Crop Picking

When I was growing up in corn/grain country, teenagers eagerly signed up to detassel corn because the pay was awesome. The work sucked - out in the sun, hot, dusty, and corn leaves are surprisingly sharp, but the money was great. Parents dropped off their kids or the older kids drove to a central meeting point where buses picked them up and took them to the fields for the day.

Of course, back then, our parents didn't just hand us $100 and the keys to a new car and send us off to Bridgestreet Mall to hang out with our friends getting our hair and nails done. So, we actually had some incentive to earn our own money. It's past time for us to get back to that ethic. The reason we have so many lazy adults in this country is because we make so many lazy kids. When you spend the first 18 years of life being indulged and pampered, you're unlikely to rush out the door on your 18th Birthday to find some good, hard work to do to earn your own way.

So, I guess my point is this: We need to send not the unemployed, not the welfare cases, not prisoners out to the fields to get the crops in. We need to send our teenagers.

(Now watch as the comments about child abuse and child labor pour in!)

Occupy ESPN

Why are we occupying Wall Street? There's no clear objective. To me, this is all just pointless venting against income disparity with no proposed solutions. The whole movement is misguided. If you're pissed off that someone makes more money than you do and more money than they'll ever need, you should be "occupying" arenas and stadiums where the MLB, NFL, and NBA play games, not business districts where people actually do work.

I'll be among the first to say that pushing papers around on a desk or creating PowerPoint presentations for one meeting after another is not exactly "work." But, neither is playing sports. Nobody ever says, "Let's go work football." You PLAY football. We call football games GAMES - not jobs.

According the an AFL-CIO executive paywatch website, the average pay for CEOs at S&P 500 companies is a touch under $11.5 million per year. Chief executives on the AFL-CIO's 100 Highest Paid CEOs list rake in between $17.5 to $85 million per year. That's for CEOs - very likely the very highest paid position in any corporation. But, it's still quite a bit LESS on average than many professional ball players, golfers, etc.

http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/top100_2011.cfm

Average salaries for sports players? NFL: about $1 million to $2 million per year depending on position. MLB: over $3 million per year. NBA: $5.2 million per year. NHL (which I consider underpaid relative to all other sports): $2.6 million per year. That's average. Plenty of individual players get paid a LOT more than average.

Tiger Woods got paid $97 million in 2006, more than the CEO of Viacom - the highest paid CEO in America according to the AFL-CIO. Tiger got to knock golf balls around for his full time job. Mr. Dauman at Viacom probably only managed to squeeze in 18 or 36 holes per week.

David Beckham signed a $50 million/year contract to play soccer for a professional soccer team in LA. Hardly anybody in America even watches soccer unless their kids play. Which begs the question, who is paying this guy $50 million per year to play a sport that hardly anybody in America even watches?

Kobe Bryant, who was actually charged with rape, brought in about $35 million back in 2007. Michael Vick, notable animal cruelty offender, signed a 10-year contract in 2004 for $13 million per year. Vick got paid about $5 million for his first season back after spending 2 years in jail. You can argue that many CEOs are criminals, but not many CEOs get their jobs back and get a raise after they get out of jail.

Muhammed Ali (Cassius Clay) brings in a cool $55 million per year just for letting advertisers use his assumed name. And, he doesn't even have to take a punch. At least Michael Schumacher (F1 race car driver) actually put his life on the line for the $80 million he netted in 2006. Most pro-sports types risk little more than a side-lining injury - and they still get paid even if that injury takes them out for the entire season. Steve Jobs kept working with pancreatic cancer, right up until he died of respiratory failure.

I could go on. And on. And on. While I've only cited a handful of the very highest paid athletes, the point is that there are hundreds of them and they all get paid more in a year than you or I will likely earn in 20 years. And, that's if we are both well paid and very lucky for 20 years in a row. They get this money not for doing anything resembling productive work but for playing sports.

Most of the companies represented on the AFL-CIO's list of 100 Highest Paid CEOs are good, solid American companies like Ford, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, CBS, Coca-Cola and Disney. These are BIG corporations that have been around a long time and virtually NONE of them are banks or investment companies that conjur up visions of "Wall Street." These companies employ thousands and thousands of people. Which is why their CEOs get paid. A lot. Even though the actual day-to-day work is done by employees and front-line supervisors, manning the helm of a corporation that size is a pretty big responsibility.

So, tell me again why it is that we're so angry about a relative handful of white collar workers who make more than we do when there are hundreds of sports figures who make even more?

Think about who pays the multimillion dollar salaries of these sports figures. YOU do. Attending an NFL game will cost you around $75 - minimum - just to get a seat. I know people who pay this kind of money regularly to watch something that they could see on TV for free. Then they'll pay another $70 or so for a (fake) jersey to wear to the game, $25 for a foam finger, $20 for a hat, and $8.00 for each beer. I don't pay anywhere near that amount of money in bank fees in a year. If you do, perhaps you should be more mad at yourself than at the bank. Maybe it's time to check into switching banks. But, I just don't see the point of occupying Wall Street when the big money is at Yankee Stadium and other places like it.

The New Rolls-Royce/Bentley

Saw on of the new Rolls-Royces yesterday, ironically pulling into an outlet mall. UGLY doesn't begin to describe this rolling eyesore. Wow. Rolls has really hit rock bottom with their latest crew of designers. Apparently they're now marketing a once-distinguished motor-carriage to makers of rap videos. The latest Rolls looks like a cross between an overgrown Kia (in the back) and a Chrysler 300 (at the front). Blechhhh! If somebody gave me one of these grotesque abominations of automotive "styling," I'd take it to downtown Atlanta and sell it to the first guy I saw wearing a fur coat and gold-framed glasses (in other words, a pimp or Elton John).

Mystery Missiles and Airplane Contrails

Hard to watch this Titan missile launch and believe that the contrail over LA last month was a missile of any kind. For one thing, a Titan is a BIG missile and it disappeared within a minute or two. The KCBS footage followed for several minutes (they only showed a short bit, but the cameraman said he watched for over 10 minutes - no way he could have maintained visual on a rocket/missile for 10 minutes).

My question is this: Why didn't the media just dig up some footage like this and show it by way of explanation? Instead, they dig up a bunch of kooks who didn't appear to know what the hell they were talking about! A picture's worth a thousand words. Video is worth hundreds of thousands of words.

Here's a bit of the original footage that KCBS cameraman Gil Leyvas shot along with some analysis:



That looks reasonable to me. Funny how the "missile conspiracy" was all over the place, but I had to DIG to come up with a logical explanation. Sad society. We buy into anything that's sold to us as a big, scary conspiracy but the boring ol' rational answers don't get much airplay because we don't want to hear that.

Huntsville-Madison. You Ain't in the Promised Land.

Holy crap. One week to the day after a fatal shooting at a local middle school and some whacko neuroscience professor at the UAH campus shoots up a department meeting because she was denied tenure. Interviews so far indicate she was one of those loony professors we've all had for one class or another - the ones who appear to know the material but cannot teach it. I've always wondered why they bother putting those people in classrooms, but at least this one didn't flip out and kill a bunch of students. Just three fellow professors. She also wounded three others (one of whom was described as being a "staff member" which I suppose could include a secretary, janitor, or some other position).

In case you didn't catch the subtle pronoun cue above, the professor here was a female. A Harvard-educated one, at that. What are they teaching these Ivy League-ers? (Some guy at Yale flipped out and killed a fellow grad student there not that long ago. . . ) Can't really blame the parents here. These are full-grown adults we're talking about. Which makes me wonder how many kids running around today are just powder kegs waiting to explode years down the road.

I guess this didn't take me completely by surprise. This place has a very weird aura. Plenty of great people - don't get me wrong. But, we picked up a very strange Stepford Wives vibe last year at the local ball park. Many people around here seem to feel they are somehow better than everyone else simply because they're here. Never mind that everyone else around here is also here. They're out to prove their worth by building larger, nicer homes and pretending that their kids are all superior. I'm thinking this professor - for no apparent reason - felt sure that she was going to get tenure and probably made some financial decisions based on that expectation. Perhaps she had signed papers to buy one of the many houses for sale locally with prices "from the $500,000s." When she didn't get tenure, she cracked. At least she won't be needing a house for a while.

They're saying that when she was arrested she was clearly in denial that she had killed anyone. She yelled something like, "It didn't happen. They're still alive." As though somebody else staged a mass killing to frame her or something? Nice set-up for an insanity defense, there. If her attorney doesn't claim that she had a psychotic break, I'll be absolutely flummoxed.

But, wait. This woman clearly showed up at a faculty meeting WITH A GUN. Was she expecting the meeting to be ambushed by 9th-grade-wannabe-Crips? Why did she have a gun? There's no place in this town where I feel like I need to carry a gun to protect myself. Well, until recently there wasn't. Now I feel like I should pack at least a .380 any time I'm near an educational institution around here.

This could just be the beginning of the end of a huge facade. There seems to be a silent consensus that this area is some kind of secret Eden where the schools are drug and gang free, we have no crime, everyone makes a gazillion dollars a year, and the streets are paved with gold. That, of course, helps sell houses "from the $500,000s." Within two years, I had already started to see through this. My son spent the better part of 2d Grade practicing the standardized EOG tests. No wonder the schools around here score well on them. They cheat! Now I'm wondering how much of a gang problem the schools have been hiding and covering up. I'm wondering how many meth labs there are IN this county; we always read about the ones in Guntersville but never seem to hear of anything happening right here - just 30 miles north.

There is one twist that I'll be curious to watch develop. Apparently they're also considering this woman's husband a "person of interest." Why? Did she just bring a gun to scare someone? Did her hubby snipe the victims with real bullets from afar while she believed she was shooting blanks? That would have to be the stupidest plan ever, but I think we've all known geniuses who couldn't change their own oil.

Stay tuned. No, really. Stay tuned. It's only been a week and I've already noticed a significant decline in the number of people commenting on the Discovery MS stories. Give it two months and there's a good chance the whole episode will just sort of go away. . .

The Unimportance of Punctuality

Those of you who spend any time around me at all know, or will realize upon a moment's thought, that being "on time" is not of tremendous importance to me. It's not that I'm inconsiderate of others, and it's not that I'm just a slack bastard who can't get anywhere "on time." I set out my junior year in high school to earn a perfect attendance award, and I did it. After that, I moved on to other challenges.

Punctuality is a highly over-rated quality. I had a friend once whose philosophy was, "Early is on time, and on time is late." But, in cases where it is vitally important to be at a specific place at a specific time, arriving early is almost always just as bad arriving late. In music, being early is possibly even worse than being late. On an infantry maneuver, being early could get you killed by your own troops. In social situations, it is rude to show up at someone's house early - they may not be ready for you. In most cases, it simply isn't all that important to show up at a specific time.

At work, my philosophy is if showing up "on time" is anywhere near as important as what I do after I arrive, it's not worth showing up at all. I don't work for the German railroad. This attitude caused me a lot of grief when I was in the military. The Army's prevailing attitude was, if a formation was called for 6:30, you were supposed to be there at 6:20. That would have been fine if the Army was as diligent about releasing us from duty on time. They wanted us there early but had no qualms about keeping us late - even when there was absolutely nothing for us to do. I got out after my first hitch. As far as I'm concerned, punctuality cuts both ways.

I'm jealous of my time. It's the only thing I cannot get more of. I can arrive at a given location at a set time when I feel that doing so justifies the opportunity cost. But, that is rarely the case. You can't even say that firemen or medics need to be "on time;" they just have to show up fast when called - not at a particular time. Getting somewhere fast at random times is far different from merely showing up at a place at a particular time day in and day out simply because it's "time" to be at work (or where ever).

You can probably blame my entire attitude toward punctuality on the medical field. I used to show up for doctor appointments slightly early like they always ask you to. Not once was I ever called in at my scheduled appointment time. Never. I may not get paid as much as a doctor, but my time is just as valuable. We each have but 24 hours in a day. Thus, I started showing up for medical appointments between five and fifteen minutes after the scheduled time. Oddly, this neither increased nor decreased my wait times. But, it certainly eliminated the stress of trying to get to a doctor's office "on time."

Gradually, my casual attitude toward time slipped into all other aspects of my life. This was mainly because I found that whenever I showed up "on time," everybody else was late. I decided that I'd rather hurry to catch up than hurry up and wait. You can argue that friends should drop whatever they're doing to be sure they meet each other "on time." Conversely, you could argue - as I do - that when the purpose of getting together is to relax you shouldn't create more stress by demanding punctuality from each other.

In Saudi Arabia (and, I understand, all across the Middle East) as well as Spain, Mexico, and a number of other whole countries, punctuality isn't even an issue. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I had a room-mate who was probably never late to anything in his life. One afternoon he suffered a massive coronary and died, ironically, what I suppose you'd call an untimely death. In five years, I never once heard of an Arab falling over dead of a heart attack - and they smoke. I also never once heard an Arab utter the words "late," "on time," or "punctual." The Arabs may be on to something.

Ice Hockey and Fighting

We are a hockey family. At our house, we say football is the contact sport for people who can't skate. Any 200+ lb. knucklehead can carry a big ball from one end of a grassy field to the other. Try "carrying" a 3" puck on the end of a stick while ice skating. And, oh yeah, while other people are crashing into you and using their sticks to take the puck away. That, my friends, takes skill. So, I get a little put off when I hear people talk about going to hockey games just to see fights. It's as though they don't think hockey is worth watching without fights.

I've heard a lot of people say they don't understand hockey; they get the fighting, but the rules of hockey itself are too complicated. They aren't. The goal is to shoot the puck into the opposing team's net. How much simpler can it get? There are rules, of course, but they are few and fairly intuitive. You cannot, for example, whack opposing players across the head with your stick. If you do, you'll be sent to the penalty box for 5 minutes.

The one and only rule you should really understand is the off-sides rule, and it's pretty simple. You cannot go across the opposing team's blue line until after the puck has crossed the blue line; if the other team moves the puck back out, everyone on your team must go back until they regain possession of the puck. In other words, you can't plant a couple of players next to the other team's net and leave them there for the entire game. If you understand that, you can watch hockey and you'll know what's happening at least 90% of the time.

Back to fighting. If both benches at a football game started brawling on the 50-yard line, it would be headline news. At hockey games, fights are common. There's a reason for that. Hockey is a non-stop game which moves fast and involves a lot of on-going physical contact. Generally, barring a penalty or lost puck, play continues without stopping until someone gets the puck into a goal. Players rotate on and off the ice constantly because, frankly, nobody can play at full speed for more than a few minutes at a time - but the game doesn't stop. A new "shift" jumps onto the ice and picks up play on the fly. Unlike football (or most other sports which stop frequently), in hockey you don't get much time to cool off physically or emotionally. Getting slammed into the boards and whacked with the butt end of a stick can piss you off, especially when you're tired. A little irritation piled on top of a close game can push players to take a swing at each other. Fights in hockey are a direct result of emotional intensity combined with physical exertion. They are not "part of the game." They are a by-product of the game.

There's more than enough violence built into the game without fights. Last year a player got his throat slashed by another player's skate. Plenty of players have died after being hit by pucks (rubber gets extremely hard when frozen, and pucks move well over 100 mph). Plus, you've got ten guys skating around with sticks at over 30 mph in an area confined by a wall of wood and glass. You know there's going to be contact. You need to see fighting on top of all that?

Do I think fighting should be completely eliminated from hockey? Not necessarily. I have played hockey in a no-checking league where fighting would have gotten a player kicked out of the league entirely. Frankly, I think the games were somewhat MORE interesting without the intentional contact because we relied solely on skill to move the puck. There was still contact, but we couldn't deliberately crash into each other. As a result, tempers tended to stay fairly calm and fights were non-existent. But, knowing that a fight would get us into serious trouble did tend to make us back off a bit in play. I'd hate to see professional play similarly restricted.

Still, I also hate to see the semi-amateur leagues like the SEHL and SPHL use fights to lure crowds of wrestling fans into ice rinks. If you want to see fights, go to a boxing match. If you just like watching overgrown guys bang into each other in the mud, you've always got football. If you want to see some intense play by some very talented athletes, go to a hockey game.