Be Smart: Play Joyfully Today

Before I moved out here to the Bay Area in California, I lived in Burlington, VT for about a year.

One day, as I partook of my afternoon dose of nicotine outside the Fletcher Free Library (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I should quit) a group of pre-schoolers, watched by their day care minders, scrambled around on the lawn outside the library with a vitality that’s missing in my own life at times.

I smiled as I watched three young boys hold hands in a circle, sing the words to “Ring Around the Rosie,” and fall down at the appropriate moment, unaware of the nursery rhyme’s tragic historical connection to the Plague of the Dark Ages.

I marveled at the energy of three others as one of the day care workers, a man they called “Don,” hoisted them from the ledge overlooking the lawn all at the same time amid their screams of joy, with them immediately taking off in three different directions at a dead run when he set them down.

Plagiarism: How the AP’s Tim Reynolds Stole the Show

While my blogs will encompass a myriad of topics, my first blog entry is going to be about a case of plagiarism by an Associated Press Sports Writer named Tim Reynolds that occurred involving a piece I wrote for Bleacher Report back on November 1 of this year.

First, let me begin by explaining that Bleacher Report is a sports website where the writers are the readers. Anyone and everyone can, and are encouraged to, write on the site, posting articles on a wide range of sports topics. It’s a site I dearly loved, and loved writing for up until just recently, when many of the changes to the site, and the attitudes of those running it forced me to decide I wanted nothing more to do with it.

I was a Featured Columnist for the site for the Miami Heat and Florida Marlins, and wrote a number of articles about other teams and sports as well, such as the Miami Dolphins, Florida Panthers, Miami Hurricanes Football team, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, etc.

As a Featured Columnist for the Miami Heat, I wrote a preview of the game between the Heat and the Chicago Bulls that took place on Sunday, November 1, 2009. I wrote the preview and posted it that Sunday morning at 10: 00 AM.

You can currently read it here, but I’ll also eventually be posting the entire article as a post here on my blog, as well as putting links to the articles, original and edited, by Tim Reynolds at the end of this piece.