Will's Good Idea for the Week of 9/12/21 with Measured Commentary on the NFL and Joe

Baaaaaa, virtually no sleep. Don't get us started on the things.

We've thrown out just about everything we can throw out. Remediation people are coming on Tuesday. 

And like that, autumn is here. As we write it's about 55 degrees. We won't bother translating that into fru-fru Euro numbers. Metric system...what are we? Canadian? What's next, football fields that are 120 yards long? Speaking of which, it's a sports ball day. No. Hell no. Lift this voice, motherfuckers. 

One of the quirks about the Northeast is that aside from Notre Dame (for obvious reasons), college football isn't very big up here. Okay, Rutgers is kinda, sorta a thing in New Jersey. One does see a lot of Scarlet Knights gear. 

Mrs. Stroock comes from a Penn State family (that's where her folks met) and is devoted. She grew up with a cat named Nittany. We watch Penn State together, and over time we find we like the college game better than the league whose name shall not be spoken. Penn State is in the Big Ten Conference, as is Rutgers. Mrs. Stroock thinks Rutgers should be kicked out of the Big Ten. She's right. They're pretenders. Rutgers is not now, nor has it ever been ready to compete with the big boys. New Jersey's big high school football stars usually choose...Penn State. See for example, Newark's own Sequon Barkley. 

Foreign readers, don't trust anybody in the low down, dirty, no good South Eastern Conference. Imagine a futball league comprised of Argentina, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Spain and England, all cheating their asses off, all stealing the best players from around the world, virtually ignoring FIFA and just doing whatever the hell they want. That's the SEC. Folks down there became militantly pro-integration once they saw what black players could do for the football programs. One has to admire the SEC's brazen ruthlessness. Bastards.    

What Will's Watching, Voyager: We are becoming annoyed with the writers of this show. There's always 'interference' with the transporters, or the sensors or some such. We don't recall USS Enterprise having these constant technical issues. It's weak, contrived. Also, and we're far from the first to say this, the holodeck is dumb. In Voyager they hang out in a turn of the 20th century French dive bar. Why not use the holodeck to recreate something from the 22nd century? That's a hell of a missed opportunity. 

We looked over The Final Storm a bit yesterday and we have the Aussies and Vietnamese in a military and diplomatic stalemate. You know, maybe we should have the Australians drop the SAS and some paratroopers on Hanoi. That'd be a good short story at least. Post war, or post Final Storm.

Joe completely fucked up Afghanistan so he could have a moment on 9/11's 20th anniversary. Instead he didn't even speak yesterday. Good. Joe is...what's the word? [Unworthy?-Ed]. Yeah. [Disgrace?] Uh-huh. [A lying dog-faced pony soldier-Ed] For certain. It is hard to put into words our contempt for the man and his 65 million or so voters. Joe has no business being anywhere near a 9/11 commemoration. 

We didn't watch any of those. We're cynical and bitter about the whole thing. For 20 years the governing class from W through Trump failed us. The War on Terror is over and America's current situation is analogous to that of Britain in 1945, exhausted and broke. Don't believe me? Look who's president. Take heart America, you did not elect this man. 

American Sports: The end is Nigh

Gallup tells us that:

American football, under attack from critics in recent years, has lost some of its popularity but is still the champion of U.S. spectator sports -- picked by 37% of U.S. adults as their favorite sport to watch. The next-most-popular sports are basketball, favored by 11%, and baseball, favored by 9%.

None of this is really surprising. 

But there is this:

The 9% of Americans who mention baseball as their favorite sport to watch is the lowest percentage for the sport since Gallup first asked the question in 1937. Americans named baseball as the most popular sport in 1948 and 1960, but football claimed the top spot in 1972 and has been the public's favorite ever since. 

Soccer now nearly matches baseball's popularity. Seven percent say it is their favorite sport to watch, the highest that sport has registered to date. Only once before have at least 7% of Americans named a sport other than football, basketball or baseball as their favorite -- and that was auto racing in 1997. (Auto racing is now down to 2% of mentions.)

That's right, Soccer is now almost as popular in America as baseball.

We've written of this before. Baseball has no one to blame for its' decline but itself. During football's rise in the 60's and 70's baseball stood complacent and pat, resting on the laurels of Ruth, Mantle, Mays, etc...

Time is now a yuuge problem. A baseball game takes three hours. A soccer match two hours, if that. Baseball is slowed by batters stepping in and out of the box, pitchers wondering around the mound, mound conferences between pitcher and catchers, TV time outs, a half dozen pitching changes....

The games cane be hard to sit through.

Baseball shifted to a night based schedule from which it's never come back. The last day world series game was 1987. We remember watching it. Because of a ridiculous 8:37 start, how many kids saw this?

...and a few innings later:

...and the next night, this:

'I have ever...scene anything...like it....' said a stunned Tim McCarver.

Neither did millions of kids because those shots came at the 11 and 12 o'clock hours.

And they wonder why Soccer is threatening baseball.

Come on, foreign reader(s) watch the clips. They're baseball.