Month: June 2020

Flashback: “Not Ready To Make Nice” by The Chicks

The s0-called “cancel culture” has hit the world of music as well. The country band Lady Antebellum recently changed the name of their group to “Lady A” – and the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks have now become simply The Chicks as of yesterday.

This 2006 ballad crossed over and became a major hit – going to #4 on the weekly pop charts at one point. The song seems to speak of the negative feedback they received being critical of the then president, George W. Bush.

I can’t imagine they would be supporters of the current president, either.

Comply Or Else

And here we go again, Florida.

The county to my north (Pasco County) and the county to my east (Hillsborough County) have now passed orders that it is mandatory for all of us to wear masks. Of course, they didn’t give the residents a chance to vote on this – they decreed it from on high. Later in the evening, Pinellas County, my county, followed suit with a mandatory face mask order.

Since COVID hit, I’ve worn a mask a whopping total of one time – to comply with my Walmart hair salon wanted in order to get a haircut. I’m not looking forward to having to mandatorily wear one to get food there – and the choice will likely come from a handful of bureaucrats who a few short months ago never would have dreamed they’d have this much power in our everyday lives.

To make wearing masks mandatory is shaky ground – as I believe, due to what will likely be the lack of an ability to enforce the law, that the decision should be best made on an individual basis. If any of you readers feel you need the protection, by all means wear your mask. If you don’t feel that way – I’m perfectly okay with your decision to go maskless.

I remember a time in Florida in my young adult life in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when seat belts weren’t mandatory – and most of the time when you don’t wear one, it comes at your peril if you get into a serious accident. Then a bunch of bureaucrats decided that we collectively were making bad decisions – so that decision went away.

Then when 9/11 happened, your “freedoms” become limited whenever you went to the airport – even though no American was involved in the hijacking of those four planes that one day. (That is, at least that we know of.) Governments always say they’re looking out for you – yet they find ways to take more power here, and more power there.

They want to get you acclimated to a state of compliance, doing it in ways that forces the public to comply out of peer pressure or being put in significant inconveniences. The day will come – at the rate we’re going, probably not that too far away – where Americans refuse to comply, taking whatever risks come of it. Then what will government do?

The Mystery Of Talladega

It is easy to state and suggest that the sports world in the year 2020 is a mess, that it has gotten too political, too out of whack, or whatever. But an incident that took place at the Talladega superspeedway in Alabama has shocked the country. Someone placed a noose in the car of Bubba Wallace, who is the only driver of color in NASCAR’s highest racing circuit.

The race was postponed to rain yesterday and rescheduled for today. On this day, NASCAR closed ranks in a show of support for Wallace in a moving ceremony, narrated by who I consider the voice of NASCAR, Mike Joy.

The FBI is said to be investigating the incident – and with the noose left in a secured area that few should have access to, the question of “who did it” needs to be answered, and quickly. As a civilian, I’m not up on hate crime law – but I assume it is possible that the perpetrator could wind up in jail.

Until we know otherwise, I treat the incident as a stain on the sports world. Regardless of how you feel politically, we have all the stains on society that we can handle right now. The last thing we need is more division – no matter who or what is at the calculator.

Only A Pandemic Could Stop A Game Of Big Brother

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I’ve had a person or two remind me that this would have been about the time the CBS reality show Big Brother would have started – and for the past twenty summers from 2000 to 2019, it has. (They also did a winter to spring season in 2008 and a fall season in 2016 that was Internet only.) As everything else has changed in this crazy year of 2020 – so has the reality TV landscape.

This time of year, the rumor mill for BB is usually as vast as the Grand Canyon – but had things gone to schedule, facts would have become known by now. With no show scheduled as of yet (the Canadian season went on as planned, but was shut down in its first month as governments shut down across the Maple Leaf nation) – the rumor mill is still in its abundance. With Survivor’s scheduled fall 2020 season scrapped earlier this year due to the virus – one logical rumor is that a delayed BB22 season would take up that spot.

With the possibility of the virus returning, whether you call that politically motivated belief or whatever – I wouldn’t be shocked if there was no Big Brother season at all in 2020. I just find it ironic for a show that loses ratings from year to year more often than not that a virus could wind up killing the show. The idea of living with strangers in close quarters as a game suddenly loses whatever appeal it may have had left.

Flashback: “Rolling In The Deep” by Adele

My rule for a song to be considered as Flashback eligible is that it had to have been released ten calendar years ago or more. “Rolling In The Deep” was released in late 2010, and went to the top of the Billboard charts in 2011. This will probably go down as Adele’s magnum opus – and was one of the better songs of the past decade.

The Post Virus Sports World

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NASCAR has been back nearly a month now – but it remains the only sport that has returned after the COVID shutdown back in March. Other sports have announced general plans to return, but haven’t exactly been forthcoming as to when they return.

The NHL has been the most ambitious, announcing a 24-team playoff – but again, no one is saying exactly when they will return. If that’s true – how will the NFL came back in August for pre-season games when no one outside of NASCAR has? It would just defy logic that the least socially distant sport makes a return like nothing had happened – whether or not whatever is left out there in terms of COVID is politically fabricated or otherwise.

It looks very likely that MLB may not have a season in 2020 – which would devastating to the sport, perhaps worse than the 1994-1995 strike that produced no World Series champion in 1994. Owners want to pay the players less, while the players contend that they should be fully compensated.

As for the national pastime, they made their bed in the 1990’s when Fay Vincent was ousted by the owners – and had an owner in Bud Selig who bid their bidding for a couple of decades. If the 1994-1995 strike didn’t wake up the baseball public in terms of the need for a commissioner who would serve everyone’s interest – they deserve what they get in 2020 with this “failure to launch” scenario taking place.

Sports will continue to be on the backburner in the maelstrom 2020 has become – and probably so. It seems everyone can agree there are bigger items on our plate in present times. Once that is figured out, if it ever is, the games should rightfully continue on.

Flashpoint America

What a year 2020 has turned into – perhaps the most tumultuous year American history has seen since 1968. I wouldn’t know – that was three years before I was born.

Adding to the unrest the COVID-19 and George Floyd situations have become are the situations in Seattle and Atlanta. Seattle now has something called CHAZ where the police has been kicked out, and an autonomous zone has been set up in that’s city downtown. In Atlanta, a black man who ran off with a police taser after a scuffle with cops was shot dead. Video showed the shooting to be an act of self-defense at best, justified at worst – but rioters burned down the Wendy’s in Atlanta near where the fatal skirmish took place anyway.

We are eyewitnesses to history every day as of late – though we don’t know exactly how this page reads in the book current history winds up being. No one who voted in the US elections four years ago could have wildly dreamed the events all occurring this election year of 2020 – making our votes more important than ever. Even if you don’t feel the way I do about our times – go out and vote in November when the time comes. The way things are going – I dare say if it comes as well.

Flashback: “Neutron Dance” by The Pointer Sisters

On Monday, Bonnie Pointer passed away – an early member of the Pointer Sisters musical ensemble that had a lot of hits on the US pop charts in the late 1970’s and most of the 1980’s.

Bonnie’s younger sisters scored this hit released in 1983 – with the song hitting #6 on the Billboard charts. It was also used in the first Beverly Hills Cop movie featuring Eddie Murphy.

So What You’re Saying Is…

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Today is the 31st anniversary of the graduation of my high school – and the 69th birthday of one of my favorite singers (a long story that goes back to the wonderful musical summer of 1983), but the latter is a story I’ve told a few times.

If you told me that 31 years removed from my graduation that a New York businessman would be driving the political world crazy – wanting to “drain the swamp” and making other efforts for world transparency, I would have looked at you as if worms crawled out of your ears. Coronavirus, riots, what’s next? I’m sure the Deep State-slash-Democrats will think of something unpleasant.

I’ve been a Democrat a few times, a Republican a few more, and Independent once or twice – but now I sound like William DeVane hocking gold and silver on TV. When I hear one side accusing the other side of X, Y, or Z – I tend to look at the reverse of whatever that accusation is and give that a smell test.

A recent example of this was when President Trump went to the St. John’s Church near the White House to pay his respects after the church was damaged after rioting the days before. The Democrats howled – how dare the President go there, having the constabulary clear a path for him.

So what you’re saying is – you wanted the President to be harmed? You want the President to stay in the White House and not go anywhere? You want to have him to have less rights and freedoms than you or I would have going to Walmart? Is that what you want?

Looking at those reverse inference should tell you all you need to know about where the truth is. The Democrats can’t seem to find it presently if it fell out of a boat. Sometime in the future, roles will be reversed – but that isn’t the case in the here and now.