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Morning Brew: ‘City kid’ finds beauty in rural Kansas

By Mark Dent

Monday, September 29, 2008

Science says you can see about five miles to the horizon if the ground is perfectly flat. In Kansas, sometimes it seems like you can see forever.

Corn stalk jungles stretch across farms in rows and columns. The stalks shroud the ground, creating a green sea of mystery. Pickup trucks rest on dirt roads outside farm houses, and nothing moves in the afternoon sun except for a bobbing oil derrick or two.

It’s beautiful.

City kids tend to think the state of Kansas is boring. Anything south or west of Lawrence that’s not called Wichita must be the end of civilization. I’m from the city and maybe used to have those same thoughts every once in a while.

Take a drive, and it will change your mind. Kansas soothes.

The small towns come and go, each one offering its own Main Street and its own stories. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else. Every few miles, another town pops up — Pratt, Claflin, Larned, McPherson, Florence, Sublette — there are tons of them and they all offer a different sort of charm.

Life gets complicated here in the city, here at the University. There are LSATs and MCATs and projects and John Stuart Mill. There are teachers and papers and textbooks and the Internet bill. It’s tough sometimes.

Near the signs that say find God and the pebbly roads with tractors on them, there are no complications.

So go past the old farm houses. Go find Main Street. Go west. Go south. Go see the beauty.

Pretty Prairie

Here’s a shout out to anyone from Pretty Prairie, located about 30 miles south of Hutchinson. That has to be the best name of any town in this country, except for Kokomo, Ind.

Loving the BCS

In two months, the columns will come. Every newspaper will feature one. Every Web site. Every magazine.

At work, business types will escape from their cubicle, crowd the coffee pot and vent. At school, we’ll talk to the kid sitting behind us reading the sports page. The topic will be the BCS. The system is flawed. It needs to go, everyone will say.

The discussion happens every year, and it shouldn’t. Last weekend’s thrilling upsets provided a resounding answer for why college football doesn’t need a playoff. The BCS system works because it makes the regular season count.

Florida, Southern California and Georgia lost to an underdog this last week and might have lost their opportunity to play in the national championship, too. None of it would matter if there was a playoff. These games would be as meaningless as any December college basketball game.

The BCS ensures that from August to November, the games count. Three months of meaningful football is better than a three-week playoff.

— — Edited by Ramsey Cox

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