It's EASY To Make Me Cranky These Days...
In addition to being busy as crap professionally, I spent yesterday afternoon helping my neighbor Danny install a "floating" laminate floor in his new sunroom which I designed a few months ago.
We both huffed and puffed and grunted and groaned going from standing up to kneeling to sitting on our butts for what seemed like a thousand times each, and after five hours we had eight of twelve rows of flooring installed.
This morning at 7:30 we'll start again and hopefully after an additional three hours of effort we will be finished. We have to limit ourselves to that time limit because Danny has a lunch date with his golfing buddies followed by a round of 18 holes at a course some distance away from West Knoxtown.
After doing what we have to do to finish the job, I would be so tired that I couldn't play a round of putt-putt golf or "Pick-up Sticks" with any enthusiasm.
But Danny's trying to save a few bucks on the end of the project and (he pours a mean Crown Royal on ice at the end of the day) and if he wants to tile and golf in the same day that's his business.
So any way, now I'm back alive after a good Blackened Grouper dinner and six hours sleep and I want to catch up on what's been going on in the world.
Let's see...
Oh...
Yahoo News has this story which gave me pause to do a little mental ranting as I was logging back in to my E-Mail account...see if you agree with me...
Classy New Jersey coach gives skid-breaking game ball to foe
By Cameron Smith
Last Friday, South New Jersey was host to a heated battle between two struggling teams. When the game was finally over, Sterling (N.J.) High coach Jarod Claybourn had to decide what to do with a game ball from his program's first win in two years. According to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Phil Anastasia, he chose the least-likely recipient in a choice which testified to Claybourn's class: He gave the ball to the other coach.
"I don't even know if I can put it into words," Gateway coach Mike Karp, the ball's recipient, told Anastasia. "We're two struggling programs. Somebody had to lose, and we came up on the short end of the scoreboard.
"But for him to do that, it just shows that we gained some respect that night. That means so much to our kids."
...snip...
Both teams were shooting for respect while carrying the baggage of epic losing streaks. Sterling entered having lost 17 straight games, sitting at 0-5 in 2010. Gateway was also 0-5, and the 20-13 loss it absorbed on Friday pushed its own losing streak to 17 games.
While the game had to have a winner and loser, Claybourn said there was no reason why his team deserved to win any more than its opponent. (emphasis mine) Leading late in the fourth quarter, Sterling declined to punt on a fourth down near midfield to try and salt away a rare victory. Instead, Gateway's defense held strong and earned the ball back.
The coach says "there was no reason why his team deserved to win any more than its opponent???
Say WHAT???
Coach...your team has won only one of eighteen straight games, and I'm pretty DARNED sure that I could go to your next school board meeting and tell them why your team is a laughing stock of the area.
Yes YOU...Coach are the problem, because any decent coach or player (or even entrepreneur) knows that to win in any game...football...or business or just LIFE in general...
there are a number of reasons besides just plain LUCK or possibly GOVERNMENT REGULATION i.e. INTERVENTION that one individual or team or business owner comes out on top in the game they elect to play.
Still with me here?
What about things like BASIC TALENT for the game?
I was a good student and a crappy athlete (if you don't count playing Frisbee), so I never played on a Championship High School or College or Super Bowl team, but I did graduate from college and I have designed several hundred million dollars worth of industrial equipment and managed the fabrication and installation of millions of dollars more.
And in spite of the "Coach's" mindless blithering, there was a REASON why I won the bids, just like there is a reason Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have a few more Pesos than I have this morning.
To say and believe otherwise would be to show my own stupidity or possibly let it be known that I'm the victim of a creeping insanity which I say is insidiously coming over the American Educational System, and most younger citizens by default.
Oh...and "Coach" Clayborne, how about another reason winning teams win...something called TRAINING AND PREPARATION (otherwise known as the "coaches" primary job)?
No matter how good of an athlete someone is, they just can't put on a helmet and shoulder pads and show up in a high school football stadium on a Friday night or on a College Gridiron on Saturday afternoon and expect to be on the winning side of the scoreboard after watching the final minutes click off the game clock.
And if they are on the afore mentioned football teams and they don't spend time conditioning and weight lifting and running a few wind sprints each week, when they trot out past the goal posts under the stadium lights, if the other team HAD spent time in the weight room each week...
I say that there's a pretty damn good reason that the disciplined team of well conditioned athletes should be able to prevail over so-called "Coach" Claybourn's eleven players in any given four quarters of play.
Are you with me, Ladies and Gentlemen?
See, this is the same crap that they've apparently been teaching in grade school and even little league sports for twenty years or so...playing games and teaching kids that there should be no winners or losers after the dust settles and the game has been played.
It started out with the elimination of things like kickball and tag on the playground because losing might make the pasty little pansy assed kids or the over weight kids "feel bad" and have lower self esteem because they lost a GAME.
Heck, in some areas of the country they've stopped KEEPING SCORE in kids football and baseball and softball games for the same reason...it makes some children (and more importantly, their sniveling, booger eating, tye died, Kumbaya singing, patchouli stinking, tree hugging parents by default) FEEL BAD.
And in my opinion it's the
public schools GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS intent to do this for a reason, so the kids believe that they need the government to "level the playing field" and protect them from the results of their "God Given" inabilities and/or poor life decisions.
Problem is, when these same kids grow up and are running around later in life, having dropped out of high school or whatever, they're going to wake up in the morning in the trailer park and wonder why they aren't living in a gated country club community and driving a BMW 5M...and I guess that they are going to wish their beloved "Coach" Clayborn was there to hand them the "Game Ball of Life" because...
...after all...Coach Clayborn said:
"there's no reason
his their team deserved to win any more than
their opponent their neighbor across town."
You know?
And I say that if the government has their way, that within the next generation this thinking is going to take over our society and "income tax" system in ways we have not even managed to think of with the idea and ideal of "equalizing everything"...
because in the minds of the
progressives liberals there should not be winners and losers in life in general, and if they get their way the government will start coming to your house or your work and then take away ANYTHING that they want which the politicians and "authorities" believe is above and beyond the standards which THEY SET.
What started as the federal income tax system and more recently mileage standards for cars and rules governing how much water your toilet uses to flush and how much water your shower head can spray on your glorious naked body and what kind of light bulb you can bUy at Home depot will soon apply to EVERY SINGLE THING you have in your medicine cabinet and closet and garage and night stand in your bedroom.
It's coming...Ladies & Gentlemen.
We can still stop it, but like a cancer we have to identify it, and then go in and cut it out of our lives and society WITH AGGRESSIVE MEASURES.
So go VOTE next Tuesday, with your brain clear and working instead of with your heart looking for any more of that "Hopie Feelie Changie Thing" we've been living with for nearly the past two years.
You Know?
I have to go now and get some work done and think about something else before my ever greying, ever balding head explodes.
Regards, Y'all...
