The Iroquois County Tea Party will show the movie "Dreams from My Real Father," director Joel Gilbert's focus on President Barack Obama's history, at 7 p.m., doors open at 6:30 p.m., on Thursday, Oct. 3, at Agape Fellowship Church, 425 W. North St., Watseka.
The film is rated R and children must be accompanied by an adult. Free popcorn will be available.
The 2013-'14 NFL season starts this week. Thursday, to be precise, in the kickoff game between the Broncos and Ravens. After that, a full weekend of action followed by Monday Night Football. And thence, the full season.
Life is once again fulfilling its natural, circadian rhythms, and all over America, there is rejoicing.
And, to make it even sweeter, there are intriguing questions among the faithful ?still to be answered. Some of those questions that faced us in the white-hot, training camp days of July resolved themselves. Others perplex us yet.
Will the Ravens repeat? No.
Are the Patriots imperiled? No
Is Tim Tebow's NFL career kaput? Maybe.
Check it out: I have the answers to these questions and more.
Do you have a burning question on the upcoming season? Or do you know exactly how it will unfold?
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The incident was witnessed by Australian journalists who were still working at the Oval while England players went into the middle to celebrate their 3-0 series victory.
The apology was issued in a statement on the England and Wales Cricket Board website and although it neither confirmed nor denied that players urinated on the pitch it apologised for any offence caused.
“The England cricket team would like to state that during our celebrations after winning the Ashes at no time was there any intention to disrespect Surrey CCC, the Oval or anyone else involved in the game we love,” the statement said.
“As a team we pride ourselves on respecting all things cricket including the opposition and the grounds we play at. We got carried away amongst the euphoria of winning such a prestigious series and accept that some of our behaviour was inappropriate.
“If that has caused any offence to anyone we apologise for that and want to reassure people that it was a simple error of judgment more than anything else.”
England’s apology was accepted by Surrey chief executive Richard Gould who had described the players’ behaviour as “irresponsible”. Gould also confirmed that no damage has been caused to the turf at the Oval.
England’s Twenty20 captain, Stuart Broad, declined to comment on the watery celebrations or the players’ apology when he attended a press conference in Southampton on Wednesday ahead of the first of two Twenty20 international matches against Australia on Thursday.
Broad was more forthcoming, however, on the lukewarm praise England had received for retaining the Ashes in some sections of the media.
“Praise from the media is not something the team is particularly concerned about,” he said. “At the end of the day the hard facts are that we won an Ashes series 3-0 and that was a tough fight and an emotional roller-coaster.
“Certain games could have been won and lost in half-an-hour spaces and it was fantastic cricket to watch. To have won that 3-0 and to have had an unbelievable chance of winning 4-0 and becoming the first England team to do that was a very special achievement and the guys in the changing room know that.
“Many of the fans know and believe that. The response from people we know and have seen has been fantastic. It’s part and parcel in an Ashes series that you get little things written about and talked about that get taken out of proportion but at the end of the day fans will certainly remember that we won that series 3-0 and played some fantastic and exciting cricket.”
Although England have two Twenty20 internationals and five one-dayers to come against Australia before the end of this season, Broad said thoughts have already turned to the prospect of completing a fourth successive Ashes series win this winter.
“The England changing room are just focused on England beating Australia. My whole childhood was taken up with England getting pumped by Australia so there’s just such a hunger in the dressing room to keep on beating Australia,” Broad said.
“Even since we won the Ashes on Sunday night there’s been talk between the guys of how much we want to work hard to win the next one and we can hit Australia hard in Brisbane.
“We know it will be a different game out there and we know how hard our home crowd have helped us here. So we’ve got to expect their crowd to help them there. Australia in their conditions will be hard to beat and we will have to play better than we’ve done here to beat them.”
Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Rutherford will be the keynote speaker at a Republican Party event hosted by Kankakee 4th Ward representatives Danita Grant Swanson and James Faford.
The event will begin at 11:30 a.m. Sept. 7 at the Homestead Restaurant, 1230 S. East Ave., Kankakee.
Tickets are $20 per person. To attend the two-hour event, people need to purchase tickets by Sept. 5. Grant Swanson can be reached at Danita@sdcecu.com. Faford can be can be reached at 815-939-1419 or jksr2425@comcast.net.
A native of Pontiac in Livingston County, Rutherford is completing his first term as Illinois treasurer. He is one of four Republicans that has announced plans to seek the state's top elected office.
Instead, with Australia on top and England sometimes pedestrian and often parked, it has had the air of a half-empty kitchen after a raucous house party: the fun parts long gone, the mood flat, a realisation in the air that everyone should probably stop drinking Blue Curacao and just go home to sleep it all off.
It shouldn't make sense. To be leading an Ashes series 3-0 is sufficiently rare to be cherished, regardless of the way it comes to an end. Those raised on a diet of hammerings and humiliations could once barely believe such a scoreline might ever come to pass.
Ashes 2013: Joe Root defends slow scoringSo why the long faces and quiet voices? England may have scored slowly on Friday as they attempted to grind towards the follow-on target - a mere 65 runs in a moribund morning session, a sedentary afternoon when the run-rate barely edged above two, just 66 in 34 overs in the evening - but the excuses are not hard to find.
Rule number one of Test batting: don't give your wicket away. If it looks like you can't win the match, make sure you don't lose it. Never take your foot from the snake's neck. In Alastair Cook, Joe Root and Jonathan Trott, they also have a top three all struggling for form.
But there is being practical, and there is being passive. As the day drifted, and the crowds snoozed, the question kept banging around the brain: would Ricky Ponting have let his all-conquering team play at this pace in 2006-07, or Steve Waugh in 2001?
Cook: 243 runs - series average 27.00 (overall career Test average 47.94)
Root: 328 runs - series average 41.00 (overall 41.77)
Trott: 234 runs - series average 26.00 (overall 47.24)
Pietersen: 326 runs - series average 36.22 (overall 48.30)
Bell: 529 runs - series average 75.57 (overall 47.10)
Prior: 86 runs - series average 14.33 (overall 42.31)
Waugh liked to challenge his team in such dominant situations. Let's win this Test in three days. Let's score at four an over. Let's reduce this rabble to rubble.
That's easier to say and do when your entire top six average at least 45 and your bowling attack all average less than 25. Yet England's last three Ashes triumphs have also been based around positive intent.
In 2005, their average run-rate over the series was 3.8, in 2009 3.7, in 2010-11 3.5. In this series so far, they have scored instead at 2.8.
Pitches have been slow and sometimes low this summer. But even Australia, with a batting line-up far less accustomed to English conditions and prone to calamitous collapse, have rumbled along at an average of 3.3 runs an over.
Neither have England scored a weight of runs to match those recent examples. They will have to score an unlikely 400 more in the remainder of this dying game to match the aggregate of 2005 - made against a superior attack - and 300 to find parity with 2009.
"There have been some memorable games at The Oval down the years, but this is not one of them. What hurts is that all the talk before the game was about how they were going to play to win and they wouldn't use it as an end-of-season match.
"Talk is cheap, and it's what you dish up that matters. They talked it up but haven't backed it up."
These numbers may pale in importance compared to that all-important 3-0. But while this series will end at some point over the weekend, its sequel begins in less than three months' time.
Patterns established here may prove hard to shift come the Gabba in November. Momentum, once entirely with England, may be drifting away.
"Friday was a reflection of the way England have gone into the entire match," says Mark Butcher, four times on the wrong end of crushing Ashes series defeats in his 71 Tests and here at The Oval as an expert summariser for the BBC.
"England could and should have totally demoralised this Aussie team. The intention should have been to humiliate them, to bury them, just as Ricky Ponting vowed to do in the aftermath of 2005. Instead they have left them feeling comfortable.
Kevin Pietersen reached his fifty off 127 balls. That was his slowest in an Ashes Test and third slowest overall. His slowest is 134 balls v India at Lord's in 2011 and his second slowest is 130 balls v West Indies at St John's in 2009. His previous slowest in an Ashes Test was 123 balls at Perth in 2006. Overall he scored 50 off 133 balls. His strike-rate for the innings of 37.59 was his slowest for an innings over 50. His previous slowest was 38.63 (51 off 132 balls) in the innings at St John's mentioned above.
"It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like a victory parade. Australia will return home not with their tails between their legs but thinking they don't actually have as much to worry about down under as they first thought."
Heavy rain is forecast for much of Saturday. With England 247-4 at the close on Friday, fewer than 50 runs from avoiding the follow-on, a draw is almost certain.
At The Oval four years ago, England only took the upper hand in the series on the penultimate day of the series. Eight years ago, that most glorious of summers was only sealed in the final session of the final day.
But Butcher, like many others, does not expect wild celebrations this time around at a far more comfortable margin of success.
"The disappointing thing from the fans' point of view is that, while 3-0 sounds like a drubbing, Australia will come out of this series with much more credit than that scoreline suggests," he says.
"If Friday were the first day of play you had seen all series, you would have assumed that Australia were the team 3-0 up, not England.
"It might all mean nothing come the first day in Brisbane. But England might have turned up with Australia in total disarray, with no idea what their top six was. Instead, Shane Watson and Steve Smith have been allowed to get set, and Michael Clarke's lack of form has not been so exposed.
Fewest Test runs scored in a full day's play:
95 (Australia v Pakistan, Karachi 1956-57) 104 (Pakistan v Australia, Karachi 1959-60), 106 (England v Australia, Brisbane 1958-59) 111 (South Africa v India, Cape Town 1992-93) 112 (Australia v Pakistan, Karachi, 1956-57) 115 (Australia v Pakistan, Karachi, 1988-89)."Perhaps the pitch has got a little slower since the first day. But there has been a lack of intent about England's play, and the initial team selection was bizarre.
"It meant that the usual tactics here at The Oval if you lose the toss - try to bowl the opposition out for less than 300, bat past them, pile on the pressure in the third innings - couldn't happen.
"Once Australia went past 450, England will have looked at Saturday's poor forecast, reasoned they were unlikely to win the game, and thought: we don't need to do anything here. Let's just bat it out.
"It's the professional approach. But it's the professional in the worst sense."
Perhaps this is all just carping. Perhaps we should all just break out the party poppers and plastic horns and revel in the unfamiliar fun of three Ashes series won on the bounce, of three series wins in three for Alastair Cook.
Let the Ashes down under wait until November. Perhaps.
