Foodball!

You may have heard there is a large football game going on tonight.

Big bin of these in the store Friday:

As you probably also have heard, Glad Take-Alongs are helpful food-safe plastic containers that are as airtight as Tupperware but cheaper and not expected to last for generations. They are often used for party situations -- if you're bringing food to a party, you don't want to demand your Tupperware back before you go home; you also don't want to demand your host do the dishes for you and return it clean at some point. With a Take-Along, the thing can be chucked or washed and reused or returned and no one feels like he or she has been taken advantage of. You see them around a lot for Christmas, but this is the first time I have seen sports-shaped containers -- here, American footballs with the classic brown.

I'm not going anywhere tonight, or I might have been tempted to pick up a pack. But why? As I considered through my aisle wandering, it occurred to me that the individual containers are not that large -- too small for, say, a party-size serving of wings or Swedish meatballs. (Sorry, Vikings.) Also, while the containers are heatsafe and microwaveable, they are not great for transporting hot foods, and they have no natural insulation. You might be riding in the car with a lap full of really hot beanie weenies. 

Further, they're too small for chips, too large for dips, too small for salads, too funny shaped for desserts . . . In fact, I can't think of any party foods that would work well in these containers. Maybe that's why there were so many of them in the bin with two days to go until the Super Bowl. 

Will unsold units be sold at a discount? Will they be returned to Glad? I'd be interested to know. But I think that either these things will be used for leftovers, or they will be leftovers. 

Good luck, Glad. Maybe basketball-shaped bowls for NCAA March Madness would work better? 

Cheesesteaks vs. Cheeseheads.

I'm still not following football much, because football continues to impoverish its fans, promote degenerate gambling, and employ wokester-in-chief Roger Goodell as commissioner of the NFL. Dumdum Goodell was doubtless the brains behind the decision to put the first game of the season, between strong contenders from Green Bay and Philly, in South America, and force North Americans who wanted to watch the game to use Peacock, NBC's streaming service, which is somewhere in popularity between endodontic surgery and CNN+. 

Old habits die hard, though, and I had to check in this morning, hoping to see that the Eagles had lost. Alas, that was not the case. 

Still, I have some fellow feeling for the citizens of Philadelphia. In 2022, recall, they lost the Super Bowl by 3 points to the Kansas City Chiefs, and then in October lost the World Series to the Houston Shenanigans. 

But the year was actually even worse. The Philadelphia Union, the city's soccer team, also made it to the championship match and also lost, to Los Angeles. The Flyers finished dead last in the Metropolitan Division of the NHL, which means eighth out of eight, and accomplished the impressive feat of missing the NHL playoffs, which takes some doing. The 76ers got to the second round of the NBA playoffs but lost to Miami. One might look in vain for joy from the Wings (lacrosse) or the Soul (arena football, off and on), but no joy was to be had in 2022. 

The Phillies are having another great season currently, and one can only hope that they get overconfident and crap out soon. As for football, the NFL can move all their games to Peacock and have them played in other parts of the world for all I care, places where they think footballs are round and it's okay to pretend to be hurt when you aren't. I don't care.

Unless the Cowboys are good this year. Then I'll have a rooting interest -- against someone. 

Thanksgiving comes around again.

I always feel bad for people who have to work on Thanksgiving, especially when I'm one of them. But hey, I'm not complaining. At least I'm working on freelance editorial stuff against hard deadlines. I'm able to be home in my sweats. I'm not opening up the stupid store to herds of Early Black Friday loons and possibly looters. I got it easy. 

And I don't feel like I'll be missing much. Sure, I would love to veg out and watch the MST3K Turkey Day Marathon via Pluto, but A) my wife isn't a fan and B) the dog knows when I'm being lazy and promptly takes steps to prevent me from enjoying it. Seriously, this guy will sleep 14 hours a day, but if I try to loaf without actually sleeping, he will demand to go for a walk, or play outside, or at least freeze on the porch. So I don't get to watch much TV anymore. 

Two of my old Thanksgiving favorites are on the Nix List. I gave up on the Macy's Parade years ago when it became little more than an advertisement to get the moneyed folks from Connecticut and Westchester to come to town to see Broadway shows that I would not watch without being paid in the mid-five figures. And football? Is Roger Goodell still ruining -- uh, running -- the NFL? No thanks. Besides, the local teams suck, which reduces my interest in what the rest of the league is doing. 

So while I will be at home, working, I will be having the traditional feast, and it is really a treat. Do not think I am not grateful, because I am. I am just very, very tired. Combine that with the turkey and I think even the dog -- spunky though he may be -- is not going to be able to dislodge me from the sofa after eats. I suppose he'll try, though.  

Maybe I'd better have seconds.

Just Hoffa top of my head...

Friends of mine, fans of the Jets and the Giants, have been joking (I think) that they want Zombie Jimmy Hoffa to rise from his burial ground under the old Giants Stadium to play QB for their respective teams this year. In fact, they're willing to get into a bidding war over him. They think his almost-fifty-year-old corpse will show more life and resilience than they've seen from the live players.

But some cold-case hobbyists think they have a better fix on the location of Jimmy's remains. The one-time Teamster boss, who disappeared in 1975, is now said to have been planted by his Mafioso pals under third base in the old Milwaukee County Stadium. 

Best seat in the house?

The Giants Stadium myth was the claim of gangster Donald Frankos, who said in 1989 that Hoffa had been buried under Section 107 during construction. The story was so widespread in the 90's in the NY/NJ metro area that one could hear game promotions like: "In 1975, the mob buried Jimmy Hoffa in Giants Stadium. This Sunday, the Giants will bury the Eagles there." A 2004 episode of MythBusters was given over in part to disproving the story, with Jamie and Adam at the stadium, helped by then-Giants head coach Jim Fassel. 

But the new theory makes more sense on one level, or at least more sense than the Giants Stadium story -- Hoffa disappeared in a parking lot in Detroit, which is 225 miles closer to Milwaukee than it is to the Meadowlands. The mob doesn't get away with its hits by playing Weekend at Bernie's with the corpses; they dump them fast. Closer is faster.

But Giants Stadium was under construction when Hoffa vanished, and Milwaukee County Stadium opened in 1953. So why go to all that trouble to plant Hoffa in an extant structure? Plus, Hoffa vanished on July 30, right in the middle of baseball season. I can't think of a worse way to get rid of a body than bury it in a stadium that's always going to have someone on duty at the time. Furthermore, the Brewers were playing a long homestand from July 26 to August 5 that year. "Gee, third base seems a little -- elevated tonight, doesn't it?" is something infielder Jack Heidemann did not say.

To be fair, the cold-case group thinks that Hoffa was not buried there during the 1975 season, but for some reason was moved there in 1995. Which doesn't really make it any less crazy. Why move a body that had been tucked away safely for twenty years? Because the site had become risky? What could be riskier than the middle of a major league ballpark? 

But Richard III was found buried in a parking lot, wasn't he? Is it so crazy?

Yes. It is. For one thing, Richard's plot was not a busy car park in 1485. 

If by chance Hoffa turns out to have been entombed under what is now a parking lot, the Brewers might want to take an option on Zombie Hoffa. Sure, they had a good season, going 92-70 and finishing first in the NL Central, but they got swept by Arizona in the first round of the playoffs. 

If Zombie Hoffa's got a decent changeup, he might put the Brewers over the top. After all, he's kept more people guessing in death than he even did in life.

Bloody sacrifice of the cash cow.

Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it.

All the best and brightest around us who achieve high positions in any capacity feel obliged to follow this series of steps:

1) Examine the state of the organization.

2) Determine what segment of the market is outside its current reach. 

3) Viciously attack its strongest adherents in the hope of winning over the outsiders. 

We all know the term cash cow from marketing -- that beloved quadrant of the business that just keeps pulling in money, year after year, without very much tending, a segment that yields predictable if unspectacular dividends that can be used to fund more risky, more potentially wealth-generating projects. All the company has to do is feed the cow and not murder it. 

It seems that all the grads from the business schools get a complimentary butcher knife along with their sheepskin. They loathe having to work on a dull part of a dull company that just makes money. Blech! (People who blech! at profit are people who have never had to worry where their next meal is coming from.) They would much rather be social engineering!

Step one: Kill the cow. And the fastest way to do that is to insult its greatest adherents to the point of libel and make them angry every time they see your logo. The next step is to be shocked that people got upset, and then get panicky when the sought-after new audience segment does not flood into the doors and double the revenue. Step three: Write a book about your great accomplishment a fail upward into a new job.

Gilette. Bud Light. Disney (subsets especially include Star Wars). The NFL. These are only some of the prominent businesses that have suffered at the hands of their young geniuses. 

The United States is doing it to its citizens. The very people who love this country and the principles upon which it stands and would die for it are treated with suspicion and worse by its own government, which is run by people who would not suffer a rainy weekend for it. Meanwhile, noncitizens are welcomed, no matter how illegal their entry, no questions asked, and criminals are allowed to run the streets. 

And now, the Catholic Church?

Every devout Catholic I know is worried that the Holy Father, a.k.a. Hippie Pope Frank, has called the three-year synod to make some rash changes, like ordaining women (which the church has declared is not possible), encouraging more illegal immigration (but not into Vatican City), easing up on divorce, or blessing same-sex unions, following the lead of some apostate bishops in Germany. (Germany: Birthplace of Bad Ideas Since Forever.)

The stupid logo they commissioned for it fills me with dread. Rather than being focused on Jesus, God, or the Trinity, it looks like a pagan tree god sheltering the usual multiculti mob, which schleps forward into a future of tribalism and special pleading.

I know church membership is down since World War II, but that's true for all churches. The reasons are varied, ranging from scientism/positivism to the apathy of wealth to the sickness of Communism to worldwide PTSD from the war. It's not just because the Pope doesn't like the Pill. 

Protestant churches who ran out in front to rubberstamp everything people wanted lost attendance even faster. Why? There's no point to a church that asks nothing, because a church with no firm moral center can give nothing. A church that approves everyone's bullshit can neither inspire nor educate, and certainly can't compel adherence or the personal sacrifice that leads to spiritual growth. If they're just social service stations, who the hell cares? The government already does that and tithing to them is not voluntary.

Is the Catholic church killing the cow with the so-called synod? Is it Vatican III, "Just do what you want"? Which would utterly infuriate and demoralize the faithful, who have kept the joint up all this time. And the church would be following a modern heresy. 

Heresy is not what the atheists say; that's simple unbelief. Evildoers within the church are not usually heretics; they are evil bastards who would have been better off sunk with a millstone necktie. Heresy comes from focusing on one part and blowing it up to be the whole thing. Worship of poverty like Tolstoy or worship of spiritual matters as secret magic like the Gnostics are heresies. Love of people to the exclusion of the laws of God would be the greatest heresy to ever invade the church. 

If the pope is thinking of doing something nuts -- not ex cathedra level but still -- he will not bring any of the "lost sheep" and he will lose the powerful love and devotion of those he has. He may think he's being Christlike, leaving the 99 to go after the 1, but when he gets back with the 1 and finds the 99 have fled and then the 1 kicks him in the nads and tears off, he'll feel a little stupid.

If that's possible. None of these cash-cow-killer geniuses ever seem to regret, understand, or appreciate anything. You explain that people don't like it when you attack them and their cherished beliefs, and they act like it's weird that stupid people would have feelings. They fail to grasp the most simple ideas, and we're the stupid ones?

The people in charge of things hate the very people whom they need the most. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. 

Frecoin Super Bowl Ad!

Well, friends, I hope you enjoyed the Super Bowl! Mostly of course I hope you enjoyed the Fredcoin ad that aired coast-to-coast during the game, and even in parts of Guam! It's sure to be on everyone's Top 10 Super Bowl LVII Commercials this morning. 

Did you miss it? I mean, it was right there, late in the fourth quarter. Actually, it was after the final whistle. A little bit. A couple of hours. Well, just in case you did, you'd better have a look at this baby, because everyone at the office is going to be talking about it this morning. 

 

Doesn't that just have the zingeroo? Gets the visual across with a catchy tune and leaves people wanting more. Like a lot of the ads, it doesn't waste time explaining the product. If you're not cool enough to know what we're talking about, well, I guess it sucks to be you. Or you could just look online and find out that Fredcoin is simply the fastest growing cryptocurrency mentioned in this post. It's true! 

I don't mind telling you we spent a pretty penny on that ad, yessir, a pretty penny. It was a 2018, exceptionally shiny. Minted in Denver, I believe. But it was totally worth it. Our agency, Wahoo Begonia, is simply amazing. Great work, guys! Is that Clio I smell? 

So thanks for all of you who supported us when we were just starting out, a far cry then from hitting the "Big Time." Remember, we're always here for you for all your crypto needs. We'll never get "too big for our britches." We're not even sure what "britches" are, but we'll never outgrow them. 

Oh, and I hope you liked the game. I heard one team beat the other one. That's probably for the best. 

Hungry for a football?

Not hungry for some football, but a football. 

Yes, this little... thing is supposed to be a football-shaped tortilla chip. See the laces on top?

Tostitos, a Pepsi-owned Frito-Lay product, has done foot-ball shaped chips before, but not if I recall correctly in their Hint of Lime flavor. That's the favorite of the L&T Mrs. Key.  

These are thicker and smaller than the usual Tostitos chip, which is okay -- less chance of breakage when going for the dip. While not being an authentic-type cantina-style tortilla chip, they're still a much closer approximation than Fritos. 

A lot are still busted in the bag, of course. Despite the nitrogen in the bag, fumbles will happen, and I'd say maybe 40% of the chips did not maintain a perfect football shape. They still taste the same, of course, and the proof of the tortilla chip is in the eating.

Pepsico's sponsorship with the NFL is intended to meld the football-watching experience with the chip-and-soda consuming experience, but nope -- I'm still not watching. Since the NFL decided to take a dump on its biggest fans in 2020, I've maintained my anti-NFL stance, which will probably remain in place until Roger Goodell walks out of the building with his cardboard box of desk tchotchkes. Those of us who hoped that at least the NFL and the armed forces would be resistant to the poke of wokeness were and are disgusted by just how fast they folded. They collapsed like a, well, a bag of Tostitos under a fat guy's ass. All that remained were busted chips and some gas.

It's as well for me, since the Giants suffered their worst playoff loss, against the Santa-hating Eagles, since the embarrassing Super Bowl XXVI. I wouldn't have even bothered with the football-shaped chips, but that was all they had, and my wife wanted Hint of Lime Tostitos.

On the bright side, when it comes to eating the ball, a football-shaped chip is a lot more pleasant than being sacked by a 300-pound lunatic, so there's that. 

Memey like Sunday morning.

Busy day yesterday so... break out the memes! 

Good morning... What hurts today?

Noted this on Lileks's blog the other day

Meme Joe Greme.

Yep, we're forced by circumstances to rely on memes again today! But in a way, isn't everything just a meme? Isn't a movie just a long-form meme? Aren’t serial TV shows just one, long, punctuated meme?

Sports heck.

I won't say sports hell, but sports heck will do, I guess. 

An overly optimistic friend of mine has been watching the Beloved Mets coast along in first place all season, expecting a neat slide into the playoffs. An overly pessimistic friend has been expecting another September crash and burn. If you've been reading this blog for a while I'm sure you can guess where I fall. 

You must never underestimate the power of the S.S. Mets to hit an iceberg on a warm September day. Not that everything is over, but the Hated Braves have had an incredible winning streak, and this past week the Mets decided to start losing to poor teams, and we landed in second place over the weekend. The Mets rebounded, and it could be an exciting back-and-forth battle right down to the wire, but I expect the Braves to leap over the Mets and pull away, and the '22 Mets to become the Baxters in another legendary Atlanta season. 

As for football, meh. In years past I would be over the moon by the Giants' gutsy play that won their first game of the season, but I'm still disgusted by the NFL's descent into wokeness. The last places you'd expect to find political correctness were the Marines and the NFL, and they're both becoming riddled with it. I enjoyed the piece by America's Newspaper, the Babylon Bee, on this topic: "NFL Hoping 3rd Year of 'End Racism' Painted in End Zone Will Do the Trick." 

"This is the year that the NFL ends racism, once and for all. Third time's the charm!" said Commissioner Jim Hardleather at a press conference while surrounded by a dozen other old, white members of the NFL executive committee who also showed the courage to not dare recommend removing "End Racism" from the end zones for fear of being canceled.

Yeah, no doubt. 

My overly optimistic friend is a Giants fan, and he thinks the team looks much improved. My overly pessimistic friend is a fan of the Redskins Commanders, so he's already miserable. This is a guy who knows all the words to the original Redskins fight song: 

Hail to the Redskins!

Hail Victory!

Braves on the Warpath!

Fight for old Dixie!

Run or pass and score -- we want a lot more!

Scalp 'em, swamp 'em -- We will take 'em big score

Read 'em, weep 'em, touchdown - we want heap more

Fight on, Fight on -- Till you have won

Sons of Washington. Rah!, Rah!, Rah!

I kind of expect the fans to sing the old words (maybe the revised version that doesn't mention Dixie or use fake Indian talk though) instead of the "Hail to the Commanders" lyrics that have the Official Sanction. 

I don't think this team name controversy means a hill of beans to actual Native Americans compared to more serious issues, but the National Congress of American Indians cares. Mostly, though, it's another scalp -- uh, victory -- for sniffy college types who can't throw a football ten yards, have never been to a reservation, and never done a day of real work. But you know, if it makes the actual tribes happy, that's fine. 

I do wish the Cleveland MLB team had picked a better name than the Guardians. They're in first place now. It would just figure if Cleveland won its first championship since 1948 with that dumb name. 

Enjoy your disease!

Good morning, sports fans! And welcome to Super Bowl Sunday! Time to hunker down with beer and chips and pizza and nachos and your buddies and enjoy what the sponsors who didn't pay for naming rights call The Big Game. 

But wait, what's this? Why, could it be... Yes, it's those twin towers of terror, Chinese Death Virus and Medical Spokesmen to take a dump on the fifty-yard line of your day!  

Medscape's cheerful report, "Superspreader Sunday: The Super Bowl with COVID Variants Afoot," would like you to know a few things:

After almost every major holiday in 2020 — Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years — the United States had an increase in COVID-19 cases.

This Sunday, Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida — a venue that normally seats 65,890 fans and can expand to 75,000 — will be filled to about one-third capacity. The National Football League has announced the sale of 14,500 tickets; in addition, approximately 7500 vaccinated healthcare workers will attend as guests....

"I'm not so much worried about the 22,000 fans in attendance, some of whom will be vaccinated healthcare workers," Cedric Dark, MD, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Medscape Medical News. "I'm more concerned about the indoor parties happening all over the country."

And away we go!

Well, a lot of people have been getting vaccinated, so that should help.

And just because some of the attendees at the Super Bowl are vaccinated, it doesn't mean they are not infected, he pointed out. "They can still pass the virus on to others."

The variants are of grave concern. "Even though we are beginning to vaccinate, the virus is continually mutating. And the more it mutates, the more it may become vaccine resistant," Salemi explained.

How about mask compliance? It's in the 90-100% range, I'm told.

So far, the American population has shown a lack of enthusiasm toward changing behavior to protect others from getting sick, and that won't likely change for game day. "I have been given the vaccine, but I still wear masks and social distance. I don't want to risk infecting other people."

People who are not normally careful about taking COVID-19 precautions likely won't be more cautious just because it's Super Bowl day. "And some others may be even more relaxed for this event," Salemi said.

Individual behaviors are the fuel that keep the pandemic burning. "If we want this to end sooner rather than later, we have to put in the work," said Dark. He added that he hopes any Super Bowl parties will include only the people in that household's bubble. And if not, "they should be outdoors and people should wear masks."

Sure, an outdoor party! It's going to be 28 degrees here at game time. So we'll put up a tent with some electric heaters, and -- whoops! Now outdoors is indoors!

And there you have it! You selfish jerks, with your "lack of enthusiasm toward changing behavior to protect others from getting sick," all suck. You can't do anything right, so you're going to eat nachos with your drunk-ass pals and kill Grandma. 

Over and over we get the message pounded into us: Stay home, avoid others, isolate, everything you're doing is useless, and COVID is now coming up with more variants so THIS IS NEVER GOING TO END. Let's have a look at this one sentence again:

The variants are of grave concern. "Even though we are beginning to vaccinate, the virus is continually mutating. And the more it mutates, the more it may become vaccine resistant," Salemi explained.

If this is true, there's simply no way to beat the bug. We can never have 100% compliance, and 100% will be necessary. We cannot endure lockdowns forever, neither economically nor emotionally. The vaccine was our only hope, but no, sorry, going to be useless in the long run. What do they expect us to do, really?

I don't think these chattering health types quite come to understand that a lot of us would rather take our chances with the virus than with them. A virus, even an evil coronavirus initially manufactured by the evil Chinese Communists, is going to run out of steam eventually, but the do-gooders who hate us will never run out of power. Their self-regard is like a perpetual motion machine. 

I do not want to catch COVID-19. I know it's no joke; I have two acquaintances in the ICU with it right now, a third isolating with it at home, and I've lost touch with a fourth who already has COPD. I'm not in a high-risk group, but even if it didn't kill me, it would be a massive inconvenience. If my wife and I get it, who's going to take care of the dogs? Yesterday the canine idiots ran out in the street on me. If I can't handle them on full strength, no way can I deal with them while fighting a horrible flu. Plus, I have deadlines on Monday and Tuesday and another project after that. If I don't work I don't get paid, and if I miss deadlines I'll lose clients.

All the same, I'd rather get sick and never hear from our public health ninnies again if it were possible. Just a reminder, these jerks who want to ruin the Super Bowl for you (if the NFL and its players haven't done that already) were the ones who had no problem at all with the riots and looting over the summer. Until some disciplinary action is taken against the thousand-plus morons who said they were A-OK with masses of asses tearing up our cities last year, I see no reason why we should take any of them seriously.

Enjoy the game. Be as careful as you feel you need to be. Tell these spokesdopes to go play with their rectal thermometers. As for me, the NFL and its players ruined football, so I'll be avoiding everything as much as I can. 

More light -- more dark our woes.

Okay! Thanksgiving is gone! Time to get the Christmas stuff up! Hurry hurry hurry! It's an especially good day to fight about the lights! 

Actually, I'm not sure about whether people fight over the Christmas lights. There may be some families where Dad insists on something like football lights on the house or tree... 

...but I think most of the time it's whatever Mom wants.

And what does Mom want? It's my experience that many high-class type families, or those who want to look high-class, prefer all-white lights. It looks snowy and stately, the kind of décor that says WASPy restraint. Lower-class families prefer the more fun multicolored lights, as do families with small children, and of course those whose small children have driven them to lower class. Iconoclastic high-class types will go with all blue lights, which have a restraint to them like the white lights, but more soothing. Also appropriate for Jewish families as Hanukkah lights. Iconoclasts of lower class go all-green, which is Christmassy but also a little non-Christmassy at the same time; someone celebrating the solstice would be equally fine with green lights on their green boughs. And those who get the hard-to-find all-red lights may think it looks Christmassy against the green decorations, but those are black in the night so the place looks like a Commie safehouse. 

Some people may try to be ecumenical, putting white lights on one bush and green on another and so on, but I guess that it neither wins the support of the white or green or other light people. They never are so ecumenical that they mix in multis, though.

Indeed, you can't win, but you also can't lose. Any decoration that isn't positively offensive is good decoration. If Christmas is not complete for Dad without his football lights, let him have some football lights, I say. If someone wants to go the Commie light route, fine, whatever. It's still pretty.

Personally I'm more of a multicolored light guy myself, but my wife prefers all-white, so guess what we use? What can I say; she's the classy one in the relationship. Meanwhile, for my fellow low-class lads, here's the type we can wear personally:

I'm referring to the light string, of course, not the model. She seems awfully excited by the necklace of battery-powered lights, doesn't she? I think the necklace and Santa hat were Photoshopped on. 

If you really want to see fireworks, watch what happens when a blinking-lights person marries a steady-light person. That's a which-side-of-the-toilet-paper-roll-hangs-down level fight. It makes mere religious differences look like an argument over white vs. colored underwear. But that's much too hairy a topic for this blog today, which is all about peace and serenity. Mainly because I'm too full to move.

The Washington Whatevers.

I've been thinking about this business of the Washington Redskins. Nike, a company so well known for its love for humanity and human rights, refuses to stock merchandise with the team logo now because it is... Well, I'm not sure if it's just the name, or if using any kind of Native American imagery without the endorsement of everybody who bears that ethnicity is a bad thing. Whatever it is, it's a bad thing now and must be removed. So many bad things, so little time.

Personally, I leave worrying about the name to others, but the team's imagery is of a fierce warrior, which is the whole point of a football team. They don't play the New York Toddlers or the Minnesota Pacifists. Although as football gets more PC, it gets closer to that reality.

Anyway, I, being the helpful sort, was looking around for some kind of image that might be a compromise, something that would engender respect and recognition. So I asked the boys in Art & Design to come up with a few ideas. Let's see what they got...

Umm, no, that's no good. Now they'll be in twice as much trouble. We need to look beyond the American Indian theme.

No! What are you, nuts? That's a crazy idea!

NOOOOO!!!!! You cut that out right now! 

Look, we don't want to offend any ethnic group! Is there a way to do that with some other kind of mascot? Since Nike is in bed with Communist China, maybe we can find something that might appeal to the Asian markets. 

Okay, that's just hilarious. Newman the Ninja. Great. 

Come on, you guys. Isn't there some symbol that we can use? Something everyone in America respects? Something that has a positive history on human rights? Something that the Chinese will recognize? 

That's it. I quit. Dan Snyder can solve his own problems.

Fred's Book Club: Root Fan or Die.

Welcome to another episode of Fred's Book Club, also called the Humpback Writers because it falls on Wednesday. And if you think that joke is a disaster, then you haven't seen the real disasters that have been seen by...

Joe Queenan, who has written for pretty much everybody from TV Guide to National Review to the New York Times, published True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans as an ode to long-suffering sports fans -- a painful, awful ode. As with all of Queenan's writing, there's a lot of hilarity in this book, despite his perpetual agony of being a fan of the teams from his native Philadelphia all his life. And if you know about the Phillies (two championships in 136 years) and the Eagles (no championships between 1960 and 2018) and the 76ers (no championships since 1983) you know how he feels.

True Believers is a deep dive into some of the characteristics of the die-hard fan -- the willingness to defend and fight for and pay large amounts of cash to his beloved teams; the superstitions; the birth of fandom from childhood up; and the stupidity. If you've ever loved a team beyond all reason, ever quit following the team and kept coming back, ever said "Wait till next year" when there isn't a spark of hope in you that next year will be better, this book is for you. Even if you've finally given up and walked away, he has a chapter about that.

Don't think that Queenan calls all dedicated fans unrealistic or dumb. To the contrary. He writes that "it would be remiss to overlook the Manichaean nature of the true fan's relationship to his team. By this I mean that, while one is morally obligated to root, root, root for the home team, it is also perfectly acceptable to maintain a simultaneous hatred of the franchise and to curse the moment it first saw the light of day. I personally believe the Eagles and the Phillies have each taken about five years off my life through their vaudevillian antics down through the decades. As a friend once put it, the difference between the Phillies and the Third Reich is that after the Second World War, a few of the Nazis apologized for their crimes against humanity, while the boys in the colorful red pinstripes have remained obstreperously mute on the subject."

And don't think this is a book just for Philadelphia fans. In one chapter he discusses the woes of Jets fans, for example, describing the time "the Jets' ancient, mysterious, and very possibly insane owner Leon Hess went out and hired Richie Kotite to be his new head coach. In a remark so cryptic that cultural anthropologists will still be analyzing it centuries from now, Hess said, 'I want to win now.' Kotite, who had just lost his last seven games with the Eagles, thereupon guided the Jets to their worst season in history, winning just three games, and the next season, one. In Kotite's defense, it doesn't seem fair that a genuinely nice man who had survived brain surgery and four years in Philadelphia should then be asked to coach the Jets."

As I noted above, Queenan spends some pages looking into the origin of the suffering pastime of sports fandom, usually in childhood.

Fans' support must be based on one of two criteria. Either you grew up in a specific locality and inherited a congenital municipal connection to the team, or you grew up somewhere else but rooted for your father's teams. (In certain rare instances an exception could be made for supporting a team simply because your uncle Sal did. But only if he was your real uncle Sal and not some mythical figure you dreamed up to make your perfidy seem more palatable to your naive, gullible friends.)

After all, "it was morally unacceptable, an outrage against the laws of God and man, to root for teams with which these emotional or geographic ties did not exist. For starters, it weakened our national moral character by promulgating the notion that it was permissible to arbitrarily switch allegiances."

Without question, my favorite part of the book was Queenan's description of the turtle.

In a dark corner of my kitchen, right next to the radio, sits a hideous enamel turtle that has not budged from this position since October 1993. During that memorable year, or so I have come to believe, the turtle's uncanny telekinetic powers contributed in some way to the Philadelphia Phillies winning the National League Pennant. 

This is the kind of sports superstition everyone can admire. I know for a fact that when I was a youth, the Mets' Game 6 rally in 1986 was caused by me sitting in my house, on my street, on the edge of my bed, with my legs and arms wrapped around my old desk chair, watching on a blinkered old black-and-white TV. If I had gotten up during the rest of the inning, we would have lost. I was as much a key to the win as Knight, Mookie, and Aguilera. You're welcome, Mets fans.

And you know why the Beloved Mets have not won the World Series since? My family moved the next year.

Sunday recap.

So how was your Sunday?

Here's my story, in painless brevity:

1) Weather

Large Economy Size Dog Tralfaz was foiled again in his quest for snow. It was actually snowing when we went out at six, but it didn't mean it. All told, it wasn't even a dusting -- more like a film. It had melted by nine.

I think he's actually getting sore about it. Me, I still think Old Man Winter has something awful in the wings. I'm not putting away my Porta-Igloo, the Huge Lands' End Coat That Walks Like a Man, just yet. Or my thermal underpants.

What? Of course I have thermal underpants. Everyone in the Hudson Valley has thermal underpants. Even Paul Shaffer, I hear. Yeah, big ol' union suit, red as a stoplight.

2) Door

February is here! So my concerns about the blank door are over. Like many of my neighbors, I hung a big red Valentine's Day heart on the door. Stepped back; looked good. Then suddenly realized that the block now looks like a string of Japanese love hotels. Maybe this decorating for every holiday thing is a bad idea.

💖🏩💘🏩💓🏩

3) Sink

All right, all right, I didn't stop the stupid leak! Sheesh. I had the part but I couldn't get the hot water off. I needed to get a tool from the cellar, maybe some Liquid Wrench, and figure a way to do it without causing a boiling-hot geyser. I'm sure this will all be blogfodder at some future time.

4) Groundhog Day

Staten Island Chuck, the groundhog at the zoo on that much-abused borough, predicted an early spring this year, as did that Pennsylvania guy. Chuck has the higher accuracy rating, so Phil probably just fell in line. I'll remind readers that Chuck bit Mike Bloomberg and was maliciously treated by Bill "Warren Wilhelm Jr." de Blasio, so over the years he has also proven to be a good bellwether of human character.

5) Church

Our parish has two afternoon Masses, noon and six. We usually make the noon. It was jamming like Christmas Eve. The pastor welcomed everyone, including those who normally make the six p.m. but didn't because of...

6) The Super Bowl

As you may recall, I have not watched any NFL football since the commissioner decided that political correctness and football go together like mac & cheese, so the crazy people should be allowed to run the asylum. But to be accurate, I caught a little of the Bills/Texans playoff game when we were visiting friends last month, because they had it on. Prior to that the last game I saw any of was last year's Super Bowl, and yes, that was because I had just fallen in the driveway as gracefully as a piano in a Chuck Jones cartoon and gotten a concussion. So, dazed on the sofa, there was nothing I could do when my wife put it on. She's as bad a channel-flipper as any man you may know, and she likes football.

This year I distracted the family unit with Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl XVI for as long as I could (Team Fluff won in a squeaker!), but the unit insisted on seeing the game. And it was a pretty exciting finish. I hear that Hard Rock Stadium has a lot of gold confetti for sale cheap.

And that's another Sunday in the books! Who knows what thrills away today?

I do. Proofreading and physical therapy. Blecch.

Punt.

Another September and another year I intend to spurn the NFL. They still have the same dumb commissioner; they still feature a workforce that thinks it can get away with all sorts of behavior that would get any other employee of any company in the country fired so fast they would be standing on the street with a cardboard box before they knew what was happening. And the NFL still treats its fans like suckers and idiots.

So, I'd rather be neither.

My previous years' boycotts was, I admit, eased by the fact that the New York Giants have been pretty bad -- 8 wins over the last two seasons. I wasn't missing anything. Some Giants fans I know are pretty excited for this season, and I have been told that they went undefeated in this preseason. There is nothing about this last bit of information that would excite me. The Giants were 5-0 in the preseason in 2014 and 6-10 in the regular season. If they're undefeated twelve games into this season, I still won't want to watch them.

When Major League Baseball shot itself in the tush back in 1994, doing what two World Wars couldn't do -- cancel the World Series -- they at least spent the next four seasons trying desperately to get the fans interested again. The NFL pisses off half the country, the half that contains most of its fans, and just assumes we'll fall in line if they wait us out. And they're probably right.

But I've realized that I'm busy enough without squeezing hours of football into my week.

I'm not so much angry anymore at the anti-American protests and the league's embarrassing response; I'm just tired of the crap. I have better things to do.

Head of the class.

First, I want to thank everyone here, on the Great Lileks's site, and via email (frederick_key AT yahoo.com for those of you still communicating the stone age way, like me) for the kind thoughts following the injury that kept me out of action for a few weeks. Spoiler alert: It was a mild concussion, and thank God it wasn't worse.

Here's what happened:

It was Super Bowl Sunday, February 3. The weather was a bit warmer than it had been, causing some ice and snow to melt. That morning I was reading an important essay, "Ten Reasons to Have a Gravel Driveway," in the book pictured above by the indefatigable Red Green. Number 8 on the list:

8) Inertness. Gravel is rock in a manageable size, so it tends to be virtually impervious to chemicals, heat or impact. So don't worry about any gasoline spills or the resultant fireball--the driveway will be fine. Same thing when you fall off your roof; even if you land on something hard, like your head, the gravel will remain unscathed.

Ha-ha, I laugh hollowly, knowing what was to come. My driveway was paved years ago, and resurfaced during another medical mess last year. A perfect blacktop surface for nighttime accumulation of black ice.

Sunday night I was out there with older dog Tralfaz. As usual, he headed toward the neighbors' yard, and I knew why -- because of the ice melt there would be a delicious mud puddle between the properties, and he enjoys a little digestif. I was standing on the grass by the walkway as I saw his fuzzy butt go in that direction, and I said, "Hey, get back--"

When people get hit on the head in comic books the sound effect is usually Wham or Thud or maybe Pow. But when my head hit the asphalt it was like a Ponk, like a bowling ball bounced off concrete, and no wonder. I have had a lot of experience falling (more about that in a moment) and can usually fall pretty well, making those lovely balletic gyrations that may not prevent the fall but A) slow the effect of gravity, B) help ensure a soft landing spot, like my tush, and C) provide plenty of entertainment for onlookers. That didn't occur this time. My foot hit the invisible patch of ice and I went down so fast I didn't know what was happening until it had happened. Suddenly I was on my back with a terrible pain in my head.

Clutching the old melon, I rolled onto my front, feeling the world lurch around me. I had no idea what happened to Tralfaz, but I thought I heard barking. As it turned out, it was another dog. At that time on a winter's evening I would expect to see no one walking around our quiet neighborhood -- only people dumb enough to own a dog, maybe. Like the guy a few doors up from us, who was standing by me saying, "You okay? You need help?"

Knocked silly as I was, in pain, on the dirty ground, head spinning, in danger of puking, embarrassed, my first thought was along the lines of This reminds me of college. My second thought was Oh my God if he falls down he'll sue. So I said something like, "Slipped on black ice! Stay on the grass!"

He was kind enough to go fetch my wife; I couldn't see anything at that point and I think the dogs may have been barking at each other. While he was ringing my doorbell my pride took over and I made the effort to get up. If you've ever read a passage in a book where someone staggers to his feet, you can picture how I looked. Wobbling, still clutching the head, the whole world spinning around me. I knew it was a concussion immediately; I'd seen athletes do this enough times on TV. But I was determined that unless I was in agony or puking uncontrollably I was not going to go to the hospital. Not on Super Bowl night. There are seven nights you don't want to go to the hospital in America, and the others are Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Halloween, July Fourth, and St. Patrick's Day. Because you don't want to be in the ER surrounded by drunks. And that's the most unfair thing about the whole business -- I hadn't been drinking! I wasn't even watching the football game! I'd been watching the freaking Puppy Bowl earlier!

My wife, bless her, answered the neighbor's call and got me and Tralfaz inside. She planted me on the sofa, where I found that as long as I promised not to budge an inch, the world would agree not to spin like a top. I remembered that this once happened to Underdog, only in his case it was caused by an alien mastermind. In mine it was caused by winter and my own non-master mind.

So that's where we'll leave this thrilling medical drama for the moment: me on the sofa, gripped by fear and nausea, wife trying to get the dogs settled, the canines worked up, sensing that something is wrong. Will I be smart enough to go to the hospital on Monday? Will the dogs learn to walk themselves on icy nights? Will I suddenly be able to play the piano? Will I DIE from my injuries? Come back Wednesday for our next episode of As the World Turns and Turns and Turns!

Fight with ferocious ferociously!

I have a friend whose son played football for Army, which here in the lovely Hudson Valley is the closest thing we have to a college team. College football is a big fat nothing in most of the northeast -- it's hard now to believe that Columbia was a football powerhouse in the early twentieth century.

Army football was pretty bad when I moved to this area, which is why I called for bringing back the military draft, assuming some talent would be swept up with the masses. But in 2016, some weird things started happening -- the Black Knights got a passing game, and started ending seasons with a winning record. My friend's son has been off the team for some years, so I told my pal that clearly his young man had set the wheels in motion toward their current success. "Yeah," he said, "or maybe they've been getting peewee opponents."

Regardless, this Saturday is the big Army-Navy game, and Navy's kind of sucking wind this year, so it should be a good one for Army fans and veterans.

But it got me thinking about college football fight songs. As I've noted before, my small college was so invisible to the NCAA that our division didn't even get a Roman numeral. I may have been mistaken when I wrote that the division was represented by an emoji (😜), as I attended in the pre-emoji era, but it was something like that. Maybe Division §. If we had a fight song, it probably had two power chords and was composed by a bad garage band called the Future Podiatrists of America. Or the Free Design.

Members of my family, though, knew the Notre Dame fight song (a.k.a. "Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame"), even though they were not Catholic or from Indiana or had ever been to college. Hell, they knew "Buckle Down, Winsocki," even though they weren't from the fictional town in the film Best Foot Forward. A good fight song is a good song.

Since my schools going back to kindergarten have been historically lame at sports, I've decided to pick some other fight song. Here are the ones I am considering -- note that I'm posting this on December 5, 2018, and if you're viewing this page in The Future, Where We Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives, YouTube will probably have reshuffled the videos and they won't appear below, because even though Blogger and YouTube are owned by the same company, they don't care if they hose the lowly blogmeister. Let's give it a shot.

Here's Tom Lehrer's, for Harvard, one of his first parodies, written when he was an undergraduate at said school:

When I posted Lehrer's song in the comments of the Great Lileks's site, a fellow commenter (I believe it was NH_Flier) posted "We Are Victorious," the military march from the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

But I'm leaning toward Weird Al's most excellent generic sports fight song:

Any one of these is better and more sincere than that precious "Fight Song" that one hears from time to time, usually from people who have never landed a punch or gotten so much as a black eye. It isn't strong enough to inspire a Pop Warner team.

"Wrecking balls inside my brain"? You don't need a fight song, kid, you need Unisom. I'm sticking with Al.

The shoe is on the other football?

A friend asks if I'm continuing my boycott of the National Football League, begun last year. It went all year. I did not watch the Super Bowl for the first time since 1984. So would I do it again this season?

Hmm. Well, I guess I should consult my decision tree.

I am reminded of the lines from Benjamin Franklin in the play and film 1776 (not from the actual Benjamin Franklin, I imagine, but he wrote so much, who knows?): "Never was such a valuable possession so stupidly and so recklessly managed than this entire continent by the British Crown."

It's not hard to find some examples of stupid management ruining valuable properties -- Coke in the 1980s, the Big Three car manufacturers in the 1970s, Kodak in the 1980s and 1990s, Kmart/Sears now -- and these were only examples of things that were not quite brought to complete destruction. I suspect Roger Goodell could have destroyed any of these companies to the point where they'd be sad memories at this point, like A&P, Enron, Trans World Corporation, Wedtech, and so on. Hell, I think the man could destroy an entire continent if he wore the British Crown.

Roger Goodell kicking football
(artist's interpretation)

So what's been going on since my blog entry on this topic last year? Well, under Goodell's crack leadership, the NFL instituted a namby-pamby policy to deal with the knee issue, a policy unlike that of any company on the planet (which is: Protest On Your Own Time, Stupid), a policy that was rescinded at the first sign of pushback. NFL sponsor and notorious sweatshop runner and sexual harassment playground Nike decided to name washed-up crybully Colin Kaepernick its man of the year or something, a thumb in the eye to football fans.

At least Hank Hill went on to sell propane
and propane accessories.

That's the thing I want to point out here: NFL fans who love their country and respect law enforcement have done nothing wrong and are the only ones being punished. No one seems to understand this.

And the NFL continues to hope we'll keep talking about all this instead of its function as a brain-injury machine.

Throughout all this, Roger Goodell has shown the guts, the leadership, and the keen intellect normally associated with a headless chicken, so the NFL voted to extend his contract for five years, another thumb in the eye to football fans.

So I'm sorry, NFL; there's no way I can watch football with all these thumbs in my eye. You may gain my support again when you throw this clueless moron Goodell into the pit of shame where he belongs, deal with your concussion issue, and stop acting like terrified sheep with employees who bring disgrace onto the your product. Until then, I have much better things to do with my time and money. Like, anything else.

Mud and ice.

Boy, the weather changed fast.

After weeks of very cold temperatures and snow that refused to go anywhere, we hit a record high on Friday. Counting windchill, it was more than a 70 degree swing in three days. Parts of the state, like Syracuse, hit records for the date -- in their case, 62 degrees. It certainly felt like a record high here, but it wasn't like you could run outside and sunbathe -- it rained like crazy all damn day.

I think I spent the bulk of the day drying off dogs. My wife was at it with the good ol' Swiffer SteamBoost, but the mud and water splashed in the hall every time some puppy needed to visit the great outdoors. The snow was melting at the fastest pace I have ever seen. This was tragic for the big dog, Tralfaz, my fuzzy chum who, if forced to choose between me and snow, might very well pick snow. Our last outing Friday night we visited his domain, the snow fort at the end of the driveway created by our plow guy. It had been reduced to a single manhole-size splotch of snow. Tralfaz laid on it, covering it almost entirely, rolled on it, tried to bury his face in it as he does with snow. It was the saddest thing I have seen in a long time. By Saturday even that was gone.

Saturday morning I took baby dog Nipper (90+ pounds of fun & muscle) out to the backyard for his early morning romp, and I had to cut it short. The yard had gotten so muddy it was sucking the shoes right off my feet. No kidding; and I was wearing a pair of rubber moc boots Mrs. Claus bought me for Christmas, or I probably would have had mud inside my socks. It made me think of this meme:

No kidding; thanks to TV we kind of thought quicksand could pop up anywhere -- in the woods, by a pond, in the supermarket parking lot, in aisle 5, you name it.

It also brought back a memory of the time in my youth when I drove three of my friends in my dad's economy car to play toss the ol' football around in the park. We got in a pickup touch football game with some other guys. After a while we discovered that, not only had the park been subject to at least a week of soaking rain, but the rain had also caused the sewers to back up, resulting in that odd odor that got stronger as the game progressed. I don't remember if we won, but I do remember being in that small car with three other big, filthy, sweaty guys, smelling of sewer. I had to clean out the car and then hose myself off before I could even get in the house. It was a little more than 50 degrees, not the kind of weather you want to be running cold water on yourself off the backyard hose in your underwear. I'm not sure my mother didn't toss my jeans directly in a Hefty bag on the curb.

So when I told Nipper it was time to go in, it was time to go in.

Later on Saturday the rain cleared off, the wind picked up, and the temperature dropped like a stone. It fell below freezing by eight in the morning; it was 19 by six p.m. Fortunately there was not a lot of water on the streets to freeze, but the yard, such a sodden mess, became icy enough to send out young Wayne Gretzky to practice hockey. This morning when I took out the boys it was 9. Glad I had my long thermal underpants on.

It's been such an odd couple of days that it seems to have shut up the climate deniers and the climate cultists all at the same time. No matter where you are on such things, if it makes for a peaceful and quiet Sunday, it is a good thing.