Comes all the way back to Dallas.
Stays in
I didn't wake up with a tooth missing or a tiger in my hotel bathroom. But only one - that's right, one - of the following did not happen during my 4-day excursion to Las Vegas.
Venture a guess?
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I realize we are a society of cheaters:
Steroids and corked bats in baseball. Spying in the NFL. Fudging our taxes. Speeding. Rosie Ruiz in the Boston Marathon. Foot wedges in golf. NASCAR crew chiefs altering specifications. Ponzi schemes. Our spouses.
I get it. Cut a corner here or tell a lil' white lie there. Anything in the name of getting ahead. Right?
But every once in a while the habitual cheaters get their comeuppance, in the form of $200 finger waggings. On Monday police officers ticketed 75 jerks and jerkettes who drove solo in Central Expressway's HOV lanes.
To this I say: Brah. Vo!
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| The board of education. |
It was a better world when paddling was a part of school. A safer world when "licks" between a teacher and student were punishment rather than perverted pleasure.
Hear me out: I'm not condoning the 21 "licks" allegedly applied to the backside of a Lincoln High School football player. That, of course, is excessive, brutal abuse and the fact that the school's coach and principal attempted to hide the episode proves their guilt.
But we wonder how our kids got so out of control? Where's the respect for teachers? For authority? Where have all the hard-nosed disciplinarians like Bobby Knight and Vince Lombardi and Woody Hayes gone?
Easy. We've degenerated into a wussified country weakened by Downy-soft consequences, only to inexplicably react with aghast at the resulting hard times.
I don't remember all the numerous groundings I incurred as a kid. But I vividly the recall the two times I got paddled.
The following is a prime example of my curse here on Earth. A fleeting thought sprouts into a mild observation, only to bloom into a thesis that eventually flourishes into a blog item with sports branches. My apologies ...
Got a text the other day, the salutation of which was LOL. It struck me that:
1. "laugh out loud" isn't that difficult to type.
2. it's official, our laziness has become lazy.
When in the name of Jack LaLanne did our lame asses become DOA? Our latest exercise evolution from VCR-to-DVR, for example, was born out of a unyielding desire to avoid the physically grueling task of pushing LCD buttons to stop 12:00 from blinking. Even worse, we've become obsessed with language lethargy, better known as ASS - Acronym Soup Syndrome.
(Like TV, it rots your CAT-scanned brain waves, man. And like PCP, it makes you see UFOs.)
FYI: ACRONYM is itself an acronym, a group of letters used as a shortcut around the cumbersome, draining process of actually writing or saying "Alphabetic Collocation Reducing Or Negating Your Memory." Whether it's remote controls, drive-thrus or whittling words and condensing consonants, in the 21st Century we're doing less, faster than ever.
Then: Pick up the phone and dial 36 of your friends.
Now: Go on Twitter and carpet-bomb your Twollowers with 140-character status updates.
I'm as guilty as anyone. Here in my corner of the blogosphere I constantly refer to SMU (Southern Methodist University), AAC (American Airlines Center) and PPMs (Portable People Meters). And I often wonder what happened to Mark Cuban's problems with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and Russ Martin's with the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).
RE: The timeless seduction of sports has been edited down to NASCAR RPMs, ACC MVPs, MLB ERAs, NBA DNPs, ETC.
RIP, elbow grease.
Consider this not a Q&A, but merely random FAQs on how our EKGs are revealing dramatic, dumb-down shifts from IQs to IMs, and from P.S. to PS2:
If we lived in California there'd be an easy explanation: Earthquake.
Poltergeist? No? Fine, then you tell me.
But we live in McKinney, so there's no logical reason why our house mysteriously shook this morning at 6 a.m.
I was yanked from my sleep by what sounded like the loud, violent slamming of a door, followed by the rattling of the large piece of iron art on the wall above our bed. Simultaneously, my wife shot up off her pillow and one of our dogs - from the far, opposite corner of the house - began barking as if startled.
Something happened. But what?
I interrupt my usual smart-ass sports snarkiness for a serious item:
Just a little over a week ago Megan Cherry was a talented teenager with a world of promise. She was a star soccer player for her Dallas Texans club team and Allen High School, with a scholarship awaiting at Iowa State University.
Today, she's on the National Missing Persons List, as an endangered runaway.
Her family, friends, Allen police and the FBI have been searching frantically for her, but so far with zero leads or tangible results.
UPDATE: Just heard from a family friend that Megan's car was today found in San Angelo. No signs of foul play. Developing ...
My corner of the blogosphere was in its infancy - 14 days old, in fact - when I first lampooned the ridiculous, dangerous, 14-mile stretch of Central Expressway from Dallas to Allen known as the HOV lane.
My road-ragey rant went something like this:
The HOV lane dividers are made of what, light bulbs? WTF?! I'm sure these plastic posts are cheaper (i.e. suckier), but when cars accidentally swerve into them they immediately shatter into flying shards of petrified plastic. My neighbor suffered collateral damage of dents in his car and a flat tire from a nearby accident's shrapnel. Drive the highway on a given day - actually, any day - and the posts look like rows of broken, jagged teeth. What was supposed to be a psychological barrier has deteriorated into a physical danger.
Don't look now, but my soap box is getting crowded.
*Former Stone Temple Pilots' front man Scott Wieland is (still) on something.
*Paris Hilton is (still) annoying.
*Mariah Carey is (still) hot.
*Jamie Foxx is cocky with a capital 'K'.
*Kanye West wants to be Elvis. Making the feat even more unlikely, he's apparently he's going to try it while dressed like a rodeo clown. - Richie Whitt
Been watching some CNN today and was a tad alarmed by the headlines:
“Problems at polling stations!”
“Record voter turnout!”
“New York’s 'Naked Cowboy' endorses McCain!”
Frightening stuff. So I scurried down to my local polling place at McKinney’s Valley Creek Elementary School and found …
Hmm, what oh what could distract us from our Cowboys' misery today?
Two words: Mavericks! Dancers!
The squad hyped its shiny, skinderful new calendar with a shindig at Ghostbar after Friday night's Fan Jam.
Here's a slide show of shots from the night. I predict that by about pic No. 4 you'll forget all about Brad Joh ... --Richie Whitt
