President Donald Trump has signed an executive order (EO) directing the U.S. government to rename "Lake Ontario" to “Lake America.”

Six Flags Magic Mountain quietly shut down one of its roller coasters without saying why, but a new investigation found that the coaster left riders with life-altering disabilities, at least one coma, and two deaths. According to CNN’s review of medical records, depositions, and legal filings, X2 is linked to more than a dozen serious injuries and hospitalizations since it opened in 2002. Originally named X, the ride was the world’s first “fourth-dimension” roller coaster. Its seats rotate a full 360 degrees independently of the track as the train travels at speeds of up to 76 miles per hour and plunges through a series of sudden drops. X2, located in Valencia, California, has an average rating of 4.7 out of five stars from riders, but several negative reviews share a common complaint that the ride was enjoyable until its violent final moments. “Terrible, avoid this coaster,” one rider wrote. “It started off really fun until the last ‘raven drop,’ where it forces your head forward and then slams you back hard against the seat.” Another rider said, “The ride was fine until the last bit where it shakes you up. I felt like I was in a car wreck.” “I don’t know how this ride continues to operate,” another person added. “It seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.” The ride officially closed on July 12, after two riders suffered brain hemorrhages in less than a week. Doctors told CNN that the injuries observed were typically seen in patients after high-speed crashes, not after riding an amusement park ride. Three neurosurgeons who treated the women wrote in an email reviewed by CNN that the injuries were “the result of a traumatic rapid acceleration-deceleration event experienced while on the X2 ride.” One of the women, 40-year-old Pamela Guillen, required emergency skull surgery after losing consciousness on the platform. Guillen immediately began vomiting after the ride, and paramedics said they found her unresponsive with her pupils looking “sluggish.” The other woman, 25-year-old Naomi Greer-Wilkinson, lost consciousness shortly after exiting the coaster and remains in a coma, according to her family. But X2’s history of incidents predates this summer. In 2022, 22-year-old Christopher Hawley died less than 10 hours after riding X2, with a neurosurgeon comparing his injuries to “shaken baby syndrome.” Hawley rode the ride with his cousin and brother, and court records stated that the three of them were flipped around like “rag dolls.” When the three exited the ride, Hawley said he felt lightheaded and then slumped to the ground. CNN reported that Six Flags had received over 70 complaints involving head and neck injuries linked to X2 from 2019 to Hawley’s death.  State regulators shut down the ride after Hawley’s death, but days later, it reopened. According to CNN, regulators did not interview witnesses or medical experts but relied on safety data provided by Six Flags. Twelve years before Hawley’s death, 28-year-old Hilda Farias died after riding the coaster. She had a preexisting brain abnormality when she rode the coaster. Farias’s family settled in court for an undisclosed amount.  Six Flags has defended the ride in litigation by arguing that it warns people about the coaster’s “inherent risks” and that the physical forces involved are not strong enough to cause brain injuries in a “normal” rider. But not every expert agrees. “I personally don’t think head injury should be an expected risk from going on a roller coaster ride, and there is no reason a ride can’t be properly designed to prevent injuries like this,” Lyndia Wu, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of British Columbia who studies roller coasters’ effects on the brain, told CNN. Six Flags has not said when, or if, X2 will reopen.

Monday night, Americans were subjected to a frontal lobotomy as a radical, terror-sympathizing, West-hating Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, drew a false equivalence on “Jessie Watters Primetime” that canon law is the same thing as sharia law. Last night Abdul El-Sayed sat equated Sharia law with Christian Canon law. “I don’t begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose. I don’t know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem.” It is a problem. The story below is Sharia in… https://t.co/A1UgTtrYM7 pic.twitter.com/7FMNjFmvkL — Trisha Posner (@trishaposner) August 25, 2026 Just relax, people! Let sharia law shine! Host Jessie Waters didn’t buy it, and neither should you. Because he could not be more obscenely, iniquitously wrong. These two are not the same thing. One is a filing cabinet for a church; the latter could destroy Western civilization. Canon law is not “Christian law,” no matter how confidently the Blue’s Clues Bolshevik says it. Protestants don’t walk around with a Vatican codebook, and the Eastern Orthodox have their own canons entirely. What El-Sayed inaccurately conflated with sharia law is the Catholic Church’s internal legal system: the 1983 Code of Canon Law, plus a pile of older tradition, that tells the Church how to run itself. Think of it as the bylaws of a 1.4 billion-member organization that also happens to believe it was founded by God. It tells bishops how to assign priests. It governs sacraments, parish property, religious orders, and whether a Catholic marriage can be annulled inside the Church. Its harshest penalties are laicization, denial of Communion, and excommunication. Notice what’s missing from that list: Fines. Prison. Stoning. A bishop in Detroit cannot walk into a Michigan courtroom and demand the state enforce Canon 1398. He cannot jail you for skipping Mass, seize your house for leaving the faith, discount your court testimony as half of a man’s, execute you for converting to Judaism, or shrug while a mob stones you for premarital sex. If he tried any of it, the First Amendment and a civil court would have him in handcuffs by lunch. The Code itself instructs the Church to defer to civil law on ordinary matters (property, guardianship, adoption, contracts), so long as those laws don’t violate divine law, and in the United States, “divine law” is not supreme law. The Constitution is. The Church can preach at you. It can withhold the Eucharist from you. It cannot become the penal code. That’s why almost nobody outside the Catholic Church has ever heard of canon law: it doesn’t reach past the pews. But canon law works in harmony with America, because we are, whether the current moronic moment likes admitting it or not, a country built by Christians and Jews whose moral vocabulary stems straight from the Bible. Our Declaration of Independence promised the government would not take away the rights endowed to us by our Creator. Washington called religion and morality the “indispensable supports” of political life. Adams, who is probably looking down in complete horror at us right now, once said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But here’s what Sharia Sayed misses: The Founders didn’t install a national church. They assumed a national conscience and then built a limited government on top of it, because they believed men were fallen and power needed a leash. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, the First Amendment; these were written by men steeped in scripture and allergic to theocracy. They had just watched Europe’s centuries of throne-and-altar bloodletting and said: never again, not here, not as public law. Believe whatever you want. Build a church with the strictest internal rules imaginable…just don’t conscript the sheriff, pretty please. Christianity and Judaism are examples of faiths that live melodiously inside that bargain. A rabbi can’t stone you in Brooklyn. A priest can’t flog you in Detroit. Their authority stops at the congregation door. The state’s law is identical for the believer and the atheist who lives next to him. That’s the deal. And canon law fits inside it. So does halakha, practiced privately. What doesn’t fit is a legal system engineered from the ground up to be the state. Which brings us to the thing El-Sayed is trying to smuggle in under “freedom of religion”: “sharia” is not “Muslim canon law.” Stop letting him say that. In private, sharia (religious rules) can look like piety: prayer, no pork, etc. — which the First Amendment covers, but the part he is flattening is sharia as public law: the version currently operating in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Taliban Afghanistan, and embedded in the penal codes of parts of Pakistan and beyond. There, sharia isn’t a cute little parish pamphlet; it’s the theocratic legal system that applies to Muslim, Christian, atheist, and unlucky layover tourists alike. It’s not “my faith, my choice”; it’s “Allah’s rules, or else.” And we’re not talking about a strongly worded letter from the diocese. Under state sharia: apostasy and blasphemy are capital crimes. A woman’s courtroom testimony is worth half a man’s. Daughters inherit less than sons, when they inherit at all. Male guardianship isn’t chivalry; it’s a binding legal chain of command over a woman’s body and movements. Sex outside its narrow permissions is a sin that regularly ends in a death sentence, and in several jurisdictions girls’ privates are cut to make sure they never enjoy any of it. Canon law’s worst-case outcome is that you’re denied a wafer. Sharia’s worst-case outcome, where it governs, is that you’re denied a courtroom, a passport, or a pulse. One is a church telling its members how to be Catholic. The other is a government telling an entire population how far to bend the knee, and if they don’t, they’ll cut it off. If Sharia as state law were just “another religious law, same as any other,” Riyadh and Rome would be interchangeable. They are not. In Iran, post-1979, the marriage age for girls dropped from 18 to nine almost overnight, women lost the right to initiate divorce and custody, hijab went from optional to compulsory, and Iran remains a world leader in executions, while the worst liberal you know chants in solidarity with the Ayatollah in a crop top. Pakistan, post-1979 Islamization, saw blasphemy prosecutions go from 14 cases in nearly 60 years to over 1,500 in the following three decades. Zina laws have, in practice, turned rape victims into defendants for failing to produce four male witnesses, and the country’s Christian population has been bled to near nothing. Afghanistan, since 2021, is the only country on earth with a formal, standing ban on girls’ secondary and higher education. Where, if you refuse the marriage your family arranged for you, the penalty is stoning. And this isn’t just a few bad regimes misreading their own religious texts. Pew’s landmark 2013 global survey found 99% of Afghan Muslims and 84% of Pakistani Muslims wanted sharia as official state law. Of those supporters, 79% in Afghanistan and 76% in Pakistan backed the death penalty for apostasy — which nets out to roughly three in four Afghans and two in three Pakistanis endorsing execution for leaving the faith. In Egypt, 74% wanted sharia codified into law, and 86% of that group backed killing converts — about 64% of Egyptian Muslims overall. So no…these are not “a few bad actors misunderstood by Fox News!” These are states, and in several cases outright majorities, doing precisely what their legal schools prescribe. So when Trump says he’s going to ban sharia law, that’s a massive win for this country. When El-Sayed says it’s somehow racist and Islamophobic to ban sharia law in this country, he’s telling you exactly how little he cares for you and the country you currently know. And when the man who has previously asked a documentary crew to keep his bookshelf full of Islamic books out of the frame to appear more “secular” on camera falsely equates canon law with sharia law? Let’s just say that it looks eerily similar to taqiyya, the Islamic concept that permits one to lie to advance the religion. When you’re campaigning alongside grotesque, grisly creeps who say America deserved 9/11, sharing bookshelf space with authors tied to terrorism cases, and surrounding yourself with family members who have close ties to the Taliban and want the American empire to crumble, you don’t get to lecture the rest of us about the sanctity of religious liberty and the American way of life. You don’t get to piggyback off of America’s free-speech protections while quietly pushing a legal system that would strip those same protections from the lady writing this sentence. I don’t want sharia law anywhere near the American frontier. I’m a woman. I would rather not need a male guardian to sign off on my passport. I would rather not inherit as the discount relative. I would rather not be entered into a courtroom as half a witness. I’d rather not be forced to wear a burqa at the beach, or a hijab at homecoming, or stoned for failing to do so. Western law, built on a Judeo-Christian claim that every person bears an image no caliph gets to rank, tells a woman she is a full legal person. That is not bigotry against Islam. That’s why I can function in society without being stoned. El-Sayed wants you to hear “sharia law” and picture a prayer rug. I hear a statute book. And I want it banned.

“Oh, bother.” The voice behind one of the most lovable gloomy characters in childhood is gone.   Peter Cullen, the legendary voice actor who brought Eeyore to life in “Winnie the Pooh” and gave Optimus Prime his unmistakable commanding voice in “Transformers,” died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home. He was 85. Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images Cullen’s family said he died peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. You might not have known Cullen’s name growing up. But you definitely knew that voice. Cullen started voicing Eeyore on “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” in 1988, turning the perpetually pessimistic, droopy-eared donkey into a character generations of kids knew instantly. “Hello. Thanks for noticing me,” Eeyore would say in that unmistakably low, defeated voice. Cullen once recalled that he could get an immediate reaction from children simply by slipping into the Eeyore voice. But Eeyore was just one part of Cullen’s massive career. Long before the “Transformers” movies became billion-dollar blockbusters, Cullen was Optimus Prime. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images He first voiced the leader of the Autobots in the 1980s animated series and returned to the role decades later when the franchise hit the big screen. And there was a reason Optimus sounded the way he did. Cullen said he modeled the character after his older brother Larry, a decorated U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam. Cullen remembered his brother coming home quieter and stronger, and he drew on that when he was asked to audition for a hero who happened to be a truck. Cullen’s voice was everywhere. He worked on “Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers,” “Voltron,” and “Knight Rider.” He even created those creepy clicking sounds coming from the alien creature in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Predator.” His family asked fans to honor his life by serving their communities and leading others with compassion, integrity, and loyalty. Cullen leaves behind four children and decades of characters that aren’t going anywhere. And for everyone who grew up with that gloomy gray donkey in the Hundred Acre Wood, there’s really only one thing left to say: Thanks for letting us notice you, Eeyore.

On Thursday afternoon, jurors started deliberating the fate of Lindsay Clancy, who is accused of murdering her three young children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan. Following closing arguments from the state and defense teams earlier in the day, the jury was sent back to start deliberations at around 12:45 p.m. local time inside the Plymouth, Massachusetts, courthouse. According to reporters inside the courtroom, the jury consists of nine women and three men. The forewoman has been described as an older woman with gray hair and glasses, according to CNN. An additional three women and three men are serving as alternates. Breaking: Lindsay Clancy’s deliberating jury has been randomly selected. It consists of NINE women and THREE men. (3 women, 3 men selected as alternates). The foreperson is an older woman. #WBZ — Kristina Rex (@KristinaRex) August 27, 2026 One of the female jurors was “wiping her eyes during closing arguments,” and another female juror “nodded when a psychiatrist testified Clancy’s choice to not take a certain medication was reasonable ‘in her mind,'” CNN reported. The gender of the jurors is particularly of note since the defense team has argued that Clancy, who has admitted to strangling her three children, should not be held criminally liable for her actions because she was suffering postpartum psychosis when she committed the crimes. The injection of the postpartum element has garnered a shocking amount of support and sympathy for Clancy in the online space, mostly from women. On Thursday, the judge allowed jurors to consider lesser offenses, including second-degree murder or manslaughter, when deliberating Clancy’s fate. The former labor and delivery nurse also faces three first-degree murder charges, which carry a life sentence without parole.  If convicted of second-degree murder, Clancy would face a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A manslaughter conviction is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. During closing arguments, Clancy’s defense team painted the defendant as a “darn good mother” who was mistreated by the health care system. The state said Clancy was indeed suffering mentally, but never suffering from psychosis. She was planning on killing herself and decided to take her children with her and methodically planned out the murders, the prosecution argued. Related: Judge Hands Lindsay Clancy Jury A New Option At The Eleventh Hour

Country star Jelly Roll told Trump-supporting fans to stop listening to his music after they objected to a series of crude jokes he made about the president while guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The singer, whose legal name is Jason DeFord, recently lost a significant amount of weight, which is especially frustrating for fans, since many of his criticisms of Trump focused on his appearance at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, an IndyCar race held on the streets of Washington, D.C.  “The cars drove through the streets of D.C., and there’s Donald Trump, who apparently has never held a flag before,” the singer said. “What a sh*t job. How do you f*ck up waving a flag?” “But the president seemed to enjoy the IndyCar race, which was a real switch up for him, because normally he only likes his own race,” DeFord added. The “Need a Favor” singer went on to make personal digs about Trump’s weight, saying the president had gained 14 pounds and was “tipping the scales at almost 240.” “It’s crazy. Think about this, y’all. In the last few years, I’ve lost 300 pounds,” he said. “That means I’ve lost an entire Donald Trump.” “And let’s be honest, based on his approval ratings, it seems like most of the country wants to do the same thing,” DeFord went on. The three-time Grammy winner sarcastically suggested that people should not mock Trump’s weight because the president “would never do that to other people.” The program then played a montage of Trump criticizing other people’s appearances.  “Well, if that ain’t the pot calling the kettle fat,” Jelly Roll said. “Mr. President, from one fat pig to another, take it from me that physical fitness is very important. And trust me, you’ll be happy to see your p*nis again.” The monologue surprised some of Jelly Roll’s fans, including Trump supporters who threatened to stop listening to his music. Former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan accused the singer of using Christianity to “make money” and said she was deleting his songs from her collection. “He’s still a pig,” she added.  While guest-hosting the show again Tuesday, Jelly Roll addressed the backlash without apologizing. He said the reaction was “the weirdest thing I’ve ever done to stun people,” given that he is a former felon and drug dealer who has tattoos covering his face. He said some people were upset because he “didn’t treat the president with reverence and dignity.” “But I want to remind y’all that I go by the name Jelly Roll,” he said. “I don’t even treat myself with reverence and dignity.” He added that he thinks that “most people were just surprised that I had any opinions at all.” “They see a guy that looks like me and assume the only opinion I have is whether I prefer my meth crystal or classic,” DeFord joked. Jelly Roll defended the monologue as part of his temporary job hosting a late-night comedy program. “Any U.S. president should be able to handle a few jokes, right?” he said. “They should also be able to handle gas prices, health care, and the occasional international conflict, but beggars can’t be choosers.” “If you wanted me to make jokes about Kamala Harris, you should have voted for her.” The singer then addressed fans who had threatened to boycott his music. “I just want to say with conviction: Go right ahead, because I’m gonna keep speaking my truth or my name isn’t Post Malone,” he said. Jelly Roll continued targeting Trump while guest-hosting Wednesday’s show after Fox News host Jesse Watters accused him of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” caused by Ozempic use. “I can’t believe, out of all the jokes I’ve told the past few nights, the one that really seemed to make people mad was when I said [Trump] was overweight,” Jelly Roll said. “I thought fat-on-fat crime was okay.” Jelly Roll previously described himself as apolitical after facing criticism for meeting Trump at UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden in 2024. “Dude, there’s not a chance in hell that I’m not going to meet the president-elect. I don’t care,” Jelly Roll said later. “If I got a call to meet Joe Biden, I would have stopped at any point and [met] him.” “Meeting President Trump was cool. Ultimately, I don’t really care [about] any blowback I get about it,” he added.

The days of the Bad News Bears are long gone. No longer can a drunk, a bail bond company, and a cigarette-smoking teenager propel an underdog team to victory in the world of youth sports. Today, it’s all about time, money, and travel. Mostly, though, it’s about over-involved parents, ones who are too often living vicariously through their little athletes. I know this because I spent years as a soccer dad, even if our experience wasn’t quite as harrowing as the ones described in “Pay to Play Childhood,” written by Caitlin Moscatello for New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer.” In her piece, she details much of what I saw. Actual team members get benched for guest players, aka ringers. Parents scream at other kids, coaches, and the refs. Families spend holidays and vacations to go to even more specialized tournaments around the country and the world. And kids, once they become teenagers, get burned out and more prone to injury. If it was all a result of private equity, I didn’t see it. Or, perhaps, when my daughter decided to quit to dedicate her energy to choir when the club got too focused on getting the players to college ball, it was before the effects of private equity were noticeable locally. Regardless, her 12 years of soccer were not cheap. Exactly how not cheap they were, I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes it’s mentally easier to not total up every line item in the budget. Which isn’t to say private equity isn’t coming for youth sports. It most certainly is. People tend to recoil at the term, but there’s no guarantee it’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s neutral. The important part is that money men started looking at all the cash being spent on youth sports and decided it was a worthy investment. We definitely contributed to that. Not that we ever expected a return on investment. We were also outliers. Smart, successful people, often in careers with objective goals and low risk tolerance, were convinced their kids were going to beat the odds. Maybe it was the former player whose college career was derailed by an injury, maybe it was the mom who came from nothing and wanted to give her daughter every advantage possible, ones she didn’t have growing up. In either case, while private coaching and better clubs help, you can’t teach raw talent, and raw talent is what’s going to get kids into college on a scholarship and a Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) deal. I also never saw much point in getting too caught up in the stats or the losses, so long as my daughter was having fun. She’s naturally competitive, she’s smart, and she likes rules, order, and schedules. Club soccer made sense for her even if college was never the goal. She had to stick to goals, learn to work with a variety of personalities, and follow rules, all while spending lots of time outside. The traveling wasn’t even bad. It definitely wasn’t as costly for us as others have reported, which is too often downplayed because it’s so excessive. We’ve spent many hours between games in various museums, zoos, and aquariums. Sometimes we’d walk historic downtowns, look at the architecture, and get the flavor of the area. The only time there was ever a fight over a performance, it was my fault, I must admit. I told her, “Good game,” after a controversial loss in the final. As Moscatello writes, there’s a tendency to blame the refs. In this case, there was some merit to blaming the ref. My daughter was playing keeper and had the ball securely in her hands. The opposing team managed to knock it out, which is a no-no, but no foul was called. They scored and won the tournament because of that no-call. She didn’t talk to me for 30 minutes for my insane suggestion that she’d played well, not breaking her silence until she got hungry. That’s when she sheepishly asked from the backseat, “Can we stop and get some food?” On the field, though, the players constantly critique one another. Parents, despite club rules to the contrary, coach from the sidelines. Some pick fights in the group chat about coaching strategy mid-game, then storm off when the final whistle is blown, only to never be seen again. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that the money isn’t really the problem; parents are. Clubs wouldn’t charge what they charge if parents said no. Private equity wouldn’t be interested if the money weren’t there, because parents don’t say no. Those guest players, the ringers, wouldn’t magically be on the field without having to pay for uniforms, club dues, or tournament fees if profit were the only motive. But there are also parents who will pick up the financial slack for those guest players. It’s also not the lack of rec leagues, which is more a symptom than a cause. The growth of the club monster has two primary culprits: birthrates and overcorrection. When I was a kid, there were still enough of us to support not just rec leagues, but the impromptu neighborhood games that sparked interest. By the time I was a father, there weren’t enough children within a mile radius to put together a decent pick-up game. Travel brings together a dwindling number of children. When I say overcorrection, that’s about Gen X, primarily, constantly extolling our toughness, our feral upbringing, our lack of rules, and doing so while giving our own children the exact opposite experience. We complain about helicopter parenting and participation trophies while not thinking about where those problems came from, then get mad and try to organize our way out of being overly organized. Travel clubs, which leave no time for being feral and getting into the trouble that being feral invites, are also hyper-competitive and devoid of any sort of participation trophy, which is actually one of the best things about club sports. And because we overcorrected and didn’t procreate enough, we end up driving a few hours to play tournament games that include a final against a team from the same town as we drove from. If it seems silly, it is, but kids also don’t want to play in a tournament that features a grand total of three teams, which is what would happen if there were no travel. America is awesome, and our desire to be amazing isn’t an impulse we should squander, even if it sometimes produces insane results like youth travel sports, which no one could afford if it weren’t for our proclivity toward being amazing. That impulse also needs to be periodically evaluated. Famed UCLA Bruins head coach John Wooden had a saying: “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” When it comes to travel ball, even if winning is the ultimate goal, activity is often mistaken for achievement. We just need one more practice, one more session with the coach from the local university, one more night watching game tape. What the kids actually need is for their parents to let them be kids, instead of seeing them as a product to be developed through relentless activity. Earl Woods is not the example to follow here. We never pushed our daughter into soccer. She started in a program called Happy Feet, offered at her daycare. She fell in love. Happy Feet was a feeder league for Legends. Legends wasn’t concerned with winning or team play to the point that the kids would be twirling circles on the field, trying to complete their required foot skills tasks, while the opposing teams racked up double-digit victories over them. This led to a schism and the creation of a new club, which meant new uniforms, new backpacks, and the like. If you think the kids led this uprising, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. My kid was eventually cut from that club and then ended up on the greatest team she ever played for. They won, sure, but they were all having fun doing it, mostly because the parents never made it about us. We never treated it like the most important thing in the world. It was just soccer. For example, the night before the finals of one tournament, the coach and some parents spent a few late-night hours at a burlesque club across the street from the hotel rather than obsessing about the next two games, games we ended up winning to take home the championship. The club ended up disintegrating after some defections to other sports and an influx of new parents — and if you think it was the kids who led that uprising, you’d again be wrong — and my daughter ended up back on the team from which she’d been cut years before, although the paid coach had been replaced by two passionate fathers. This time, she was recruited … after playing a couple of matches as a guest player. She just wanted to get out there and have fun. And then, when the focus wholly turned to the next level rather than the current one, when it ceased being any sort of fun, she retired. We didn’t argue with her. *** Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4