More dumb things

A certain fast-food franchise has been advertising "they've got the meats".
True enough, but they have the prices too -- and they're high.
What used to be a good deal on a tasty meat-packed sandwich is no more. It's become skinnier than your average anorexic fashion model.
To get the jumbo version of old, one has to order the super-duper size, which costs three times as much.
One can only imagine what the late Clara Peller would have to say if she could walk into a franchise today.
Ms. Peller's claim to fame was the classic line -- "where's the beef"?
Nowadays, it might be more like -- "It costs WHAT?"

Those lovable talking heads, analysts, and "experts" are up to their usual dumb sound bytes.
They always have and continue to tell us that any team, in any sport needs to ----

Find a way to score more goals, points, runs, etc. And, of course ---
Find another way to limit their opponents' goals, points, and runs. etc.
Evidently, such pearls of wisdom are what makes them experts.
Your average sports fan would NEVER have figured THAT out.

Not long ago, a college hoops head coach uttered another beauty, To wit:
"We can't win by trying to outscore the other team"
Really, coach? Defense is great but -- um -- isn't your team having more points than the other guys at the end of the game usually pretty much necessary to chalk up a victory?
Worse yet, a sports writer staunchly defended the coach's remark in a column the following day.
One can only wonder -- how did these guys do at math in school?

Others have been known to use the phrase -- "addition by subtraction". Evidently, they believe in the concept of less being more. Perhaps they all had the same twilight zone teacher somewhere along the line.

We've all seen overly-geeked sports reporters and talking heads talk about the "panic" syndrome. This usually happens when a local team might not make the playoffs -- or is on the verge of being eliminated. It seems they think the local populace should go into full-blown panic mode at the very thought their home-town sports team might come up short.

If that had truly been the case over the years -- and decades -- all Detroit Lions' fans would have jumped out of tall buildings or been confined (while heavily medicated) to padded rooms long ago.

And therein lies the difference. Like the proverbial lemmings, Lions' fans don't panic. They just keep paying big bucks to trudge up the cliff every year -- only to plunge to their inevitable doom. As Elmer Fudd could never bag Bugs Bunny, nor Wile E. Coyote the Road Runner, neither will the Motown lemmings ever sniff a Super Bowl. But they never panic. They and their team are too cartoonish to panic. One must have had a modicum of common sense in the first place before they can go off the deep end. Which brings me back to the lemmings. A vicious circle of dumb indeed.

But the colossally clueless award has to go to Major League Baseball. Fittingly enough on income tax day, April 15, they made every player on every team wear the uniform #42. This was a tribute to Jackie Robinson. The guy that broke the "color barrier" way back in 1947.

Robinson played ten seasons for the then Brooklyn Dodgers and his career stats were decent, but hardly spectacular. A white player putting up the same numbers for the same amount of time certainly never would have made it into the Hall of Fame, much less had his number retired league wide.

And hey, Jackie Robinson died way back in 1972. This was long before any current major league players were even born. Do you think they give a rat's behind about the "legacy" of some dude that last put on a uniform in 1956? Good grief, it's entirely possible the majority of them don't even know who or what Jackie Robinson was. With the major influx of Latino players and other foreign nationals in recent years -- many who don't even speak English -- it's not hard to imagine what they may have been thinking.

What kind of foolishness is this? We all have to wear the same number? Only in America would they mandate such a thing. And who the hell was #42 anyway? Wasn't that a guy named Clinton that got in mucho trouble over the stain on the blue dress thing? These Americanos are plum loco -- but they pay well, bless their Yanqui hearts.

But it's still dumb.....