Tax Cuts Will Not Lead to Job Growth

Posted on 06 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

The official line from US-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the US Chamber of Commerce!)

But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.

—Jon Schwarz
Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs

Image of Jon Schwarz cropped from his Twitter image. Licensed under Fair Use.

My Christmas Books

Posted on 05 Jan 2017 by Elizabeth

I am one of the easiest and yet hardest people to give gifts to. On one hand I love books so you would think, “Easy, I will just get her a book.” Then you realise you have no idea what books I happen to have. Even having a wish list on Amazon doesn’t help as one friend somehow managed to pick the ones I had no interest in reading but had to put on there to placate other friends.

But I am easy to shop for since getting me gift cards to Barnes and Noble always works. So this holiday season, I got book spending money from a couple of people and went digging around for good books to get and now will tell you all about them.

Sex and Politics

My first books was, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power.

When it comes to powerful women there have been few more powerful than Elizabeth I. (That’s real power and not simply puppetry power like say Queen Victoria after the reforms from the Glorious Revolution continued unabated to now the British monarch runs the military and not much else). The Russians topped her with the German Catherine the Great. (She stole her crown from her husband. Then again, he was incompetent.) And possibly you could consider Tsu-Hsi or Mbande Nzinga.

Fine British Cuisine

Next up is, Seven Centuries of English Cooking: A Collection of Recipes.

This one hasn’t arrived yet but I will experiment with one of the recipes and tell you how fast my kitchen exploded from goodness.

Blood Good Battle

My third books was, Fatal Colors: Towton 1461 England’s Most Brutal Battle.

This was a battle that decided a war, killed a lot of men and took place during a raging blizzard. It is also one of the battles that led to some amazing archeology that you can watch on YouTube.

When you are living through history — like we are — it is helpful to go back to other times where history was being made and see how people reacted to it and what the ordinary had to deal with when it came to the extraordinary. The men and women who dealt with the tumult of a civil war that led to peace and prosperity for most of the time that Edward IV reigned (1461 to 1470 and 1471 to 1483) had to deal with the taxes, the loss of family members, and the social upheaval that war always brings. Some were able to and others were not.

Teen Fiction

The next book was perhaps an odd choice, Forever Again.

One of my favorite authors wrote a teenage book that has a lot more adult elements and a very good twist for the ending. [Bruce Willis is actually dead. -FM] I recommend it because it takes little time to read (I finished it in about four hours) and it reminds me of how different our world is from the late eighties.

Discworld

My fifth book was, The Wee Free Men.

Terry Pratchett’s death left a huge hole in the world of gentle satire. He also was able to blend different lessons into one book again and again without it seeming dated. On one hand, this book is about a bunch of little blue men with violent red hair. On the other it is a book about the importance of family and defending them from those who wish them harm — even if the harm is in the form of sticky sweeties. It is further about learning who you are and who you can become.

MST3K

And last on this sort list is, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever.

I followFrank Conniff on Twitter and he is great. He’s always willing to bash a troll in the most droll way possible. But this book has been kind of a dud so far. Maybe you will like it more.

And those are just a few of the books I got with my Christmas loot. I mean gifts.

Image of books cropped from one by klimkin. It is in the public domain.

Morning Music: Hurt

Posted on 05 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

I’ve known the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” for a very time. But I seldom pay attention to lyrics of a song that I hear casually. Today, I looked them up. It’s pretty good. I like the connection of self-mutilation (“I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel”) and heroin use (“The needle tears a hole… Try to kill it all away”). I’m not so fond of the externalization of the self (“What have I become, my sweetest friend”). But that’s a choice, and very typical of the genre.

The wonderful thing about a song like this is that everyone can related. You don’t have to be self-mutilator or a junkie. Even 14 year old kids feel like they’ve experienced it. When Trent Reznor wrote the song, he was only 29. And his greatest period of depression and despair came years after writing the song.

Depression Is Not Absolute

In the 12 Step mythology, one must reach “rock bottom” before one can “recover.” But the truth is that there is no rock bottom. As bad as you feel, it almost certainly will get worse. All that happens is that you get better at dealing with it. Depression and despair become decoupled.

I remember one of Vincent van Gogh’s last letters to Theo where he noted that he could get some canvases and paint and do some work, but comments what would be the point. I’ve misinterpreted that comment however, thinking that it came right before van Gogh’s suicide. But it didn’t. After writing that, he did get some canvases and paints and did continue on. In fact, he appears to have shot himself while painting.

Anyway, we continue on. Artists whine for us because it is certainly true that no one is interested in hearing us whine. Everybody’s got their troubles. And everybody thinks theirs are as bad as they get. Don’t make that mistake.

Afterword

I couldn’t find a good copy of the album version. The change of “I wear this crown of shit” to “I wear this crown of thorns” is pretty much unforgivable. It trivializes everything else in the song. Sorry about that.

Album cover image licensed under Fair use.

We Must Stop Thinking the Rich Are Better

Posted on 04 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

Matt Bruenig is back in the land on the public intellectual, The UBI Already Exists for the One Percent. In the article, he notes that roughly 30 percent of all income in the United States comes in the form of capital. That is: 30 percent of the money made each year comes not from work but just from capitalists owning things. A total of 10% of our nation’s income is paid out to the top one percent in this form. That is: they don’t work for it; they just sit back and get checks sent to them. This is effectively a universal basic income (UBI) — except it isn’t universal; it just goes to the very richest among us.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We could just take that 30 percent and distribute it evenly to everyone in society. It is, after all, a shared resource. Bruenig compares it to the Alaska Permanent Fund, where everyone who lives in Alaska gets an equal share of the capital gains from the oil that is pumped out of the ground. So why don’t we do this more generally? Well, obviously, there are reasons. Even ask poor people and they will tell you: if people don’t have to work, they will just become a bunch of loafers and society will fall apart.

Why Do We Trust the Rich?

Bruenig is making a very limited point, “If you have a problem with this, but not the current arrangement where capital income is paid out in huge sums to small fractions of our society, then your issue is not really with passive income.” And that is certainly true. But I look at it from a broader perspective. The problem is that humans are hierarchical. And as much as we may think we have grown past the days of feudal lords, we really haven’t. Almost everyone I know believes what is the great lie of our economic system: the rich are different from you and me.

For most Americans, that means that not having to work doesn’t corrupt the rich while it does the poor. The interesting thing is that Fitzgerald, who we get that misquote from, felt exactly the opposite. He felt that great wealth hindered the rich. It’s funny that people have gotten the impression that Fitzgerald had a fascination with the rich. Have they not read his books? It’s like saying that Steinbeck had a fascination with floods and mice.

The truth is that we don’t know. If we distributed all the passive income of the US equally, each man, woman, and child would be given a bit less than $16,000 per year. I don’t think that would be enough money to cause everyone to sit on their couches and watch video games. The experience I have with people is that having a basic income to fall back on would make them more likely to take risks. We might have flying cars now if those tens of millions of poor people had been able to do something productive rather than scraping to get by.

The Problem Is Our Sociology

We have to get past this idea that the rich actually deserve their wealth. That just isn’t the way our economic system works. But I can understand why the rich believe it. What I don’t understand is why the poor are so fond of this myth. Why do poor children have poor parents and vise versa? It’s like we live in the Third Reich and believe that everything is determined by genetics. But if you really believe that Donald Trump is rich because of the genes his father gave him and not the money he gave him, you’re an idiot.

This is why I see more and more that we have to get past politics. We need to change the way we think. Our problems are sociological. If we can see the way we are as a society, the political and economic solutions are trivial.

Image of Matt Bruenig cropped from one at Gawker. Licensed under Fair Use.

The Doctors’ Cartel We Don’t Care About

Posted on 04 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

Breaking the taxi industry cartel’s and promoting Uber has been somewhat of a cause célèbre among economists in recent years. Any card carrying economist can give you the two minute tirade on the evils of the taxi cartel and the benefits of Uber…

What is striking is that the enthusiasm for the virtues of competition seems to disappear when we switch the topic from the taxi cartel to the doctors’ cartel. Doctors actually have been far more effective than taxi companies in limiting competition. Doctors largely get to set standards of care, which not surprisingly requires twice as high a percentage of highly paid specialists as in other wealthy countries. They also restrict the number of doctors with a wonderfully protectionist rule that prohibits doctors from practicing in the United States unless they have completed a US residency program. This means that even well-established doctors in places like Germany, France, and Canada would face arrest if they attempted to practice medicine in the United States.

As a result of this cartel, doctors in the US earn on average more than $250,000 a year, putting the average doctor not far below the one percent threshold, even assuming no other family income. This is roughly twice the pay as the average doctor earns in other wealthy countries.

It is striking that the doctors’ cartel gets so much less attention from economists than the taxi cartel. After all, we spend close to $250 billion a year on doctors compared to $6 billion a year on taxis. I could suggest that the lack of interest is due to the fact that many economists have parents, siblings, or children who are doctors, but I wouldn’t be that rude.

–Dean Baker
Economists, Doctors’ Cartels, and Uber

Image of Dean Baker cropped from one at the CEPR, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Countable Infinity and Rick and Morty

Posted on 03 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

When it comes to math, I think it is best that I assume everyone is really ignorant. So forgive me for going over some really basic ideas about infinity. But I have good reasons for doing this. Some time ago, I wrote, Infinity Is Not a Number. In it, I discuss how the great Christian apologist William Lane Craig used a total misunderstanding of infinity to “prove” that the universe is not eternal. I was pointing out that this brilliant man was ignorant of the fact that infinity is not a number.

I guess I can understand. Mathematicians use infinity (∞) along with a lot of numbers. To understand infinity as a mathematical concept, you really have to study limits. And that isn’t something students get into until college — if then. It’s really when you start to study calculus that you get into limits. And that is done for the opposite reason: to understand the infinitesimal. It’s actually the same thing, but I won’t bore you with it. You either understand what I’m talking about (It’s the reciprocal, stupid!) or you would require a good deal more exposition than I’m willing to expend.

Countable Infinity

But there are some things about infinity that are intuitive to people of this time and place. For example, if you think of the whole numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…), you know that there are an infinity of them. Regardless of what natural number you can come up with, there is always a number that is one unit larger. Let’s combine the whole numbers with all the negative whole numbers (…, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, …) that infinity space is twice as large. But that doesn’t mean there are twice as many integers as whole numbers. Both sets contain an infinite number of elements. But they are both “countably infinite.”

So what does it mean that they are countably infinite? It means that you can pick any number in the series and count to it. Consider the whole numbers again (because it is easier). You can count from 0 to 15,000,000 or 15,000,000,000 or whatever. It will just take time. If you have an infinite amount of time, I guess you could count all the whole numbers (and, unintuitively, the integers). (Note: this is one reason immortality is so terrifying: eventually you would get to the point of counting all the whole numbers.)

Rational Numbers

Now let’s consider the rational numbers from 0 to 1. These are just the fractions. You can tell that they are countably infinite. You just start counting: 0/1, 1/1, 0/2, 1/2, 2/2, 0/3, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3, etc. It doesn’t matter that many of the numbers of duplicates. The denominators go on forever. Thus, the number series is infinite. And we know it is countable because we are counting it. In theory, we can count all of the numbers. The same is true of all the rational numbers — not just the ones between 0 and 1.

So a countable infinity of countable infinities is a countable infinity. You would think that all infinities would thus be countable. But no.

Irrational numbers are numbers that cannot be represented as a fraction of two integers. You know: numbers like π and e. The set of all these numbers does not represent a countable infinity. Indeed, the irrational numbers between any two numbers are not a countable infinity. Think about it. It’s mind blowing.

Rick and Morty

I was thinking about this because I was watching an episode of Rick and Morty, “Rick Potion No 9.” In it, Rick turns his human world into Cronenberg-world. So in order to fix things, Rick goes looking for another reality, “There’s an infinite number of realities, Morty. And in a few dozen of those, I got lucky and turned everything back to normal. I just had to find one of those realities in which we also happened to both die around this time.” (Note: if there were an infinite number of realities, there would be an infinite number of realities where Rich “got luck,” but I’ll leave that as something to consider on your own time.)

The implication of this episode (and others) is that at every instant, there are an infinite number of realities, and each one creates an infinite reality at that point — and on and on and on. I’ve long thought this is what Planck time must represent: the time at which every possible quantum reality is spawned. But that doesn’t much matter. It’s just a thought. But I like Rick’s idea of an infinite universes (“realities”) constantly spawning an infinite number of universes.

Countably Infinite Universes

As outrageous as this notion is, it would still represent a countably infinite number of universes. I find that vaguely comforting. Of course, there’s all that dark matter and dark energy. Maybe that’s where the non-countably infinite universes exist. I don’t really care. I don’t like thinking about things that can’t be counted. Irrational numbers are as strong a proof of the non-existence of God that I can think of.

But let me leave you with a practical thought. As many of you know, I think memorizing multiplication tables is a waste of time. I think children would be better served watching Rick and Morty. They’d have a chance of thinking about math. And it wouldn’t make them hate math. Finally, it might get them to watch Existenz.

Rick and Morty image cropped from one at Wired. Licensed under Fair Use. Because of course everything has to be copyrighted forever. How else would we have the idyllic world we now live in? Infinity image is in the public domain.

The Iraq War Was a Major Success — For Some

Posted on 03 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

Here’s the thing we always misunderstand: we always think that the Iraq War was a disaster — it was a failure.

No it wasn’t. It was declared by (in essence) Dick Cheney, who was, by all accounts, running the country from 2001 to 2006. And Bush, for better or for worse, took charge in the last two years. And believe it or not, it was slightly better than the Cheney years.

Now Cheney, who used to work for Halliburton and got a $34 million exit bonus from them, started a war where Halliburton’s stock price went up five fold during the war.

Mission accomplished!

–Cenk Uygur
Michael Moore Puts Obama’s Legacy In Sad, Simple Terms

Image cropped from Cenk Uygur at Streamys 2010 by Andy Sternberg. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Keith Ellison and the Difficult Path Forward

Posted on 02 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

We are less than two months away from the election for the DNC chairmanship. This year, it has taken on an over-sized importance among American liberals. The front-runner is Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison. And you would think his election would be a sure thing. He’s been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren on the economic left and Chuck Schumer on the economic right. But the whole thing has unfortunately turned into a proxy war between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton — as if we need to run the presidential primary all over again.

Jeff Stein wrote a very good overview of what’s going on, The DNC Race Has Become Another Fight Over Bernie Sanders When Dems Need It Least. As he indicates, the push to get Thomas Perez in the position shows how stupid this all is. The two men are pretty much identical ideologically. I certainly admire them both. But why is it that Ellison is not acceptable? The best example of this was how Ellison was unacceptable because the job should be full-time. But as soon as Keith Ellison said he would step down as Representative if elected, new reasons to be against him popped up. There’s clearly a more fundamental reason that Ellison is unacceptable — just not one that Democratic Party elites want to talk about openly.

Elites Don’t Like Keith Ellison

The truth is that political parties are the way that their elites want them to be. And those elites don’t want things to change. And this was always my biggest concern about Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic primary. I voted for him, of course. But I saw the complaints that Sanders supporters wouldn’t support Clinton as being more projection than anything else. That is to say: there were far more Clinton supporters who would never have voted for Sanders than their were Sanders voters who didn’t vote for Clinton.

We’ve seen this same kind of thing in the UK Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the party has been met with extreme hostility. There is a huge part of the Labour Party elite that would rather see the Tories in power than Labour in power if it were led by Corbyn. And I think we would have seen the same thing with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party if he had won the primary.

Trump and the Republicans Are Different

And note: this is not equivalent to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. In as much as the Republican elite was ever really against Trump, it was because he was seen as (1) personally offensive and (2) unelectable. The issue was never ideological. Yes, there was a little ideological heterodoxy at first. But as soon as Trump came out with his tax plan that was a huge giveaway to the rich, the Republicans knew they had nothing to fear from Trump. The issue with Corbyn and Sanders (And Keith Ellison!) is different. In each of these cases, the liberal party is afraid that it will have leaders that are ideologically in sync with their voters. That is to say: they are afraid that the liberal party will be run by actual liberals.

The Democratic Party Is Moving Forward — Regardless

It doesn’t matter to me if Ellison or Perez become DNC chair. Actually, I’d kind of like to see Perez in the position because I want them both fighting for us in high profile positions. But it’s clear that the push for Perez is not about that. The push for him is about telling the base of the party that it isn’t in charge. Yes, Perez is as liberal as Ellison, but the more conservative elites can ignore that. Allowing Keith Ellison to become chair would be an unmistakable indication that the Democratic Party has changed and that the New Democrats are dead, after doing so much damage to the nation and the party.

But like most fearful efforts to hang onto what little power you have, the anti-Ellison campaign will likely fail. I find it annoying that we are even having this fight. Part of being a liberal is believing in democracy. So there really shouldn’t be a big effort to stop the Democratic party from representing the base. But it’s okay. I think the Democratic Party will get to where it needs to go. Eventually. Despite the wishes of too many in the party elite who represent the past and not the present (much less the future).

Image of Keith Ellison is in the public domain.

The Joke of Existence: Happy New Year!

Posted on 01 Jan 2017 by Frank Moraes

The Joke of Existence - The Nihilist by Paul Merwart

I generally think in terms of days. This is why I manage to make at least 365 foundational errors every year: each day I choose to continue on being conscious of the universe. But today, let’s consider this whole year that we look toward. Are we really all going to sit through the whole thing? I think it makes the question of continued survival more stark. Yes, I can make it through the next day. But the next year? Given that we know it will be much like last year, it’s hard to answer in the affirmative.

The Meaning of Life

Many people ask, “What is the meaning of life?” That’s a stupid question. Can you honestly look forward or back on your life and see any meaning in it? I don’t want to upset anyone who really hasn’t been paying attention, but life is meaningless.

For most people, I stand as an object lesson for never allowing a teenager to read Schopenhauer. So I’m on record — repeatedly — about my belief that the continuance of life — the will to live — is an irrational thing. But one needn’t be rational in all things. Indeed, I write more about the irrationality of humans than I do Schopenhauer. One of the easiest ways to annoy me is to tell me that humans are rational. They aren’t — even in little ways.

It’s because of this that I have a thin reed to hang onto as I continue into the future. Perhaps you will find it helpful.

You Make the Universe Worse

I have a great love of anti-art. This is the kind of art that is created only for the process itself. So an example of anti-art might be a digital music device programmed to destroy itself before playing any of the music it was programmed to play. It is art explicitly created for no one. And I am a work of art created for no one. (When you get into ontological matters, it gets hard to distinguish between the implicit and the explicit.) I like to learn things, gain skills, create stuff — all while knowing that they are all ephemeral.

An enormous amount of the universe’s energy has been used to fight entropy and create me. And then I exist for a period of time before giving into entropy. Ultimately, I will have taken very useful energy and turned it into heat, which is a decidedly poor energy source. The universe will be more chaotic after I’ve gone than it was before I existed. So the universe has greatly harmed itself for the purpose of creating a machine that understood for a short period of time that universe was doing this.

And that is hilarious!

More Than You Think

It’s even more hilarious when you consider that the vast majority of people on earth are too caught up in their delusions of meaning to even know the joke exists — much less to get it. And that’s to say nothing of billions of years of evolution of creatures that didn’t get the joke.[1] So why not hang around for another year?

Think of yourself as conscious toxic waste. Wouldn’t you want to hang around as long as possible soiling your environment? But if you don’t like that analogy, you can feel good that most of the damage that your existence has done to the universe has already been done. Maintaining your wasteful machine is pretty cheap. And depending upon how funny you think your existence is, maybe it’s a net positive.

Existence Is a Joke

We are all a joke. If more people understood that, maybe we would live in a more just society. Because when you know that existence is a joke, you also know that it has nothing to do with justice. Your existence is a waste of elementary particles. In this next year, thousands of children will be burned alive. And a trust-fund baby will get the biggest ego stroke on the planet by being the leader of the “free” world. Try not to think of that. Focus on what a waste you are in this universe. That might get you through to next year when I promise I’ll have a whole new reason for irrationally continuing on.

[1] Or maybe all these “lesser” brains did and do get the joke. Maybe this whole self-awareness thing makes the joke harder to get. Maybe when a female mantis is biting the head of her mate, she is laughing up a storm, thinking, “Can you believe this?!” The male might be thinking the same thing in its final milliseconds of consciousness. For the record, I suspect that no mantis, dog, or cat actually gets the joke. But they do have us beat in not thinking themselves rational. Biting the heads off your mate is just what you do.

Random Ramblings On Sports Fandom

Posted on 31 Dec 2016 by James Fillmore

It’s that magical time of year when Minnesota’s city park employees turn tennis courts and baseball diamonds into hockey rinks.

How do they perform this amazing transubstantiation? (H/T: Catholicism!) Well, there are several complicated steps. I shall endeavor to describe them as best I can.

Remove tennis net or baseball bases. Put in storage.
Get fire hose. Attach to fire hydrant.
Spray court or field with water.
Wait a day.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 as necessary.
Get hockey goals out of storage. Place in park. Number of goals depends on size of park; however, number must be divisible by 2.
Empty park trash cans weekly.

How to Make Friends Through Sports

I am from Oregon, originally. So I grew up playing baseball, basketball, and football. Hockey? Not so much.

When I was about to move here, I stopped at Powell’s Books, a wonderful store in Portland. I found a book titled “50 Ways To Make Friends In Your New City” (or something like that).

I am terrible at making friends (largely because I don’t trust humans, which is a prejudice, but not an unjustified one). So I picked up and read the book. In Powell’s, it’s completely acceptable to grab a book, sit at the cafe, have coffee, and read the whole book. Pay for your coffee. And put the book back where you found it. These are the rules.

The book had lots of advice I couldn’t use. “Join a local church.” That’s a fine notion for some, not really my speed. “Change your political views.” For example, if you’re moving to Houston, become a Republican; if you’re moving to Seattle, become a Democrat. Well, I’d rather join a church than switch my party loyalty. My cultural background is quite mixed: Québécois, Irish, English Catholic, and some Native American. All have different traditions. One thing they have in common: they don’t switch political sides. That’s a no-go.

But this was a piece of advice I liked, “Root for the home team.” Yes! I can do that! And I did.

Minnesota Sports Are Cool

I had many fun evenings cheering along with Minnesota sports fans, in stadiums and bars. The Twins were quite good for a long while, and rekindled my childhood love of baseball. The Timberwolves are never good, but it’s kind of a shared misery thing.

Even the Vikings were fun. At least they were until I heard one too many fans complaining about “Culpepper & Moss”: a quarterback and wide receiver “team.” Daunte Culpepper, the quarterback, had a crazy strong arm. Randy Moss, the receiver, had the eyes of a wary small mammal. They’d glower out from under his facemask. He had a bizarrely balletic mid-air grace.

Culpepper-to-Moss

Imagine a clever chipmunk watching two dogs snarl at each other over some piece of meat. As they pace around and bristle their fur, our chipmunk friend dashes in, grabs half the meat, and disappears up into its tree before the dogs know what hit ’em. The dogs, furious, bark like mad. Tough luck, guys! Dogs can’t climb trees!

This was Culpepper-to-Moss. It was, as one writer put it, the pro football equivalent of every kid’s favorite football play drawn up with sticks in dirt, “You go long, and I’ll hit you.” The skinny kid runs as fast as he can. The quarterback throws a bomb. The skinny kid jumps in the air, and, even if about to get tackled by three guys around him, he corrals the ball with one hand and cradles it to his body.

This happened almost every Vikings game! And it was fantastic! But Vikings fans started complaining about “Culpepper & Moss.” I didn’t get why, at first. Then I did: they were both black. Football fans are pretty damn racist. So I stopped watching football.

(The Vikings also gave me one of my favorite sports memories. Another receiver, Cris Carter, had a contact lens pop out. As Carter was one of the football’s most respected players, referees paused the game. For two full minutes, giant behemoths from both teams were crawling around, looking in the turf for a contact lens. This was a wonderful thing to watch.)

But Not Hockey

I’ve enjoyed the Minnesota Wild, too. Or enjoyed other people enjoying them. Because, honestly, I don’t “get” hockey.

Not that I don’t appreciate the sport! It’s full of skill, drama, tension. Players do amazing things while skating at high speeds — even while skating backwards!

(My favorite hockey players are the goalies. People are hurtling a harmful projectile at you. Your job is to go “No! I can’t be hurt! Stop, projectile, stop!” For similar reasons, my favorite baseball players are catchers.)

However, I don’t “get” hockey: for the same reason anyone “gets” anything, whether it be a religion or cuisine or whatever. I didn’t grow up playing hockey! If you fire-hose-spray a city park in Oregon, you have a muddy park. In Minnesota, in winter, you have a hockey rink. So everyone plays hockey. That’s one subject in the fine Pixar film, Inside Out, directed by Minnesotan Pete Docter.

I don’t ice skate, and never will. I’m not training for any hobby which includes, as a practice requirement, “falling down repeatedly.” Fallen on ice lately? It’s very hard. It kills people! No ice skating for me. So I’ll never “get” hockey. (Or sadly, curling, which is much more up my alley, but still requires ice skating.)

Other Ways To Enjoy Sports

I used to work helping take care of disabled adults, and there was one guy I’d bring to Twins games. The guy didn’t talk and didn’t sign ASL. It was virtually impossible to communicate with him. He’d allow you to help him with some things, resist other attempts to help, that’s pretty much all the feedback you’d get.

He’d agree to let you load his wheelchair in the van for a Twins game. I don’t know why. With people who don’t talk or sign, I’d still talked to them. My reasoning was that it doesn’t take any effort to do so, and I have no clue what they’re picking up on the other end. It may be pure syllabic gibberish. They might understand every word. Or something in between. If they want me to stop talking, they can push me away.

So we’d go to Twins games, and who knows if this guy actually liked baseball. But there was one thing he clearly liked. (Keep in mind, this guy had a grumpy expression 99% of the time.)

If the Twins scored — and the crowd went wild — this guy would crane his neck around, look at all the cheering people, and start laughing. Belly laughing. He didn’t make laugh sounds, because he didn’t make sounds, but his chest would heave and his mouth would smile and tears pour from the corners of his eyes.

I suspect, though I do not know, that he found sports fans hilariously ridiculous. As, indeed, we are.

Nothing At The End

Now’s when I’m supposed to wrap this all up and make it come together, right? Nope. That’s for real writers. I’m posting on a blog!

There’s a local minor-league baseball team, the St Paul Saints. Yes, uninspired name, but they have a long history of inspired promotional gimmicks. At one, Mascot Night, there was a mascot from a pre-employment screening clinic. The mascot was a pee cup. Cup-shaped, yellow on the lower half. This was one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen.

Some years, the Saints do Atheists Night. It has various skits in-between innings. One had two random fans racing around the foul territory, with obstacles to overcome. As they raced, the PA announcer described what symbolic meaning each obstacle represented. Such as, for a mudslide, “it’s the primordial ooze!”

When one was first to the finish line, our PA announcer said, “The winner gets…” and froze. For 15 seconds. Then intoned, “What?! Did you think there was a reward at the end? It’s an atheist race! There’s nothing at the end!”

Nothing at the end here either, I’m afraid. Enjoy sports if that brings you closer to others. Remember, they are a bit silly. (But most hobbies are. Nothing wrong with that!)

Skate in the park if you live in a frozen place — if your home is warmer, enjoy it being not so damned cold. And have the merriest New Year you can.

Sports balls image by various people (see link). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Frankly Curious

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