Although there are numerous rooms in the new Ohio Union at Ohio State U. named in honor of people and organizations, there is only one room named after an animal – the Maudine Cow Room.

David Hothersall, professor emeritus of psychology and something of an expert on the subject, tells the story like this:

In 1926, Rosalind Morrison won the Homecoming Queen election, but because only 10,000 students were enrolled and 12,000 votes had been cast, it was clear the election had been rigged.

“Rosie was named Queen, but as an honorable young woman, withdrew when the fraud became apparent,” Hothersall said. “The runner-up was Maudine Ormsby, a mystery candidate entered by the College of Agriculture.”

It turned out that Maudine was actually a Holstein cow. Despite this, she was still crowned and rode in the Homecoming parade.

However, she did not attend the dance.

“The ‘Maudine the Cow’ room is meant to honor Ohio State’s rich land grant and agricultural history,” said Heather McGinnis, director of development for the Office of Student Life and the Ohio Union.

Ohio State was originally called the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College and was founded as part of the Morrill Act, “which gave 10,000 acres of federal government land to each state to sell and use the proceeds to create a public university,” according to OSU’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences’ Ohioline Web site.

“Because agricultural is – and has always been – a significant focus for Ohio State, it is fitting that students from the College of Agriculture are responsible for one of Ohio State’s most unique and well-known Homecoming ‘happenings,’” McGinnis said.

The story of Maudine is still alive and well on campus. Or at least it is if you visit the office for the University Hosts and University Ambassadors programs. There you will find a large stuffed animal cow dressed in a “Go Buckeyes” T-shirt and a University Ambassadors jacket.

After winning the stuffed cow during a team-bonding event, the students in the programs remembered the story of Maudine and decided to name the stuffed animal in her honor.

“She’s part of the tradition and pride of Ohio State,” said Ebony Smith, University Ambassadors supervisor. “It makes sense that we’d want to recognize that in our own little special way.

“She is the unofficial mascot and we’re proud of her,” Smith said.

The Maudine Cow Room is located on the lower level of the new Ohio Union.

After being hospitalized earlier in the day with apparent food poisoning, Ohio State recruit Jared Sullinger still managed to put on a show for the Schottenstein Center crowd.

The Columbus Northland center scored a game-high 22 points and grabbed seven rebounds for the East in Wednesday’s McDonalds All-American game. Sullinger was named the East’s MVP, but his team lost to the West, 107-104 after guard Brandon Knight hit a three pointer with less than five seconds remaining.

Despite the loss, Sullinger still considered the night a success.

“Early this morning I didn’t think I was going to be able to play,” Sullinger said. “I just wanted to show the Buckeye fans what Columbus had coming and luckily my teammates were unselfish enough to let me do that.”

The West’s MVP, and the player who many believe is the best in the 2010 class, was North Carolina recruit Harrison Barnes. The future Tar Heel scored 18 points, 13 of which came in the first half.

East forward Deshaun Thomas, who will join Sullinger at OSU next season, had a somewhat mediocre performance. Thomas had 11 points and seven rebounds, but was just 5-14 from the field. Regardless, Sullinger said, he and Thomas showed why OSU fans should be very excited about next season.

“Deshaun and I are really excited to play for the Ohio State University,” Sullinger said. “[We] really wanted to put on a show for the Buckeye fans tonight, and that’s what we did.”

Nearly three months to the day since its demoralizing Rose Bowl defeat to Ohio State, the Oregon Ducks football team was back in action for the first official spring practice on Tuesday morning at the Moshofsky Center.

The short spring season —15 practices and one game — is all about getting more repetitions, said second-year head coach Chip Kelly.

“This is always an exciting time of year,” Kelly said. “Because you get to get back out, no matter what happened during the winter term, this is the first day you get to go back out and work with these kids.”

Those kids certainly put Kelly and the rest of his staff through the wringer this offseason with more than a handful of legal issues, which most notably resulted in the yearlong suspension of two-year starting quarterback Jeremiah Masoli.

Kelly met with Masoli on Monday afternoon to hash out what his role is going to be this season, and he said Tuesday after practice that he was not at all surprised to see his star player stay with the program.

“He’s just going to practice with us,” Kelly said. “But he’s really not going to take a lot of reps at quarterback because he’s not going to play quarterback for us next fall.”

While Masoli did not take any reps at quarterback during the 7-on-7 drills or the final 11-on-11 series, he did jump in several times as a slot receiver. He caught a pass or two, while three others bounced off his hands and hit the turf. Clearly Kelly isn’t looking to morph his best player into a situational receiver, that’s just one of the many roles he’ll play while serving the remainder of his suspension.

“(We) need somebody to hold the dummy, need somebody to run practice, need somebody to do different things. He understands his role on this team.” Kelly stated.

Redshirt sophomore running back LaMichael James, who will sit out the Ducks Sept. 4 home-opener against New Mexico due to off-field issues, was also in attendance for a portion of the practice, but was seen leaving in street clothes about midway through. James is expected to fully return to practice on Thursday afternoon.

The newest edition of quarterback controversy led to Kelly being swarmed with questions about the first day of competition between senior Nate Costa and redshirt sophomore Darron Thomas.

“They were throwing it around, slinging it around, fortunately for us we don’t have to pick a starter until New Mexico so it’s a long ways away,” Kelly said. “It’s just about getting those guys reps, and I thought both of those guys did some good things today and they made some mistakes, but that’s to be expected on day one.”

From the sideline, it appeared that Costa had the throwing advantage early on as he connected on several of the throws Thomas was unable to make. Thomas on the other hand looked to be the more mobile of the two, while redshirt freshman Daryle Hawkins might have run the best and most consistent zone-read fake of the day.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been out there mixing it up with the first team,” Costa said. “And I just want to get a great connection with those guys and see what we can do together.”

Costa again finds himself in the running for the starting quarterback spot, something he’s grown used during his time at Oregon.

“It is a good feeling,” Costa said. “It’s something that I’ve been dealing with since spring break; I worked hard all spring break preparing for it, and I’ll continue to prepare for it and we’ll see what happens.”

The Texas State Board of Education handed right-wing extremists a landmark victory in advancing its political agenda this month. Only this time, the board’s decision applied not just to the oft-attacked science of evolution or global warming, but rather to a much broader target: history. To combat its perceptions of liberal bias in the field of education, the board mandated a list of specific changes to social studies textbooks–changes that will likely transform the curriculum of all states due to Texas’ large share of the textbook market.

In making these major changes, the school board felt no need to consult a single historian, economist or sociologist, relying instead on their own self-appointed “expertise.” For Cynthia Dunbar, one member of the board, this consisted of penning a book entitled “One Nation Under God,” that called public education “clearly tyrannical” and “a deceptive tool of perversion.” In further open scorn of scholarship, a fellow board member, Don McLeroy, proclaimed, “Somebody’s got to stand up to the experts.”

With such defiant opposition to expertise, the flabbergasting historical inaccuracy of their prescriptions comes as no surprise. From the implication that unregulated free markets never fail–not even in 1929 or 2008–to a positive portrayal of Joseph McCarthy as a defender of American liberty, the Editorial Board could literally fill this newspaper from front to back with criticisms of this absurd version of history.

In the interest of conciseness, we limit ourselves to our personal favorite example: removing Thomas Jefferson from the list of thinkers that influenced the nation’s origins. Those of us with the faintest background in education might recall that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. But since Jefferson’s deism does not fit in with the conservative narrative of a nation founded on Christian beliefs, Texas textbooks must replace him with religious figures such as St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Jefferson’s term, “separation of church and state,” on which the Supreme Court has ruled more than 25 times, will not be mentioned. And the author of our nation’s independence will no longer be considered a Founding Father.

This revisionist attempt to exclude Jefferson is only the beginning of the school board’s discrimination. After unsuccessful attempts to remove mention of Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice, the board decided to call Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson role models of “effective leadership.” The board diminished Hispanics by eliminating the Tejanos who died alongside Davey Crockett at the Alamo, and showed contempt for gays and feminists by elevating the historical role of Phyllis Schafly, whose anti-gay and anti-feminist rhetoric could well be considered hate speech. One member confirmed the intentions of the board by complaining about the “overrepresentation of minorities” in the traditional portrayal of American history. These amendments were not even sincere attempts to represent an alternate version of events, but rather a blatant, racially-motivated power-grab.

The pettiness in the changes went even further. Country and western music were added to the nation’s list of important cultural movements while hip-hop were removed from the same list. The term “democratic” republic got changed to “constitutional” republic just to avoid the term democrat.

The hypocrisy of these conservative activists is astounding in this massive intrusion of government. Teaching history will no longer be up to teachers. Writing history will no longer be up to academics. Instead, the whole process will be controlled by the same type of politically-motivated government bureaucrats these small-government activists claim to deplore. And in their unilateral, amateurishly conceived decrees on what exactly constitutes the truth, the brainwashing this school board seeks to impose on the American population is downright Orwellian. The Editorial Board hopes that the American people will not swallow this bitter pill from Texas without a fight.

The sky darkens.

Fifty-mile-an-hour winds whip debris across the open field. Blinding rainfall slams the windshield. Erratic zaps of lightning infuse the air. Scott Blair’s heart races. But he’s advancing toward the storm, not running away from it.

Blair, a meteorologist for the Topeka National Weather Service, is a weather-hunting fanatic. During the past 14 years he has driven more than 200,000 miles, chasing 350 storms in more than 20 states. He has seen 150 tornadoes.

For him, chasing is a hobby. He captures the alluring landscapes of storms with his camera — and gets an adrenaline fix.

Habitual storm chasers such as Blair and University students preparing to go into the field, look forward to the spring and summer months so they can monitor storms. What is routinely seen in movies and on television isn’t always an accurate depiction of real-life chasers; it’s their tactical preparation, sound execution and captivation with these mysterious storms that set them apart.

“When storms aren’t doing damage there’s really a certain beauty to them,” Blair said. “There’s something magical about severe weather and its neat to see something that some people may never see in their lifetime.”

As a meteorologist, Blair has the knowledge to track severe weather without putting himself in danger. His knowledge is what separates him from amateur chasers.

David Mechem, assistant professor in the atmospheric science program, said chasing without proper training and knowledge was incredibly dangerous.

“There are a lot of people out there who go out and do it just as a thrill-seeking adventure,” said Mechem, who has chased about a dozen storms as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma. “You don’t have to have a degree in meteorology necessarily, but you definitely need to understand sog about storm structure.”

Mechem said it helped if chasers had a proficiency in forecasting so they could know what conditions were favorable for the kind of climates they were in.

Blair said that the peak storm season in Kansas was from April through June, but that severe storms could occur as early as mid-March. The Southern plains will have an earlier period from March through May, and the Northern plains will have a strong season from June through August.

“Those are the times where the environmental conditions provide the greatest frequency of severe weather,” Blair said. “That is when chasers really start coming out, in April, May and June.”

The chase

In their storm-chasing quests, chasers hope to find storms that produce violently rotating columns of air called tornadoes. Chasers prepare in different ways.

As a meteorologist, Blair has tools available to him that others do not, such as weather balloons, satellite radio and radar. That equipment gives him extra time to interpret the type of severe storm that might be developing. He can then get on the road days before the storm is expected to occur.

On the other hand, chasers such as Scott Durham, a senior from Kansas City, Mo. and an atmospheric science major, use resources offered on the Internet to determine the exact location and size of the storms they chase.

“Before I head out, I’ll go online to weather.gov because I find it to be most reliable,” Durham said. “I’ll find out what the weather is like and look at the satellite to see if there’s any other systems coming in that the radar isn’t showing.”

Durham also uses a severe weather index called CAPE, convective available potential energy, which detects values in thunderstorm environments. Durham said if the value was really high then he could generally expect a severe weather outbreak, which usually leads to tornadoes. Storms are classified by how strong the winds are or by how heavy the rainfall, snow or lightning is; tornadoes and hurricanes have their own set of categories.

Durham has gone out storm chasing twice. He witnessed his first tornado — the paramount objective for most amateur chasers and atmospheric science majors — May 4, 2003, outside the Kansas City, Mo. area.

Durham said he spent most of his time storm spotting rather than storm chasing. As a Johnson County storm spotter, he stays in a stationary location while monitoring the severe weather in designated areas.

While out storm chasing, Blair said, they pinpoint an area where they expect the storm to occur.

“At that time what we’re looking for is environmental data,” Blair said. “Surface observations, temperature, wind speed, dew point and relative humidity, which tells you so much on where to go from a surface perspective.”

Because storms are unpredictable, Blair said it was not uncommon to have 1,000-mile chase days. One day you might be in the Nebraska sand hills and the next you might be in the Oklahoma panhandle, he said.

“If you do everything else right, all the luck still has to fall into place,” Blair said. “The storm is still going to do what it wants to do.”

Safety

Mechem said that he and his classmates as undergraduates at the University of Oklahoma were conservative storm chasers and that they tried to avoid putting themselves in danger. If a storm develops into a tornado, a storm chaser generally wants to be on the south or southeast side of it.

“I tended to stay near the car,” Mechem said. “Largely because sometimes the back side, or the safer side of storms can get hail and you want to be able to take cover.”

He said the two biggest hazards while storm chasing were driving on the roads and lightning.

“Lightning tends to be unpredictable so you want to be able to have some kind of shelter,” Mechem said. “It can be really close and really frequent in these types of storms and it’s a big danger.”

Durham said, depending on where he was in relation to the storm, he also generally stayed in the car. If there is lightning and thunder then there is a chance of getting struck. Remaining inside the vehicle and not touching the frame, will keep passengers safe if the vehicle gets struck, he said.

Blair said education was the No. 1 way to be a safe and successful storm chaser. He said it was not dangerous as long as chasers had the skill sets to go along with it.

“It can put you in the right place where you would have a better success rate to see storms,” he said.

How to get involved

For those interested in storm chasing, Blair recommends attending a weather service spotter training session. The Topeka National Weather Service has a calendar online with upcoming sessions.

There are also ways to build basic skills from home through online modules and weather observations, he said. For more information and photos visit Blair’s website.