Today is Saturday, December twenty eighth, the 363rd day of 2024. There are three days left within the 12 months.

Today in history:

On December 28, 2015, a grand jury in Cleveland declined to indict two white cops within the killing of black 12-year-old Tamir Rice. He was shot while carrying a toy gun.

Also on this date:

In 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, held the primary public screening of their movies in Paris.

In 1912, the San Francisco light rail began operating. Mayor James Rolph Jr. was on the wheel of the No. 1 streetcar as 50,000 spectators watched.

In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1972, Kim Il Sung, the prime minister of North Korea, was made president of the country with a brand new structure.

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the primary American “test-tube baby,” was born in Norfolk, Virginia.

In 1991, nine people died attempting to attend a charity basketball game on the City College of New York.

In 2014, the U.S. war in Afghanistan officially ended after 13 years with a quiet flag-lowering ceremony in Kabul that marked the transition of fighting from U.S.-led combat forces to the country's own security forces.

Today's birthdays:

• Actor Denzel Washington is 70.
• TV personality Gayle King is 70.
• Hockey Hall of Famer Ray Bourque is 64.
• Linux inventor Linus Torvalds is 55.
• Political commentator Ana Navarro is 53.
• TV host and comedian Seth Meyers is 51.
• Actor Joe Manganiello is 48.
• The musician John Legend is 46.
• Actor André Holland is 45.
• Actress Sienna Miller is 43.
• Actress Jessie Buckley is 35.

The college football contest between Army and Notre Dame on November 23, 2024 will fittingly happen exactly 100 years after the 2 storied programs met on the Polo Grounds in New York City – a clash that many sports fans remember due to dramatic column remember Sports journalist Grantland Rice published the following day.

In his first paragraphRice famously compares the Fighting Irish's backfield to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and suggests that the “South Bend Cyclone” simply overwhelmed the Army players:

“The four horsemen stood out again against a blue-gray October sky. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are just aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone, before which yesterday afternoon another struggling Army football team was swept over the abyss of the Polo Grounds as 55,000 spectators gazed upon the bewildering panorama that spread out on the green plain below.”

Based on this rousing introduction, readers of the time—let alone readers today—may need been surprised that Notre Dame didn’t overwhelm the military.

The game was a 13-7 cliffhanger. After Notre Dame's offense took a 13-0 lead within the third quarter, Army's offense responded with seven points of its own before missing several opportunities within the fourth quarter to attain the game-winning touchdown.

Of course, that wasn't the story Rice desired to tell.

More than a game

In my 30 years as an English teacher and writing teacher, I even have read a number of essays that reflect Rice's purple prose. I’ll tell my students that it’s exaggerated and exaggerated.

But unlike most freshmen, Rice's style has served his purposes well.

Rice honed his craft as a sports journalist in the primary twenty years of the twentieth century, just before the start of the so-called period the golden age of sport. In the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, newspaper circulation expanded rapidly, radio technology brought live sporting events to hundreds of thousands of American homes, and interest in college and skilled sports boomed.

As journalism scholars Patrick Washburn and Chris Lamb have explainedBefore this golden age, many American sportswriters sought to extend attendance at sporting events, a few of them even being employed by leagues and teams. They also reported the facts of the boxing matches, horse racing and baseball games they covered – the outcome, key moments and peak performances.

Rice, who had started off as a reporter for the Nashville Daily News and later became a columnist for the New York Tribune, believed that his job was not a lot to inform what happened in the sport as to create a story , which fit his vision of how sports ought to be celebrated in American culture.

He believed that sports were not only a stage for men and girls to reveal their athletic abilities; He also tried to imbue their performances with biblical drama and transform athletes into contemporary gods. Rice, a Vanderbilt University student who often wrote original verse in his columns, was the unofficial leader of the Gee Whiz school of sports writinga bunch of writers who celebrated the achievements of athletes while ignoring and even concealing their character flaws.

For Rice, athletes like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Manor, Bill Tilden And Babe Didrikson Zaharias weren’t odd individuals who happened to be good at sports. They were worthy of reverence in American culture itself – key figures in the best dramas that unfolded on the country's fields, courses and racetracks.

Advancing a narrative

It's not hard to assume a unique form of column for this 1924 game, one which highlights the Army's courage and tenacity and the heartache its players ultimately endured once they ran out of gas. This would even be story and a straightforward sell to readers, especially given the military connection.

But Rice didn't wish to downplay the tenacity the cadets displayed in the way in which they conducted themselves.played the sport.” Instead, he focused his column on the plot of a cyclone in South Bend that was beyond the control of any team. It was definitely an efficient approach.

Additionally, there can have been one more reason why Rice tried to amplify Notre Dame's win. According to sports journalist and critic Mark Inabinett: Rice was friends with Notre Dame coach Knute Rockneand the victory provided a chance to position the Fighting Irish as the very best team within the country.

Never mind that Notre Dame had won the primary two games of the yr with much larger margins. Rice used this fairly close win to show the Fighting Irish into an unstoppable powerhouse. His column – with an estimated New York readership of lots of of hundreds and a syndicated readership of about 10 million – was a spectacular opportunity to claim the team's dominance in college football.

When the literary touch goes too far

His column that Sunday morning in the autumn of 1924 was just that – spectacular.

It is the embodiment of his approach to sports writing and stays his best-known work.

His writing style inspired generations of sportswriters who followed him – including Bill Simmons, who named his influential ESPN-owned website Grantland after Rice in 2011. It also paved the way in which for a college of sportswriters to view games primarily as potential storylines: opportunities to articulate their very own ideas in regards to the cultural function of sports.

For some authors, that meant treating a hockey game as a geopolitical stalemate. For others it meant performing a Major League Soccer game as a milestone for LGBTQ+ people or see a tennis match as a lesson in aesthetic pleasure.

These are all well-written stories, and there's nothing inherently improper with following storylines and constructing particular narratives about games. Sports actually serve a cultural function and it’s the writer's prerogative to channel his vision.

However, chances are you’ll be wondering what’s lost when a game is viewed as a method to the top of the writer's work. The untold narrative may represent a more accurate account of what happened in that field that day.

Even if it was all only a loss.

Nearly 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of rice are grown in Florida each summer. Agricultural area of ​​the Evergladesan area of ​​roughly 2,800 square kilometers south of Lake Okeechobee.

Farming here requires an important deal of sensitivity. The area has lost almost 1.8 metres of soil within the last century on account of Process called soil subsidence.

One option to slow this subsidence and preserve the nutrient-rich soil is to flood the world during Florida's rainy season and use the fields to grow rice. The fields are flooded with water from the adjoining canals. Once the water dries up or seeps away, the rice is harvested.

The Conversation asked Associate Professor Jehangir Bhadha, a Soil sustainability expert on the University of Florida, how the university got here to grow rice and what advantages this brings to the environment.

What is the story behind rice cultivation within the Everglades?

In the Fifties, rice was grown for a short while within the Everglades Agricultural Area, but the world was limited to about 2,000 acres (800 hectares).

Then got here the invention of a rice virus in Florida called Hoja Blanca or white leafwhich causes the plants to wither and even kill them. This virus was first discovered within the late Fifties in Colombia and Venezuela.

Rice made a comeback in Florida in 1977 after farmers within the Everglades Agricultural Area demonstrated that it grown on sugar cane fields in the course of the summer fallow period from May to August – when it is simply too hot and wet to grow vegetables in South Florida. By this time, Hoja Blanca disease was under control and recent resistant rice varieties were being developed.

In late spring and summer, greater than 20,000 hectares of fallow sugarcane land within the Everglades Agricultural Area can be found for rice cultivation. In 2023 About half of this area was planted with rice.The remaining land is either left fallow or flooded but doesn’t produce rice – a practice commonly known as “Fallow water flooding.”

On average, every hectare cultivated yields approx. 2 tons (1,800 kilograms) of rice.

What makes rice cultivation on this area so special?

Rice cultivation within the Everglades Agricultural Area doesn’t require initial fertilization with nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium since the region's soils are highly organic and nutrient-rich.

The area covers almost 450,000 acres (180,000 hectares) organic soils generally known as histosols. These soils contain as much as 80% organic matter, making them unique to the region and a vital resource for its thriving agriculture. Histosols are sometimes called bathroom or peat soils.

The Histosols of South Florida were formed over a period of several thousand years as organic material gathered faster than it could decompose within the flooded sawgrass prairies that flourished in the world south of Lake Okeechobee.

But for the reason that land here was drained for agriculture within the early twentieth century, organic material has been decomposing faster than it may possibly grow back. This is especially on account of microbially mediated oxidation, which occurs when organic material is slowly decomposed and consumed by microbes, resulting in a gradual lack of soil and a lowering of surface elevation.

The soil depth on this area varies from just a few centimeters to as much as 1.5 meters. Beneath the Histosols lies hard limestone rock that just isn’t suitable for agriculture. In many places the limestone rock is exposed on the surface or parts of it are incorporated into the soil.

What contribution does rice cultivation make to soil health there?

By flooding the fields for long periods of time, farmers suppress each the microbial activity that results in oxidation and the hatching of Pests. It also increases the water holding capability of the soilwhich allows for higher moisture retention within the drier seasons.

The improved soil health advantages the sugar cane crop and maximizes the lifespan of the soil.

The cultivation of flooded rice has also proven to be Attracting waders How great white heron, Great Egret And Glossy-headed Ibis.

What work is your team currently doing?

In the last 15 years, more rice and more varieties of rice have been grown. While in 2008 only two dominant varieties were grown on around 4,800 hectares, by 2023 there have been already greater than 10 varieties on 9,300 hectares.

To ensure a continuous supply of latest varieties, researchers and others University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciencesalong with Company: Florida Rice Growers Inc.conduct annual rice variety trials to guage recent or existing varieties in South Florida. The goal of the trials is to discover high-yielding, disease-resistant rice varieties which might be compatible with the region's subtropical climate and highly organic soils.

Every summer University of Florida IFAS Extension and the Research Faculty hold a rice field day dedicated to presenting their current research.