I’ve got to go back to the boneyard today to get rid of all the thoughts – some meaningless – that are giving me a headache. It’s sort of like a pressure cooker, my brain, and often I have to vent off or go crazy.
And, yes, some of you already know I’m crazy.
As I have aged – and I’m talking just about the last 10 years – I more and more realize the common denominator in just about everything in life starts and ends with money. It should be love, but it’s really money.
Within the last few years I finally got it why NFL football, and to a lesser extent college football, means so much to so many. It’s brutal, which appeals to the very basic human instinct – we are after all descendents of the cave man, the original hunter and gather – and the organizers of football (owners and colleges) know that means money if they can exploit it to the fullest.
And they certain do exploit that basic instinct.
The NFL has gotten so big it dwarfs just about everything else, which in its basic form means it makes piles of money. It also attracts the cottage industry, which can mean anything form hotels to restaurants to merchandise to radio and TV. The NFL cottage industry is huge, especially TV and radio.
Now I’m getting to what really bugs me about all this. The radio shock jocks get amped up months before the actual NFL even begins. They start talking and continue talking until my headache becomes a migraine.
Football, especially the NFL, pays big for radio and the shock jocks. But I get tired of hearing the same stuff every segment. How many times do I want to know that Russell Wilson is the second coming of Otto Graham?
Ok, ok, I get it. He’s super. He’s all world. He will lead the Seahawks to the promise land and spend his off hours talking to the elementary kids all over the Northwest and help out at the Mission on a regular basis.
But enough, already.
Give me a break.
But I also know that this shock jock talk is making the radio stations big money, so they are not going to stop talking. And some day they will talk football 24/7 365 days a year. And I will die of a severe migraine: Here lies Terry Mosher; he died of an overdose – of football talk.
No wonder I don’t have any money, I refuse to rush to the front of the line to listen to the shock jockers, and I refuse to set up a hot dog stand near Century/Link Field on game days.
I feel bad again today. For the third or fourth time this year I told our teenage son I would not be going with him to the Mariners game. He just called to tell me they won 6-4 and that Nick Franklin hit two home runs (he now has 10). I was too busy going to church, mowing the lawn and picking up the leftovers from the trees that were cut down so we could see a little bit more of the water.
I keep telling Michael that when you dig a ditch for most of your life and you finally retire that you don’t want to go out back and dig another ditch. I have seen thousands of baseball games in my life, and that is not counting those I have viewed on TV, and I find it difficult to grab a ferry to Seattle, walk over to Safeco, and sit in a good seat and shuck peanuts while I watch another ballgame.
When the Seattle sportswriter John Owen retired years ago I told John he would now have a “Gold Card” from the Baseball Writers Associationof America and now could go any of the ballparks in American anytime he wanted for free.
He stunned me by saying he would never go to another game.
I didn’t understand that then. I was still relatively young and eager to get to the ballpark most nights to watch the Mariners futile struggle to say away from 100 losses, which they struggled with frequently in the early years of the franchise.
Now I understand. I don’t want to dig any more ditches, even though I now have a Gold Card.
But, yes, if you are asking, I will go to a ballgame with Michael. I think it is my duty as a father to create a good memory for him. So I will go. And I will have fun. But I will not listen to the shock jocks that day tell me more than I want to know over and over again until my migraine comes back.
Speaking of headaches, I would imagine our government at the highest levels has a huge headache over Egypt. They have to be careful in the response to the military coup. Me, I can speak out.
You don’t like to back a military coup after it has overthrown a government that was legally elected. If it overthrows a dictator, that is one thing, but we cannot and should not condone a coup that deposes a government that was fairly elected by a legitmate democratic process.
In this case, though, I agree with what has happened. The Muslin Brotherhood was waiting in the weeds for just the right opportunity to grab power. They were the best organized group in the country, although they had been shackled by previous governments that were wary of them.
And there was good reason to be wary of them. They were wolves in sheep clothes waiting to pounce, and when Hosni Mubarak was overthrown thanks to the Arab Spring uprising the Brotherhood had its chance.
The Egyptian people were tired of Mubarak, a dictator supported by our government, and although suspicious of the Brotherhood, they preferred it to a number of other presidential candidates who had connections to Mubarak.
So they voted in the Brotherhood representative, Mohamed Morsi.
And regretted it ever since as the Brotherhood under Morsi quickly moved not only to consolidate power but also to move it to a Muslin-powered government. It also didn’t help Morsi and the Brotherhood that they were terrible rulers and ground the county into almost economic ruins.
So when the military saw a chance to overthrow Morsi and the Brotherhood when citizens took to the streets in protest, it leaped to the task.
I believe it’s a good move for Egypt and for the U.S. We don’t need another Muslin country, especially the big one like Egypt to start making plans to attack Israel.
Now we just have to wait and see how it all plays out because the Brotherhood having gotten a taste of the power it has always longed for is not going to back off without being forcefully beaten back.
I just got done reading Mossad: The greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service, and I must say I have had some restless nights in the process of reading it. Just a tip: don’t mess with the Israelis.
The elaborate way the Mossad went about its missions, especially assassinations, is unbelievable. The time spent to set things up and the special effort to accomplish the missions are unlike anything I have heard about our CIA. Their agents silently slip in and out of countries. They do their thing and quickly disappear.
I can’t imagine being a spy because it means being paranoid and on alert and on edge all the time. One misstep and your loved ones will never hear from you again, and likely will never find your body.
Still, I might prefer being a spy to listening to a shock jock talk about the same thing over and over again.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.