A Super Romance

 

 

In case you haven't heard, Taylor Swift, Time Magazine's Person of The Year 2023, is dating future song subject Travis Kelce.  Kelce plays for the Kansas City Chiefs and is the favorite receiver of quarterback Patrick Mahomes.  Kelce is so important he not only dates Swift, who is a billionaire, but is also in State Farm commercials.

(I like the State Farm commercials, but seeing a State Farm agent hanging out at a football practice field is weird.)

Swift has transcended into a part of pop culture where we must be reminded how important she is every few minutes.  

Since I'm not a 14-year-old girl, I haven't paid that much attention to Taylor Swift.   I'm not as bad as William F. Buckley, who commented on the death of Jerry Garcia that if he ever heard a Grateful Dead song, he wasn't aware of it. I know three of her songs: "Tears On My Guitar," "Shake It Off," and "Anti-Hero."

 That's it. Sorry, I'll do better next pop superhero.

Somehow, and I need clarification, when this all began, Swift and Kelce started dating each other. Swift started showing up at Kansas City home games wearing Kansas City swag like Kelce gave her his letterman jacket.

 I mean, I have a hard time believing both of them were on Tinder (that's still a thing, right?), and one day, they swiped right and met for coffee. One thing led to another, and soon Ta-Ta was sitting next to Tra-Tra's mother at football games.

"What up? I saw your profile. I'm a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs and I have a couple of Super Bowl rings. Additionally, I can introduce you to Jake from State Farm so you can combine your home and auto."

"Yeah, I'm a billionaire, and I write songs better than Joni Mitchell. Plus, if you into red lipstick, that's my jam."

Of course, this means we must see Taylor on TV and her reaction to anything Travis does on the field.  This means we see Taylor a lot and sports commentary like "I wonder what Taylor thought about that holding call".

As Triumph the Insult Comic Dog would say, it was the perfect storm for me to poop on.  Overexposed pop princess falls for meathead football player.  The jokes practically write themselves.

Of course, my fellow travelers on the Right have to come in and ruin everything by wondering, out loud, that the Taylor-Kelce hookup was some sort of "psyop" by the Biden campaign. Does anyone really believe the Biden campaign is that smart?

One podcaster, Mike Crispi, wrote on X (Twitter)about this romance: "All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and 'endorses' Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield. It's all been an op since day one."

I'm not sure Mike has actually ever watched football, but Kelce couldn't come out during halftime since his team is playing. But if this did happen, he can proudly say he called it first.

For years, Swift avoided politics because the mean girls thought politics was icky.  But she has for the past several years commented on political issues and always for Democrats, surprise, surprise.

Some people have other theories about conservative attacks on Swift.

Professor Joan Donavan says, "Amongst the right wing, because she is getting older and hasn't had children and whatnot, she's less seen as the traditional 'wifey' material."  In broad terms, Taylor Swift represents older, independent women who do not need male support to have a career, to self-determine where they're going."

First of all, who says "Amongst" anymore?

Secondly, I didn't know she didn't have any "whatnots."  At the big conservative meetings, we look at all the celebrities to ensure they have whatnots.

Some have suggested we ought to celebrate that Taylor and Travis "found love." Fine. Yippie. Famous people have found love.  I would be more receptive to it if Travis was on the taxi squad and Taylor was singing backup for Adele.

 

Goodbye, S.I.

 

 

George Harrison said all things must pass, but I didn't think he included Sports Illustrated magazine, which pulled the plug last week.

Sports Illustrated was simply the best sports magazine ever.  Sure, the others were good, but S.I. had it all. Good writing and excellent photographs, and in February, they had girls in bathing suits.

They had writers like Tex Maule, who loved the NFL as much as he hated the AFL.  He thought Randy Johnson (the first starting quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons) was a better quarterback than Bob Griese.  History does not show that.

However, Maule could write. He said this about a fight he covered between Muhammad Ali and Ernest Terrell:  "It was a wonderful demonstration of boxing skill and a barbarous display of cruelty."

They had Dan Jenkins.  He wrote over 500 articles for S.I., including a piece that introduced us to the world of an Illinois college student named Dick Butkus.

Jenkins wrote the book Semi-Tough, which is, in my humble opinion, the funniest book ever written about pro football.

Jenkins also said, "Archie Griffin won the Heisman twice, and he didn't deserve it once."  I have used a variation of that line for years.

I could go on and on. Frank Deford. Ron Fimrite. Rick Reilly. All of them could write, and all of them wrote well.

Sports Illustrated was the king when it came to sports photography.  The pictures they published captured the moment. It was the literal thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

At one time, pro football ended in mid-January, and it would be another month until Spring Training.  S.I. developed their "Swimsuit" edition to fill in the time between. 

Kids, you have no idea what big deal it became.

First of all, having a sports magazine publishing pictures of women in skimpy bathing suits seems kind of off, but you know, boys like looking at pictures of women in skimpy bathing suits.

Secondly, as time progressed, the "bathing suits" were only bathing suits in the technical sense. I never saw a girl wearing a bathing suit S.I. published because it usually showed the model's hindquarters and sometimes all of the upper part of the torso.  That was a big deal to a fourteen-year-old boy in the South. 

Once, S.I. had a model named Cheryl Tiegs. She was super.

One of her bathing suits was mesh. I never saw a girl wear a mesh bathing suit. As we said in the library at Wheeler High School, you saw everything.  By the way, Cheryl Tiegs is now 76 years old.

Well, with time, the internet came, and people stopped reading magazines. You couldn't give away enough football phones to get people to buy a subscription to the magazine.

Sports Illustrated began making odd decisions to get people to buy their magazine. The cover girl for the swimsuit issue a few years back was, as we say, husky. Last year's cover girl wasn't technically a girl, at least in the total physical sense. 

Their last Sportsperson Of The Year was Deion Sanders who lead the Colorado Buffaloes to a 4-8 record. That's when I should have known S.I. was going down.

It is sad that future generations won't look forward to Thursday for the weekly Sports Illustrated.  But hopefully, some of us boomers have kept copies for those coming behind us. Just don't tell your mother and grandmother which ones you find because one of them might have the pictures Cheryl Tiegs and her mesh bathing suit.

 

Never Enough

 

 

One of the things everybody has to admit about college is that it matters a great deal where someone graduates from college because there are college graduates from other schools than the one you graduated from.

Some people don't go to the large state schools. They go to the smaller state schools that the people at the large state schools call "Directional."  This means the school's name has a "direction" in it.  Southern Mississippi is one (Jimmy Buffett and two of my high school teachers, Mr. Hines and Miss Love, graduated from there.)

 I didn't know this was a big deal until I heard some of the people at the larger state schools crack wise of the Directional Schools.

Of course, I have never done this. I am a graduate of Kennesaw State University. That means my diploma has the word "Kennesaw" on it. I can't make fun of anyone else's school unless they are total dorks like Georgia Tech graduates. But even then, I don't make fun of their degree. I make fun of them because they are dorks. Plus, and I am legally obligated to say this, Georgia Tech has graduated more astronauts than Kennesaw State.

I bring this up because of Harvard University.

Everybody knows Harvard University is the leading university in America.  The alumni of this institution include Henry Kissinger, the Unabomber, and Thurston Howell, III.

All the intelligent and rich people go to Harvard, and a Harvard degree guarantees a job where you can wear an ascot and drink a martini at your desk.

Recently, Hamas invaded Israel. They killed and raped. They took hostages, which are still there.

You would think Harvard University would be where students would protest Hamas.  No, the students protested Israel and threatened Jewish students.

The president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was called to testify in a congressional hearing about the apparent anti-semitism on campus. Dr. Gay hemmed and hawed about it, stating she would have to see the context of someone punching a student in a yamaka.

You will note I am adding quotation marks to the following sentence from The New Yorker.

"In early December, the activist Christopher Rufo published allegations about Gay in his newsletter, including instances of missing citations and verbatim copying of other scholars' writing without the use of quotation marks or attribution. In the following weeks, more apparent instances of plagiarism piled up."

 

This caused a big scandal because, and I am speaking as a Kennesaw State history graduate, nothing will get you into more trouble than missing citations and copying other works verbatim without quotation marks.

 

I found my senior paper about Gerald Ford.  I wrote:  

"Gerald Ford" was the "President Of The United States" (Encyclopedia Britannica).*

 

I made a B+ on the paper because my professor said he didn't believe there was a student paper ever written that deserved an A.  No, I'm not bitter.**

Christoper Rufo is a graduate of Harvard.  Wait, make that Harvard Extension School.

 

Harvard Extension School is the Online Harvard.  It is a way for people to obtain a degree from Harvard without having to live in Boston and spend billions of dollars for a degree.

 

Of course, people took to X and noted that Rufo isn't a graduate of the real Harvard, but instead of the online Harvard, like there was a difference.

The problem is what Harvard says about Harvard Extension School.

"Our degrees and certificates are adorned with the Harvard insignia. Earning a credential from us means enjoying the best of a world-class Harvard education, and the weight of that reputation and lineage on your resume. You’ll have access to our world-class libraries, walk at University Commencement along with students from other Harvard schools, and become members of the Harvard Alumni Association."

My son's brother-in-law is taking classes from the Harvard Extension School.  That's the first time I ever heard of it.

I have recently discovered that a high school chum is a recent Harvard Extension School graduate.  I asked him about it. 

He said. "I thought it was great. It is the same classes that regular Harvard people take. Overall, a great experience with the best professors in the world."

Eventually, the people on X who belittled the Harvard Extension School returned and had to do an Emily Litella and say, "Never mind."

But to paraphrase Rosanne Rosannadanna, it just goes to show you that even a Harvard diploma doesn't satisfy some people.

 

 

*I must note that my buddy Greg Marshall actually opened the door for Gerald Ford one time.  He has also met Jimmy Buffett. Greg, not Gerald Ford, although Gerald and Betty probably visited Margaritaville a few times.

 

** Yes, I am.

 

The Future

 

Here we are in 2024! We are waiting to see what the new year will hold. I have some predictions.

The most important: Taylor Swift will not marry Travis Kelce. But she will write a song about him and OMG HOW SAD IS THIS SONG AND WHAT A RAT TRAVIS WAS TO TAY-TAY, YOU GUYS.

The Atlanta Falcons will hem and haw and not fire their head coach because, well, he just moved in and everything. 

There will be a new Tik-Tok craze that will sweep the nation, and by nation, I mean young people. It will be stupid and potentially dangerous. 

Somebody will use the term "fur babies," which will get on my nerves.

When discussing College Football, a Georgia Tech graduate will mention how many astronauts graduated from Georgia Tech and how many felons graduated from Georgia.

Trump will announce that he is picking himself as his running mate.  When told he cannot do that, he will post on his Truth Social that this is the kind of WITCH HUNT and ELECTION INTERFERENCE HE'S BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR THE PAST EIGHT YEARS.

President Biden will mumble.

When you see the movie that wins The Oscar for Best Movie, you will not like it.

Speaking of movies, soon, movie theatres will offer financing to see a movie. EZ PAYMENTS!

The Atlanta Braves will make the playoffs and lose in the first round.  

President Biden will win the nomination of the Democratic Party. His acceptance speech will be about how bad MAGA is and how the economy is doing well, and you should buy electric cars because of climate change, and somebody get me some ice cream because it tastes so good. 

Somebody will ask you: "Is it hot enough for you?"

Former President Clinton will say that he doesn't like young girls. Instead, he likes the brainy know-it-all types with cankles that don't know how to laugh. 

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein, Cornel West, Joe Manchin, and Larry Hogan will be blamed for the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.

You will look at Netflix, Amazon, Peacock, and all the other streaming services for something to watch. You will give up and watch a rerun of "Friends."

 

Speaking of the streaming services, you will run across a detective show that features a detective who doesn't play by the rules.  He likes to kick butt and chew gum and guess what?  He just ran out of Hubba Bubba. But he's very intelligent. How do you know?  Because he listens to JAZZ.

A famous Rock star will pass away.

 

I will turn 65 years old this year.  I think I could pass at being 63 years old. I know when I pick up my grandson, I will make a noise like "oomph".

 

 

 

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.