Endangered Species?

For a while, I was actually concerned that in some near-term politically-correct future, my beloved alma mater, Hortonville High School, would have to change its mascot from the Polar Bear to the Baby Harp Seal or the Emperor Penguin or some critter along those lines.  After all, my parents both graduated from Oshkosh High School - long before there were four high schools in that city - and were proud Oshkosh Indians  - long before what’s now Oshkosh West High School had to change the mascot from “Indians” to “Wildcats”.

For a while, mascot-changing was rampant in Wisconsin, under the Doyle administration, when the politically-correct-police were put in charge of a new committee to make us all feel bad about native American-themed mascots.  Now, the tide has apparently turned.

A Waukesha County judge has ruled the Mukwonago High School Indians can continue being the Indians, and the state’s attempt to force them to change mascots was unconstitutional.  The Reader’s Digest version is that the judge ruled that the DPI (Department of Public Instruction) bureaucrat who tried to force the change…a dude named Paul Sherman…had an “impermissibly high risk of bias”.

I’m really not certain why the good folks of the village of Hortonville decided years ago to select the Polar Bear as a mascot.  I always liked it, because it was unique, and the Polar Bear is considered a powerful and self-reliant critter.  I was a staffer on our high school newspaper, the Polar Cub.  In sports, we played teams like the Omro Foxes, the Winneconne Wolves, and, yes – the Berlin Indians.  And the Clintonville Truckers, so-named because of the huge Four-Wheel-Drive plant there.

The thing that annoyed me so much about the politically correct forces in Madison is that they completely ignored the simple fact that mascots are selected because they are reflective of the community’s roots (Clintonville Truckers, Kimberly Papermakers, Ashland Oredockers, Stoughton Vikings, DeForest Norskies), or that the mascot possesses qualities which we wish to emulate.

I’m not offended that Notre Dame calls itself the “Fighting Irish”.  They could have called them “The Drunken Micks” and it wouldn’t have bothered me a bit.  Same with the Boston Celtics.  I have no idea why any “native American” would be annoyed that a community like Berlin or Mukwonago  or Oshkosh decided to use the Indian as its mascot, and I would make the case that only in the City of the Perpetually Offended (Madison) would a notion that “Indians” is somehow demeaning would gain any traction.

I will admit that some of the logos used are stereotypical, in a cartoon-like fashion.  The one used by the Cleveland Indians, for example.

 But that’s just bad taste, which you may choose to define as offensive, but not cause to change the name of the mascot.  They need a face-lift, not a name-change.

So long live the Hortonville Polar Bears, and the Mukwonago Indians, and all the rest of them.  Including the Marquette Warriors.

Have You Heard? Chris Christie is FAT!

It’s the only remaining form of discrimination that you can still get away with, so apparently everybody and their brother feels it necessary to comment on Chris Christie’s unhealthy weight.  You can’t make a joke about his religion, whatever it is.  You can’t make a joke about his ethnic background, no matter what it is.  You can’t make a joke about his skin color, no matter what it is.  You can’t make a joke about a disability which may affect him, no matter what it is.  You can’t make a joke about his sexual orientation, no matter what it is.

But being fat?  Well, roll out the barrel!!!

Everybody from pea-brained social media friends of mine to national TV hosts like Jay Leno have made jokes about Christie’s weight.  It’s such an easy target.  Asked about his weight by some nooz dweeb a few weeks ago, Christie shot back “I eat too much.  It’s not a mystery.” 

Oh, and the fat puns – Christie tackles weighty issues; he’s not running for President so much as he’s waddling for President; he needs to fatten up his campaign chest – most of them aren’t even mildly creative.

We have TV shows that poke fun at fat people, like the now-popular “Mike and Molly Show”, about a couple who met at “Overeaters Anonymous”; like the old “Fat Albert Show” from Bill Cosby, who should be ashamed of himself for naming the big guy “Fat Albert”; and the perennially popular “Biggest Loser” shows, which have engendered local spinoffs.  Some people argue that “Biggest Loser” is about success and confidence and transformation; but at its essence, it’s a show about fat people.

Try to imagine a show “Biggest Gainer”, about people with anorexia desperately trying to see their body as the rest of the world does, and GAIN weight.

Didn’t think so.

Loyal - or not?

Reports in the public prints and media indicate Coach Bielema and his minions are disenchanted with Badgers fans who’ve sold their tickets to Saturday night’s game to Nebraska fans.  Something like “loyal Badgers fans wouldn’t do that”.

Indeed.

At this writing, Thursday noon, according to StubHub, nosebleed seats are going for around 200 bucks; good seats are ranging from 300 to 700 bucks; all the way up to 4 seats at Varsity Club Level 1 going for a cool 1200 bucks apiece. 

The UW Football brain trust is implying (if not outright saying) that selling your tickets to a Nebraska fan is disloyal.

Commentators are saying this would NEVER happen in places like Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, where football is more religion than sport.

Many years ago, I decided the best seat in the house for the “big game”, no matter what the sport, is in my huge overstuffed recliner in the media room of our home, watching in hi-def on the 65-inch screen and listening through a 300-watt 5.1 sound system which can create sound so massive I alert the US Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center when I’m going to move the volume past “5” on the indicator. 

So I have no issue with those Badgers fans who’ve decided to trade in their game tickets for a mortgage payment.

Loyalty, schmoyalty.  It’s the free market in action.

And This Is News Because.......?

Every time the Football Badgers play at Camp Randall Stadium, the local media – print and electronic – report the exact number of people who were ejected or arrested at the game.  The number is usually around 25 or 30.  The media don’t report this number for Badger Basketball games or Hockey matches at the Kohl Center; nor for the UW womens’ softball games at Goodman Field on the UW Campus; or, for that matter, the intercollegiate golf matches at University Ridge or the volleyball matches at the old Field House.

But, like clockwork, the morning after the football game, the news radio station in town and the local TV news stations parrot the numbers, taken from the official news release of the UW Police, I’m sure.  The Wisconsin State Journal ran about two column inches on the official drunken/disorderly count on page 5 of this morning’s paper.

For the mathematically challenged (certainly including me), let’s use easy-to-work-with numbers, and assume that 40 people were ejected or arrested at a typical football game.  Since Camp Randall holds about 80 thousand people, the total number arrested/detained/ejected/taken to detox is 0.05%.  In other words, not statistically significant.

99.95% of the fans at Camp Randall were NOT arrested/ejected/taken to detox.  And the actual percentage is lower, if you add in the thousands who just mill around the stadium, and the hundreds of ushers, security personnel, concessions stand workers, and media types who infest the area on game-day.

Do the statewide media report such a figure after every Packers or Brewers or Bucks game?  Of course not, but I’ll bet a week’s pay that the Green Bay and Ashwaubenon Police and the Brown County Sheriff’s Department would tell you the percentages are similar at a typical Packers game at Lambeau Field.

I think the reason(s) the local media report this figure as if it were news is simply that years ago, when the Badgers Football team sucked and lost all the time, it was more entertaining to report the number or arrests than the number of points scored – and the “tradition” has continued.

Why the University Police continue to provide this number to the media is a deeper mystery; if I were Barry Alvarez, I’d have coffee with Chief Riseling and ask her nicely to discontinue the practice.  Of course they have to keep official records, but spoon-feeding them to the media is another thing.  (Here come the e-mails and comments from my many newsie friends yelling “freedom of information”.)

When/if the number exceeds the norm (as it well may next Saturday when Nebraska comes for its first game at Camp Randall, and it’s A NIGHT GAME which means all-day-all-night drinking), it may qualify as news.

But to merely parrot the number after every home game seems pointless, and, well, not “newsy”, even if it is “truthy”.

Who's Afraid of the "New" Facebook?

Not me.  There’s a reason Facebook has outlived similar sites like MySpace and why Facebook dominates social media.  It keeps reinventing itself, and making improvements.

Do I have to repeat the old saw that most people hate change?

I can still see everything I want on Facebook.  It’s just laid out differently.  It’s like the grocery store – once you get used to a particular layout, they change everything around.  But like the “new” Facebook, the basics are still in place after they change the store layout….the milk and eggs are still way at the end of the store, and the high-markup impulse purchase items are still prominent.  The can of beans that you’d find in Aisle 7 last week is now in Aisle 11, but it’s still there.

My “news feed” on Facebook is now a running display on the right margin of the page, and status updates and pictures posted by my friends are still on the “center aisle” of my Facebook display.

Early this past summer I was forced to make some huge changes and adaptations when my trusty 2005 Compaq desktop computer (which has been fully updated twice since I bought it) started to crap out.  I’ve got a venerable HP (circa 1999) in storage “just in case”, but my computer guys told me it was time to upgrade.  That meant switching from Windows XP to Windows 7. I had about a week to worry about it, because my computer guys custom-ordered a new desktop for me (a high-end Dell Vostro), so it took a few days for the Dell folks to build it to spec and ship it.  I wrung my hands.

My friends and business colleagues kept telling me “no sweat, you’ll pick up Windows 7 with no problem”….and I kept thinking “I learned on Windows 3.0 and was always happy with Windows 98 – why do I have to go to Windows 7 on this new machine?”.  As everybody found out, Windows 7 looks and runs a little differently, but it IS better than XP; and Office 2010 is better than Office 2007; and, in my particular case, because I record and edit a lot of digital audio for my “day” job, Adobe Audition 3.0 really is better than Adobe Audition 1.5. 

The “new” Facebook is just fine.  And I have no doubt that it will keep changing and morphing and developing and reinventing itself.  The day I can’t keep up with it is the day I’m officially “old”.

V A (o) R

VAoR: Voluntary Assumption of Risk.  Also, for you pilot types, a play on VOR, which stands for VHF Omnidirectional Range, or VHF Omni-Range.

I suspect the legal world will have something to say about voluntary assumption of risk, in what is certain to be a flood of lawsuits following last week’s crash at the Reno Air Races.  The concept is simple.  If you go to a baseball game and sit halfway down the third base line, there’s a chance that a foul ball will head right at you.  Most people are aware of this, unless you’ve never been to or watched a baseball game.  The ticket you buy to get into the game probably says somewhere in fine print that the team isn’t liable if you get conked on the noggin by a foul ball.

When you go to an air race….not an air SHOW, and there’s a huge difference…you may or may not know that there is a chance something horrid will happen, as it did last week.  I have every confidence the lawyers will clear this all up for us.  (Sarcasm is dripping off that last sentence, but it sometimes doesn’t reproduce well on the internet.)

Both air shows and air races are regulated by the FAA, but there’s a major difference.  In an air show, the pilots keep their planes parallel to the flight line and grandstand or seating area, and perform their maneuvers in a way that’s designed to never aim the plane toward the spectators.  This minimizes the chances a plane in trouble will go down into the crowd.  In an air race, there’s a point in the course where the planes turn right toward the spectators.  As they round the pylon for the home stretch, for a short time they’re essentially aimed at the spectators.

And if something goes wrong at that point…as it did in Reno last week….a lot of things can happen, and very few of them are good.

That’s the most significant difference between and air show and an air race.  Someone should explain to the TV nooz geeks that the two terms are decidedly not interchangeable.

I love aircraft and aviation, and have been a member of the EAA for decades.  I’m not a licensed pilot, but years ago in my broadcasting career, as architect of the formats run on the AM radio stations in a broadcast group I was once affiliated with, I had to do a lot of flying with our CEO in the business twin (a Piper Aztec – the Navy calls them U-11A’s) that the company leased.  It was the only way we could spend a full day at one of the other operating companies and be home to sleep in our own beds that night.  Efficiency.  The CEO was many years my senior, and he asked me to fly right-seat with him no matter how many people were on board (the plane carried as many as 5), and he taught me how to land the plane in case some horrible medical situation befell him in the sky.

What happened in Reno was a tragic accident.  I’m not looking forward to how the legal eagles will compound it.

(Photo at top copyright Associated Press.)

Upon Further Review...

I may have been wrong about the “Curse of SI” when I wrote about it a few weeks ago.  Note the late-August date on the cover above (Copyright Sports Illustrated).

The Brew-crew did well for a few days after the magazine cover came out, but then….

Watching them struggle to hit Phillies’ pitching was one thing; though that voice in the back of my head kept saying “they can’t do this if they meet the Phils in the playoffs”….but now, to watch them struggle against Rockies’ pitching….ugggh.

And the cherry on the cake is Prince Fielder’s interview with Brian Anderson, done Tuesday and leaked this morning, to run this weekend…..that Prince is apparently “going to take his talents elsewhere” next season; at least, that’s what one concludes when Prince tells BA that it’s been fun being the one-two punch with Ryan Braun, but those days are numbered.

When you’re in a pennant race, particularly when you’re slowly losing traction, the ONLY appropriate answer to a question about free agency is “let’s wait till after the season to talk about it.  Right now I’m focused on winning the NL Central and moving forward into the playoffs”, or some variation of that idea.

Curse of SI or whatever, I have an uneasy feeling.