Yes, the weather is dreadful, and we're not even in August yet, but let's look ahead and on the bright side: It's only three months until United States forces "find" Osama bin Laden, in what promises to be the least-surprising October Surprise of all time.
This August, we also have the Summer Olympics in Greece, which means that we'll get to watch the U.S. men's basketball team lose to Azerbaijan or somebody, and see 8,000 promos for Joey, the new spin-off series from Friends, which, in case you weren't aware, was the most over-rated sitcom OF ALL TIME!
September will bring us the new football season. Do you realize that, because of the way the schedule is set up, the Arizona Wildcats could go through the entire month of September and not be below .500? The absolute best part will be home day games on consecutive weekends--IN TUCSON, IN SEPTEMBER!
I've lived here a long time, and the most miserable day I ever spent in Tucson was an early-October afternoon at Arizona Stadium. Keith Smith was quarterbacking the Wildcats to a win over USC (I know that sounds far-fetched, but it was only a few years ago) in a regionally televised game. It was a brutally hot, cloudless day, and instead of sitting in the press box, I sat with my son high up on the east side of the stadium.
People were dropping left and right. The only saving grace was that Tucson Water was handing out free, ice-cold bottles of their new CAP Crap water blend. There could have been live trilobites swimming in it, and it still would have been the best water I ever tasted.
And now they want to have not one, but two, games in September? They need to send out bumper stickers with the season tickets: "I'm Dying to See These New Wildcats."
Of course, after September will come October and November and the meat of the Pac-10 schedule, in which we will learn that, in this, the first year of the Stoops Era, Stoops is a contraction of "Stumble" and "Oops!" By then, it will be basketball season, and as mentioned, we'll have bin Laden in custody, so all will be cool. Of course, bin Laden will spout some nonsense about how he's been held captive in West Texas for the past three years, but nobody will believe him. At least, not until after the election.
Speaking of the election, next week, the Democrats gather in Boston to officially nominate John Kerry. With Boston pretty much being the Cradle of Liberty and the birthplace of the American Revolution, it's somewhat disheartening to learn that Beantown's city fathers--with a whole lot of help from the feds--have designated certain areas, far away from the convention center, as "free speech zones," to be used by protesters and those seeking photo ops with unmotivated network news crews.
I'm sorry, but I could have sworn that the entire United States was a free speech zone. When did that change? And why are Democrats going along with this nonsense? Furthermore, there is a citywide ban on marches between 3 and 6 p.m., because they might disrupt traffic! I'm tempted to fly to Boston and try to organize a march between 3 and 6 p.m. to protest the fact that we're banned from marching between 3 and 6 p.m. What has happened to our country?
I called a friend of mine who lives in Peabody, Mass., and he agreed with the ban "because the traffic is awful that time of day." I told him that all that meant was that he would have to sit in his car and listen to his beloved Sawx choke rather than getting home and watching them choke on TV. It would be the patriotic thing to do.
Protesters have to be careful not to give Sean's Fawns and all the morons on the right something to chew on. I'm old enough to remember the negative fallout from the protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. Therefore, steps must be taken to ensure that nothing is done on which the Great Satan's Network might Foxate.
That's a new verb I came up with. Foxate: To focus on one small aspect of a story--whether it really happened or not--then edit the crap out of it so that it's as negative and harmful as possible, and then run it and run it and run it and run it until:
The drones think it really happened;
The other networks, too lazy to do their own research, run it;
It's proven to be false, and the smell of lawsuits fills the air.
(See Wellstone, Senator Paul, memorial service, at which the boorish behavior of a handful of people was Foxated into a Republican rallying cry that gave the GOP control of the United States Senate for two years.)
