

    Yesterday, I received a news notification from CNN on my phone that actor Peter Falk had died. Falk was best known for his role as Columbo, but I was born in 1985. I’ve never seen Columbo. A second thought then entered my mind.

    I thought to myself, “I think that guy played an American in a German film that I watched in high school…”

    I vaguely recalled a movie called Wings of Desire where two angels observe people in their daily lives, and where one of the angels falls in love with a human woman and gives up his immortality (because angels are immortal, as everyone knows) in order to become a mortal man and pursue the woman with whom he has fallen in love.

    Spoiler alert: he becomes mortal and the two fall in love. It is the only film in the history of German cinema to have a happy ending.

    That all may sound familiar. There is an American remake of the film called City of Angels made in 1998 starring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. Although it doesn’t end happily. Meg Ryan gets hit by a truck and dies.

    But what did Peter Falk have to do with the German version of the story? Did the wires in my psyche get proverbially crossed and supplant him into the plot of a movie I barely paid attention to almost a decade ago?

    So I went to the Wikipedia article. First things first. My recollection of the plot was pretty spot on. And not only had Peter Falk been in the movie, he PLAYED HIMSELF. Peter Falk played Peter Falk in a 1980s German movie. Greatest actor of all time.

    He plays himself, and you find out that Peter Falk used to be an angel, but had, like the star of the film, given up his immortality to become a human. And now Peter Falk is deceased. I couldn’t help but wonder, “what if Peter Falk actually had been an angel?”

    Peter Falk playing Peter Falk is on the same level of awesome as in the Eddie Money song “Take Me Home Tonight,” where Eddie says, “just like Ronnie sang…”

    And then Ronnie Spector, who was famous for singing a song titled “Be My Baby” in the Ronettes sings “be my little baby.”

    As an aside, the star of Wings of Desire was Bruno Ganz. He played Hitler in an amazing movie about Germany’s last days in World War II called Downfall.

    That movie features a climactic scene where it becomes apparent that winning the war is no longer a possibility for Germany. Hitler explodes in a rage at his senior officials.

    There are several dozen videos on YouTube which utilize this scene and change the subtitles jokingly. You’ve probably seen these. That’s Bruno Ganz. He was also in the Liam Neeson thriller called Unknown which came out earlier this year.

    Recalling Peter Falk was definitely a blast from the past. Rest in Peace Peter Falk.

  • Obama commits major military gaffe

    President Obama committed a major  gaffe yesterday while speaking to members of the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York.

    Here is the quote:

    “First time I saw the 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq, when I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there.

    I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”

    There is a problem, however.

    Obama didn’t present the Medal of Honor to Monti. Monti died in 2006. Obama posthumously presented the award to Monti’s family in September of 2009.

    It was actually the first time he had presented the medal, which is the highest military honor our nation bestows.

    The difference between giving it to the person to whom it is being awarded  versus giving it to a mourning family is significant.

    Obama is the Commander and Chief of our military. I’m not saying he needs to remember every intimate detail of everyone he’s ever met associated with the armed forces, but the Medal of Honor is a big deal. And I feels this shows a general disinterest in our military, because it doesn’t seem like it was an experience that had much of an impact on the president.

    I am also amazed by the lack of media attention this story is receiving. If Bush had ever made this mistake, he would have been rightly vilified. People would have said that he was out of touch.

    The fact that the PRESIDENT of the United States awards the highest honor which this nation can bestow on our service members and forgets that it was given to this man’s family and not to the man himself is not excusable. Obama dropped the ball. Plain and simple.

    He may have confused details with Salvatore Giunta, who was awarded the Medal of Honor last year. Giunta was the first living recipient of the award since Vietnam.

    Some people may and try to excuse Obama’s error by citing how busy the president is. I feel that doing this devalues the significance of the award.

    jrb

  • Stop making excuses for Tressel

    The NCAA was aware of the rules violations of five Ohio State football players and affirmed five game suspensions for them earlier this year.

    Then things got much worse. It came to light Tressel knew about the violations and lied, and now there are reports that even more players had done the same thing.

    Pryor and everyone else who got this started should just be kicked off the team! Right?

    No. That’s crazy. If we do find out that there were additional violations by Pryor of which the NCAA was unaware, then that may be justified. But the NCAA has already decided what the appropriate penalty is for these guys based on what they did. A week ago, most Buckeye fans would have been happy with the penalty they received, but now that the situation seems so much worse than we had originally thought, those guys deserve to be punished to a greater degree?

    I just don’t see how that logically follows and that this is a knee jerk reaction.

    Well…. Tressel had to resign for what they did. If he can’t coach, they shouldn’t be able to play.

    Actions of the players were definitely the original sin in this debacle of a situation, but the scale to which people were breaking rules and high profile players were breaking rules with Tressel fully aware and lying to the university and to the NCAA on multiple occasions and running a program over which he had lost control was one in which he could no longer reasonably remain as the head coach.

    The players are isolated entities in themselves. They broke the rules and that was wrong, but those who had already been caught have received their punishments for the rules they had broken individually.

    The fact that this was rampant in the program with Tressel at the helm doomed him.

    But some make the mistake of viewing Tressel as a martyr or the one who took the fall. If it is ever found that university president Gordon Gee or athletic director Gene Smith knew this was going on, they too will be forced out.

    Tressel built a program around integrity with a philosophy of teachable moments through the game. When he found himself in a situation where he could have (and should have) done the right thing, he lied and misled again and again.

    Even now as he resigns. It’s not because he suddenly became honorable. It’s because the university was tipped off by Sports Illustrated  that another shoe was about to drop, and you can be sure that they told him to take himself out like how the Nazis took down Erwin Rommel.

    People are making too many excuses for Tressel. It’s not because of some tattoos that he no longer gets to be coach. It’s because he lied and withheld information. There is no excuse for that. This program was never going to seriously regain credibility with him at the top.

    Throughout Tressel’s career, players had issues with rules. While I know that no program is perfect, when there is proof that he lied and it was rampant, how many more chances were we going to give him?

    In a couple of years when someone else got in trouble, was that going to be the time he was fired? It was going to be an inevitability.

    While I don’t think these players should be kicked off of the team unless more information about them comes to light, I do think Luke Fickell needs to lay down the law that from this day forward, any player caught selling personal items will be thrown off of the team.

    Earlier in this post, I said that the punishment for players should not suddenly be made more severe because more information is coming out about more rules violations from other players. But I do think that Tressel should be out.  Am I not guilty of the very thing about which I am complaining? No. Because I don’t think Tressel should have resigned over these latest details about the scandal. He should have resigned in March when it initially broke that he knew and lied, just to protect start football players.

    jrb

  • Reaction to resignation of Tressel

    For Ohio State football fans, this morning’s news that Jim Tressel has resigned as football coach is the Buckeye Nation’s, “You remember where you were when you found out…” moment. While I was surprised to find out this morning of his resignation, ultimately this is someting which I believe was inevitable. And while I said that Tressel should have resigned months ago, this is something that I cannot celebrate. It’s just the conclusion that had to occur.

    After the initial news of this scandal, and the heat that came on the program, the digging was going to continue. To think that Tressel was ever going to legitimately get this program back under control and restore the sense of pride which Ohio State fans expect was always just wishful thinking.

    For the good of the program, there was no other way. Even though I think his handling of this situation lacked integrity, I still think he’s a good guy. These events cannot diminish the wonderful impact that he has had on so many young football players, and the great joy which all Ohio State fans have experienced in watching his team’s success over the last decade.

    I don’t feel sorry for Tressel. Today’s news is the result of bad decision’s he made. He lied to the NCAA on multiple occasions. And he lived a lie every single day that he was aware that he had players who had broken the rules, while he carried on with a program with the facade that they were obiding the NCAA’s guidelines when he was fully aware that they were not.

    While I don’t feel sorry for Tressel, one person who I do have mixed emotions over is Luke Fickell. Not in the fact that he’s interim coach. There is no one better suited for that roll at this time. Fickell being a former Buckeye football player, and a Columbus native (from my hometown of Westerville), who started 50 games as a defensive linemen from 1993-96, culminating in his final career game where he played with a torn pectoral muscle in the 1997 Rose Bowl win over Arizona State.

    I would assume Fickell has dreamed about becoming the Ohio State football coach for a very long time. And now he has it under the worst of circumstances. He has be the interim head coach in a program that is struggling with constant questioning and speculation of who Ohio State will pursue to be the permanent head coach. Meyer? Stoops? Gruden? Pelini? The list continues.

    When Ohio State does bring a new coach, will it be a possibility for Fickell to remain on the staff? Even if he’s interviewed for the position and not selected? I would say no. It’s the end of May, he’s become the head coach, but now he may very well have less than one full year to be the top man before being forced out.

    It will be interesting to see. For many Buckeye fans, this is a horrible day. The program is going to be all right. Tressel could have left now, or he would have been forced out later as the program kept declining as he continued to lose control. I say now is a better time than in the future, because with him leaving now, the rebuilding process can start and there is one less distraction.

    O..H..

    jrb