On the Saints
I never thought this would happen in my lifetime—until about three weeks ago, I didn’t think it was even possible, that the forces in the universe would ever all work together to make it happen, and yet, somehow, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. Which still, even as I watch SportsCenter’s recap of the game, seems impossible. I’ve suffered and anguished and been laughed at and taken all kinds of verbal abuse (especially at my upper-middle-class private high school where everybody was a Titans or Colts fan and those teams were dominant then) for being a fan of this football team, and I have kept rooting for them and kept rooting for them time and time again, even as my hopes were dashed year after year—sometimes two or three weeks into the season. After Katrina, I remember the serious discussion of whether or not the Saints would stay in New Orleans—the N.F.L. has been needing a Los Angeles franchise ever since the Raiders and Rams left town, and here they had a team whose stadium had literally been ruined—and I remember thinking that if this team gives up on itself and leaves town, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to watch an N.F.L. game again.
Well, they didn’t leave town. After going 3-13 that year (and playing in New Jersey and Baton Rouge and San Antonio and everywhere else they could find a field) they’ve been on a monumental tear, and the team whose fans literally wore bags on their heads at home games to hide their shame in how awful the team was, whose fans (even as they held a 14 point lead with 40 seconds left in the Super Bowl) never allow themselves to expect the Saints to win until the game is over, have won a championship, and the whole thing still seems impossible.
So. You know what? I don’t care if they never have another winning season. God knows I’ve cheered for them for year after punishing year of losing. I love my Saints, and I always will.
Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.
Sadly, Race is all Herenton Offers Voters →
ismh:
Geoff Calkins nails it. Herenton is right about the all-white representation being a bad thing, but wrong about being the right guy to change it.
I disagree that Memphis having all-white representation in Congress is, based solely on that fact, a bad thing. If the best man or woman for the job is white, or black, or Hispanic, or Middle Eastern, or, hell, purple with pink polka dots, that person should be who is elected.
This notion that Herenton will be a better U.S. Representative than Steve Cohen just because he’s black and Cohen is white is (of course) ludicrous, but equally dangerous (and pernicious in Memphis’s political culture) is this notion that because there are more black people than white people in Memphis, the government must necessarily be run by black people as well.
We’ve got to figure out a way to change the politics in this city, away from not only racism (on both sides of the apparent racial divide) but also away from revenge and you people are too different from us to understand and/or live with us, on both sides of the racial divide. It’s like the violence in Palestine: retribution and retribution and retribution, and without standing up, without choosing not to just “let black people also have power” but to cease to see racial identity as a criterion for judging a candidate, Memphis will never be better. It just won’t.
I’m having a huge crisis over whether to continue using Nisus Writer Pro or switch to Pages. I like them both equally. The only thing keeping me with NWP is the fact that RTF is cross-platform (that is, able to be opened and edited on my Ubuntu Thinkpad).
GM’s Space Robot Can Beat Up Your Space Robot →
Super awesome humanoid robot, built by NASA and General Motors. From the way they talk in the video, it sounds like they want to use these for setup and tear-down (that is, prep work and cleanup) for tasks that would then be completed by space-walking astronauts, thus saving the astronauts from having to be out in space so long, completing tedious tasks before and after doing the things that I assume NASA isn’t as willing to trust robo-astronauts to do.
Also, I assume these so-called “robonauts” are cheaper to replace in the event that HAL-9000 kills one of them.
