The Cold Call From Hell

USC’s football team lost last night to Washington State. Hahahahaha.

Yours truly, Dodgerblue, UCLA ’72, ’75.

Is any of the suggestions “Not being an Asshole”?

I’ve found that people who read that book and memorize it seem to forget that one.

@Dodgerblue: It’s like a fetish with you, this L.A. Thing. That sports team you like that’s named after you.

ADD: Or is it? Is it the college version of the sports thing? How do you even keep it straight?

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: Things are very simple in sports. There are things that are right and things that are wrong. If you attend UCLA, you hate USC and the dumb rich kids who attend it. Same thing for UC Berkeley and Stanford, although Stanford has smart rich kids. You grow up in Los Angeles, you hate the San Francisco Giants and are generally contemptuous of SF, that self-important theme park pretending to be a city. Although you can get a good drink there.

@Dodgerblue: They have good seafood.

I will never understand sports. I think it’s like Project Runway somehow, butt with very few gay guys.

@Dodgerblue: And if you attend Oregon, you know the football team will always suck and Eugene will be spared the hell of Big-Time Collegiate Sport.

Oh, wait.

Meanwhile in Sandy Eggo, you can go to Albertsons on Sunday afternoon, and even if all the clerks are wearing Chargers jerseys, it’s not something you really notice, because who cares?

@nojo: Exactly.

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: If you’re from The Delaware Valley, you love the Eagles. You hate the Cowboys. Period. You hate the Giants, unless they’re playing the Cowboys. You hate the Redskins because of their name, but you don’t hate them if they are playing the Cowboys or the Giants. The only time you may root for an AFC team is if they are playing the Cowboys in the Superbowl. Otherwise, you always stick with the NFC team, even if it’s not the Eagles.

If the Eagles hire someone like, oh, Michael Vick, you give up on football all together.

In college, the Ivy League and the Quakers are a fucking joke. Penn State, well, I’m glad to see Joe-Pa’s statue hung, drawn and quartered.

There’s always the Fighting Blue Hens, I guess.

People are a little too nutty about the Seahawks. I’m sick of it. They’re worse than Raiders fans.

Baseball — Phillies for life.

@Dodgerblue: Saw that and thought of you.

@nojo: NIKETOWN

Speaking of dystopias, Detropia is well done.

@JNOV: No, that’s Beaverton. Nike merely owns the entire campus. Twenty years ago, we were already joking about all the Knight Buildings named for various family members.

Oh, and “Just Do It”? Dan Weiden ’69.

Then again, at least we’re not Beavers.

@nojo: Around 2000, Beaver College (all women, natch) changed its name to “Arcadia University.” Maybe someone will forget in 2075. Probably not.

@JNOV: You hit that out of the park.

The Vick thing is a little more subtle though don’t you think? When he first came in for Kolb and was successful, many folks started to forgive him. Once he stated to lose that went back to wanting him to go away.

There are a few Cowboy fans in the area that grew up here. It is a little jarring to come across them proudly wearing their jersies.

Change of subject here – it is that time for me submit my U-Way pledge for next year. I would like a portion to go to Planned Parenthood in one of the states most effected by cutbacks in funding over the past year. I think SFL posted something in the past year on this subject. Any suggestions? I know Texas received a lot of press which might actually help but what about the states that do not seem to get the press attention?

thanks

@JNOV: With you on the Cowboys hate. Worst flight ever: flying from OKC to SC for the funeral of the grandmother who raised me on a plane full of drunken Cowboys fans headed to the Super Bowl in Atlanta.

@DElurker: If you don’t want to do Planned Parenthood’s affiliates in the Rio Grande Valley (the Dallas affiliate recently got $ 1 million from Ross Perot but that doesn’t really help in the colonias on the border), then I’d suggest Planned Parenthood of Nebraska, Indiana, or Alabama/Mississippi. You can go to the main Planned Parenthood website and put in the states’ names and get to the affiliates (or just google the name of the state and “Planned Parenthood”).

@SanFranLefty: Thank you for the information. I guess with a state like Texas donations like Perot’s, and mine, really become localized. Here in Delaware it is a single affiliate. The local is poorly operated but well funded.

TJ/This is what I felt like posting on Facebook today, but didn’t want to deal with the inevitable hate. I always feel like this on 9/11….

Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

Wow, I killed the party.

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: Sincerity will do that. ;-)

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: I’m sorry, darling, I don’t really understand it. Do you mean this to represent what happened in New York in 2001? This makes me think of the account I read of an Iraqi woman whose son was blown to bits and who, when going to retrieve his body at the makeshift morgue, was shown to a large warehouse full of body parts and told to try to find those bits that belonged to him. And you know what? She did.

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: Pshaw. Your post was a thing of beauty.

@Benedick: It captures how I feel about the sorrow frenzy every year around 9/11. How we all cluck our tounges and nod our heads sagely and “never again” and not a lesson learned. Not one. But we’re a good and gracious people, right? We must be, we post pictures of weeping eagles on Facebook.

“Behind all this a great happiness is coming.”

… but what have we seen? More racism. More imperialism. More and more and more death.

But it’s okay, because we can “mix sorrow with sorrow”. It’s all right here, convenient and pat, down to the weeping children of the lost on television, right there for us to toothlessly consume and abandon, until next year, when we do it all again. For one day. Learning nothing.

Refill, dear?

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing:
Why should many US Americans learn a lesson? That would have to start with admitting that they were horribly tragically sadly terribly wrong about Iraqinam. It’s only human nature to blame everyone but themselves. Then they’d have to admit they were wrong about a lot of things and they can’t have that.

Something something unable to handle the truth blah blah.

For example, it explains why people (not just US Amercians) believe can get more for less yet they wonder why their food is terrible, their cars break down so quickly and why they lost their job at the widget plant because they can make’em cheaper in /fill-in-the-blank-3rd world shithole/ in part due to Voldemart’s pricing pressure.

@Tommmcatt Can’t Believe He Ate The Whole Thing: Have I told you lately how much I adore you, sweet Tommy?

@ManchuCandidate: What you said.

@SanFranLefty: ah, darling, back at you :).

@ManchuCandidate: Manchu, me Droog, we need to start a commune. Remember the ark? It was a worthy idea.