The New Blog

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to start a blog and actually post regular pieces. The idea was to write a little bit every day. Now that the year has started its time to give up on that fantasy, but I think it might be realistic for me to try to post something once a week.

I’ll probably write mostly about sports and politics since those are my primary interests, one in a good way and the other with dumbfounded morbid fascination. (Yes, isn’t the Patriots’ domination sad, like watching a train wreck?) Anyway, the goals of the blog are to be frequently entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, so those are topics with plenty of grist for the mill. Here are a few thoughts and articles that piqued my interest this week.

This article about how the Buffalo Bills’ coach built team camaraderie was inspiring and wise: https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/12/01/buffalo-bills-sean-mcdermott-team-building-through-storytelling. It’s about sports, but it’s really more about making any group of people more enriched and productive.

I read these two pieces over the Christmas break, I call them the Rock and The Redeemer. I think you will find them worthwhile as well, unless you are like me and they just make you wonder “where did I go wrong?” Let’s hope the Democrats will utilize some of these fresh faces, though describing The Macker as a fresh face is a bit of a stretch. See https://www.gq.com/story/dwayne-johnson-for-president-cover and https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/governor-superlative?utm_term=.lrD00qJ9R#.xj8OOmqgK.

As far as my thoughts about politics, I’ve decided it’s not very interesting any more to just complain about Donald Trump. What I do find interesting is the psychology behind why people have the political views that they do, especially when so many people seem to have views that I find surreal. For example, I continue to be mind-boggled that many Americans, especially Republicans, don’t believe that climate change is being caused by humans, but this survey spells it out pretty clearly: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climate-change-by-education.html. Doesn’t it make you wonder what it will take before people wake up? Maybe when a polar bear wanders into their front yard.

I also thought this survey on changing gender roles in the US was fascinating: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gaps-in-u-s-over-how-far-the-country-has-come-on-gender-equality/. Remarkable how different are the views between Dems and Reps about whether changes of the roles of women have been positive or negative. I often wonder if anyone besides me has considered that he might have been born a different gender had it not been for an “accident” at conception… (By the way, is it time to stop using “he” and use “their” as the object pronoun referring back to “anyone”?)

On the sports scene, the big story of the week is the upcoming NCAA football national championship game, with the Universities of Georgia and Alabama facing off for the trophy. The obvious story here is that both teams are from the Southeastern Conference, and though many sports fans have been trying to argue that the SEC has not dominated college football for the past decade, the evidence tells a different story. So the question for inquiring minds is, why?

I believe the answer is that these teams seem to have more very big, athletic African-American linemen than teams in the other major conferences. Not so much skill position players (backs and receivers), lots of teams have great African-American athletes at those positions, but just linemen. So again, why? In other words, why does the South produce more large black athletes than other regions of the country? Is it the legacy of slavery? Is it the Southern diet? Or to put it another way, why are there proportionally more big athletes in the African-American population of the South than in their counterpart populations in the urban centers further north like Chicago, Detroit, Washington, etc? I don’t know, but I think it’s an interesting question if you are a fan of college football.

That’s all for today. I think I need a signature tag line for signing off, I’ll try different ones until one sticks. Seeking signs of intelligent life, until the next time.