2023: A Swift Year

 

 

We stand at the precipice of another year and look back at 2023, a year best described as the Aaron Rodgers of years.   It goes out on the field, with great hoopla, and falls over after four plays with a knee injury which doctors describe as "really bad", especially for a four-hundred-year old quarterback.

It was the type of year that Time magazine, pronounced Taylor Swift the "Person Of The Year."  (Not to be outdone, Sports Illustrated deemed Deion Sanders, coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes, as "Sportsman Of The Year" for winning four whole games.)

Prompting Swift's "Person Of The Year" selection was her concert tour, which sold a billion tickets despite her look as a skinny pale girl that trowels on a ton of red lipstick.

Time Magazine said, "Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point so shut up, nobody cares about your Boomer music anymore. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Boxcar Willie; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, and Ray Stevens whose song  'The Streak' still cracks us up." *

President Biden finished the year with a 39 percent approval rating-up from 37 percent in November.  Things are looking up for President Joe who is a vigorous man that sometimes can even remember he lives.

This following is the truth.  When a nut attacked a private school in Nashville, the whole country waited for our kind, elderly, fatherly President to console a nation,which he did by explaining how much he likes ice cream.

Why is President Biden so unpopular?  I don't know, a seven-dollar bag of Doritos?

This is how bad it is for President Biden. His polling shows he is trailing former President Trump, a man who is such a threat to democracy that he must be kept off the ballot in Colorado.

President Trump is running against several others for the Republican party's nomination. His opponents are (I've included the Trumpster's reaction) Ron DeSantis (We don't like his shoes), Nikki Haley (A southern fried Hillary Clinton), Chris Christie (Boy, is he fat), and something called "Vivek."

Nobody has been able to get any traction on Trump because he is being indicted almost weekly, which has caused the opposite of the intended effect by making Trump more popular.  Trump is a parking ticket away from winning a landslide victory.

For the tenth year in a row, I didn't see won the movie that won The Academy Award for Best Picture. However, I did see the TV show "Suits," and it introduced me to something called "Mudding," in which a person lays in a tub of mud.

Bud Light made the worst marketing decision in years when it reached out to an "influencer" who is a male but whose pronoun is Audrey Hepburn.

The Kansas City Chiefs won their second Super Bowl behind the leadership of quarterback Taylor Swift, who is dating the "tight end" Travis Kelce, who has a brother who plays on the Philadelphia Eagles.  Things are complicated in the NFL.

The Atlanta Braves had the best team in baseball, but they didn't make it to the World Series because that's what Atlanta teams do, but hey they won The World Series two years ago.  Shohei Ohtani signed with the Dodgers for 14 Kabillion Gazllion Dollars.

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, changed the name of Twitter to "X Used To Be Known As Twitter".

The worst thing that happened in 2023 was the Hamas attack on Israel, which killed 1200 Israelis in one day. The second worst thing is our best and the brightest young people who attend our best and brightest colleges became big Hamas fans. But don't worry. The administration of these schools will protect Jewish students.  Hahahahahahahaha. I kid, I kid. First senior leadership at all of the fine institutions must investigate the context in which the antisemitism took place.

The best thing that happened in 2023 was the arrival of Rowan Elliot Manis, my grandson. He is well on his way to becoming something I have never been: Tall.

 

* Okay, maybe I added some to this quote.

Yikes! College Football And The Best

 

 

 I haven't given my opinion on the selection of Alabama into the College Football Playoff for several reasons.

One, it really doesn't matter.  Really.  I could say Florida State, as does Liberty University, deserves to be in the playoffs. But I don't have a vote on the matter.

Two, if you are looking for a logical approach to determining "the best", College Football is the last place you should look.

 In the old days, they determined the best by two polls. One poll was from "the coaches," and the other was from sports reporters.  Heck, one year, Richard Nixon got involved, which Joe Paterno complained about until his dying day.

Then, they devised something called The Bowl Championship Series (BCS). I never quite figured out how they came upon their rankings, except it reminded me of a boiling cauldron surrounded by witches.

 One year, Alabama won "The National Championship"  when they didn't even win their conference or even their division in the conference.

The brilliant minds then came up with the College Football Playoff system, which seems to works better than the BCS, but then again, fly swatters work better than the BCS.

Here's what happened.  Michigan, which beat the might Punters of The University of Iowa last Saturday, is the number one seed, despite cheating just a tiny bit.  The second seed went to the University of Washington (or "Warshington" as Lee Coroso calls it).  

The third seed went to The University of Texas, who lost to Oklahoma. The fourth seed went to The University of Alabama who lost to Texas in September.

Left out was Florida State University who didn't lose to anybody and the back-to-back champion Georgia Bulldogs who lost to Alabama on Saturday.

Bama lost at home to Texas by ten points.  Texas lost to Oklahoma by four points.  Georgia lost to Bama by three points and got booted out of the playoff.

Again, Florida State did not lose a game.

However, they did lose their first and second string quarterbacks and beat Louisville which wasn't as impressive as Bama beating Georgia.

It broke my heart that Georgia was given the gate and hear the laughter from the Georgia Tech side of the river.  "Ha, Ha! You lost and we have more astronaut alumni than you do."  But what are you going to do?

Georgia could have made it simple and you know, beat Alabama, But that didn't happen and so their fate was left in the hands of others. Still, what Georgia has done in the past three seasons ain't chicken feed. 

Florida State makes a compelling case that winning their conference is just as important as beating Georgia. It is just not as important as beating Louisville with a third string quarterback.

The Playoff Selection Committee was commissioned to find the four best teams.  They found them. I can see any one of those selected winning the CFP.  I'm sorry, I just don't see Florida State beating any one of those teams.

So, College Football got it right, but just did it in their typical clumsy, ham-handed way.  Next year, there will be a 12 team playoff. Florida State just picked the wrong year to become FLORIDA STATE again.

 

Venite Adoremus

 

 

Due to several factors, I have to call the "provider line" of several different insurance companies.  It is the glorious result of a misspent youth.

Most of you know that means I am talking to someone in another country.  You would not believe how difficult the name "Alan" is to explain to someone overseas.

But these folks can do something I can't: they can speak another language besides their native tongue.  

Sure, sometimes the hiring process for some is one question: Can you speak English? (Answer: "Huh".  Boss Man: "Close enough.")  But for the most part,  the people at the other end of the phone can speak English as well as I can.

Like most Americans, I took a foreign language in high school for one reason.  You had to take two years of a language to graduate.

In ninth grade, I took French, which my performance could best describe as a garbage fire in a train wreck during a fecal storm.  

So when tenth grade somehow came, I decided to switch horses in midstream, which had always been my go-to academic strategy.

I decided to take Latin.

There's a little poem about Latin that every student should know before taking Latin.

"Latin is a language
  dead as can be.
  First, it killed the Romans
  and now it's killing me."

In French, you had to speak all the time, and the teacher thought I didn't know how to pronounce words correctly, so she stared at me, which made me nervous.

You didn't have that in Latin because nobody was walking around asking you where the library was in Rome.  That was a big plus for me.

 I mainly took Latin because it would make me look smart.  I already had some of the components of the "smart look": acne, thick glasses, unruly hair, and bad breath.

I soon discovered that more to looking smart than carrying around a Latin book. You actually had to be smart. Which meant you had to open your book and study.  As we said back then: Gah.

My years in Latin at good old Wheeler High School were not a plane crash like my year in French, but it wasn't great either.

But it would surprise you that I made two "B"s in Latin.  

In Latin I, my teacher, Mrs. Altenbach, died in the middle of Spring quarter.  Mrs. Altenbach was nice, even though she gave me detention for saying "Snot" in class. ( I should have said "Snoti, snotum, snotus").  When I came in to do my detention, she had forgotten about it and said I was a sweet young man. Those were the last words she ever said to me.

Her supply teacher gave me a B for that quarter. I entered 11th grade, thinking I could be smart even though every math I ever took was called "Math."

My teacher in Latin II was named Noel Jenks. I think she was born on Christmas Day. I also heard she made 1600 on the SATs, so she had some candle power.

I remember Mrs Jenks being a very pleasant person despite having red hair.  She had a class of all these high achievers. Then there was me.

I'm sure I was the "less gifted" person in her class.  All I wanted was to pass and never take another language again.  (Surprise, Surprise: You must take a language class to get a history degree. Really.)

However, in the winter quarter of 1976, I made another B in Latin.  I'm still trying to figure out how or why.

As they say in Latin, "Tempus Fugit"- time flies.  I made it through Latin and went on with my life. My wife (who was in Latin I when I was in Latin II) and I ran into Mrs. Jenks several years ago. I reintroduced myself as her worst Latin student ever.  She didn't disagree.

The other day, I was listening to the Classical Choral channel on Pandora because you have to fight for your right to party.

"Adeste Fideles" came on. I found myself singing "Ventie Adoremus" because it sounded so pretty, and I was saying it right.

I realized Latin explained things with fewer words than English.  "Adeste Fideles" is "O Come All Ye Faithful" in English.  "Ventie Adoremus" is "O Come let us adore him".

It just took over forty years, but I have a new appreciation for Latin. 

Thanks, Mrs. Jenks and Mrs. Altenbach.