Well, That Explains Everything

The headline on CBS News reads,in part, "Why are there two games in Week 2?" I had been wondering why there are two NFL games on Monday night, and at roughly the same time to boot, so I clicked on the headline to read the article.

Silly me. There are a lot of words in the article, but very little meaning, as has become the norm these days. The article's verbiage boiled down to, "because the NFL scheduled it that way," which I had already figured out for myself. (Well, not "figured out" - it was self evident.) I was actually looking for an answer as to why the NFL scheduled it what way, an answer that was not provided.

Unwarranted Pessimism?

I was accused of "unwarranted pessimism" regarding my last post. I stand my ground.

The "science is settled" that sea levels are rising and that all of our coastal cities will be drowned within about two decades. No one in government at any level refutes that, in fact all government backs it unreservedly. The most dense population of this nation, some 40% of our people, will be flooded out of their homes in about twenty years.

Is anyone, one single person of authority, proposing a solution that consists of moving those people to higher ground? No. The universally proposed remedy is to stop the oceans from rising.

I repeat. The ship is holed beneath the waterline and is sinking fast.

The Race for President

Almost two years before the election the race began, and it continues resemble two village idiots wearing blindfolds stumbling down what they hope is the racetrack, but isn't, not knowing where the hell the finish line is, or what the hell they would do with the prize if they crossed the line first. What makes it more appalling is that no one wants either of them to be in the race, but we can't find anyone else we want to run it either, which keeps these two stumbling their way along.

Take heart, though , as I do, by knowing that it doesn't really matter. It isn't really important who the captain is when the ship is holed below the waterline and sinking fast.

One Cop Town

I was reading a piece online today, and the guy mentioned growing up in a small town which had only one policeman. It evoked a childhood memory of living in a similar town. Can’t say I “grew up” there, but we lived there for three years or so, which was a long time for a military family.

The town had a single cop, who we called “old pear shape” for self evident reasons. He drove a Dodge which was almost always parked in front of Seitz’s drug store while “old pear shape” sat inside drinking sodas and jawboning with cronies. Crime was, as you might imagine, not rampant.

I was, actually, one of “old pear shape’s” most hated criminals. Unlike most high school kids, I had my own car – a 1951 Hudson Hornet. I had told my father that I wanted a car, and he replied, “Fine, you can have anything that you can save up the money to pay for.” That was actually a far more generous reply than most boys got when they asked their fathers for a car in those days.

The car had a “straight eight” engine, which I had tuned to a cat’s whisker. It did not take long for me to find out that my Hudson could outrun “old pear shape’s” Dodge, which did not please him at all. There were many things in those days that he could not punish me for unless he could catch me, and he could not catch me. He couldn’t set roadblocks either, because there was only one of him.

(Yes, I was a cocky little shit when I was a kid. Some people claim I never outgrew that including, once in a while, my wife.)

Along with tuning the engine, I had rigged the car with a cutout, so that I could send the exhaust straight to the tailpipe, bypassing the muffler. The noise was wonderful, although “old pear shape” didn’t think so. In fact, it really pissed him off, but he couldn’t ticket me for it unless he caught me while I was making the noise. Which, of course, he couldn’t.

My favorite trick was to cruise down Main Street and, just as I was approaching the drug store, open the cutout and gun the engine, blasting past the drug store at high speed and high noise level. “Old pear shape” would come dashing out of the drug store, or as close as he could come to dashing, more like sort of waddling, jump in his Dodge and come after me, much to my delight and that of any of my friends who were riding with me.

You had to be there and to be 18 years old, I guess. It sounds pretty trivial by today’s standards, but it was fun at the time.