Zillions of messages today and every one seemed to be from some Clarkson fan. One fan who shall remain nameless included closing messages like make "gopher road kill" and "gopher pizza". Good idea. Gophers are pesky rodents and should be stomped on. In fact Minnesota is teeming with gophers that is why they are called the Minnesota Gophers. Here in Wisconsin we have badgers. They are hardworking, brave, dangerous creatures. Just like our team the Wisconsin Badgers. I must note badgers make a terrible pizza topping. Speaking of gophers, Shari and Erik were so nice to say such good things about the UW band. Thanks, we north-central people need to stick together. Now if only we could get Carol to say something nice about Wisconsin. Well Carol did write some things about older Canadian-born, Junior league hockey players in the US college ranks. This is a tricky subject that no sane person would touch. Here are my two cents. First, Tony Szabo according to my sources is a 21 or 22 year old sophomore. He did not play last year due to Prop. 48. WARNING: High school hockey players reading this list do not attempt to raise your SAT scores by playing in the Cana- dian Junior leagues. Try a Stanley Kaplan course instead. END OF WARNING. Hmm, does Wisconsin have any too old Canadian freshman? Blaine "Never" Moore age 21 oh-oh Jacques "Grain" Auger age 18 OK Jacques, by the way, escorted our governor's daughter to the guv's inaugural ball. Hope she doesn't look like her dad, he's a homely sucker. It seems that there are a lot of red-blooded Americans boys who go the junior route before college too. Unfortunately, not many states have high schools programs as competitive as the ones in Minnesota or Mass. So the good but not great players spend a year or two improving their skills against tougher competition. Could that be what the Canadian kids are doing? Guess I've rambled on enough. Good luck to all the remaining teams, even Minnesota (trying to get on Carol's good side). Mark "snake in the" Grassl Where the heck is Potsdam? I thought it was in Europe, now they tell me it's in NY. Guess this airline ticket is no good now.