Today's Bamboozle

I need to smack myself in the head with this whenever I think I'll watch a game on TV on any given Sunday, because no - I won't.  I'll watch commercials and replays and people standing around not doing jack shit.

I'll spend more time watching video of something the players did a few seconds before than I'll spend watching the players actually doing what I'm watching on video.

Average length of NFL game: 3:12:00

Average time the ball is actually in play: 0:11:00

Number of commercials: 100+

It Was A Metaphor After All

So OK, congrats to the Patriots for a pretty amazing comeback win last night.  

Tom Brady is probably the best ever at quarterback.  And maybe it's because he cheats. Or maybe not.

And you can argue that Bill Belichick is the best coach ever. And maybe it's because he cheats. Or maybe not.

And maybe New England is the best franchise ever. And maybe it's because they cheat. Or maybe not.

I say, "Teach the controversy".

Anyway, the top trending hashtag on Twitter this morning is #NotMySuperBowlChamps, and it's all about setting the game as a metaphor for the election and gloating about it.

Breaking: Jill Stein announces demand for a re-match because Russia hacked the football. Send her lots of money. #NotMySuperBowlChamps

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 6, 2017

#NotMySuperBowlChamps https://t.co/69yNWU2WNs

— Yashar (@yashar) February 6, 2017

We're all so clever.

It's the spectacle that's important - especially to The Daddy State.  Bread and Circuses. It gets the blood up and inspires us ever forward.

And yes, I know - the whole bit about drawing the parallels with Rome and the Gladiators is old and tired. But y'know what? If it wasn't so fucking obvious all the fucking time, maybe we could stop doing it. Or maybe not.

I'm just glad I can put it down and walk away again -  for a while.

My Super Bowl Prediction

I've been thinking about this for a while. Something that keeps popping into my mind is the fact that I've watched every Super Bowl. I've been in front of a TV on Super Bowl Sunday every year for 50 years. 

50. Fucking. Years.

And I'll be there again today. Not because I feel a weird need to blindly continue a personal tradition, but because this is being hyped now as something much bigger than just a game. And that in itself seems pretty bizarre - the thought that an event that couldn't possibly get more over-hyped is now being overly over-hyped into America's Mutual Orgasm Of Battle-Porn.

The team representing the blackest city in USAmerica Inc - and the political home of The American Civil Rights Tradition - is up against the team from a city that is known for (and in some ways, proud of) being the most racist city anywhere; the team with a quarterback, a coach and an owner who're publicly good buddies with 45*.

So while there is nothing at all to the bullshit of God Will Decide This By Taking Sides In Mortal Combat, I'm pretty sure that's how it'll be characterized by the side making the claim that their cause is represented by the winner of the game.

A fucking game.

BTW - here's hoping the so-called president Donald (The Pissant) Trump gets his ass stomped by Genuine Home-Grown Hero John Lewis.

My Donkeys

1700 guys making almost $5 Billion a year, but it's the jewelry they really play for.

Peyton adds to his collection.#Horsepowerhttps://t.co/2ToDeTQsc9

— Denver Broncos (@Broncos) June 13, 2016

Pretending It Doesn't Matter

It bothers me a lot that they can't play football for more than a few minutes without somebody being in need of medical attention.

Football's my game.  I loved playing it.  I love watching it.  I get it and it gets me.  It's my game.  But there's something wrong with it, and I have to admit there's something wrong with it.

I just really wish I had confidence that the people who have the power to make the necessary changes will, in fact, make those changes.

hat tip = politicians are poodyheads

Brady's Balls

Billy Belichick

...rhymes (in a Slant Rhyme kinda way) with Lyin' Sack O' Shit.

hat tip = FB friend KH

Today's Worst

Seems like every other day or so, something pops up about something I've really loved for a long time that makes me have to consider blowin' it off for a while or telling it to take a flying fuck at a rollin' doughnut.

The world just kinda sucks right now.

Trying

Trying not to laugh while trying not to cry while trying not to puke, while trying to figure out how to make sense of these 1st World Problems of Privilege.

Ohio State wins the big game (beat the snot outa the Ducks), and it came as no surprise to anyone when the Traditional Celebratory Riot soon followed.


And so also too, I just can't resist:  When will the moderates of White Middle Class America step up and not only take full responsibility for the actions of their people - but take it upon themselves to eradicate the violent behavior of the Young-Adult-ish Extremists among them?

Undercurrent

So, 5 guys - the receiver corps - who play for the St Louis Rams did the Hands-Up-Don't-Shoot thing when they came out of the tunnel during introductions yesterday.



Which BTW just continues a long proud tradition of Americans standing up for what's right, and being unafraid to speak the truth.



I remember thinking back then that it wasn't cool for Carlos and Smith to do that, but I was fortunate enough to have people in my life to present an alternative viewpoint - to teach me that ya gotta take your shots whenever the chance comes along.  Powerful people are 'in charge' and they need everybody to stay in line, and if staying in line makes permanent losers out of a significant bunch of Americans who're supposed to be getting exactly the same chance as everybody else, then somebody has to have the balls to step outa that line; somebody has to throw a little sand in the gears; somebody has to take one small moment to remind us that all anybody really wants is for this country to try a little harder to live up to its promises.

Anyway, then the Rams hung 52 on the Dog-Ass Raiders.  

And Dallas lost.

And my Donkeys beat KC to stay on top in the AFC West.

Pretty good Sunday.

The Real Outrage

Olbermann brings it - and nothing will ever be the same.

If It's Not About Football

One of my basic themes is "It's not about what they tell us it's about".

Things change, and that's a necessary thing - not necessarily a good thing, but a necessary thing nonetheless.  And it seems to me that we've changed our way into some weird place where we think we have it all figured out - eg: with computerized automation, we can build things to an amazing degree of accuracy, within tolerances that we only dreamed about 35 years ago.  Productivity is thru the roof and the costs of production are so low, we can afford to waste billions of dollars shipping goods from cheap-labor countries to low-price consumers and still turn record-breaking profits, etc etc etc.

And yet, with all our big-brain accomplishments, it would appear the world around us insists on going up in flames anyway, as we sit and wonder what we're doing wrong.  Which led me on a typically circuitous path to remembering the scene from North Dallas Forty (the book, which was pretty good; not the movie, which was bloody fucking awful) where the D Lineman finally goes off on one of the coaches, saying "Whenever we say it's a game, you call it a business; and whenever we call it a business, you say it's just a game."

So, maybe we could take a look at the NFL as an example of our obsession with a kind of robotic pursuit of smash-fitting people into a marketing department's spreadsheet model of perfection -  per Steve Almond:

What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any football fan, the sense that I was watching an event that mattered. The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention. The players dashed about, their bodies lit in a kind of bright funnel of consequence.

There are all sorts of laudable reasons people watch sports, and football in particular. We wish to reconnect to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. We wish for moral structure in a world that feels chaotic, a chance to scratch the inborn itch for tribal affiliation. Sports allow men, in particular, a common language by which to converse.

When we root for a team, the conscious desire is to see them win, to bask in reflected glory. But the unconscious function of fandom is, I think, just the opposite. It’s a form of surrender to our essential helplessness in the universal order. In an age of scientific assurance, people still yearn for spiritual struggle. Fandom allows us to fire our faith in the forge of loss. Because our teams inevitably do lose. And this experience forms the bedrock of our identification.

Backing a team helps Americans, in particular, contend with the unease of living in the most competitive society on earth, a society in which we’re socialized to feel like losers.

That’s the special sauce that capitalism puts on the burgers. It’s how you turn citizens into efficient workers and consumers. You convince them that they are forever falling behind.

A Sad Time For Me

I will absolutely admit that I'm a football guy.  It's my game.  It's been my game since about 3rd grade.  Seems a little silly to me now, but it's easy to see how you can get hooked once you strap on the armor and everybody seems to be really excited to watch you go crashing into people.

"Football is not a contact sport - it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport."  (Vince Lombardi and/or Duffy Daugherty)

--and let's not forget--

"All real Americans love the sting of battle." (George Patton)

I was hooked.  My game; my idea of fun.  Of course, eventually it morphs into "My ball; my territory; my team against the world; I will destroy you in pursuit of my goals"; and above all else, "football teaches a young man important lessons he'll carry with him throughout his life blah blah blah".  (accompaniment by a choir of angels optional on the last bit)

Gosh, it's almost as if it's perfect training for an authoritarian society being geared for industrialized perpetual warfare.  Solely in defense of all things wholesomely traditional and homespun of course - while conveniently co-opted (deliberately or otherwise) to accommodate ambitions of global hegemony.  "They" get us to do what "they" want us to do by convincing us we're actually doing something else.  And even when we know that what we're doing isn't particularly a good thing, we can be taught to rationalize our way into believing we're doing it for "all the right reasons".

So anyway, these things have been flowing thru my brain channels for a while and I've been trying to resolve some of the resultant dissonance, and then along comes Jerry Sandusky and Jameis Winston and Ray Rice.  And I have to wonder - just what the fuck is going on?Let's take a quick spin around the InterToobz.

Here's a piece in WSJ Market Watch:

Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer is facing aggravated assault charges in connection with alleged fights with his wife earlier this year. It’s the latest in a series of recent criminal cases involving NFL players.

Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson is facing child-abuse charges. Ray Rice was recently dropped by the Baltimore Ravens after video surfaced of him knocking out his then-fiance in an elevator last February. And Ray McDonald of the San Francisco 49ers was arrested on domestic-violence charges in connection with an incident involving his fiance, who is pregnant.

USA Today maintains a database of NFL player arrests dating back to the year 2000.

According to the data, some 732 NFL player arrests have been reported in the past 14 years. Of those, 88 were on domestic violence charges, including some players who were arrested more than once.

(note on the WSJ piece: interesting how the bankers take notice of the problem once it begins to threaten their prospects for making money from other peoples efforts)

And here's something pretty interesting from Deadspin:

By my count, the three most common charges in the NFL database were DUI, assault/battery (including domestic violence), and drug possession, with 72 percent of all incidents including at least one of these charges. Below, we compare the NFL arrest rates for these offenses, plus weapons charges, to the arrest rates for the country as a whole in 2010.

At first glance, this looks not so great for the league. With 7.4 annual assault/battery/domestic charges per thousand players, the league saw 34 percent more arrests for these violent crimes than the general population; 8.3 annual DUI charges per thousand was 81 percent higher than the U.S. average; and 2.2 weapons charges per thousand was 324 percent (!) higher. NFL players faced only 4.2 drug charges per thousand, which was actually 20 percent lower than the U.S. as a whole.* (We can guess why: The NFL tests for recreational drugs during the season, so there's one good reason not to use them, and some drugs also make it awfully hard to compete at the highest athletic level.)

But comparing NFL players to the general population does us little good. NFL players are all adult men, and adult men are more likely to be arrested than the population at large. How do those numbers look?

Well now - that's better.  Whew!  Looked like trouble there for a minute.  But hey, NFL'ers
are just a buncha regular guys who, as it turns out, are actually a better buncha guys than the rest of you losers.

Yeah, but no.  Ya see, there's a fair bit of a huge fuckin' difference between any given NFL player and all the other adult Testicular-Americans.

The biggest factor "explaining" the difference in the crime rates is that high level footballers have high-powered organizations working really hard to make an awful lot of these pesky little legal problems magically disappear way before they have a chance to show up in the crime stats.

Every big school; every NFL franchise - they all have many many many millions of dollars that we pay them for shitty seats, flat beer and stale nachos at the local Taxpayer Subsidized Stadium, which doubles as a billion-dollar billboard for the local corporation that happens to own the most Coin-Operated Politicians in that particular media market. Anyway, they have this shitload of money they get to spend very freely to hire PR Fixers and Brand Polishers and .50-Caliber Lawyers who specialize in bleaching out the dirty laundry to make sure it's all neat and sparkly in time for the next kickoff.  Add the efforts of the NCAA and the NFLPA, and it means they can count on a significant percentage of us to be totally dismissive of anything that "distracts" from our feeling entitled to ignore the wrong-doing of our all-universe god-annointed heroes in order to enjoy USAmerica Inc's game, even as the coverup of all that wrong-doing rots the whole institution from the inside out.

It all starts to look way too much like Bread and Circuses, and it has the stench of a very bad abscess.

Olbermann

Just in case you've grown unfamiliar with such things because of our long national drought - what Keith just did there - that's a little thing us oldsters used call Journalism.

Linda Cohn (also at ESPN) has been guilty of unapologetically committing Acts of Reportage as well.  I just can't find any good clips of her work on the Ray Rice thing right now.

One "Simple" Step

The New York Daily News has announced that it won't use the word "Redskins" anymore in its coverage of the NFL's Washington franchise.

The Daily News publishes its annual, best-in-the-city National Football League preview on Thursday with one deliberate omission — the Washington franchise appears without the name Redskins.

Similarly, its logo depicting a feathered Native American has been replaced with an image that uses the team’s burgundy and gold colors to key readers to stories, columns and statistics relating to Washington.

Henceforth, in The News’ sports coverage, the team that has been known as the Redskins since 1933 will simply be called Washington.

Enormously popular and deeply ingrained in sporting culture, the Redskins name is a throwback to a vanished era of perniciously casual racial attitudes. No new franchise would consider adopting a name based on pigmentation — Whiteskins, Blackskins, Yellowskins or Redskins — today. The time has come to leave the word behind.

Good on 'em.  And just in case you need some convincing, let's run this test:  You and I will take a little trip to some tribe-owned resort and/or casino and/or anywhere else that might have Native American clients or employees - maybe we could drop in on a cop shop or a sheriff's department in northwestern New Mexico or southern Montana.  Anyway, once we're inside, you go ahead and find some folks with dark hair and darkish skin and "that Indian look"; you stand face to face and you address them thusly: " Hey, Redskin - how ya doin'?" --or-- "Yo, Redskin, can we get a coupla beers over here?" --or-- "Wow, I didn't know so many Redskins were working for the police department."

You look 'em square in the eye and you say it loud and with all your usual bullshit I'm-no-racist conviction.  You try that a good half dozen times with half a dozen people, and if nobody either verbally slaps you down or literally kicks you in the nuts, then I'm with you and I'll fight your fight against your Political Correctness Phantom Demons.

But if it turns out otherwise (and if we manage to survive the encounters), then you get to drag your dumbfuck attitudes a little closer to this end of  last century and stop using that stoopid shitty word.

KO'd

I miss Keith's rants.



And I wonder why a smart guy like Stephen A Smith decides to say incredibly stupid shit like this:

I understand that Smith's main function at ESPN is Provocateur - the guy who gets paid "to say what nobody else has the balls to say on the air" (which sometimes just ends up being the SportsGab version of "both sides do it; let's hear the other side blah blah blah").  That's his niche, and he's good at it, and he's done quite well by it.

Smith got (rightly) slammed hard because his remarks sound a whole lot like Blame The Victim.

And he continues to get slammed (again rightly) for his stoopid-sounding attempts  "to set the record straight", which sounds like: "I love women; some of the people dearest to me are women; and all they need to do is not make me beat the fuck out of 'em."

This will be a long tweeted message, folks. So please stay with me and let me finish my complete thought before responding...b/c i'm ANNOYED

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

In discussing the Ray Rice ruling earlier today on @ESPN_FirstTake, me and@RealSkipBayless ventured into discussing domestic violence.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Upon hearing what I had to say, although admitting I could've been more articulate on the matter, let me be clear: I don't understand how on

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

earth someone could interpret that I somehow was saying women are to blame for domestic violence. And when I saw @MichelleDBeadle -- a

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

colleague I have profound respect for -- tweet what she tweeted, enough is enough. Something needs to be said right now.
REPEATEDLY i said:

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

There is absolutely no excuse to put your hands on a women. REPEATEDLY, I said dudes who do that need to be dealt with. REPEATEDLY, I echoed

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

when confronted by it in the past -- when someone was stupid enough to touch a loved one of this man, raised by 4 older sisters, a mom and

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

numerous female relatives and loved ones, that man was dealt with. From that point, I simply asked: now what about the other side.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

If a man is pathetic and stupid enough to put his hands on a woman -- which I have NEVER DONE, btw -- of course he needs to pay the price.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Who on earth is denying that? But what about addressing women on how they can help prevent the obvious wrong being done upon them?

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

In no way was I accusing a women of being wrong. I was simply saying what that preventive measures always need to be addressed because

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

there's only but so much that can be done after the fact....once the damage is already done. Nothing more.
My apologies to @MichelleDBeadle

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

And any woman out there who misconstrued what I said. I have always -- and will always -- find violence against a women every bit as

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

horrific as women, themselves, find it. Always have. Always will, which my personal behavior exemplifies. I'll strive to be more articulate

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

in the future. But be clear, I wasn't BLAMING women for anything. I was simply saying to take all things into consideration for preventative

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

purposes. Period.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Yeah - kinda like Bull Connor saying, "We have lotsa negras down here; and we don't have a problem with 'em as long they don't do nuthin' that makes us turn the dogs and the fire hoses on 'em."

So maybe we're getting a little better at seeing thru the bullshit(?)  I dunno, but it looks like a feud is erupting inside the ESPN family and it'll be interesting to see how Management handles it.