Tuscaloosa Gets The Birmingham Blues
Part of the lack of consistent Trash has been aversion to NCAA “opening”, knowing what would happen. The NFL pros had/have a shot, but even that has not been easy. Colleges? Anybody that has spent time on a college campus knew that would be a tough pull. So…..
Nick Saban is a Trumpian hero that magically slays the Covid and can coach the most important thing in the world, a belligerent SEC game. What a jerk. That said, UGA at Bama is close to a national championship game as you will get prior to any supposed BCS Championship.
Bill Bel had an interesting start to his coaching career. He was always that guy, and it is interesting reading.
As to the Pros, they are holding on. Barely. The Tennessee Titans has a huge COVID scare that seems to be slightly smaller than first advertised. The Titans are actually a pretty well run organization, so that is not surprising. But what a warning shot, along with Cam Newton and Gilmore in Boston. Playing football, with giant team roster numbers, and even bigger administrative staffs, was always going to be harder than the NBA, NHL or even MLB.
The AFC alone lost steals the day Sunday. I’ll take the Pats over the Donkos in Gillette, but that is not overly easy, Baker and the Brownies in Pittsburgh is the game to really watch. Green Bay at Tampa Bay is the other one to watch. Whether you are a fan or not, that is two of the best QBs ever tilting at each other.
Okay, a story about the Trash music attached hereto. Long ago, I went to a Charlie Daniels Band concert in Phoenix. It was really good. So, one of my first summers in Santa Monica, I was just kind of driving around. Drove by the Civic Center and saw that the CDB was playing. So found a place to park and bought a ticket. It was absolutely great, as the CDB was back then. Later, I had an opportunity to talk to Daniels via email. He was stunningly smart, even if we disagreed about most everything. His politics were not mine, but he was great. This was before even Twitter. RIP Mr. Daniels. The Birmingham Blues are close enough to Tuscaloosa. So is Caballo Diablo.
College football is pretty high on the list of things about which I do not care. If there’s any relevance, it’s a way of assessing the effect of the pandemic on things I do care about–like politics. In the midst of the most consequential election of my lifetime, I’m looking to meaningless but fairly standardized activities like these for hints about how the pandemic might impact election process in surprising ways.
College football is instructive in many ways. Outbreaks among college football teams were completely expected by epidemiologists, so that’s not really a shocker.
The thing that I’ve found most instructive is that there is a group of people who are extremely passionate about having college football regardless of what the experts say about it how dangerous it is, and this group was able to get places like The University of Michigan, whose President is a virologist, to reverse their decisions about not having college football right now.
I think that we’ve known for a while that the well-being of the players isn’t at the top of the list of priorities of most people (if any) who work for the NCAA, but now we know that the NCAA, along with many college football fans and supporters, literally don’t care if the players get sick and die, or even if they act as vectors to other people who will get sick and die. Those lives as dispensable if it means getting college football back on television. That part surprised me a little.
Right, the Michigan thing was a disappointment–really did underline how vigorously the tail is wagging the horse. .
I suspect the NCAA’s attitude is “There’s always more where those came from.” As long as kids see pro sports as an easy way to get rich, they’ll be right.
Plantation system.
Football Team has continued its losing ways, dropping to 1-4, but to be clear even worse is the release of more news about Football Team’s barbaric treatment of cheerleaders:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/16/washington-cheerleaders-video-lawsuit/
Football Team owner Dan Snyder is alledged to be behind the videotape of un- and underdressed cheerleaders obtained by the Washington Post, and the article is full of more awful details.
Many of the details of Football Team’s abuses are not new, and the failure of Roger Goodell to act against Dan Snyder is inexcusable. Snyder, of course, is a big Trump backer, although tickets to his games don’t have the same value among Washington elites as they did when Jack Kent Cooke owned the team.
I just had to read this Wapo article, although I wish I hadn’t. I have to scour my eyeballs now. Snyder is such a douche.
Many people think that the Washington Foreskins are just a bunch of useless throwaways…but they have revealed their owner to be a complete dick, er, Dan.
Thirty one years ago today, at rush hour, 5:04pm, the 6.9 Loma Prieta Quake hit the San Francisco Bay Area. At that precise moment, the San Francisco Giants were playing the Oakland A’s in the 1989 World Series. 62 people were killed, most of them when the double decker Cypress Structure of highway 80 in Oakland collapsed and when a section of the Bay Bridge roadbed fell on the deck below. Were it not for that game, hundreds, possibly thousands more deaths would have occurred.
But since it was literally a Bay Bridge Series, the residents of the Bay Area had raced home early from work or headed to the nearest beer and TV from work and the roads were eerily empty for the start of the game.
In our current situation, we need to remember as bad as things are, they could always be worse. We need to be grateful for the small pleasures in life that join us in positive ways, no matter how silly or trivial they seem.
Look at this site. I get to interact with intelligent people from all over the world about things of consequence. And I get to agree with someone trash talking the insufferably smug Nick Saban.
31…gulp. I was at my desk at Shoreline Amphitheatre, leaning over to turn on my little TV I brought in to watch the game, where half our company was in attendance. next thing I was under my desk hugging my garbage can. such a surreal day and weeks after. what your post reminded me of: how everyone came together in the days after. sooo polite on the road. compassion for our neighbors. all in a blink due to the shared trauma we went through.
may our Country come together as well as we can in January 2021 and rebuild from the rubble of the Trumpquake we have all endured.
as for Baseball! Jim White & Gregg Levine & I have been congratulating & commiserating all week as we watch the Tampa Bay Rays & Dodger games play out. fingers crossed…
And, yeah….31. Good grief.
My sis was just leaving work – she lived in north Berkeley at the time, and worked in Richmond/San Pablo. A few years earlier she’d been working down by Oakland Airport, and would have been roughly around the Cypress Structure when it happened. (She said that she thought her tires had gone flat, until she heard all the car alarms.)
I had the pregame show on the radio, and heard it live.
(Correction: It was I880/CA17, the Nimitz freeway, south of I80. The structure was pre-interstate. I never liked it, it was claustrophobic and there was no short way out if you were northbound.)
This is one of those “I remember exactly where I was when” things.
I was in my carport working on a boat with a boom box radio sitting on the bow. Had friends at the game, but I was listening to radio in Phoenix. It took me a bit to get inside and look at the TV, but what a nuts thing.
Still have my ticket stubs to the game; Section 1, Row 18, seats 13 & 14.
First reaction of the crowd after the shaking stopped, a loud cheer like “OK, bring the game on!”
Then reality set in as people started hearing and seeing the news on their Watchmans and radios. Surreal.
Ooof. It was surreal 800 miles away. Cannot imagine how it felt there.
My grandmother who lived about 40 miles from the Bay told the story that she was out gardening when the quake hit and it shook her and knocked her over.
She thought she had a stroke or heart attack and went inside to call an ambulance when she saw everything that had fallen off the shelves, she felt a big wave of relief that it was only an earthquake.
Achieved a new appreciation for Candlestick that day; my wife and I were underneath the Upper Deck overhang which wiggled but didn’t break.
Lived through many minor temblors before that in NorCal but that day we learned to respect them.
There’s a reason UC Berkeley grad engineering is known as “The Rebar Program.”
There’s also a reason why so many bridge supports have full metal jackets. And why most of my heavy books are on lower shelves.
Bay Area native here (Giants fan, although I’m cool with the A’s). I was living in Paris at the time, and the World Series was not on local TV. I don’t recall how we found out, as I don’t think we even had a TV. Early news reports were confounding and practically made it sound like San Francisco had fallen into the ocean.
Friends and family who experienced it were scared shiftless and humbled by it. Most of us who grew up in EQ country took some pride in riding out the occasional moderate temblor – an unearned swagger that is no longer on display.
It was batshit even in Phoenix. Again, I had friends at that game. Only one had a cell phone, they were not ubiquitous at the time, and could not get through to that one. Was scary.
I think mobile phones were so big back then that you had to buy them their own seat at the ballpark.
sitting in my dark living room listening to the portable radio, the walls shuddering with constant aftershocks, it was strange how quickly i adapted to the (erroneous) early reports. “Bay Bridge has collapsed” “A terminal at SFO has collapsed”. it was just like, yup, ok.
The unpredictability can make them more frightening or surreal.
From 2010 to 2018 I worked in downtown San Francisco. We had an earthquake drill one morning. Two hours later an earthquake stuck! Not huge, but we felt it and went to our safe location.
The 1994 MLK earthquake in the San Fernando valley I felt as it was a strong quake even though I lived 50 miles away in the most excellent city of San Dimas. In Santa Monica the damage was worse than in many areas closer to the epicenter. Some of the shock waves bounced off deep layers and met other waves near in Santa Monica and there was much destruction there. The, exactly one year later to the day, Kobe Japan suffered a major quake with huge loss of life.
It’s a bizarre thing to live through.
As many know, I spent many summers in Santa Monica. Never felt an earthquake the first couple. But then I was in a studio apartment on 2nd Street close to the Incline. I woke up and things were rumbling. A few things fell off of table and shelves, but not bad. Still extremely freaky. Neighbors laughed and said, don’t worry, it happens. They were right, but it was still extremely bizarre.
I was at work in El Monte when Whittier Narrows happened, in 1987. Our workplace was maybe a mile from the epicenter. The first shock felt like the whole building jumped about six or eight inches north. I don’t really remember the next several seconds – but I know I went under the desk! (They were ex-linoleum-tops, steel and very sturdy.) The offices in Monterey Park got it much worse.
I didn’t miss Northridge: I wasn’t there for it. (I was in Texas and saw it on the news.) Waited a few days to call a friend who lived there. They got cracks in their house, and the concrete wall in the back yard fell over. FEMA came by and asked what they needed, and left a case of bottled water.
Everyone has stories about Weird Things that Happened in Earthquakes. They can be very entertaining. (Northridge friend had a bottle of tequila with an inch or so in it, sitting on top of the fridge. After the quake, it was still on top of the fridge, but the cupboard door was now in front of the bottle.)
My brother and sister-in-law live in Boulder, home to many of our top athletes who want to train at altitude. Both of them got Covid-19 in March. Neither has fully recovered. My SIL is a competitive rower, competing around the West in Masters races, but she has not been able to train. My brother has had breathing problems. His doctor says she’s seen a number of athletes who got it and have lost lung capacity.
There were a bunch of stories about football players demanding that they be able to play. It’s like they are as desperate to play as the fans are to watch. Maybe they think the Covid is just one more risk in a risky sport? I don’t get it.
OT
One of my kids just watched the Sen David Purdue’s racist video making fun of Harris’ name. Child turned to the family and said “Wow, that Sen. David Purdouche needs to get a life.”
RIP Joe Morgan – best second baseman ever? Bruce Jenkins thinks so.
Oakland can field a pretty good team of homegrown talent.
Rogers Hornsby and Robbie Alomar may have an argument. But, yeah, Morgan was that good.
That’s good company. Jeff Kent was a great hitter, but not fleet of foot nor a classic fielder at that position.
Joe Morgan was a great 2nd baseman. I would throw Eddie Collins into the mix of who was the greatest.
Best defensive? Maybe BMaz, Bill Mazeroski……..
who’s home run in game 7 of the 1960 World Series Yogi Berra watched exit Forbe’s Field.
I see Jim White’s Gators are now a Covid-19 ClusterFk.
Guilty pleasure: Watching Dusty Baker take his 5th major league team through a playoff series. Even bigger pleasure: Watching his old-school managing style, the likes of which I’ll never see again. Old-school managers are going the way of the coelacanth.
WOoHoo !! Tampa Bay Rays beat the ethically challenged Astros !!
bmaz’ comment on Charlie Daniels politics being different than his raises in my 2:00 AM 2-cocktail mind an issue I’ve been chewing on for the last year or so.
I, too, was a fan of CDB from high school on until a few years ago until I learned of his (to me) abhorrent politics and social views. Same with the Nuge. Then there’s Ryan Adams, an artist I truly loved and now can’t comfortably listen to. And most recently, Van the Man and Liam Gallagher and their idiotic posturing re the freedom and liberty of endangering others in a pandemic.
I really wanna find a way back to their art, but so far can’t get past the seriously flawed artists.
Wait Gallagher the watermelon guy? He’s a fascist?
I continue to call for Matt Naggy’s firing for wearing that visor cap. It’s simply unacceptable.
Weird drive by the Stillers in the last minute of the first half.
Joe Morgan was my idol. I played 3rd base, not 2nd, but I modeled my hitting after him. I was up at bat and flipping my right elbow up and down before the pitch. Joe Morgan did that to remember to keep his elbow up so his swing plan remained ideal.
Of course that was ideal for a time when hits were more valued than home runs. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone else flip the elbow like Joe did.
This post reminds me of a brief exercise involving brains and hands. If I could see you, I could show you this physical demonstration that illustrates succinctly to our brains that they are not as smart as they think they are. Alas, I only have words to tell you. So, I may completely flop in my attempt. But here goes:
1. Find a willing person to participate.
2. Tell the person to extend arms outward in front of their body.
3. Next, tell them to cross there arms in an X.
4. While the arms are still in an X, tell them to clasp their hands together, intertwining their fingers.
5. Now, this is the hard part. With the fingers and hands clasped and the arms still crossed in an X, tell them to pull the hands under, toward their chest. If done correctly, this will force the elbows to automatically move outward. So, it looks like their arms and hands are in a twisted prayer position. They may have to readjust their thumbs slightly to be more comfortable.
6. Okay. Now, being very careful NOT to touch or come too close to any fingers, point to one of their fingers and ask them to move it. If they struggle, tell them you will try another one. Then point to a thumb or another finger.
7. What usually happens, if done correctly, is that the person knows what you are saying and understands which finger or thumb they are supposed to move. But they struggle to accomplish the task. Their brain is either very slow to get the finger to move, or totally incapable of doing so. But if you touch the finger (or even come too close or touch a hair) the brain knows immediately what to do.
8. This shows how dependent we are on the sense of touch. So, that’s how it relates to sports and to music. So many things are reliant on other things that we don’t take into consideration or dismiss as not important.
And that makes me think of a concept I heard expressed somewhere awhile back, “when the mind is gone, the heart’s still there.”
Okay, Birmingham Blues was the front tag for this post.
But don’t sleep on the last link, Caballo Diablo. It is seriously pretty great.
None of us will all be on the same music page, and that is okay. I have a good friend that has repeatedly invited me to Nuge shows. I’ve seen Terrible Ted a couple of times back in the day, and … the man has some good music and can really play guitar.
But, nope, no desire to see him again. I do not know what I would do if it was CD still alive and the CDB nearby. Probably pass, but they were something really good at one time.