One of these pics is Tina Fey, a comedienne best known for her work on SNL. The other is Sarah Palin, Republican nominee for V.P.So, ya' think SNL might be doing some Sarah Palin sketches in the next month or two? I'm betting we'll see one this week.
One of the football fantasy leagues I'm in is a "Pickem" league. The goal is to pick the winner of all the games on each weekend, with the person who gets the most picks correct at the end of the season winning the league championship. That brings absolutely no prize, monetary or otherwise. But we're guys, which means we'll enter any kind of competition for no reason whatsoever except the chance to beat another guy. (Beating a girl doesn't bring any sense of satisfaction. Losing to a girl brings total humiliation. No sexism. It's just what is.)This is the second week of the season and this morning I made my picks for the 16 games that will be played over Sunday and Monday. But I learned something this morning I didn't know before I made last week's picks. The league has factored in the spread - the expected margin of victory for the team predicted to win. So the NY Giants are expected to beat the Washington Redskins by 4 points. If I pick the Giants and they win by only 3 points...I lose. Conversely, if I pick the Redskins and they lose by less than 4...I win.
The spread is determined by sports experts (read: bookies) at places like Vegas casinos. Their goal in factoring in the spread is to make each matchup even, like you do with a handicap in golf. That way the house significantly moderates any losses it might face. And that's why these guys are very, very good at what they do. The casinos pay them BIG bucks in order to avoid large payouts.
So here's the problem: if the spread does what it's supposed to do - achieve near parity between any two teams facing each other - then the choices I make are really me guessing which team will under or over perform vis a' vis the experts' expectations. Unless you're a total football freak, and I'm not, what chance do you have of beating the experts at their job? I might as well flip a coin. Which begs the question why I'm in this league to begin with.
A: see comment above about males and competitions.
As long as we're on that topic:
- A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush & toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap and a towel. A woman has, on average, 337 items in her bathroom. A man can correctly identify no more than 20 of them.
- Men wake up looking like they did when the went to bed. A woman wakes up needing rehabilitation.
- A woman knows all about her children - their dentist appointments, friends, favorite foods and secret fears. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.
- If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah. If Mike, Dave and John go out they will refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.
OK, my next executive order once I'm elected President: the word "lobbyist" will be purged from the English vocabulary. In it's place we'll use "paid advocate." Furthermore, any organization or firm that employs a paid advocate will have to put the initials "PA" in prominent type anywhere their corporate or organizational name appears - all their letterhead, envelopes, advertising in any media, etc.
The word lobbyist is being used in this election as though it was synonymous with crook, and any association with a lobbyist is the equivalent of sleeping with Bin Laden. (I'm going to take that simile out of my next press conference.) To listen to the rhetoric you'd assume that one party is making heavy use of lobbyists and indebted to them while the other has none on its staff and has never so much as sat down for lunch with one of those political pariahs. Meanwhile, the other party vows to fight against the Washington establishment and the influence of the lobbyists.
All of that is a lot of horse puckey.
Virtually any organization that has a relationship with the Federal Govt. employs lobbyists. (The same goes at the state level.) Sure, big oil has a cadre of lobbyists. So do the environmental groups. "Big business" (whatever that term means) has lobbyists and so does your Savings and Loan. The states have lobbyists in Washington, AAA has them, Planned Parenthood has lobbyists and so does Right to Life.
It makes sense for any group that does business with the Fed. Govt. to have lobbyists in Washington, in order to keep track of relevant legislation and make sure the interests of their clients are well represented before that legislation is voted on. Farm bill? Farmers have lobbyists calling on Congressmen to represent them. The farmers can't be there to do it themselves and they don't know how Washington works, so they hire someone who does. So do foreign countries. France, Poland and Brazil have lobbyists in Washington.
Yes, there are some real scoundrels working as lobbyists who will do anything on either side of the line to get favorable decisions for their clients. In recent years rules have been tightened to prevent abuse and those rules need constant refinement. But you want lobbyists! More than one organization you belong to - AARP, your union, your service club - has lobbyists working on your behalf. It's how we get access to our govt. without having to be there physically ourselves.
But the word lobbyist has been so tainted by generalization that it's become a caricature of evil personified. That's why we're going to take it out of all dictionaries and make it a crime for anyone to use the word. We'll start over with Paid Advocate. And displaying "PA" everywhere the name of an organization or company that employes Paid Advocates appears will open the eyes of the people to the valid roll they play in our political process.
What shall we do with all the hot air that's going to be left over once we eliminate the empty rhetoric about lobbyists?
I know! We'll have a hot air balloon festival!
Click to open as a Power Point presentation. But mute the music. It's really annoying!
No comments:
Post a Comment