Football and the name game

The Houston Texans at the Jacksonville Jaguars for Thursday night football? Blech, yuck, ptooey, gag me with the moon, and all that stuff. Who came up with the brainstorm to feature these two teams in prime time? This is god-awful, or at least turrible, as Charles Barkley would say.

After showing some promise last year, the Texans have recently lost their last 10 games in a row. These guys are falling faster than the popularity of a certain President. Nobody expected much out of the Jaguars. Jacksonville's just a town you have to go through on your way to the good stuff in Florida.

Nevertheless, the always rosy announcers had to try to drum up a little interest in this game. For a while, they focused on Jacksonville running back Maurice Jones-Drew. That reasoning was flawed from the beginning.

You can't trust those guys with three names. In my younger days, I remember hanging out with William Henry Harrison. Yeah, he finally served a very short while as President, but he was a trouble maker as a kid, especially when a few of us would get together for a trip down a river. Old Willie had this thing about tipping over canoes.

And he's not the only one. History is chock full of them. Oliver Wendall Holmes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, James Fenimore Cooper, Scott Van Pelt, etc, etc. The list is long of people that became famous, but like Willie, they had their dark sides as well.

Worse yet is those folks that precede their name with an initial. Consider the following:

H. Ross Perot
L. Ron Hubbard
J. Paul Getty
L. Brooks Patterson
G. Gordon Liddy

All uppety schmucks that wanted to tell the rest of us how to act, while getting rich in the process.

k.d. lang has taken it to another level. I'm not exactly sure what that consists of, but I don't want to hang with her either to find out.

Back to Thursday night football. Normally, one could say two NFL teams are slugging it out. But in the case of the Texans/Jaguars matchup, it seems to be more like a pillow fight at a girls' sleepover party. These guys are not good.

Besides, think about the two cities themselves.

The best thing to ever come out of Jacksonville was my favorite rock band. Lynard Skynard. Alas, many of their original members are dead now -- but their music lives on. Small town wannabe bands continue to copy their stuff. Walk into any honky-tonk bar, and it won't be long before you hear one of their tunes blasting from the jukebox. The Jags, on the other hand, appear to be as forgettable as it gets.

Houston? They were once known as the home of "mission control" when it came to NASA space flights. Now, other than sending up the vast hush-hush variety of spy satellites, and a few doodads to keep the telecommunications folks up to speed with modern-day technology, it appears NASA, and "mission control" are but a shell of what they once were. Besides, there's the bottom feeding Astros in major league baseball. Did I mention turrible?

Houston, we have a problem indeed.

Ah well, back to the game. Any game is better than no game, I suppose.

And who knows? Maybe Maurice Jones-Drew will grow up to be President himself someday. But I'm not going canoeing with him either.