Chidem Inch: This Winter Blockade

 

     It is a precarious time for Artsakh and Armenia. The Azeris have blocked the Lachin Corridor cutting off supplies of food, fuel and medical supplies. With winter setting in and no other power stepping in to assist us, it appears the Azeris hold the upper hand. To say it is disheartening for all Armenians to have to watch this happening barely explains how horrible and helpless we are feeling. It is difficult to read or write about it.
      I am not an expert, nor am I privy to any great insights, but there seems to be no military option for us. The Azeris have superior weaponry and numbers as was shown in the costly and devastating 2020 war. Unlike Ukraine, no one is coming to our aid with training and weapons. There was news a few months ago of an arms deal with India. I am guessing it is nowhere near the kind of support the US is providing to Ukraine.
     Nancy Pelosi did visit Armenia in mid-September. She was the highest-ranking US official to visit the Republic of Armenia. It came at a time when Azerbaijan was making incursions into Armenia, and it looked like another war was about to start. Her visit seemed to calm the tensions until just over a week ago when Azerbaijan began this blockade. France’s Macron has recently spoken on our behalf as well.
     Azerbaijan does not seem fazed by Pelosi’s visit or Macron’s words. Aliyev seems to believe that no one will come to Armenia’s aid. I shudder that he may be correct. It seems to be in no one’s interest to help us. We are small in numbers. We are not laden with natural resources, and there is nothing strategic about our location. Our immediate neighbors? Turkey and Azerbaijan are enemies. Georgia is not Armenian friendly by any means. Iran has their own issues internally and quite a large Azeri minority living there. We are in Russia’s sphere of influence, but there seems to be little hope of Russia stepping in. Putin has the war he started with Ukraine to deal with anyways. I really am not sure we can stop them, and it looks like no one is going to help us. What can we do? What can we really do? A friend of mine in Chicago posted this:

Artsakh needs you. What you can do.

• Amplify voices from Artsakh and raise awareness of the humanitarian crisis.
• Contact your representatives and demand sanctions against Azerbaijan.
• Protest, in person and online, against Azerbaijan’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Armenians from Artsakh.

     Church leaders, diasporan political parties and our lobbying groups have basically encouraged us to do the same. Another friend just started a nonprofit to raise money to purchase border monitoring equipment. Their fundraising effort is to raise like $10,000. Of course, we need to do these things. Of course, I will do these things. I just worry about how useful and effective they are. It just doesn’t feel like enough. I was feeling quite grim. Then, I read Simon Maghakyan’s article in Time, History Suggests This Winter Could Be Dangerous for Armenians. His historical perspective helped turn my bleakness to a grim resolution that we can never give up. Defending our lands and people from these enemies has to be our sole focus.
     Hopefully, in the short run, negotiations will work. In the longer run, we need to focus on defensive military strength. We don’t need any more congressional or parliamentary resolutions or recognitions of what happened in 1915. We need them to treat us a lot more like the West is currently treating Ukraine. We need money, modern weaponry and training to be able to defend ourselves from enemies that want to eliminate our presence in what remains of our ancestral homeland. If no one helps us in this regard, we must figure out how to do it ourselves. Our only salvation is in our collective strength… and an iron ladle.

First Published in The Armenian Weekly

Bomb Cyclone

 

NY Post

For four days now, the weather reports have been warning of a huge winter storm heading our way.  It is supposed to start tomorrow, Thursday December 22 and end on Friday.  It is predicted to dump anywhere from 8 to 24 inches of snow.  As the storm is coming from the northwest, it is dragging artic air frigid air along with it.

Today, the day before the storm is to hit, the high is going to be 30 degrees with a low of 9.  On Friday, when the storm has passed the high will be 0 and the low -8.  That is cold by December standards.  It sounds certain we will have a White Christmas.

Yesterday, I heard the storm referred to as a “Bomb Cyclone” on a local news weather report.  Bomb Cyclone?  I had never heard that term before.  What the heck is a Bomb Cyclone?  Cyclone makes it sound so Asian and Pacific Oceany.  A quick internet search had CNN telling me that:

Bomb cyclone is a term given to a rapidly strengthening storm that fulfills one important criterion. Generally, pressure must drop 24 millibars (a unit of pressure) within 24 hours.

 

However, that benchmark is also based on the latitude of the storm. So, the millibar requirement can change depending on where the storm forms.

Well that totally clears it up.

The term was created in 1980 by two MIT meteorologists working with a Swedish researcher.  Basically, the pressure drop intensifies the storm quickly.  The farther north the storm develops the smaller the pressure drops required.  The included the word “bomb” because these storms are quite fierce.  So basically, we are expecting a big-ass storm.  Didn’t we used to just classify all these kinds of winter storms as blizzards?

While weather forecasting has improved, there seems to be a recent history of predicting cataclysmic, cyclonic, epic, bomb-like, winter storms days in advance that turned out to be duds, big nothings.  There have been predictions of several feet of snow that resulted in a dusting or maybe a lame inch or two.  Has global warming made the forecasting less predictable?  Certainly, there is probability involved in the forecasts.  The is also the possibility that local news might just exaggerate a bit, days in advance, to draw viewership?  I know I have watched more local news in the past two days than I have all year.

I feel cheated when a winter blast that was predicted doesn’t happen.  I look forward to such storms.  There is something Zhivagoesque about the hunkering down while the snow falls silently or in a blowing rage.  There is something special about going out after the storm and surveying the pristine white blanket before cars, footprints, and grit make it lesser. 

So, I hope, come tomorrow, it is a good storm for all those reasons.  I also hope it doesn’t disrupt holiday travel too much.  We are expecting family from Boston to fly in on Christmas Eve.  We shall see.

I am writing this on the Winter Solstice which adds a bit of serendipity to this all.

Archbishop Paul (1953 – 2022)

 

Yesterday, I learned that an elementary school friend of mine, Archbishop Paul Gassios, passed away on April 24, Easter Sunday, of this year.

I believe we first met in Mrs. Allen’s kindergarten class at Robert Burns Elementary School in Detorit.  As his last name is Gassios and mine is Gavoor, whenever we lined up alphabetically, which was quite often in those days, Paul was right in front of me. 

Naturally, we got to know each other.  We were in classes together.  I admired Paul’s quiet intelligence.  He was a nice fellow.  We were on the safety patrol and were partners at the Hubbell and Lyndon intersection for one.  In our last year at Burns, 7^th Grade, I opted for a special duty on Safety Patrol: to raise and lower the flag each day.  It was a two-man detail.  So, I asked Paul if he wanted to do it.  He agreed.  It was a fun job and it was a great pleasure doing it with him.

There was a home economics teacher at Burns, for the life of me I cannot recall her name, who ran the Future Teachers Club.  She was a wee bit ahead of her time and sensed the changing tides of the various liberation movements that took root in the 1960s.  In that same year, 1965 when we were in 7^th grade, she decided to invite a few boys to join the Future Teachers Club which until then had been all girls.  She recruited the two of us, the flag detail boys, and young fellows that were likely to become teachers.  The meetings took place in the home economics classroom which we had never been in before.  While I do not remember many details of the meeting, I remember it was a good experience.  I believe that experience had some influence Paul’s calling to the ministry and mine to higher education.

I think Paul and I were also part of the glee club that year, the only year I participated.  We worked long and hard to put on a concert of songs from The Sound of Music. 

The next year we went to Cadillac Junior High which was for 8^th and 9^th grade.  It was a transitionary time there from a few perspectives.  The white flight really accelerated with the 1967 Detroit Riots.  Paul and I, were no longer in the same classes for whatever reason and we drifted apart.  I went to Cass Tech for High School and Paul went to Cooley.  We moved to Livonia in the middle of my sophomore year, and I just completely lost touch with him.

Over the passing years I would think of him now and again and wonder what became of him.  I had no way of easily finding out until… I joined Facebook.  I reconnected with many classmates from Burns and Cadillac.  Many of them went to Cooley together and never really lost touch.  In 2016, i asked if anyone of my Burns friends had any information about Paul and was directed to his Facebook page.  

I was most impressed to see he was a Bishop of the Orthodox Church in America Diocese of the Midwest.  He was based in Chicago.  We met for dinner at Greek Isles downtown on August 17, 2017.  I had arranged the dinner with our parish Priest, Father Ghevont, and my brother in-law, Jack, who was the Chairman of the Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic church in the US.  We had a wonderful evening.  Bishop Paul and reminisced about our days at Burns.  Father Ghevont, Jack, and Bishop Paul compared the way the Orthodox Church in America and the Armenian Apostolic Church were organized and governed.  It was a great evening and a great pleasure for me to see my old friend.

We communicated a bit after that, but never saw each other again.  We were both busy and I would say his schedule was much more hectic than mine.  I would check his Facebook page now and then, basically to see pictures of my old friend in his vestments.  I learned he was elevated to Archbishop in 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic. 

I saw a posting yesterday.  It was a Facebook story of another Bishop of the Othrodox Church in America in Chicago.  I naively assumed Bishop Paul had been transferred to another Diocese, so I searched his name on the site and was, sadly, led to his obituary.  I read it few times.  I learned we were both graduate students at Wayne State University at the same time.  He was working on a Masters in Social Work and I was in Engineering.  I was in Manhattan at Colgate and he was in Yonkers at St. Vladamir’s Seminary in the early 1990s.  We might have crossed paths in either of those times.  Coincidently, he was ordained on my birthday, June 25, 1994.  I read the heartfelt and touching sentiments his faithful flock left had posted and felt a surge of pride for my childhood friend.

I am sorry we were not able to spend more time together the past few years, but I am glad I did have the chance to reconnect in 2017 and see the path that he and God had chosen for him.  I will remember, Archbishop Paul Gassios of Blessed Memory, fondly.

Annals of Customer Service: The Tale of Two Plumbers

 

We have a few bathrooms in our house.  We mostly use the shower in our master bathroom the most.  A few years after we moved in, say sometime around 2012, the shower was not working properly.  The symptom was that water pressure was not strong.  We cleaned or decalcified the showerhead to no avail.  We called the plumber we normally used, let’s call them XYZ Plumbing, and they came out and diagnosed the problem as the thermo-element cartridge inside the shower faucet.  They replaced it and the problem was solved.

Fast forward ten years and we had the same problem.  We cleaned the shower head again.  It worked a little better but reverted to the same symptom shortly.  I called XYZ again.  When they came out, I explained the problem and what the solution was the last time.  They ordered the part.  It took forever because of all the supply chain issues due to Covid.  We were barely able to use the shower and moved on to another bathroom in the few weeks it took to get the part.  The same fellow from XYZ return and replaced the cartridge and we were back in business… for a week.

Then the low pressure, low water flow, symptom returned.  We called XYZ and the same technician returned and spent a couple of frustrating hours trying to diagnose the problem and cleaning some kind of goop out of the cartridge and shower head.  Again, it was good for a week and the issue returned.  I called XYZ and talked to the owner.  This fellow was the son of the founder who was running the show back when we first used XYZ.   He wanted to send out another plumber, a master plumber, with more experience, if it was OK with me.  I agreed but expressed my displeasure with the paying for any more hours of diagnosis.  He agreed to waive the visits of the second charge.

I was beginning to regret calling XYZ for this job.  I liked them for small jobs, like faucets and toilet innards and such.  My experience with them bigger jobs was not as good and this was beginning to feel like a bigger job.  Case in point, they installed new water heaters in 2009 when the old man was in charge.  It seems water heaters these days only last about ten years.  They installed the new ones in series, telling me that whoever installed them in parallel “didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”  What did I know?  After their “expert” installation, it took a lot longer to deliver hot water then the almost instantaneous hot water we were used to.  In 2019, they water heaters needed replacing again.  Given a friend’s recommendation, I tried another plumber, let’s call them MBP.  They were astonished that XYZ put our two water heaters in series and reconfigured the piping for a parallel installation.  They also put drip pans under the water heaters.  We were back to instant hot water.  I liked MBP and used them for both big and small jobs.  They were good but did not carry all the small job parts in their trucks like XYZ did.  They kept charging me their hourly rate when they went out to procure said parts.  Consequently, they charged more.  So, my policy became MBP for big jobs and XYZ for the smaller jobs.

XYZ sent their master plumber.  He was good but I found him a bit… um… well I will just say it, arrogant.  He diagnosed the problem as the anodes in the water heaters we most recently installed.  Based on the water chemistry, there are three kinds of anodes inside modern water heaters:  zinc, aluminum, and magnesium.  I believe all three are alloys of some kind.

Anodes?  What do they do?

The anode rod is made from a metal with a more active voltage and higher electrochemical potential than the metal of the tank, which is typically made from steel. This means the anode rod’s metal will give up electrons and corrode before the tougher steel metal of the tank will. As this lesser metal corrodes, electrons are distributed into the tank, creating a more favorable chemical environment that prevents the corrosion of the steel tank itself. ~ Empire State Plumbing

If you had the wrong kind of anode for the local water chemistry, the life of the water heater might be compromised.  Or as in our case, the water heater begins to generate aluminum hydroxide, the blue goop that was causing the shower low flow.  As the master plumber fellow was explaining this, I was googling the issue and found a Technical Bulletin that explained it all.  He gave me the phone number of the tech rep for the manufacturer of our water heater.  He suggested that I all the tech rep and provide the serial numbers of the water heaters.  The rep could then tell me what I kind of anodes I had and what I needed to replace them with.  I suggested that XYZ should call the tech rep, but the master plumber told me they would charge me their hourly for that and it would be cheaper if I called.  I was a bit more perturbed by XYZ’s wanted to charge for what they didn’t know.  But, as it was my money, I made the call.

As it turns out, we had zinc/aluminum anodes.  The rep said if that was generating aluminum hydroxide, we ought to replace them the magnesium ones.  OK.

Now you might think this is MBP’s fault as they installed the water heaters with the wrong kinds of anodes.  It was not.  My friend who recommended them for the installation is a general contractor.  To save me some money, he ordered the water heaters, and I paid his cost.  It was very nice, but in the end, he was as surprised as I was when I explained the whole aluminum hydroxide thing to him.

So, as I was already using XYZ plumbing, I called them back.  In the meantime, they sent me a hefty bill and, mind you, the problem was not yet resolved.  I was only dealing with the owner at this point.  I emailed him the Technical Bulletin with my notes on it.  I asked if could do this.  His response was, “Of course, we will take care of you.  I will order the parts and get back to you.”  OK then.  I paid the bill and waited.  I waited longer and then called the owner back.  He apologized for not getting back to with an explanation that involved personnel shortages etc.  He promised to get back to me.  He called a week or two later to say he had not forgotten about me.  We were into month three of this problem.  I have yet to hear back from him.

I decided to forget about him and XYZ plumbing forever.  I did however resolve to write this bloggy bit exposing their lack of customer service even though I am being nice and not using their name.

I called MBP and they got the anode and replaced them within two more weeks.  They cleaned out all our faucets though only one, the one closest to the problem shower, had a slightly diminished water flow.  Then, they had to order another new thermo-element cartridge as the one installed by XYZ was all full of aluminum hydroxide and almost impossible to clean.  That, believe it or not, took another month.  They came out again, replaced the cartridge, and we have had no problems since.

From start to finish, it took five months, three plumbers, from two different companies, and an outrageous amount of money to solve the problem. 

It has been five or six months since I last talked to the owner of XYZ.  This has to be one of my worst and most expensive customer service experience ever.  If they treat too many of their customers this way, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they went out of business.  MBP picked up the ball and finished the job expertly.

Cry the Beloved Country

 

IMDb

It was easily forty-five to fifty years ago, that someone suggested that I read a book or two by Alan Paton.  I don’t recall the person who made the suggestion.  I am guessing it was a professor at Michigan, most likely in the  English or Philosophy Departments.  I am guessing it was my freshman writing professor, actually, a teaching assistant.  This fellow was may five years older than I was.  I was too young to fully appreciate this professor, the writing guidance he provided, and the reading suggestions he made.  I moved on to the next semester and never really had the wherewithal to remember his name.  As I said, I was too young.

Alan Paton (1903 – 1988) was a South African writer.  He was also an anti-apartheid activist.  He was a prolific writer mostly.  He wrote a lot of political and historical essays and books.  He only wrote three novels.  His most famous novels were his first and third:  Cry the Beloved Country (1948) and Too Late the Phalarope (1953).  These are the two that English professor suggested I read.  I think I chose Too Late the Phalarope for two simple reasons.  First, it was written in the year I was born.  Second, I liked the title more, because I was forced to look up the word Phalarope which is a shore bird similar to the Sandpiper. At that time, the novel was eye-opening and a tough read about a South African police officer who has a relationship with a black woman.  It was well done and eye-opening to my then nineteen year old self.  While I recall the contribution of the book to my growth and understanding of segregation and discrimination, I don’t honestly recall the details of the book.

I thought about reading Cry the Beloved Country next but chose not to.  I had other books and other topics to explore and put Cry the Beloved Country on the read it someday list.  That someday has yet to happen. 

This morning the 1995 version of Cry the Beloved Country was airing on one of the movie channels and I decided to watch it.  It starred James Earl Jones as a South African pastor in Natal and Richard Harris as a wealthy landowner.  They barely knew each other until a tragedy involving their sons brought them to a place where they could understand and appreciate each other.  I was impressed and touched by this film.  It made me wonder if I should read this book.

Alan Paton began life as a teacher after his education at the University of Natal.  In 1935, he left teaching to become the head of the Diepkloof Reformatory for African boys.  It was located near Johannesburg.  This position, which he wove into the plot of Cry the Beloved Country, shaped Paton’s career.  Because of it he became a writer and a politician/activist.

He was one of the founders of the Liberal Party of South Africa.  This party worked to eliminate apartheid.  Because of his writing and involvement in the Liberal Party, South Africa revoked his passport from 1960 – 1970.  As he passed away in 1988, he did not see the end to apartheid in 1994.

At the end of the very well-done movie, there was a scene where the camera panned the beautiful landscape of the mountains of Natal with this quote from Cry the Beloved Country:

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.

But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.  

Alan Paton - onthisday.com

 

Shooting of Electrical Substations

 

The events the past week in Moore County, North Carolina are quite troubling.

On Saturday December 3^rd at 7 pm, gunmen opened fire on two electrical substations causing enough damage to disable the substations and leaving 45,000 Duke Energy customers without power.  It took until today, December 7^th, for the equipment to be repaired or replaced.  Power to customers is being restored via a rollout process of testing and restoring service.

These were not random shooters or the uncoordinated acts of amateurs.  Per law enforcement, the attackers knew what they were doing.  They knew what to hit to knock the two substations out of commission for four days.  45,000 people were left without power causing, yet untallied, losses to businesses and households.  This includes the costs of repairs, business interruption, spoiled food, lost wages, and such.  People had no heat and folks in rural areas dependent on wells were without water.  This was way beyond just a nuisance.

This was sabotage and that is what is troubling.

Was this a test attack?  Can we expect more?  This is the reason law enforcement led by the FBI are investigating this with great vigor.  As of today, there is no news of progress in their investigations.  I am guessing there was no video surveillance.  I only say that because no footage has been shared.  Was it domestic terrorists?  Or a foreign group? I am not sure what would be more upsetting.  My guess is that it is domestic, and I think that bothers me more.  I do fear we shall see more of these kinds of attacks.

There was a day, not so long ago, in this country where people did not lock the doors to their houses.  We left our keys in our cars.  Those innocent and trusting times were not all that long ago.  It was when I was in elementary school.  With the rise of urban sprawl and poverty came a rise in crime.  In the blink of an eye, or so it seemed, everyone was locking their houses when they went out and even when they were home.  We were locking our cars.  In another blink of an eye, people in “rough” neighborhoods were putting bars on their windows and doors.

In that same innocent time, we used to walk into airports and go directly to the gates to board planes or greet friends and families as the got off their planes.  There was no security.  It was quite pleasant, very convenient, and very innocent.  The hijacking of planes ended all of that in another blink of an eye evolving to the security screening run by the TSA that we have today. 

We have electrical substations all over the place.  While they may fences and barbed wire around them, they are sitting out unprotected like the unlocked houses and cars with the keys in them from my youth.  We just saw how a concerted attack could disrupt electric service for four days to 45,000 people.  What if the attack was more widespread?  What if it was widespread enough it required more spare parts than we have in inventory?  What if such an attack was a prelude to something more nefarious?

I hope they get to the bottom of this quickly.

Where did November Go?

 

After Thanksgiving, I return to the University on Monday, November 28^th.  On the early morning drive in, I realized that November was ending in two days.  I wondered, almost out loud, “Where the heck did November go?”  I did not have a good answer.

I had a fleeting thought to blog about that wondering thought and dismissed it.  Later on same very next day, a colleague posted the graphic shown here in his Facebook Story:  “We went from November 1st to November 27th in just 5 minutes, now watch it be Christmas next week.”  Well, that was all the sign I needed to address the topic in a bloggy bit.  Clearly, I was not alone in this thought.

I have written before about the acceleration of time as one ages.  There is kind of a mathematical explanation for it. Basically, if you are n-years old, the next year 1/(n+1) of your total experience.  If you are 1 year old, the next year is ½ or 50% of your entire experience. If you are 49 years old, the next year is the 1/50 or just 2% of your entire experience.  So, I suppose psychologically, the days seem pass faster with each ensuing year even though the seconds, minute, hours, days, etc. tick off at the same rate. 

I am kind of used to this, but that is not what happened in November.  There was something else at play this November.  Seemingly, it passed faster that any other month in recent memory.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had fully emerged from the Covid pandemic and life resumed it’s intense, at times insane, whir and hum.  Commuting, face-to-face meetings, shopping, socializing, all kind of, sort of, returned to pre-Covid levels.  Maybe November was the month where we took the biggest leap of resuming our old frenzy of activities?

Maybe it was all astrological?  Perhaps it was a certain alignment of the planets.  This one rising or that one in was in retrograde.  It could have been a comet whose orbit had somehow changed. 

It might me that the aliens so many of us believe are buzzing about our planet, used their vastly superior technology to make November zoom by faster than other months.  I cannot think of the reason they might do such a thing.  I mean how might fathom the reasoning and motives of vastly superior beings.

If I were a Republican, I might easily blame Biden and the lame press for screwing up the flow of November to make it pass before the vote counts could be questioned.  If I were a Democrat, I would be convinced that Trump and his minions were somehow manipulating things enhance his chances, somehow, of being re-elected.  I think I like the alien theory the best.

The most mundane answer might just be that only the singer and songwriter Alex Duncan IV (ADIV) and I were the only two that thought November slipped by faster than normal. We may never know.

Let’s see how December flows.

Another Potpourri

 

IMDB

I haven’t written one of these in a while.  The last was January 29 of this year.

Why Potpourris?  Well, there are two reasons.  The first is that I have a lot of thought rumbling around in my head with none of them worthy of a full post.  This may sound odd as I often get chided for writing about any old thing that comes to mind.  Actually, I get chided from writing about any old nothing that comes to mind.  I have often referred to these posts in a nod toward the Seinfeld sitcom as a “Blog About Nothing” which it sometimes is.  The second reason is somewhat related but much more practical. The case here is that I feel compelled to post something and I just don’t have a topic.    

This was clearly the case in January.  My objective then was to post something every day in January, which I was able to do.  Clearly, by the 29^th day, the well of ideas was dry and a Potpourri was definitely in order. Because of that great start in January, I find myself with 85 posts for the year so far.  The most I have ever done for a year was 92 in 2018 which followed my worst year of a dismal 8 posts in 2017.  I have a chance to surpass that 92 mark this year and hit the century mark which has been a goal since 2018.  Sitting at 85, 86 after I post this one, it seems quite doable.

So, why not start with a Potpourri?

I am in Detroit.  I am here to play at the St. Sarkis Armenian Church Bazaar this evening.  Beyond the enjoyment of performing this evening is the chance to visit the family here.  I am staying at my mother’s and the bonus of that is my Aunt Suzie is vising from Reno.  It is always good to see her. 

We just watched the US lose to the Netherlands in the Round of 16 in the FIFA World Cup.  The Dutch jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first half.  The US scored a goal at the 76 minute mark of the second half and was psyched to tie the game.  The Dutch scored a back beaker 4 minutes later.  Despite a furious effort by the US, the game ended with the Netherlands winning 3-1.

Tonight, is the Big Ten Football Championship.  Michigan will be facing Purdue in this game.  The game is on at 7:30 pm.  Because of the gig this evening, I cannot watch the game.  As much as I love Michigan Football, music has always taken a priority.  I will watch it tomorrow, but it won’t quite be the same as I will already know the score.  If we lose, I probably won’t watch the recording. 

Might Michigan lose?  Of course they could, but they shouldn’t.  We are favored by 16.5 points.  I worry that we are overlooking Purdue who is 6-3 in the conference and 8-4 overall.  By we, I am referring to the fans.   Reading the social media posts, the fans have clearly think that trouncing Purdue is a done deal and are more concerned who we will be playing in the National Championship first round.  I believe and hope the coaches and players are more workmen like attitude of taking one game at a time.  Go Blue.  Beat Purdue.