Of Mice and Men (and Replacement Referees...)

Oh, look.  It's the news.  I promised not to watch too much of you, because you make me so very angry sometimes.  But I'll check you out and-hey, what's this now?  What are people making such a big hooplah over?  Oh.  Football.  Really?

So what I'm gleaning from the stories I'm seeing is that sometime late last night, the greatest tragedy  in the history of professional sports occurred.  People are talking asterisks and malfeasance and pitchforks and boiling lead and other, less reasonable things like actually getting the officials that are on strike back to work so that these types of missed calls don't happen anymore.

Yeah.  Right.

Now by no means am I saying that it's a good thing for refs to get a call wrong (replacement or otherwise).  But I will say the same thing I have for years on the subject of a referee "robbing" a team in the last seconds of the fourth quarter: if you're ahead by the margin that you should be at that point, then you can't have anything taken from you.

In short: don't want to lose?  Be up by 10 points.  Boosh.

Now, if you want to argue that officiating during the game kept you from being up by said 10 points...  well then you may have a stronger argument.  But I will probably then play the card I like to call "It's a motherlovin' game!  It's football!  Don't you have more important things to worry about?  (And yes, Wisconsin, I'm aware that you don't think that you do for 48-72 hours a week, but I assure that you do.)

I get that football is a part of our American heritage.  But no matter what strange injustices might occur, we have to embrace the fact that they just aren't really that big of a deal.

But anyone can feel free to point out that I said this a few months from now, sometime shortly after I scream the sentence, "How?!  How could this have happened, Atlanta?!  You were 3-0!  This is the worst tragedy in the history of America...!"

That's only fair.

"An Inelegant Truth"

By now you've heard eight shades of why Mitt Romney's infamous "47 percent" comment bothers people.  Let me explain in some part why it bothers me personally.

First, let me play a little devil's advocate and say that any statement can be taken out of context.  It happens with people of all walks and statures, and over things that are both trivial and significant.  Heck, you can even build an entire convention around it (not that I give the GOP any real credit for creating such a crapstorm over the President's "you didn't build that" comment; their dog and pony show was a pretty silly thing to do...).

Having said that, let me be clear: there is nothing about what Mitt Romney said that I like.  There is no spin to be placed on it that makes me feel any better about it.

Because what you have to understand about what he said is that it isn't a new thought.  A lot of people have gone through life aware of the fact that people with money, regardless of how they may have acquired it, have a problem with it being used to help less fortunate people.  They perceive it as giving the lesser fortunate person a "handout".  And furthermore, the more fortunate person perceives the world as owing them something for taking care of these less fortunate people.

As such, they view those other people, the less fortunate ones, exactly the way that Romney portrays them.  In their minds, they are not only dependent on the government for assistance, but these poor souls feel some sense of entitlement to government funds.  They deserve to be taken care of, like it is owed to them or something.

Except in some cases, this is entirely true.  The elderly, the disabled, soldiers who have fought overseas... these people are quite entitled to benefits from the government.  Alternatively, there are countless others who are just down on their luck and need some temporary assistance.  These people also need a little help from the government, if only for a little while.

The continued notion that not only a significant amount but also the majority of people who have little to no tax obligation (and by that we mean income tax; other taxes are paid in various ways) are somehow a bunch of self-entitled freeloaders is not only incorrect but a little insane.  It's the type of self-delusional tripe that rich people feed themselves so that they don't feel so bad about getting over on the system through their own dodges and tax breaks.

And that's why what Mitt Romney said strikes such an ugly chord with me.  Because it bothers me that he can speak those inaccurate numbers so dismissively.  It bothers me that he can say what he said about almost half of the population of my country to a room full of people and not have that room of people have an issue with it.  It bothers me that he said it not just because it was a personal opinion of his, but also because he knew that was the type of thing that they wanted to hear.

There is no greater truth to it.  As political strategy, it's suicide.  And to paraphrase Bob Schieffer, there is no fathomable reason that a candidate running for high office should say something like that.  Unless, of course, you have the poor judgment and lack of character of a Mitt Romney.

That same lack of character, for the record, allows Romney to attack President Obama using excerpts from a speech the President made over a decade ago.  And, as is par for the course, taken just out of context enough to be warped into the Republican's own sense of reality.

That's what we've come down to now.  We've reached the point where people can twist less damning phrases out of context to build their monsters, all while spinning their own miscues into "harsh, inelegant truths".

Tuesday night, the President let Romney off the hook by admitting that everyone can misspeak sometimes.

Less than 24 hours later, the GOP couldn't help themselves from going on a witch hunt with footage that's over a decade old.

Because really, you should hold everyone's words, every single one they have ever spoken, against them.  No matter how inelegant.  Isn't that right, Mitt?

Flashback Friday: "You call these grapes..?!"

"They taste like Fresno!"

I was far too young to understand the subtle in-joke of those fateful words, but even then they stuck with me.  The line, of course, is the last thing spoken before the opening credits rolled in the 1986 CBS mini-series Fresno.  I feel like this is one of those things that got swept under the rug way back when, but maybe it has a fan or two that I'm not aware of.

Why I stopped Spreading Joy (Sorta).

Happy Birthday.

I admit that it's not a difficult thing to say.  Heck, typing it doesn't take much effort, either.  And you can pretty much program an app or two (or seven probably) to wish your friends a good one on their special day.  So why then did I abandon the practice of wishing my friends a happy birthday on Facebook?

Well, that's a good question.  The answer is just a little complicated, but not really so.

First, it's not for lack of noticing.  It's fairly impossible to be part of a social networking environment and not see that someone's special day is happening.  Either the system tells you its their birthday, you see someone (possibly the birthday boy/girl in question) mentioning it themselves, or some combination of the two.  So it's never as simple as "I didn't know".

And as anti-social as I can be at times, I am not opposed to giving people greetings.  People that know me know that I will, at times, go above and beyond to send heartfelt sentiments their way.  And therein lies the problem.

See, way back when, I really liked wishing people a happy birthday.  It was fun for me to come up with some little wish or comment to put onto their wall.  But I'm a prideful person.  It’s important to me that I actually exert the effort to be sincere and heartfelt.  I want each person I give a greeting to feel like it was something unique and personal to them.

And honestly, I just haven’t had the time.  It worked just fine when my friends list was just over a hundred.  But now that it’s several times that number, I see that it’s someone’s birthday almost every day.  Sometimes multiple people.  And I’m not online 24/7 (and have no desire to be), so all it would take is a lapse or two and I’d have forgotten someone.

I’ve thought about alternate solutions to the problem.  I considered only sending well wishes to people I was pretty close to, but I didn’t want to have to go through the grueling process of evaluating my friends to see who would be “worthy” of my time versus who wouldn’t.  Likewise, I didn’t want anyone to feel slighted just because I didn’t get around to them while I was mulling over whether I would get around to them.

So I took the rather draconian approach of not sending birthday wishes to anyone.  Save my girlfriend Danielle, which we can all agree is a wonderfully appropriate and loving thing to do.  I’d rather just spare myself the drama, even if it comes at the expense of doing something I genuinely used to love.

So if your birthday happens to roll around, and in sorting through your messages you find mine absent, please: don’t think too much ill of it.  I’m honestly happy that you’re a year older.  I just didn’t get around to saying it, is all.  Which, believe me, is sadder for me than it is for you.