Saturday, September 12, 2015

Saturday Morning Madness

I'm dropping this here on the off-chance that you feel like you're having a bad day.

This is a bad day.  You are doing fine.



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Y'know, I see crap like this all the time in my feed.  You people are not impressing me.  Show me somebody who can do this in their forties, they're gainfully employed, knees still work, and their marriage is alive and well twelve years or more after their wedding.

Anybody can be fit in their twenties.  Show me what you've got when you've got two kids and you're paying a mortgage.

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Wow.  Vol Nation is feeling it, folks.  When they start dropping Heath Shuler references, forget about it.  That's some old school pride right there.  Peyton Manning, yeah, that's normal.  Even Tee Martin because he finally took the team to a national championship.  But Shuler?

That's not a name that gets dropped every day.

If you're wondering, I follow Tennessee because that's where my parents and grandparents went.  The 23rd ranked Volunteers are at home today against #19 Oklahoma.  Kickoff is at six on ESPN.

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For what it's worth, I'm following college football a little closer than the pros this year because it seems like my college teams look a little better--or are more likely to have interesting seasons, anyway--than do my pro teams.  Tennessee is flat out resurgent this year, and although Army is off to a rough start, I have this persistent faith that Coach Monken is going to turn the season around somehow.  I don't think Army is going to finish above .500 or anything, but against all logic, I do believe that the team is going to turn the corner soon, that the youth movement will eventually find its feet and show some promise.  This is why I bought season tickets, and it's also why it bugged me so much when the Army defense failed to show up for the first half of last Friday night's game.

Meanwhile, the NY Giants have the same basic problems that Army does.  The offense looks okay, but they have no pass rush and no safeties, and it's tough to mount a credible defense without at least one of those two.  The Tennessee Titans may have some success under Marcus Marriotta, but he's still a rookie, and anyway, I've been out of Tennessee for well over a decade now.  It feels like my Titans--the Eddie George/Steve McNair Titans from the period when I was just leaving the Army--have moved on to the annuls of football legend.  Sure, I want the team to do well, but whatever connection I had to Middle Tennessee died with my parents.  I'm not going back there, and a decade or more of crappy play has made it hard to stay a fan-in-exile.

The same is true of the Chargers but even more so.  I was born in San Diego but haven't actually lived out there since the late 1980s.  Last time I cheered for the Bolts as a home team, Taylor Swift hadn't yet been born, and 1989 was a year we looked to in the future.  I really liked the Ladanian Tomlinson/Drew Brees editions of the Chargers under Marty Schottenheimer, but even they've now passed away into football myth.  To the extent that I'm still a Chargers fan, it's a matter of sheer personal habit.

So we're left with Army--and maybe some residual enthusiasm for the Volunteers.  That said, clearly I'm not the only one who has a tendency to think about their football history.

A photo posted by Army West Point Athletics (@goarmywestpoint) on

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What I've learned this election cycle is that Americans don't care about issues.  I don't know if this is because arguing issues on their merits is beyond many Americans' capabilities or if it's because gridlock has been so persistent in Washington that folks simply don't believe in solutions any more.  Regardless, this election cycle is all about personality, and what Biden's doing right now is showing his personality brilliantly.

I think he's going to run.  I don't know if he's going to win, but he's a credible candidate with enough on his resume that we don't need to ask what he believes.  His beliefs are already out there.  This quasi-campaign is showing America who Biden is as a person.  In 2015, that's a killer strategy.

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That's all I've got, folks.  Have a good weekend.

1 comment:

  1. Forties? Check. Gainfully employed? Full-time! Married... yes, happily, no not for 12, only 7 (so far!), but as Indiana Jones said, it's not the years, it's the mileage!

    ReplyDelete