That’s all that really mat­tered here.  If you go with this Cap Times’ article.

Remem­ber when it was in vogue to say that watch­ing pro foot­ball caused hus­bands to beat their wives.  Remem­ber how once upon a time it was said men hit their wives more when their teams lose games.

Remem­ber when it was in vogue to say spousal abuse went up after a Pack­ers defeat.  I don’t doubt there are nuggets of truth to all that, but some­thing tells me this sort of news wasn’t what those push­ing those sto­ries for years had in mind.

APPLETON — Police say a drunken woman twice choked her 11-year-old daugh­ter on Sun­day after becom­ing angered by the Green Bay Pack­ers game.

The 36-year-old Grand Chute woman was charged Mon­day in Out­agamie County Court with felony child abuse and mis­de­meanor counts of bail jump­ing and dis­or­derly conduct.

Police were called about 8:15 p.m. Sun­day to a Grand Chute hotel where the girl told police her mother grabbed her by the neck dur­ing the foot­ball game. The woman was drink­ing alco­hol and became upset because the team was los­ing. The girl said that after the Pack­ers lost, her mother choked her again with enough force that the girl couldn’t breathe, and her mother said, “Do you want to die?” the crim­i­nal com­plaint says.

Police saw red marks and scratches on the girl’s neck.

The Post-Crescent is not nam­ing the woman to pro­tect the iden­tity of the child.

The woman’s hus­band told police she also threw her din­ner on the floor, broke a lamp and attempted to punch him in the face because she was upset about the game, which marked the Pack­ers’ first loss in 14 games this season.

The child abuse charge car­ries a max­i­mum sen­tence of 12½ years of impris­on­ment and $25,000 in fines. The woman could face up to nine months in jail if con­victed of bail jump­ing and 90 days on the dis­or­derly con­duct count. She is being held in jail on a $2,500 cash bond.

It’s a game peo­ple, not life or death.  Do take a moment to remem­ber that.

Have a hard time dis­agree­ing with the man since in more ways than one, it is.  If you read through the team-provided prospec­tus on the stock sale and have a busi­ness degree, you can’t help but laugh at it.

The team’s “buy­back” price — what they would pay you if you own a share and wanted to sell it back to the team — is 2.5 cents.  That is one ten-thousandth of what you paid for it (before the $25 han­dling fee).

I real­ize peo­ple are not mak­ing a finan­cial deci­sion on these stock pur­chases (and I say that as I actu­ally pon­der pos­si­bly get­ting one myself), but the idea that you have any real power, or clout, after mak­ing one of these pur­chases is a joke.  It’s the NFL’s great­est con­ver­sa­tion piece; and it only can hap­pen in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Green Bay Pack­ers, the country’s only pub­licly owned pro­fes­sional sports fran­chise, today began sell­ing shares to help pay for $143 mil­lion in sta­dium expan­sion and improve­ment projects, and Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame Finance Pro­fes­sor Richard Shee­han, who spe­cial­izes in the eco­nom­ics of sports, says “This stock sale is pretty much a scam from an invest­ment perspective.”

The author of “Keep­ing Score: The Eco­nom­ics of Big-Time Sports,” Shee­han says, “For $250, you can own one share out of more than 4 mil­lion and you can’t pur­chase more than 200 shares. You receive a stock cer­tifi­cate and the right to vote at the annual meet­ing, but you can’t amass enough shares to give you any mean­ing­ful say in the franchise’s deci­sions. You won’t receive any game tick­ets, div­i­dends, or guar­an­tee the share will be worth any more at any point in the future.”

Shee­han says fans are effec­tively financ­ing the sta­dium ren­o­va­tion through a stock offer­ing he calls “pos­si­bly one of the worst of all times because it offers no mean­ing­ful input and no finan­cial ben­e­fit.” Regard­less, he says the Pack­ers will raise a lot of cash.

“It’s like the old Mas­ter­Card ad: pair of Green Bay Pack­ers tick­ets, $200; share of Green Bay Pack­ers stock, $250; being a Green Bay Pack­ers stock­holder, priceless!”

Though that being said.  Get­ting a 10% off deal at the Pro Shop for pur­chases you make, for say, the next 5 or 10 years after buy­ing a share of stock wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world the Pack­ers could for those fork­ing over at min­i­mum $275 so that the team can add more seats, build a cou­ple restau­rants, and relo­cate the Pro Shop and Hall of Fame in its quest to build “Lam­beau World.”

There should be at least some perk for “own­er­ship” I suppose.

I’ve been told there are cheaper ways to spend a cou­ple of hours in a motel room.

Police had to help remove a 170-pound white-tailed deer that crashed into a Janesville motel.

Offi­cers were called Thurs­day morn­ing after peo­ple saw a male deer run­ning around a park­ing lot and ram­ming into cars at a Tar­get store. The deer then ran across a high­way, vaulted through a closed, ground-level win­dow and entered a room at a Super 8 Motel.

The man­ager says the room was empty. The Janesville Gazette (http://bit.ly/rOGB2E) reports police guarded the door to keep the deer inside while vet­eri­nar­i­ans and DNR biol­o­gists tran­quil­ized the animal.

Author­i­ties removed the deer shortly before noon. The deer had minor injuries to its snout from crash­ing through the win­dow. Dam­age to the room was minor.

The DNR planned to release the deer at Storrs Lake Wildlife Area near Milton.

I’m try­ing to imag­ine what the insur­ance inves­ti­ga­tion report would read for some­thing like that.

Here’s my best attempt at it: “After the ani­mal wrecked havoc in a nearby park­ing lot, it made a “B-line” for the win­dow, shat­ter­ing it as it jumped into the room.  Upon hear­ing the dam­age, an employee of the front desk of the hotel called author­i­ties to help deal with the ani­mal.  The ani­mal was shot with a large seda­tive from a high-powered rifle and car­ried out in a sheet onto a wait­ing Ford pick-up truck.”

Atten­tion lib­eral, do-gooder, nanny-state groups in DC:  Don’t say you haven’t vio­lated image or like­ness rights, when your actions pretty much tell us you did.

A bill­board warn­ing that cheese can be haz­ardous to your health, fea­tur­ing the Grim Reaper, went up along High­way 41 on Tues­day, but with­out the image of a Cheese­head hat.

The non-profit Physi­cians Com­mit­tee for Respon­si­ble Med­i­cine paid for the bill­board, which orig­i­nally fea­tured the Grim Reaper wear­ing the iconic Cheese­head hat.

But the maker of Cheese­head hats, Foa­ma­tion, based in St. Fran­cis, Wis­con­sin, told the orga­ni­za­tion it would vio­late the company’s trade­mark rights.

The Cheese­head was removed before the sign was put up south of Scheur­ing Road in the Town of Lawrence.

A spokesper­son for Foa­ma­tion tells Action 2 News they’re happy the issue has been resolved and want the pub­lic to know it did not con­done the group’s message.

Foa­ma­tion said it received numer­ous emails from peo­ple in Wis­con­sin ask­ing about the use of the Cheese­head in the orig­i­nal plans for the bill­board and had to respond to those inquiries.

Physi­cians Com­mit­tee for Respon­si­ble Med­i­cine says the bill­board still gets the mes­sage through to foot­ball fans on High­way 41 headed to Lam­beau Field that “cheese can hurt your health,” PCRM pres­i­dent Neal Barnard, MD, said.

UPDATE: There seems to be a bit of con­fu­sion in media sources I’m see­ing on this story.  Accord­ing to the JS, it was the bill­board com­pany which took out the Cheese­head after a request by Foamation’s attor­ney, a part­ner at Michael Best & Friedrich.

Yeah, this will go over just swell at UW-Madison and the thou­sands of alumni who went there.

Cit­ing increased vio­lence and cost to the city, Madi­son police are say­ing the annual Mif­flin Street block party “sim­ply can­not continue.”

Rea­sons for that rec­om­men­da­tion are high­lighted in a Madi­son Police Depart­ment report, which was posted Wednes­day by activist and for­mer City Coun­cil mem­ber Brenda Konkel on her blog, but not yet released by police as of 10:30 a.m. Thursday.

“The bot­tom line for the depart­ment is if this event does not have a pos­i­tive ben­e­fit for the com­mu­nity, we’re strug­gling to see how this is a worth­while event to con­tinue in the future,” Madi­son Police Depart­ment spokesman Howard Payne said Thursday.

This year’s 42nd annual block party in May was marred by a large, drunken crowd and vio­lence includ­ing stab­bings, sex­ual assaults, bat­ter­ies and rob­beries dur­ing and after the event. In addi­tion, three offi­cers were injured.

The block party cost police $130,542, an increase of $42,983 from 2010. Police arrested 162 peo­ple dur­ing the event and they were charged with 206 dif­fer­ent offenses and vio­la­tions, accord­ing to the report.

What to do with the Mif­flin Street Block Party has been a topic of dis­cus­sion since at least when I was in col­lege and would read about what was going on at it in the Bad­ger Her­ald from my focal point at UW-Eau Claire.  At the time, it might have been because a whole bunch of play­ers on the foot­ball team were involved in a fight at one of the houses on the block, or busted for under­age drink­ing or something.

Hon­estly, I forget.

Frankly, try­ing to talk sense about the Mif­flin with any UW alumni about how messed up the party looks to us out­siders is not worth your time.  The party has been com­pletely roman­ti­cized by those who went there and the grow­ing vio­lence at it has been swept under the rug of an atti­tude of “We Study Hard at UW, We Deserve to Party Hard at UW” mentality.

In my book, no where does stab­bings and sex­ual assaults at the event con­sti­tute any­thing close to “par­ty­ing hard.”  (That’s just me, but I could just be get­ting old.)

Is any­thing going to change at the Mif­flin?  Unlikely.  Paul Soglin’s back in the mayor’s office, was at the first cou­ple block party’s him­self, and he’ll prob­a­bly tell you things were “much worse in his day.”

So, despite police warn­ings, despite con­cerns in the neigh­bor­hood, the Mif­flin Street Block Party will prob­a­bly con­tinue unabated and we’ll be read­ing arti­cles about peo­ple try­ing to shut it down for the fore­see­able future.

Until some­one gets killed at it of course…that might finally change things.

Maybe…

I’ll admit, I’m still shocked there hasn’t been some sort of law­suit out of all this.  You’d think the airline’s a top tar­get, maybe even Dane Co. Regional Air­port as well.

Give it time I guess, we are a liti­gious peo­ple after all.

Madi­son - About two weeks after a bat emerged on a Wisconsin-to-Georgia flight, health offi­cials say the pas­sen­gers they’ve con­tacted so far won’t need to take pre­ven­ta­tive rabies measures.

The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion said Wednes­day about 40 of the 50 pas­sen­gers have been reached, and none had a level of con­tact with the bat that would require a rabies vaccination.

On Aug. 5, the bat flit­ted around the cabin of a Delta Air Lines flight. The Atlanta-bound flight returned to Madi­son after it emerged. It even­tu­ally escaped, so no one knows whether it was rabid.

CDC spokesman Tom Skin­ner said health offi­cials are dis­cussing whether to visit the Madi­son air­port. He said there have been reports of dead bats and bat colonies there that inves­ti­ga­tors may want to study.

Here’s footage taken by a pas­sen­ger on the flight from CNN.

Shock­ingly, for­mer state Rep. Jeff Wood was nowhere near the scene.

For the sev­enth time this year a motorist has been arrested for allegedly dri­ving drunk in the wrong direc­tion on the Mil­wau­kee County free­way sys­tem, the sheriff’s office said Thursday.

The 45-year-old man almost caused a head-on col­li­sion while dri­ving north in the south­bound lanes of I-43 at W. Burleigh St. shortly after 4 a.m., the Mil­wau­kee County Sheriff’s Office said.

Another motorist was south­bound on I-43 and had just rounded a curve when he saw a pickup truck head­ing directly toward him, the sheriff’s office said.

The motorist then veered left to avoid a col­li­sion. The motorist struck a bar­rier wall, but was not injured.

The truck con­tin­ued north until a sheriff’s deputy dri­ving north along side the vehi­cle on the other side of the bar­rier wall acti­vated his squad’s siren and air horn and motioned the dri­ver to stop.

The truck finally came to a stop at Capi­tol Drive, where the deputy jumped the wall and arrested the dri­ver, who had a blood alco­hol con­cen­tra­tion of 0.25. A level of 0.08 or more is legal proof of intox­i­ca­tion for motorists in Wisconsin.

The sheriff’s office will seek charges of first-offense oper­at­ing while intox­i­cated and first-degree reck­less homi­cide against the man, the third dri­ver this month arrested for allegedly dri­ving drunk in the wrong direc­tion on the freeway.

There have been seven such inci­dents this year, includ­ing one in Jan­u­ary that resulted in a fatal crash, the sheriff’s office said.

Sad news as a Wis­con­sin icon passes on.

George Cul­ver passed away Thurs­day, July 7th in Sauk City. He was 88.

Mr. Cul­ver and his wife Ruth began their food ser­vice career by open­ing an A&W restau­rant in Sauk City in 1961. After oper­at­ing a num­ber of other restau­rants in the area they founded Culver’s in 1984 by con­vert­ing their orig­i­nal Sauk City site with their son Craig and daughter-in-law Lea Cul­ver. Today Culver’s has 435 restau­rants in 19 states.

“George never com­pro­mised on qual­ity, says Phil Keiser, Culver’s Pres­i­dent and COO. “ He made sure each prod­uct was made with qual­ity ingre­di­ents and cooked exactly to order, while his wife Ruth was a role model for ser­vice and hos­pi­tal­ity. It was a per­fect blend that set the stan­dard for the way Culver’s does things today,” he adds. Ruth Cul­ver passed away in 2008.

George Culver’s mark on the restau­rant sys­tem led the orga­ni­za­tion to cre­ate an annual GM Cul­ver Award. For many years the award has been given to a fran­chise part­ner who has demon­strated long-term vision­ary lead­er­ship and success.

Mr. Cul­ver will be laid to rest beside his wife in Prairie du Sac, WI.