Take that lampshade off your head Fool

So Friday night is New Year's Eve. I have not celebrated that night in a long time. The holiday used to seem so glamorous to me. I judged the night's success by what time I got home or if I got home at all. One of the wildest New Year's party's I ever attended was at a neighbor's house. Sometime around midnight most of the women at the party had gravitated to the kitchen and were all setting around a large table, three of the men at the party jumped up onto the table and did a strip. Not one of the women gave up their seat. That is about as close as I have ever gotten to seeing someone putting a lampshade on his or her head.
New Year's Eve is called Amateur's night, but I've never seen an Amateur at any party I attended, we were all hard core drinkers. I gave up my amateur statues before the age of 16. It was a long time before I decided to go 180 degrees in the other direction. I started staying home on New Year's Eve. Any person with sense, let alone sophistication would never be caught out after 6pm on that night. I am not sure what made me make such a drastic change. In or out of relationships, drinking or not drinking I began staying home. This year will be different, it will be somewhere between a lampshade and the remote control, a place I should have tried long ago. I will go out for dinner then lend support to a friend as he makes a speech in front of 75 to 100 people and finish up the night with a little live Rock and Roll. At my age there is not much to prove looking down the end of a champagne flut at midnight. Home before 11pm; with the night being neither wild or dull, just somewhere inbetween.

Under the Street Light

Baseball is a game of records and bigger than life men. You want those records and men to mean something. Today's players are so tainted by the questions of performance enhancing drugs that comparing them to players of the past has been broken forever. The styles of play may differ decade to decade but in baseball you could always compare the Babe and his caree statistics with the player who was leading the home run race of any given year. That is what makes baseball different from other sports. Fans can compare generations of players. Barry Bonds is poised to surpass Babe Ruth on the games all time home run list but now Bonds has admitted he used steroids and performance enhancement substances to reach the point of breaking the Babe's record. Can the game ever redeem itself so that the first question out of a third graders mouth isn't about which superstar is on the juice, rather did he get a hit last night or how many homers does he have this season? My love for the game survived 8 work stoppages and the revelation by Pete Rose that he even bet on his own team! The last straw was when they cancelled the 1994 World Series because the players and owners could not come to an agreement over money issues. Even now when I read the newspaper and see that baseball takes up 4 pages of the sports section, I get mad. I long for the memories of baseball before it was tarnished. The memories under the neighborhood street light when all my buddies would gather each summer night. Some would walk and some would ride their bikes but someone always brought a radio so we could listen to the Colt 45's baseball game, the team latter changed their name to the Astros. They were the only team we could hear play on the radio but we could always get the scores of all the other games of the night. In 1961 Roger Maris was going for the Babe's record of 60 homers in a single season, a record that had stood since 1927. Maris hit 61 homers that year and we counted each and every one. Nights under the street light were special times, warm summer nights before I discovered girls, alcohol, drugs and all the other things that alter one's course in life. It would be nice to go back to those simple times but just like baseball things can never be the way they were. Even the street lights are not the same. In 1961 you could break the bulb of a street light with a rock and a good throw, now you need a 22 rifle to even make a dent in it's glow. It will always take more than a rock or 22 to dent the glow of memories from times spent under the neighborhood street light. Memories that are always bigger and better than they really were but who cares, they are still good memories.

Musical Chairs

The Bowl Championship Series is a huge mistake. Instead of a system that always matches the best teams, the BCS guarantees ridiculous mismatches. Only a mathematical oddity would ever result in the BCS pairing No. 1 against 2 and 3 against 4. There is a powerful argument for a college playoff. If basketball and baseball can do it, why can't football? Let teams compete and see which finish the game with the most points. The best team would get to the top by winning games against other contenders. College sports is big business, influenced by universities in the six big conferences and the revenues they bring in. They do not want a playoff system that would share that pie with teams of the lesser conferences. As long as big money and big football schools are happy nothing is going to change. One would think the NCAA has enough power, clout and guts to do something about this mess, but I know they don't. The fans are the real losers! We might as well go back to the days of behind the scenes pressure from TV and rooms of cigar smoke to make the deals for which teams play in the bowl games. I enjoyed the games much more when this was the case.

A Thanksgiving Reflection

Thanksgiving means many things to many people. Most of us give thanks for having a tight knit family and friends who gather around to celebrate good fortune. We share a huge feast and minutes later we are napping, visiting and laughing with those closest to us or glued to the TV watching football. We are so fortunate to be surrounded by people we love and who love us and to have our table overflowing with wonderful food. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I love the simple and profound fact that this unique time of gathering with family and friends is shared by all Americans and celebrated around the globe wherever Americans may be. Just as Thanksgiving belongs to everyone who calls America home, so do the blessings, freedoms and opportunities for which we can be grateful. The day is beloved by every man woman and child who ever went over the river and down the road to Mom and Dads house for a piece of pie. As I break bread with my family I always give thanks to the Lord for all his goodness he bestows on us all. He is the true master gardener, I am but a vine in his garden. The fruit I bare comes from his grace and goodness.