The World in a Twist

The whole world has its knickers in a collective twist because Hank Williams Jr. said something negative about President Barack Obama.

Monday Night Football pulled the “Rowdy Friends” song temporarily. Then Hank said he pulled it permanently. And I could not bring myself to care much less … until somebody sent along a column written by a local newspaper sports guy.

If you have ever read one newspaper you don’t really need to read this one to know what the guy said. He railed about Williams being stupid and dragged poor old Gomer Pyle into it, using the standard newspaper stance that if you are not urbane, you must be half-witted.

It was as tedious as it was to be expected.

HOWEVER…we are learning algebra now in the fourth grade. And we are using algebraic formulas to study character traits and motivations. For instance, if you do something to x and it results in y, it should happen every time.

Let’s look at this situation mathematically. A celebrity, let’s call him “h,” says something that is brutally negative about a seated president, p,  and that results in outrage, to be denoted by “o”. Therefore, h multiplied by p should equal o… h x p = o

Now, how did this formula work when the celebrity is Chris Rock, Garrison Keillor, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand or that paragon of morality, Madonna?

How many times has George Bush been called a murderer by people who supported senators who voted in favor of the war the president asked for? Rock suggested that it would be a good idea to kill Reagan. Keillor has been living on the public dime for a lifetime, doing “public” television and using the air time to rundown anybody who is slightly to the right of Miss Fonda.

And nary a peep out of the papers.

It doesn’t add up.  That means the formula doesn’t work. So we have to alter it.

An outrageous statement, “s,” that is directed against “ohbssggmpbos” (Our Honey Bunny Smoochie Smoochie Great Guy Mister President Barack Obama Sir) will, in all cases equal “ror”
… or righteous outrage.

Since the newspaper invoked the image of Gomer Pyle in its attack on Hank Williams Jr. I think it fair to use their own rural-bashing thinking. This is the kind of ciphering that Jethro Bodine might be proud of.

It does bring to mind one other possible formula.
Pc x bn = bs

PC could be political correctness, or it could be paycheck…it amounts to the same thing in print journalism. BN is brown nosing….or Barack Nurturing … again, mathematical equivalencies.
BS? Well, that’s just Bs. It may be a variable, but somehow it doesn’t seem to vary much.

Bounds and Leaps in Time

John Prine once wrote a song that said “time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps…it’s a country band that plays for keeps.”

Or something like that. I didn’t have time to look it up when I first started writing this back in early June. On the last leap and bound time had gone from the completion of FCAT to the end of school and I cannot for the life of me figure out how it got there.

And now it has bounded one week beyond the last day of school and I can’t figure out where that time went either.

I had a dental appointment and my annual physical including fasting and those oh-so-popular gatherings of stool samples (for those of you under 50, that has nothing to do with bar seating). I planted some flowers, mowed the dusty remnants of what used to be a lawn, trimmed some bushes, washed the pool deck/porch, researched paint and brushes (how fascinating), started a novel, tried to catalog all the stuff in my office, painted the porch, took the cat to the veterinarian, hit golf balls, cleaned out the armoir where I keep my clothes wadded up, counted my socks, visited two libraries, listened to a Stephen King novel on tape, downloaded some excellent P.G. Wodehouse stories and G.K Chesterton essays, cooked out a couple of times, went to a ski club pool party,  attended a former student’s baseball tournament, competed the final edition of the Room 224 Gazette and started to catch up on some mail.

Does that sound a little busy for a man who has been looking forward to relaxation?

For a teacher, it is decompression of the first order.

It is like a train rumbling toward an intersection (end of school). It collides with a vehicle (your free time for relaxation) but its momentum continues to carry it forward.

Summer break has a strange, coming home from the Civil War sort of feeling.

For 9 or 10 months, you were fully occupied with 20 kids for the biggest part of most days – this is the equivalent of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, except those people evacuating the embassy didn’t tell on each other or forget their lunch money.

Then the kids, and the happiness, is all gone and you are left with something called post-planning. If you are not a teacher, you cannot possibly understand the amount of paperwork, parent conferences, inventories, closeouts and the like go on before we leave for summer break. It is like you had a picnic that lasted for nine months and now you have to account for every napkin and plastic fork and you have to reassemble the chicken bones.

Your work area has to be cleaned, stuff has to be piled up and boxed and filed and inventoried, walls have to be cleared of all the stuff you had been told must be displayed on the walls. Your room has to be put into such a condition that it appears that you had never been there.

Sometimes you wonder if you were.

And then, all of a sudden, it is over and your time is yours.

For nine months, including weekends, holidays and the two hours every morning before other people get up, you have been living by Mr. Vest’s First Rule of the Classroom. This states that “If you have a hundred thousand things to get done, you ought to be doing one of them.”

You can’t just skid to a halt. Your eyeballs would pop out.

So, you look around at the 200,000 things you have neglected around the house while you were scrambling to do some of the 100,000 things that you needed to do at school, and you grab a handful and start doing them.

Instead of wandering around dizzily in a clockwise direction, you wander around dizzily in a counterclockwise direction.

It may appear to be mental illness…it may, in fact, be mental illness, but it is neither a cause for too much concern nor something that needs to be dealt with. It will deal with itself in time.

So, if you happen to see a freshly turned-loose teacher who feels a need to paint things, or make inventories of the sock drawer, or to draw up lists of available canned foods or whatever, don’t worry about it.

The momentum will burn off and they will get back to something like a normal approach to life. It takes about 8 to 10 weeks….just about in time for school to open and for them to start shoveling on the coal and picking up speed again.

“Two and a Half” Masters

The Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson show is sort of like “Two and a Half Men” … except with a bunch of kids instead of just that one.
Woods is, of course, the equivalent of Charlie Sheen in this metaphor…if not in real life. He also doesn’t seem to be in the show anymore, which leaves us with that dweeb guy who nobody even knows the name of. And the kids.
Not much left to it, is there?
I have to admit that I never much cared for Tiger Woods because I don’t care that much for ANYBODY who is THAT precious and special and super-dooper. I have never been one for sniffing around behind celebrities and desiring to touch the hem of the garment.
Mark Twain and I are on the same page about royalty and privilege. Me and Charles Dickens are pretty close (whenever I think about the Masters tournament, I re-read “Tale of Two Cities”). We don’t have a real royalty, but Woods had been granted “royal” status by the media and sportswriters were constitutionally incapable of mentioning him without making smooching noises.
If Tiger Woods stepped on their necks, they would admire his shoes. If he had insisted – or even suggested – that they call him Master or Your Majesty, they would have done it happily. There wasn’t a reporters notebook in this country that he could not wipe his feet on without fear of consequence.
Now, it is like post-French Revolution and they roll the former Marquis de Golfe  by on a little cart so the public can throw cabbages at him on the way to his weekly execution. I can’t say that I am real interested in that, either.
Mickelson seems to be the other side of the moon.
If I lived anywhere near Mickelson, there’s not much doubt that I wouldn’t care for him much, either. He no doubt lives in a place that is very much like Islesworth and is no doubt surrounded by people who think he is as precious and super-dooper.
But I don’t live anywhere near him and don’t have to put up with his posse of sportswriting devotees…and he has some things going for him. First off, his wife appears to have been born on this planet instead of cast from some super-model mold or simply created for the part. She was very ill for awhile and he appeared to have spent more time with her than he did with waitresses from Perkins and assorted porn stars and such.
He also is doofis looking, tends to get a little fat and has that crooked grin that seems to say “hyuk hyuk.” If you looked up the word “oops” in the dictionary, you would see a picture of Mickelson grinning next to the entry.
Woods, on the other hand, seems to have more of a sneer. Not a Snidely Whiplash sneer, but a Kid in the Gifted Program Who Has a Better Lunch Box Than You Do sneer. If he does something remarkable, he gives you a look like “ho-hum….I told you I was fantastic…now put your camera away before I have my man get physical with the likes of you.” Come to think of it, it seems almost French.
If Mickelson does something remarkable, like that shot from behind the tree at the Masters last year, he gets that grits-eating, crooked grin that seems to say “dang, how’d I manage to do that?”
It is like Duke playing Western Kentucky. Or some powerful dictatorship having its world-conquest plans held up by Norway.
I always enjoyed watching Woods and Mickelson go at it because I wanted one of them to lose more than I wanted the other one to win. If Woods isn’t in it, it quits being a World War and starts to look something like the Battle for the Falklands.
So, if something drastic doesn’t happen in the early round, I will probably be down at the Lake County Fair on Sunday looking at the livestock.
Or, maybe I’ll do some channel surfing and find an old episode of  “Two And a Half Men.”

It’s the Pitts

Our government could use a man like W.T. Pitts. Well, actually, the W.T. Pitts that once was alive. I doubt he could do much good now, what having been a corpse for these past three decades.

But, as I think of it, a dead W.T. would be preferable to some we have.

I hear they are thinking about shutting the government down because of a lack of money. I also hear that they are thinking about laying off teachers and increasing class sizes because the money ran out. Medicaid will be cut because the money is running out. Social Security is in danger because money is gone.

That would not surprise W.T. He went broke once a week, shortly after pay day, spending the last of his money on beer.

W.T. liked to sit in a tire on his front porch on weekends, drink beer and gesture at passing traffic while refighting the war in Europe. We figured that tire was a foxhole and we could figure out whether or not we were winning battles by which gesture we got….a wave of the hand meant the Nazis were on the run. A shake of the fist or a waving finger meant W.T. was dug in, once again, at Bastogne.

In most respects W.T. was crazy as a bedbug….or a Senator, if you prefer.

The difference was in budgeting. W.T. took his paycheck to the bank, then to the various loan companies, electric and water cooperatives, clothing stores and then the grocery store. He planned it all each week and his wife and kids were never in need.

Whatever was left over, he spent on himself in the form of Schlitz beer.

The difference between a government and W.T., or any other average deranged drunk, is the prioritizing of the spending. The functional drunk will take care of his bills first, his bad habits later.

Why could we not implement this simple method for our FIP (folks in power). They get their paychecks, staffing, travel benefits, perquisites, lavish pensions, medical benefits, cars and such AFTER everything else is paid for.

If we had this as a mandate, we wouldn’t need a balanced budget amendment….that would take care of itself. If that troth isn’t filled until the other animals are fed, the piggies will learn to count.

There might even be enough money left over to replace the furniture in the halls of Congress. Some tires would do nicely.

BasketBlog

I want the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team to lose – and I don’t know anything about them. My team has never played them, as far as I know. If we did, I never much cared.
My knowledge of the state of Connecticut is pretty well limited to it being the original home of Chester, from the story “A Cricket in Times Square.” Come to think of it, I don’t even much like Chester anymore.
In fact, I hate an innocent cricket, a dozen male athletes and the stupid-looking dog they have on their uniforms just because they happen to come from the same place as the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team.
This is good for sports.
If there is no hate involved in a sport, the sport is irrelevant to the point that it might as well be tennis. Think about it. If you love the Gators, you probably got a little ‘Nole hatred in you and vice versa.
The fact that I can hate UConn’s men just because they are from the same place as UConn’s women suddenly makes those women relevant. That is the direct result of, deep down in my Volunteer heart and Big Orange soul, the Tennessee basketball women being relevant.
Since MY women’s team matters, ALL women’s teams matter – and with that I have liberated more than half of the country from a second-class status. I am able to be proud of women, disappointed in them, happy about them, sad for them and, most importantly, angry at those creepy Connecticut versions of the species.
You would think we would have all gotten to this point at some earlier time than this, what with women flying jets in combat recently, being astronauts and Supreme Court Justices, secretaries of defense and state, editors, principals, doctors and cops.
But they still don’t matter on the basketball court to a lot of people.
When the coaches at my elementary school did an NCAA basketball tournament bracket, they only included the men’s half. They didn’t even mention the women in passing. Not a word…as if there were no women’s tournament.
This is at a school with a female principal and assistant principal in a district with a female superintendent. They did it in a building in which adult males are outnumbered by adult females 20-1. And nobody cared.
When I brought it up to the coaches and the music teacher, one of the other minority gender members, they had a general snort over it.
One coach just shrugged, the other changed the subject, but it was clear that neither was interested. The music teacher was the aggressive one. He just flat out said “NOBODY cares about women’s basketball.” And he added that he finds it very irritating that they keep pushing the women’s professional basketball at him during Magic games. “I wish they would just leave me alone…I don’t care about it.”
Ironically, that is pretty much what a lot of people say about music programs in schools. And sometimes, PE.
I happen to love our music program because I have seen what it can do. That is exactly how I came to love my basketball team.
And to hate UConn.
GO BUTLER!

Could Grant have handled this battle?

       Unlike many Southerners, I am a big admirer of Ulysses S. Grant — even though I am very grateful to have not served in any of his fine armies, many of which soon would have become former armies if not for replacements in groups of tens of thousands.

          The most heroic thing he did, in my opinion, was finishing his autobiographical history of the war while he was dying of cancer. His face was essentially tied together with bandages and the pain was said to have been the worst doctors were aware…sort of a full-bodied toothache. And still, because he wanted to get the story right and he wanted to pay off his debts, he dragged himself out of bed every morning, propped himself up and through bleary eyes and pain, scribbled out an extensive book.

            I just have to wonder….would he have been able to keep it up if he had to deal with a computer?

            I have been struggling with this blasted blog setup almost since the first blog I ever wrote and I have never written an entry yet that I didn’t feel like quitting at some point or other because the system is such a fussbudget thing.

             Computers are beyond me. My policy when I deal with computer programs is to click on colored type until something positive happens or until I am asked for a credit card number, whichever comes first. If it is the credit card, I unplug the machine for five or six days and change all my passwords.

             With this blog, there is a screen full of options, almost all of them either unproductive or irrelevant or possibly even disconnected. When I get instructions, it is always to “select somethign from a dropdown box” that doesn’t appear on my screen. Or when I get it, which I think I hae done this time, the dropdown box’s droppings are actually covering up my screen so I have to type the end of all my sentences without seeing what I am typing.

                Best of all, when I am finished with this, I have no idea whether or not it will exist anywhere other than in my own unreliable memory. That is why I am doing this test. Please excuse any typos that might be worse than usual, as I may not have seen them and cannot be certain which of these words that I type will end up at the end of sentences.  The machine makes that sort of decisions and God only knows which blue word needs to be clicked to check up on that.

             Hopefully something will be here when you look. More hopefully it won’t be embarrassing to me or the humans involved in this process. Most hopefully, if it is not as it should be, it wll make the computer feel bad about itself.

               That would be progress.

               Good luck to all of you who may or may not read this. I will be out on the porch with the general.

Keep your fingers out of my bowl!

I am about as sick and tired of hearing whiny columnizers and the commentatious TV talkers telling us how there are too many postseason games.
Has it ever occurred to you that there are too many complainers? Everybody makes fun of the names of the lesser bowls, but that is just cheap shotting. Last I saw, the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl will be paying out $3.5 million. That will cover about a thousand years of college education at $35,000 per student.
I can live with the name.
The last time I looked at the mail I had two bankruptcy documents from the company that used to run the newspaper that hired the people who make fun of people doing things to make money.
Harrumph. Maybe if they had gotten a sponsor, their lesser little game would be in better shape than it is.
Besides, why does the number and quality of games bother you now when it doesn’t bother you on the average Saturday throughout the season? In fact, why did it not bother you on the Thursday night when Central Michigan was playing Hampton and Kent State was going up against Murray State?
There’s an argument that ANYBODY playing Hampton on a Thursday can pretty much be defined as “one game too many.” But I doubt Hampton would see it that way.
College football is about your people playing somebody else’s people. If other people who don’t have a dog in the fight want to look in on it, well, that’s up to them. If they don’t want to look in on it, well, that’s up to them, too.
Auburn and Oregon isn’t nearly as interesting to me as Tennessee vs. North Carolina. It matters not at all to me that our game isn’t a thriller for the people whose job is to write or talk about things they don’t have a stake in. This in not their game.
In fact, they don’t have a game.
Not to be too risqué about this, but a football game is a lot like a honeymoon. You have two participants for whom this is going to be a very big night. They are both expecting fantastic things and it might just happen. Then again, one or both of them is liable to be disappointed with the results. And it will still be a night to remember.
The important thing is the experience – being in the room.
The sportswriters and commentators are like people who drive around a honeymoon resort looking in windows. They have some value in that they might find a very attractive couple to look at and they might call some attention to it.
That’s still not the same as being in the room having the experience.
This is my game tonight and it is the only one that much matters to me. The Seminoles and the Gamecocks are geared up for tomorrow night. The Gators and the Nittany Lions and the Crimson Tide and the Spartans and all those other teams are getting dressed up for what they hope will be big experiences.
Meanwhile, the nation’s sports media are all perched in trees outside the window of the BCS Championship Suite, waiting for a look at Auburn and Oregon. They’ve seen it all, they know what it looks like, they have been very near to the exultation.
But they have never been kissed.
So, to all of you who can’t understand all of us who enjoy the experience, here is a word of advice. Pucker up and get into the game. Or shut up and let us enjoy ourselves.

A Real ‘Nole Hero

Okay, I guess I have completely lost my mind and gone over to the side of the pocket-protectors and professors.
My college hero for the week is from FSU…and it had nothing to do with football and it was during football season. Her name is Lea.
In case you missed it last night, Lea was going up against a smug and smarmy Ivy League International type student from Penn, and an even more smug and smarmy Ivier League Preppy Poop from Yale.
The Penn kid was from somewhere where they allow kids to be left behind and therefore enable kids to get ahead. He had the perma-smirk of the wealthy and privileged and talked about stuff like going to Egypt and sand surfing on the dunes. Like that is a college experience I can relate to.
The Yale kid was from Yale. Enough said about that. Might as well have been a Kennedy for all the good he is to the world – you know the type…too tall, too many white teeth, just too, too smug. Probably belongs to the best fraternity hangs out with other boys who call each other “men,” got a Benz or a Beemer for graduation and his Mommy only buys him the best panties. Made me want to hurl. Or flip him on the ear and take his lunch money away from him.
If we had a king, those two would be princes. No doubt they will be in charge of something very large someday, will mess it up and need a bailout and will get it while holding on to their bonuses and houses out in the Hamptons.
(The only good thing about this situation is that in a neighborhood like that they might have to see Hillary in a swimsuit or tennis skirt.)
And then there was Lea….wearing an FSU sweatshirt, looking like she might have to work part time. She talked about having an internship at a museum and it was haunted. Might happen to me. Might happen to anybody. A REAL person, not one of those shiny, smarmy Ivy Upnorth Tootie Pooties living on daddy’s money.
She also looked athletic, pretty (even though I know that is not supposed to matter up in Hillary country where the boys are prettier, but it does in Tallahasseee) and like somebody who might have a beer every now again and wouldn’t be insulted by sharing pizza. I liked that girl.
Of course she didn’t have a chance against those overeducated sons of overprivileged sons of… well, let’s not go there.
But by golly, she stood toe to toe with the Pretty Boyz, putting on a comeback in Double Jeopardy that, had it happened outdoors on Saturday afternoon and had been done by young men on parole or probation, would have made her a legend.
If she had closed the deal.
Sigh.
Why can’t happy endings end happily anymore?
Lea smoked through a couple of categories and left those Powderpuff frat boys in a state so disorganized they were ready to text Mumsy for some comfort. She even led going in to Final Jeopardy.
At that point I told my wife, who was also cheering for Lea, that you gotta have guts to play this game. You don’t back down, you count on your brain and your training. In football you go for two, win or lose, if you have guts and character.
In Jeopardy, you bet it all.
Or most of it.
Lea bet it all but $5, which, if she and the Yale Tootie had both gotten it right, would have left her the winner.
He, on the other hand, bet it like an Ivy League student who needed a hug and his blankie. The smirker was out of it and mainly posed for the camera and daydreamed of hanging out in Monaco or somewhere. Boy, I didn’t like him.
Unfortunately none of them got the answer right.
I did. But then again, I am a fourth-grade teacher and about a hundred years old…and I read.
The question was something like this…. “In ancient Rome, it was the half-way mark in a race but it has come to mean when things start to change.”
Cue Jeopardy music. I yelled out the answer and started doing the tomahawk chop. Laurie started getting worried… “Lea is still writing…I don’t like this.” I said “no….she got it so quick that she is just waiting.”
Laurie was right. Lea was wrong. Yale wins.
But, by Golly, she showed some guts.
The answer, of course, was “The Turning Point.”
Hmmm. Some real irony there….if a female from a public school had beaten two boys who are technically male from the Ivy League, this might have qualified for one.

Gator Tears

There’s about a tragedy a day in the average school. With nearly a thousand kids, SOMEBODY is always dying or suffering or losing a home or SOMETHING. Asking for sympathy is like asking for a handout in the streets of India — you don’t get much of it for the simple reason that so many need some.
But some tragedies overshadow the childhood heart transplants, homeless kids and dying kittens.
The Gators have lost three games in a row.
At my place of employment, this calls for despondency, depression and true sadness. The fans are truly, miserably hurt. They are saddened. It is a very painful situation and they need words of comfort. When I try to think of some, all that come to mind are:
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA….HEEEEEEE-HEE-HEE….Nanny-nanny boo-boo, neener neener, good enough for you…HA HA HA HA HA HA HA….
And I am one of the kinder ones. You should see the reaction of the Seminole fans.
Sorry, Gators, I can’t feel sorry a bit. Steve Spurrier did the very nearly impossible a few years back when he made an Auburn fan out of me when Terry Bowden had his romp in the swamp. Urban Meyer has done the truly, truly impossible by making a Steve Spurrier fan out of me.
Gatordom is like an exclusive fraternity in one of those old Mickey Rooney movies – the prissy and arrogant kind of frat boys who smoke pipes and refer to each other as “men” and really fell as if they are better than the rest of the school. You always feel good when Mickey gets the girl and the frat boy falls in the mud.
That is the situation with the Gators.
Is this unkind to Florida? Probably. But who cares? At this very school where the Gators are now so downhearted and in need of sympathy I have endured my share. Early this year a little fat fourth-grader waddled up to me and sweetly said “your team sucks….we kicked your butts!” Her teacher, decked out in a Tim Tebow jersey, giggled. One time I walked into a conference room where people were having lunch together…I didn’t intend to sit down to eat, but I might have if I had been invited. What I got was a large woman with a mouth full of pasta hissing “this room is for Gators only!”
Big women should not hiss with mouths full of pasta.
One teacher dresses up weekly in a sort of Dr. Seuss nightmare outfit of orange and blue striped stockings and orange and blue elf clothing over it and can say “go Gators” in a way that makes you hear “go to blazes you other people.” At a speech once, the person who introduced me got up and did a little dance while chanting “this is Peyton Manning’s chicken dance….chicken chicken chicken” and then proceeded to make chicken noises. At one dinner party, people had the Florida-Tennessee score printed up on place mats with “you suck” on the back side. I have been taunted, jeered at, insulted, debased and have been the victim of attempted humiliation so many times I can’t count it.
All by Gators. Never by Seminoles, even when we played for the National Championship. Never by Alabama fans, never by Auburn fans or Ole Miss or Mississippi State or South Carolina fans. Arkansas fans will apologize for winning if they think it ruined your trip. Occasionally Georgia fans and LSU fans get nasty, but you can generally rein them in by telling them they are acting like Gators.
And now they want sympathy?
We ran into a big-time Gator at Olive Garden the day after the Mississippi State loss and I never said a word about the game. He was several tables away and just sat there with his face getting redder and redder. He finally threw down his napkin and in answer to something he had heard in some imaginary conversation we were having, blurted out “WE GOT THE RINGS, BAY-BEEE! GATORS WIN CHAMPIONSHIPS!”
Several other red-faced overweight people blurted “Go Gators” through stuffed mouths. What is it with these people and pasta-hollering, anyhow?
He was embarrassed. I could not feel any more sorry for him than I can for his team.
The Gators are not just like that fraternity boy I just mentioned, they are like that fraternity boy passing you in a Mercedes convertible, going 110, cheerleader at his side, glass of champagne in his hand.
When you see him pulled over with car trouble, you don’t even think about stopping to help. You blow your horn and give him a Gator Chomp and go on by. But let’s continue the metaphor. If he had a flat tire (that would be the Alabama loss), you don’t feel bad for him. When you see that the cheerleader has ditched him (the LSU loss), you tend to smile and say “good enough for him.” Then, when you see that a trooper is busting him for the open container (the Mississippi State loss), instead of sympathy, you are probably giggling to yourself…if not out loud. If you offer a little prayer in this situation, it will be for rain…while his top is down.
These are harsh words. About half as harsh as I hear every day from some self-appointed representative of the Gator Nation. I am not particularly proud of feeling good about somebody else’s misfortune, but I can’t help it when I think of how much misfortune they have served up to others and how intolerable they have been about their own good fortune.
But there is a point beyond which I will not go.
I will never send one of my fourth-graders over to tell you your team stinks.*
(*My fourth graders know better than to use that other word.)

Will it someday be “The Rest of the World” series

We do a newspaper in my classroom. This week I thought it would be an interesting story to find out which kid is supporting which team, so I assigned it.

I might have been better off assigning teams.

More than half the boys were in the “no opinion” category and none of them could tell me all the teams in the playoffs. And all they had to do was fake it, because I didn’t know either and couldn’t have called them on it.

Now let’s use Tessie’s Time Telephone (from a story we are working on in class) to dial us back to my fourth-grade class. That was the year Ms. Brabson confiscated Earl Dunn’s transistor radio and cemented her place forever as the worst person to have ever lived. She took it in the middle of an afternoon game and Earl, who was hunched over his seat in the “pretend to read with ears covered” position was listening and giving us other kids regular updates.

We not only knew the teams, we knew the batting orders for all of them that mattered, knew the pitching rotation and what Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale had for breakfast on game days. It didn’t just matter, it MATTERED!

There was no sense in trying to learn anything while the World Series was on any more than there was any sense in going to work if you could get a ticket. The afternoon games were always sold out. EVERYBODY listened.

Earl couldn’t read anyhow, so what difference did a half hour make?

I tried to argue this and was sent, along with Earl and his radio, to the principal’s office. We listened to the game along the way, which turned out to be a very long way. Another teacher busted us and dragged us down to Mr. Underwood’s Chamber of Punishment, but we had to wait in the outer office because he was listening to the game.

That is the way it used to be. Now I am in a school building with about 5,000 computers with internet hookups, hundreds of telephones that have special relationships with radios and are on networks that can deliver anything, there are radios out there that probably could be hidden in a classroom, all kinds of televisions….and no afternoon games. But that doesn’t matter because the kids wouldn’t be much interested anyhow.

Well, half of them, anyhow. The ones who do care…and care deeply and know the teams and the batting orders and what the players have for breakfast seem to have something in commont. The ones I talked to were all born in some other country — Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba all were represented in my survey.

The Great American Pastime doesn’t interest native-born Americans that much anymore, but is followed passionately by the people who packed up everything and came here looking for a better life.

Is there a metaphor there?

Not sure. But it is too early to think about it and I have a tee time and later today a bunch of us are getting together to watch two of the worst teams in the SEC battle it out for the bottom.

And I couldn’t name all the teams in the playoffs if you put a gun to my head.