Sunday, November 10, 2019

 Dad-blamit, the Saints lost, 26-9. Coming off a bye week but 7-1, rampaging through the season, and they get dominated by a 1-7 team. Worse, it was the damn Falcons. There was some hinky shit going on in with referees, but Atlanta just outplayed them. Sloppy play from the Saints didn't help. And damn Alabama got slapped around like cheap goons by LSU yesterday, to boot. So there's some joy in New Orleans tonight, but not much. No joy in the Thompson house, though.



 When people ask me if I have any "guilty pleasures," I generally answer in the negative. I really don't see why I should be ashamed of country music or Bullwinkle cartoons or Weird Westerns or anything I'm into. But when I think about, I guess I'd have to say my guilty pleasure is football.

 Look, I've never been a sports guy. A general lack of coordination and overall laziness prevented me from ever being anything but laughable when I tried to play anything. Graceless and slough-footed, slow and never had much upper-body strength, by the time I hit high school I was pretty much done with athletics. I still played backyard football with my chums, but I distinctly remember doing it at 23 and hurting for the rest of the week. So that was that, then.

 Nor did I ever have a deep, encyclopedic knowledge of sports or players. I couldn't tell you who hit the most home runs in whatever season or lead  the NFL in passing in 1990, pretty much because I don't care. I can remember minutiae about country music or the Marvel Universe up till 1990 or Douglas Adams books, but when it comes to sports, my interest ends when the game does. And I used to be a sports reporter, to boot.

 But I do enjoy watching sports, or football and baseball anyway. I can watch a bit of basketball live but televised bores me to tears. Baseball is only worth watching on the tube because turning it off because it gets boring after a couple innings doesn't cost anything. I never really could get into other sports, though I have given soccer (football to the rest of the world, and why not) a serious effort the last couple of World Cups. It just does not move me.

 I really couldn't give you a why I enjoy watching those sports beyond they're what my parents liked. Momma is still a die-hard Mets fan. She can tell you all that weird piddly stuff and continually asks me like I give a damn. Me, I just enjoy paying attention to a game for a little bit if for no other reason than it fills the hours.

 That all being said, I do consider it a "guilty pleasure" because professional sports is as evil a business as they come, topped only by advertising and tobacco. Maybe. That might be hyperbole, but it still has a nugget of truth to it. Since 2001, at least, the NFL has shown itself to a be a group of mendacious greed heads who use up the players' health, physical and mental, to bilk millions of dollars out of gormless schmucks who otherwise have no inner life.

 And the fans are almost as bad. When Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck decided to  retire after a sustaining another injurty in a preseason game, the dirty bastards in the stands booed him as he left the field. The man put his body out their for 10 years and racked up an impressive list of injuries all so the drooling morons that make up the Colt Nation had a reason to live from Sunday to Sunday, and they booed him. We're learning more and more about CTE injuries due to harder hits causing more brain trauma, but if a player bails out after a couple of years or, god forbid, the League takes steps to no longer pretend it doesn't exist, a bunch of fat slobs one more bratwurst away from their second heart attack calls the players "wimps".

 And the whole Colin Kaepernick business. That's just something. About once a week we'll watch a game where some clay-fisted quarterback prove he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, and Momma will ask me, "Why do they let him play but no one tries that Kaepernick kid," except Momma can never pronounce his name properly.

 The answer to that is, of course, he embarrassed not just the NFL but also showed how empty the cheap bullshit "patriotism" of the anthem before the game was. It wasn't because the League wanted to "honor America"; it was because the U.S. Armed Forces sent millions of dollars towards the NFL and those asshole love money more than their kids. Furthermore, his kneeling drew attention to one of America's uglier little blemishes; that is, extrajudicial murder of African-Americans by law enforcement officials who, if anything, get a slap on the wrist.

 And Major League Baseball? Good god. If it weren't for the crooked and the greedy, boh managers and players, they wouldn't exist. Any sort of light in that business was extinguished when the 1994 strike showed just how craven the whole lot were. Maybe even worse, maybe even more shameful, was when the Baltimore Orioles, who had a game scheduled during the riots following Freddie Grey's murder by the BPD, went ahead and held the game in an empty stadium.

 My brother, who knows more about these things, said it was due to contract obligations to the MLB network (which is a scam for another time). I watched that game, mainly out of curiosity. It was eerie, unnatural. Baseball should not be played in an stadium without fans, but I guess the lack of sound in that game perfectly reflects the emptiness in the soul of Major League Baseball. And don't even get me started on how money-grubbing team owners extort cities to give them a new multi-million dollar stadium every 10 years or so, or they'll pick up and leave in the middle of the night.

 Anyhow, the Saints lost and Alabama lost, and tomorrow I won't give a shit, but right now it sort of bums me out. Otherwise, it's a lovely day on the hill, sunny and warmer than yesterday. Anything in the News? Well, there is this little bit of dumbness. The FOX waterheads on the afternoon show, purposefully misrepresenting an article on the Huffington Post site concerning the environmental impacts of the average Thanksgiving, have decided that, yes, there is a "War on Thanksgiving" Foul deceiver and professional liar Jesse "I Have No Soul, Mr. Murdoch, So Yes I'll Say Whatever You Want" Watters, in tried and untrue fashion, twisted the intent of a piece that noted "No one should be discouraged from enjoying the holiday or celebrating with family and friends," but maybe look for a lower carbon alternative. This disgusting, two-face do-boy decided that meant anyone concerned about climate change was trying to eliminate turkey and cranberry sauce at Grandma's for good, God-fearing White Americans. Because that's his job, lying for the rich and powerful, especially the oil concerns, and he doesn't give a shit.

What else? Former South Carolina governor, U.S. Ambassador, and cringing lick-spittle Nikki Haley is claiming that former Trump Administration officials, including John Kelly and Rex Tillerson, tried to get her to join some sort of thing to undermine Trump's presidency. Apparently, they thought he needed help. So far, all I've seen from those two poltroons denying it is a remark from Kelly saying, essentially, if she meant by not letting the president do whatever he damn well pleased and then cleaning up the mess afterwards, then he was "guilty as charged". Otherwise, we only have her word and since all Republicans will lie to their own children for more political power, good luck with that. So who really knows.

 Haley has had an off-and-on contentious relationship with the president since 2015, when she and the GOP-lead state legislators was finally shamed into removing the Confederate Flag from the state Capitol building by the mass killing at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Even then, they twiddled their thumbs until Bree Newsome climbed the poll and took care of business. She claimed to be "worried" that Trump's catering to the racists would cause more deaths, but was more than willing to take the job as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

 And now, she's got a book coming out and it seems she's placing her bets on Trumpism being the future of the Republican Party. Which is a fairly safe bet, as all things go, as despite it all, if anyone in the GOP claims to have a problem with the way Trump is running the party, they wait until they retire to say so. Haley has wagged her finger at the big goon when he crowed about Rep. Elijah Cummings' death, just to turn around and (purposefully?) misrepresent just what impeachment of the President actually entails. There's plenty of talk that she's trying to maneuver if not just a sweet spot for a possible 2024 run, she's looking to slip a knife in Mike Pence's back and snag the VP position for Trump's 2020 re-election attempts.

 If nothing else, maybe this whole to-do will disabuse the notion among centrists and "reasonable liberals" that Haley is anything but another two-bit party hack that will crawl over a mountain of deep-fried babies to score just a little more of that sweet political pull. Maybe, but I doubt iit. We live in a world where people are still wondering what sort of "dirt Trump or Putin has" on Lindsey Graham to make him such a shameless bootlicker instead of, you know, him just being a Republican and doing what a Republican do.

 Anything else? Trump's still trying to get the whistleblower exposed so one of the drooling dimwits who consider him the GOAT pops a cap in him. At the same time, he's stomping his widdle feet demanding Hunter Biden and several others be pulled into the impeachment inquiries, because the dumb bastard is convinced spin is reality. Even though no one outside the New York media circle wants him to do so, rich asshole Michael Bloomberg is still stroking his chin about a 2020 vanity run for the Democratic nomination, apparently because Elizabeth Warren has caused some billionaires to shit their pants over taxation.

 Okay, you're giving yourself a headache, Matt. Maybe play some video games or take a nap or go outside and visit with the varmints. Anyhow, tomorrow's a new week. We'll see what happens then.