If form holds (and if the concussion protocol truly is cleared), this year’s Super Bowl (LV if you’re keeping score at home… on your papyrus scroll) could be a repeat of the teams that were in the first Super Bowl (back before Roman Numerals were a thing). The Green Bay Packers vs. the Kansas City Chiefs.
They didn’t even officially call it a “Super Bowl” back then…. it was the AFL-NFL World Championship.
I know State Farm is rooting for the Pack and the Chiefs… then the Super Bowl can finally settle once and for all whether the “Rodgers Rate” or the “Patrick Price” is better.
Jake from State Farm is wearing KC colors… could that be a clue? Call QAnon!
If the Packers aren’t your favorite team, they should be your runner-up… they are a throwback to a different era. Today, most teams are owned by billionaire businesspeople. The ownership roster is heavy skewed toward men (shocking!) who are oil tycoons, real estate magnates and scions of the original owners… and then there’s the Jacksonville Jags owner, who makes bumpers for Toyotas. You can read about how each owner made their cash here.
But the Packers a unicorn. They’re the only publicly-owned, not-for-profit pro team in the U.S. They are owned by 360,760 fan/shareholders. And there’s a limit on how many shares you can own, to prevent any one person from having too much power. It’s the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland “hey kids, let’s put on a show” of sports franchises, based in a decidedly non-glitzy city of 100,000… on the frozen tundra of upper Wisconsin. How can you NOT love them?
But first, Green Bay has to beat Tampa Bay in the NFC Championship. I think we can all agree that the last thing we need is Tom Brady in another Super Bowl. Yes, he’s the G.O.A.T. and all that, but he already has so many Super Bowl rings that at this point he’d probably just give a new ring to his personal hairdresser. (And don’t act like he doesn’t have a stylist… I’m pretty sure s/he is allowed on the sidelines to adjust his ‘do every time TB takes off his helmet, so he’s ready for the 10,000 gratuitous close-ups from the TV cameras.)
The NFL equivalent of Greg Marmalard and Doug Niedermeyer from Animal House.
Kansas City’s QB, Patrick Mahomes, is rapidly approaching that “yes, we know he’s great but we’re tired of hearing about how great he is 24/7” threshold that Tom Brady crossed decades ago.
Wait… hold on… listen! Do you hear it? That sound coming from Washington, D.C. Do you hear it? No? Neither do I. And that’s a huuuuge win for our country.
We’ve all had front row seats for a four-year, three-ring circus. “Step right up, ladies and gentleman, and witness feats you won’t believe! In this ring, we have Enormously Egomaniacal Posturing Prevaricator, spewing falsehoods and venom with hypersonic speed, and feasting on the attention of sycophantic spokespeople and a timid press. In this ring, the Bald-faced Bigots and Daring Dog-Whistlers, pandering to hate groups while simultaneously ripping children from their parents and locking them in cages. And in this ring, the compliant congressmen and congresswomen, frozen in fear, never daring to speak the truth to power!”
Now, the TweetTornado has passed. Massive damage has been done, but at least we have quiet and peace as we go about fixing what’s been broken… patching up relationships, restoring trust, providing comfort to the afflicted.
Gather round, you young whippersnappers, and Grandpa’s going to tell you about the good old days when we had to struggle to listen to music.
I overheard some teenagers talking about how all their music is stored on McCloud. I don’t know too much about today’s technology, so I have no idea how they can store all their music on top of a fish-out-of-water law enforcement officer from Taos, New Mexico, on assignment in New York City, winning the begrudging admiration of his gruff, streetwise boss with a folksy approach to detective work, but that’s what the kids… Grandpa was talking, it’s impolite to interrupt… oh, alright, go ahead… Speak up! What’s that you say? Oh, it’s The Cloud not McCloud? Well, that still doesn’t make any sense.
Back in my day, we only had the radio and records. If you heard a song that you liked on the radio, and the Woolworth’s was already closed so you couldn’t buy the 45 rpm single, you had to wait until the radio station played it again.
If you were smart, you had your Realistic brand cassette recorder nearby, and you’d record the song right off the air.
If you didn’t know the name of the song or the band that played it, you had to wait until the DJ said the names, or ask your friends at school on Monday, because this is the only Shazam we had back then:
There was only one good radio station in every town, an FM station that played “album rock.” But if you had an older used car as your first car, chances are pretty good that it didn’t have FM radio in it, so you had to buy something called an FM Converter and install it underneath the dashboard of your Dodge Cornet.
It’s probably a good thing there was only one rock station, because if you tried to tune in a different station on the FM Converter while you were driving, your car was sure to wind up in a ditch.
Eventually most cars came with FM radios, but there was no way to play your favorite albums in a car until the 8-track player came along.
Meat Loaf rocks!
But since the songs on a two-sided album had to be spread out evenly across four stereo tracks on an 8-track, sometimes the tracks wouldn’t be in album order, and even worse, sometimes an 8-track would fade out right in the middle of a song. You’d hear a loud “ca-chunk!” as the player switched tracks, and then the same song would pick up where it left off. You kids probably can’t even imagine what a letdown that would be, if, for example, Peter Frampton was in the middle of his talk box part in “Do You Feel Like We Do” on Frampton Comes Alive, the song would sound something like this: “I wanna… CA-CHUNK… duck you!” (He didn’t say “duck” of course, I’m just cleaning it up for your virgin ears. Also, that Frampton song isn’t split up on 8-track, that would be an unforgivable sin. )
Oh good, it’s on one track…
Oh, and if you missed your favorite song, you’d have to wait for the rest of the album to play through before you heard it again.
Then some smarty pants realized that we should have cassette players in cars instead of 8-track players. That was much better… even if your tape got eaten by the cassette player, there was still a chance you could rescue it with some Ticonderoga surgery.
But I’m still mad about the fact that on the cassette version of Led Zeppelin II, “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid” were on different sides. Good thing my high school buddy’s pickup truck had a cassette player with “auto reverse.” I became an expert at hitting the fast-forward button for five seconds and then hitting the “reverse” button to eliminate as much of the delay between those songs as possible.
I hear the kids talking about making a playlist by “drag and drop”… that’s how it worked in my day too. If you wanted to put together a mixtape, you’d drag your butt over to the Quasar stereo with the dual cassette deck, and drop in cassette after cassette of albums into the “playback” deck, laboriously cueing up your favorite songs just right before hitting “record” to transfer it to your Maxell blank tape in the “record” deck.
When CDs came along, it became easier to create a mix CD, but you still had to “rip” the album first, then “burn” it to a blank CD, and cross your fingers that the blank CD wouldn’t be a dud, useful only as a beverage coaster.
You kids and your streaming services and your satellite radio and your Bluetooth… you don’t know how lucky you are! Now get off my lawn, and don’t come back until I’m finished watching reruns of McCloud!
At the risk of being the out-of-touch, crotchety “get off my lawn” guy, I think social media hasn’t been helpful in regard to our current cultural predicament (see Capitol, rioting).
My friend Phil sent me a link to this PBS Frontline documentary:
I watched the program a couple of nights ago. Pretty chilling.
What really stuck in my head was when one of the experts being interviewed said that in pre-social media times, a person who believed in a conspiracy theory was usually a “lone wolf” crackpot. But through the “magic” of the interwebs, they could now not only find like-addle-minded folks, but also amplify their beliefs in the social media echo chamber.
It’s like the old saying “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on” – only now that lie isn’t galloping, it’s rocketing.
Did you notice, in the footage and photos of the Capitol coup attempt, how many of the rioters had their phones out, livestreaming their seditious acts or “doin’ it for the ‘gram”?
Seth Godin (yes, I know, I’m a fanboy) totally understands the rules of the game.
Seth’s entire post is here. Well worth a read. His wrap-up is something I hope the Zucks and Jacks of the world take heed of:
Amen, Brother Seth! It won’t solve all the problems that America has, but it’ll tone down the rhetoric and the lies that are designed to garner attention.
John Ham passed away a week ago. No relation to Jon Hamm. But there was a connection.
Jon Hamm, the actor, is best known for playing the character of Don Draper, a cigarette-smoking ad agency man in the 1960s, on Mad Men.
John Ham also was quite the character. He was a cigarette-smoking ad agency man in the 1960s. And the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, too.
I worked with John from 2000-2005. He was an illustrator, and a damn good one. He did a lot of the packaging artwork for the original line of Star Wars action figures and toys. He created the illustrations for a Cincinnati beer company’s souvenir six-packs of the Reds World Series Championship way back in 1976.
By the time I joined the agency where “Hammy” worked, he was 62 years old… the wise (and wisecracking) elder statesman of the creative team. He didn’t really need the money – he and several friends had broken away from a big agency to form their own small ad agency decades prior. They grew the business, and were eventually bought out by a big national firm. But John was a people person through and through. “Gregarious” is probably the best adjective. He genuinely enjoyed the camaraderie of a creative environment. Always smiling, always generous with his time. He was much older than the rest of the creative team, but it never really felt that way. He was one of us. And when he wasn’t pursuing his art at work, he was engaged in his other passion: playing tennis.
Toward the end of his career, John would often get tapped to create a “farewell” caricature. It was usually for a bigwig who was leaving P&G (our largest client by far). But occasionally he’d create them for co-workers. I was lucky enough to get the Hammy treatment when I left the agency.
When John retired in 2008, Keith Neltner, our mutual friend and co-worker, turned the tables and created a caricature of Hammy in that same style.
The Yoda in the illustration is fitting – not just because of John’s Star Wars experience, but also because he was a lovable, wise mentor to all of us.
I shouldn’t feel so bummed out about the passing of a guy with whom I haven’t worked in 15 years, especially someone who made it to 83 (despite the smoking habit) and lived a very fulfilling life. But that smile, man, it was incandescent. We’ll miss that light.
Well, this past week was a whole ‘nother level of abnormal, wasn’t it? I mean, we thought Kim and Kanye would be together forever, amirite? Oh, and I think something happened in D.C. too…
First, a couple of notes to the folks who are saying “this is not who we are” about the ugly rioting by Trump’s thuggish, domestic terrorist minions:
This is who we are. 74 million Americans voted for Donnie Dumpsterfire. (74 million is the real count, not the mythical one.) And he topped Gallup’s 2020 poll for the most admired man in America.
But today, let’s talk about the folks who allowed The Ego in Chief to run rampant for the past four years. The ones who work in the building that was overrun on Tuesday. My friend Greg summed it up nicely yesterday:
Ever since he won the nomination he has had enablers of various types. Hypocritical sycophants– Cruz, Graham, et al. They declared Trump as unfit, citing the clear proof. After Trump’s election they became full-blooded Trumpists. Another type–Jim Jordan, Matt Geatz, Nunes, et al. Suddenly highly noticeable like stink on shit by ratcheting up their always wacko selves. And finally the many. Think Portman and many others. Stayed as unnoticeable as possible. Too chicken to call out Trump on so many opportunities, thereby being perhaps the worst enablers of all. And even after the latest episode some of them still yammering about needing a solution to the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. The ones who went on record before and even after the riot, opposing electoral votes that Biden won. Wenstrup, Jordan, Chabot.
I couldn’t agree more. By not speaking out against Baby Donald’s baseless claims, by not calling him out on his blatant lies, his egregious (and seditious) acts, they gave a whiff of credibility to the circus… they gave oxygen to the dumpster fire. Not just about the non-existent “stolen” election but to all the stunts he’s pulled for four years.
In the days leading up to the Electoral College certification, 13 senators and 100+ members of the House (all Republicans, of course) were, as the Washington Post so eloquently put it, “more interested in placating Trump than protecting democracy.”
Heck, even after the Capitol was overrun by Trump terrorists, eight senators and 139 reps still voted to sustain one or both of the objections to states’ election results, based on spurious allegations of voter fraud. (To quote our incoming Prez, “c’mon man!” Heck, even Bill Barr said there was no evidence... yes, the same Bill Barr who, on most days, could give Trump a colonoscopy with his nose.)
I hope these politicians realize there’s blood on their hands. Brian D. Sicknick, an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police, passed away Thursday night.
Acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen said in a statement that Sicknick died of “the injuries he suffered defending the U.S. Capitol, against the violent mob who stormed it on January 6th.”
I hope their consciences haunt them, much like Lady Macbeth’s did…
No, their hands will never be clean. And it’s time to clean house (and Senate).
In the same Gallup poll where DT was the most admired man, Michelle Obama was voted the most admired woman. Here’s what she had to say after Tuesday’s events:
If we have any hope of improving this nation, now is the time for swift and serious consequences for the failure of leadership that led to yesterday’s shame… Thankfully, even in the darkness there are glimmers of hope… But make no mistake: the work of putting America back together, of truly repairing what is broken, isn’t the work of any individual politician or political party. It’s up to each of us to do our part. To reach out. To listen. And to hold tight to the truth and values that have always led this country forward.
Harry Shearer’s splendidly satirical radio program/podcast (he’s cross-platform!) Le Show does a great job pointing out the folly and foibles of humankind. His two-minute intro to the first show of 2021 made a great point about the silliness of a “brand new year”:
It’s so true – we put waaay too much stock into a single, solitary day on one particular calendar.
“Does the fate machine restart each time one of those flips a year?… We could just take the alternative path, resign ourselves to the ‘random now’…”
Harry Shearer
I love that phrase, “the random now.” Instead of making grandiose resolutions and year-long goals (most of which end up in the dustbin or collecting dust within a couple of weeks), just focus on the here and now. That way you won’t “break” your resolution irrevocably or feel like a failure.
Don’t take on the extra burden to create a “New You” in the “New Year.” The ‘year’ is arbitrary… the ‘you’ is always evolving, moment by moment.
Can you spot “Creed Bratton” from The Office in this band!
My birthday is New Year’s Eve. (My dad always liked to say I was a “last minute tax deduction.”) But on Facebook, my birthday is erroneously listed as New Year’s Day. Probably because my Facebook account was created without my knowledge or consent. Several years ago, my desk at work was in a “quad pod” with Jason, Navendu and Gopal. (Yes, I know, it sounds like the uber-nerds who kept getting shoved into a corner at the fraternity rush party in Animal House. )
Jason, Navendu and Gopal would always be talking about the latest Facebook happenings, and I’d be out of the loop. Blissfully so, I might add — I loved playing the cranky, technophobe, “get off my lawn” old man of the group.
But one day, as a practical joke, Gopal secretly set up a FB account in my name. (He even created a gmail account to set it up… it’s the gmail address I use to this day.) Then he, Jason and Navendu friended this account before letting me know that I actually was on Facebook.
I’m guessing Gopal just picked the default 1/1 as my birthday. When you’re creating a clandestine account (probably when I was sitting three feet away), you don’t have time for those details.
Every year on January 1st, I get several “happy birthday” notes from fellow Facebookers. They’re not only a day late, technically they’re an entire year late.
I probably should correct the date in my FB profile, but I’m not on FB enough to care… and part of me likes knowing that Marky Mark Zuckerberg and his Funky Bunch of Data Miners don’t know everything about me.
Plus, the fake date makes me look younger than I am.
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “That is why we should celebrate every day when our feet hit the floor. Another to enjoy and share with…” Jun 25, 04:33
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “This simply explains why we should celebrate every day our feet hit the floor. Another day to enjoy and share…” Jun 25, 04:31
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