Morning Update: 08/26/84

Morning Update: 08/26/84

August 26, 2024

Hot Even At Night [2011 original with AI background]

Today is prep day for tomorrow’s colonoscopy. Only clear liquids today, and then the all-so-lovely “cleanse” starts this afternoon. I’m looking over the instructions and realize that I forgot to order Dulcolax tablets, so I’ll have to hunt those down this morning. We’ve done this before. Most anyone over 50 and a lot of people over 40 have been through this ordeal. It’s never fun. I warned G this morning that I’d be controlling the bathroom this evening. I would have told Tipper but she did not want to talk with anyone this morning. I rather feel sorry for her teachers today.

We did what we could with the lawn yesterday. There’s still a bit of trimming I’d like to do today, but the entire Midwest is under a heat advisory through Wednesday, so I’m not sure anything will actually happen. I just took the dogs out and it didn’t feel too oppressive, but there’s no breeze so once the sun is fully up the heat will take over quickly.

Am I the only one who feels as though August has gone by terribly slowly? It seems as though the kids have been in school forever at this point. While I was outside, the school bus that the kids used to ride passed by the house. The driver honked and waved. I’m sure Tipper would rather have Ms. Theresa drive her to school than take the city bus. She’s not enjoying public transit and is disappointed she doesn’t have an alternative. Kat told her yesterday that she could go ahead and begin studying for her driver’s exam, but she doesn’t want to drive, either. I’m not sure what our princess expects, but she’s pretty much stuck with the city bus, at least until her brother learns to drive.

I’m not all that anxious for either of them to drive. Being teenagers is dangerous enough and this morning’s headlines just drive that fact home. An 11-year-old was killed and four others, ages 13 and 15 were injured over the weekend when the car they were in ran into a tree. Police are not sure who was behind the wheel at the time of the accident, but obviously, none of the kids were old enough to be driving. Given the aggressiveness of drivers today, I’m not sure 16 is all that safe of an age for one to be driving. Kids have always pushed boundaries, I get that, but now it seems that danger is chasing them more than it once did.

Not that one has to be in a vehicle to get hurt. Friday night was the first football game of the season for a lot of high schools. No one thinks much of a football game being all that dangerous. Coaches and high school athletic associations have done a lot to make the game safer for everyone. But yet, there’s still that random chance, and this past Friday, that chance hit an Alabama quarterback who died from his injury on Saturday. One bad tackle. The injury wasn’t intentional, of course. But one school is mourning and at another school a young man is dealing with the fact that his tackle accidentally killed someone. I’ve seen this before. Everyone loses.

There are a number of newsworthy things that are supposed to happen today, but none of them have started yet. I’m looking at pages filled with rehashes of yesterday’s headlines. How many different ways can one say that the Gaza war is expanding to include Hezbollah in Lebanon? There’s no real question at this point, it’s happening. I’m still waiting for China and Taiwan to get into a tussle as well. They’re playing war games and sooner or later there’s going to be a provocation that likely gets the US and Japan involved. Then, who the fuck knows what’s behind the murder of 31 people in Pakistan? People were yanked from cars, buses, and trucks only to be executed by insurgents who then burned the vehicles. There’s no way to make that kind of brutality make sense.

What does make sense? There’s a tough question to answer. When I think of everything that friends are going through right now, perhaps the answer is ‘nothing.’

At least coffee’s on the list of acceptable things to drink.

Art / Long Read / pop culture / PotD

Sports Are Not Art

January 9, 2017

How can people not tell the difference?

I am not an athlete. One look at me pretty much lets one know that. Not that I didn’t try, though. All through Jr. High I did my best to fit it. I tried ’em all: football, baseball, and basketball. One coach even let me on the basketball team in eighth grade. I played for the last three minutes of one game where we were already losing by 18 points. Other than that, I did my best to be encouraging from the bench. Because of my experience, however, I have an incredible amount of respect for those whose eye-hand coordination is sufficient to allow them to be successful at a sport or two.

When I got older, I tried my hand at some other sports that weren’t quite as dangerous, such as tennis and racquetball. Uhm, did I say they weren’t dangerous? That would be an error. One of my worst sprains ever came from diving across a racquetball court and missing the damn ball. It was fantastic exercise, mind you, but I was repeatedly covered in bruises and spraining something, which probably contributes to the arthritis pain I have now.

Sports are wonderful. I can sit and watch football for as long as the chips and beer hold out. I can watch baseball live if there are plenty of hot dogs, and I can sometimes even tolerate an NBA game as long as 1. I didn’t pay for the seats, 2. We start drinking upon arrival, and 3. I don’t have to drive home, ‘cuz I’m not going to be sober by the time we hit the fourth period. I have absolutely no axe to grind with sports in general. I’ve even been out on the golf course and am pretty sure the solution to doing well is taking four or five Xanax before hitting the course. Although, that probably violates some rule about athletics and drugs.

So, given that sports are sports and involve getting all sweaty and worked up and physical in one way or another, I am totally perplexed why entire athletic organizations would get so freaking upset by being told that they’re not arts. What the literal fuck? How can anyone in their right mind even begin to put the arts and sports in the same basket? Why would you even want to try? They are both two very distinct and different things with two dramatically different purposes. Why are we even having this conversation?

Blame Meryl Streep.

Here’s What Happened

When I wake up each morning, one of the first things I do is check to see what’s trending on Twitter. I try to prepare for our 5 Things You Should Know article before I go to bed each night, but there’s always the chance something can happen while I’m sleeping. I went to bed Sunday night before the Golden Globes because, 1. we had been up 17 hours already and was exhausted, and 2., find awards shows to generally be a complete waste of time. Monday morning, however, I get up to see that not only is #GoldenGlobes trending, so is #SportsAreNotArt and #MerylStreepForPresident. That was my first clue that something of reasonable significance had taken place.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long to discover that Ms. Streep had pretty much eviscerated the president-elect, who deserves every last bit of the condemnation heaped on him last night. That was a big story in of itself. What was getting just as much attention, at least on Twitter, was when Ms. Streep had said that football and MMA are not art.

Oh. My God. You would have thought that Ms. Streep had plunged a dagger into the very heart of the planet and that we all were about to die. The President of MMA even wrote and posted a huge ass response trying to convince Ms. Streep and the rest of the world that there is something remotely artistic about two people stepping into the ring and proceeding to pummel each other to the point of concussion and, most likely, permanent brain damage. Yeah, some people apparently think that there’s an art to bleeding.

Now, before we go too much further, we should take a look at Ms. Streep’s words in context. So, here’s a larger version of what she actually said:

I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates?

And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in — no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she’s here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.

So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three seconds to say this, so. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that — breathtaking, passionate work.

The longer point Ms. Streep would go on to make is how the president-elect continually demonstrates a lack of regard for anyone who is not white and rich and that the press needs to habitually call him out on his nonsense. Like the opinion or not, Ms. Streep has a right to it and since she had the platform to make that opinion heard she had every right to take advantage of that situation.

What she said about football and mixed martial arts not being the arts, however, is correct. They’re not the arts. They never have been and they never can be in their current forms. Moreover, we really don’t want to think of them as art. To put athletics into the art basket would require fundamentally changing their reason for existing. We wouldn’t like most sports if they concentrated on being artistic. We want them to be the physical display of training and skill in a competitive format that they are. We like them that way.

So, what’s the difference, really?

The MMA world seems to be much more upset about Ms. Streep’s remarks than is anyone in the NFL. Bellator CEO Scott Coker even took the time to write and tweet a response which says in part:

Please be my guest at the LA Forum on January 21st and you will see that Mixed Martial Arts is truly artistic – which will feature fighters from all over the world competing at a world class level.

Now, in case you’re not a huge MMA fan, which I am not, we looked up the event scheduled for the LA Forum on January 21. The multi-bout card includes the following people beating the living hell out of each other: Tito Ortiz and Chael Sonnen, Georgi Karakhanyan against Emmanuel Sanchez, Paul Daley against Brennan Ward, and Ralek Gracie against Hisaki Kato. The event is broadcast free on the SPIKE cable network. All the young men on the card are big, tough, and athletic. I’m sure they will all give their best in the ring. Those who enjoy watching this type of competition will be thrilled. However, not a damn thing about this event is going to be artistic except, possibly, the singing of the national anthem.

Why? Because sports are not arts. In case you were sleeping during your humanities class, or completely skipped out that semester, the are five basic arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. Those have existed since the beginning of time and deserve to be respected as such. As society developed, somewhere along about 3,000 BCE, theatre and dance were added to the list. As part of that gradual progression and the development of technology, film was added as an extension of the theatre. Photography, video production/editing, design, sequential art, conceptual art, and printmaking have been added as an extension of painting. Arts related to painting, sculpture, and architecture as generally classified as visual arts while those related to music, dance, and theatre as classified as performing arts.

Now, please, take a close look. Do you see anything in that list that looks like a competitive sport? Granted, dancing is extremely athletic, which probably explains why I suck at that, too. Still, a dance performance isn’t a competition like a sport is. No one keeps score. There’s no audience hoping that the prima ballerina pulls a hamstring so that the understudy can win. Dance is not a sport. Sport is not an art.

While I could spend hours nit-picking all the minute details that hold arts apart from sport, the primary difference is that one is a competitive exhibition whose purpose is to determine a definite winner while the other is a presentation for the visual and visceral pleasures of its audience over that of those creating. Athletes want to win, to beat their competition. Artists want only to please an audience in some form or fashion. There’s no contest. In the case of visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, there’s not even an end point so long as the works still exist. They can go on and deliver pleasure and expression for centuries provided they are given appropriate care.

To be art the work has to attempt some significance outside itself, either through its impact on society and culture or to the greater art itself. There must be an aesthetic element to the work and contain an element of emotion that varies from artist to artist and work to work. Art requires no participation of anyone outside the artist and yet is fulfilled in its exhibition. If one is an Art History major, one classifies art through both form and function. Art requires a unique creative act whose interpretation is variable by either the performer or the audience, and sometimes both.

I suppose, if one really stretches the definitions, one might claim that some sports figures are artistic in their work, but then we still come back to the fact that sport must, inherently, be competitive. Sport is a contest; there is a constant adversary. The fundamental of success in sports is that one follows the rules for their function within their sport or one is disqualified and penalized. Even in a sport seemingly as benign as golf, one must still exhibit some form of aggression against that stupid little ball if one hopes to ever win. None of those things are appropriate for art.

And none of this explains why anyone would bother to be upset that the two are distinct and separate entities. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone trying to turn art into a sport. Most artists I know would bristle at the very idea. So why would a sport try to portray itself as an art? What is the purpose of such an attempt? Are athletes feeling left out that, despite their million dollar salaries, they’re somehow left out or cheated by being portrayed as artists? If football players want to feel more like real artists, then perhaps they could start by attempting to get by on one-tenth their current salaries; that would still have them being paid more than most artists. I simply cannot imagine why anyone in sports would be offended by Ms. Streep’s comment.

The only thing I can surmise is that the athletes who are upset are simply jealous that there’s an arena from which they are excluded, which is interesting since I’ve known multiple athletes who were also wonderful artists in genres that are actually art. It’s not that the person can’t be an artist, but more that the sport itself isn’t art.

Sports are sport, and they’re a lot of fun and have an important place in our society. The arts are art, and they’re a lot of fun and have an important place in our society. Yet, art and sport as distinct, separate entities occupying different spaces that have no need to overlap. Together, with other fields such as science and math, and philosophy and literature, they make our world a very wonderful place to be. We don’t all need to occupy the same space. Be cool with what you are and let others be what they are and we’ll all get along much better.

pop culture / PotD

Alternatives To Thanksgiving Day Football

November 24, 2016

Somehow, not everyone is a football fan. So, we found some alternative activities for you.

I don’t understand it, exactly, but I get it: not everyone on the planet is a football fan. At least, not American football. For many families, watching football on Thanksgiving is as much a part of the tradition as is the turkey.

Football serves a unique purpose at Thanksgiving because not only is it inclusive of many people in the family, it is also a way to distract relatives from unpleasant political conversation, something that is especially important this year. We may not agree on who should be president, but we’ll all get excited about a great touchdown pass. Football is also, for many of us, the perfect background noise for taking that post-dinner nap. It’s been years since some of us have actually been awake for the end of the game.

Not everyone is as enthused about the sport, though. In fact, I’m pretty much the only one in my family who bothers to turn it on. They would much rather be doing other things. Unfortunately, too often, those “other things” leave open space for conversation and those conversations can go sideways in a hurry. What we need are after-dinner activities that the whole family can enjoy without risking an outbreak of politics. It took some doing, but we looked around and found a few things that might just work. Feel free to add your own items.

Netflix and Chill

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to do some damage to your Netflix que. Chance are you’ve been adding a number of movies and/or series that sound really interesting but you never seem to have the time to watch. Now you have the time. The biggest decision comes in deciding what to watch, and that might be no easy tasks. Consider some of these matters before clicking that play button.

Is it family-friendly? Those who watch Netflix often can easily forget that there are no censors on the streaming service. There is a preponderance of PG-13 and R-rated films that probably don’t seem that bad but we forget how sensitive Grandma is about “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and other language issues that slip right past those of us who are more secular. If one doesn’t have children it is also easy to forget that they repeat everything they hear.
Is there a backstory? So, you’re on episode 4 of Season 2 of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. There are no small children in your family and the show’s hilarious. Seems like a good fit—unless someone doesn’t know the backstory. Remember, not everyone has Netflix, as crazy as that may seem. Uncle Ned might be totally lost coming in so late on the story and trying to catch him up only interrupts the show. Be considerate of those whose lives are not as boring as yours.
How well does it sit on a full stomach? I know a lot of people who just love screaming at movies, a trait which seems to run in families. Don’t jump into horror mode just yet, though. Remember, you just finished the largest meal of the century. Keeping all that food down is probably a good thing. Toss out anything on your list that might have the potential to be vomit-inducing. Perhaps old Alfred Hitchcock movies are best. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents series is currently available.
Is this something you really want to share with your parents? What is on our Netflix que can be rather personal and says a lot about us. Perhaps you don’t necessarily want everyone to know that you’ve recently watched Easy or Shameless or 10 Things I Hate About You. Certain titles, we won’t name anything specific, might cause family members to question your lifestyle which could be an issue if you’re not ready to come out as a closet Alicia Silverstone fan just yet. Remember, you’re trying to avoid awkward conversations. Maybe football isn’t such a bad idea.

Taking Family Pictures

No, I”m not suggesting you call me. I’m not going anywhere all weekend if I can help it. Instead, get out the Instamatic, dust it off, drop in some film, and let different family members take turns being the photographer. You’ll likely be surprised by just how much ham there is in your family, and you might even discover some hidden talent along the way.

Why use film? Because you want memories that can be preserved. Snapshot prints are less that ten cents a piece now, so there’s no excuse for not getting copies for everyone in the family. While having digital copies is convenient for sharing online, there’s something warm and wonderful about having a print you can put on your refrigerator or tape to a mirror, or tuck away somewhere to cherish. Digital photos can be corrupted. Cloud services come and go. Prints, if cared for properly, can last forever.

Also keep in mind the fact that life sometimes sucks. None of us know who might not be present at next years’ gathering. Get plenty of pictures of everyone, not just your grandparents. Even if the exact same crowd shows up for the next ten years running, it will still be fun to compare how much everyone has changed. There’s no substitute for memories like this. Find that camera and start snapping.

Stream A Little Stream

Netflix isn’t the only streaming game in town, you know, and if you have a large enough computer monitor or one of those newfangled gadgets that let you stream online content on your television, there are a number of things online that might provide a sufficient distraction.

One of the things that excited me most was discovering that A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is streaming on ABC.go.com. You know you love Charlie Brown. This is one of those shows with which we all grew up. There’s an inherent warm, smooshy feeling that goes with watching Lucy pull away the football at the last moment and Snoopy serving popcorn for dinner. In fact, popcorn for dinner doesn’t actually sound like all that bad an idea, does it?

Oh, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is streaming on YouTube as well if you need an early morning distraction for little ones. I mean, c’mon, who doesn’t love a parade? Well, okay, I do know a few people who don’t, but this is a fantastic way to keep those under ten from getting underfoot. They’ll stay occupied for a couple of hours and you can cook in peace. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. Your experience may differ.

Family Storytelling Time

I’ll admit, this won’t work for every family. A certain amount of familial cohesiveness has to be present for anyone to be interested. However, especially if you have grandparents and/or grandparents still around, sharing family stories is a great way to pass the time. Perhaps more importantly, however, this is also a great way to preserve your family’s oral history. We too often take for granted that history lives in the experiences of our elders. These are stories we need to hear and to capture before they are lost.

StoryCorp has provided a means for helping people capture these stories at holiday moments like this. Even if you don’t have a video camera or recording capabilities on your computer, chances are you have a cell phone and most every cell phone has a voice recording app that came pre-installed. Capture the stories of what school was like for your great-grandmother. Listen carefully to your parents tell about getting their first car, or the first time they fell in love with someone. These are all stories that are much, much too precious to lose.

Most importantly, stopping to listen to these stories helps build family cohesion. Who knew that Uncle Bud turned down an appointment to the Pentagon so he could marry your Aunt Bea? Or that your cousin Kendra, who you only see every other year, helped author one of the Internet’s biggest mobile apps? Chances are high that almost everyone in the family has a story that no one has heard before. Take a moment and tell those stories, listen to those stories, and cherish the people telling them.

Thanksgiving can be dangerous territory if everyone’s not kept busy in some form or another. As challenging as this year has been, you really don’t want to risk Grandpa Fred finding out that Cousin Norman wrote in Harambe on his presidential ballot. There are plenty of ways other than football to keep everyone busy. Give them a try.

Current Issues / PotD

Hello, Human. Today You Get To Die

September 26, 2016

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. —Mark Twain

charles i. letbetter - hello, today you get to die

We rarely get to choose when we die. If your day was today, would you be ready?

Looking at the headlines this morning was a bit depressing. Golfing great Arnold Palmer died at age 87. Miami Marlin’s ace pitcher Jose Fernandez was killed in a boating accident. Mylan Hicks, currently a defensive back in the Canadian Football League and formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, was killed in a Calgary nightclub shooting. While I had no personal connection with any of them, I certainly respect their accomplishments and the impact their deaths have on their respective sports. We’ve mentioned multiple times that this is being a lousy year, but the past couple of weeks have been especially brutal it seems. Two friends have lost their fathers in the past two weeks. Other friends have lost childhood playmates way too early in their lives.

Death surrounds us all the time. We are subconsciously aware of that fact, but there are times when it seems to get too close for comfort. When we see so many die around us we start to feel uncomfortable. Dealing with the reality of our own mortality is not easy. No one really wants to die, especially not right now. Yet, there are so many ways in which death can sneak up and take us unexpectedly.

China lost control of a space station and it could crash into a US city. Imagine driving to work one morning and a chunk of space station falls out of the clear blue sky and you die. This is the reality in which we now live.

Mitigating The Risk

Before walking the dog each morning, I’m careful to check the weather. Regardless of what the forecast might have said the night before, weather has a nasty habit of changing. This morning, there were storms in the area. Lightning struck less than a mile away. So, we watched radar and timed our walk to minimize the risk of getting fried on the sidewalk. That wouldn’t be a good way to start the morning.

We know the potential for dying is out there. We all have those preventative actions we take to mitigate the risk that we might die on any given day. Eating veggies is one of those things we know pushes death out a little bit. Same goes for driving safely and crossing the street at the crosswalk with the light. Most people try to not do stupid things that have a high-risk factor for ending up dead. Even when doing something silly like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, we take the precaution of using a reasonably good parachute packed by someone we trust.

Yet, no matter how many precautions we might take, death sometimes has a way of finding us at the least expected and most inconvenient moments. Be sure, Jose Fernandez didn’t think the risks were too great when he got on that boat. None of us see all the risks. No matter what we do, sometimes death just shows up and says, “Hey, you’re coming with me now.” We don’t get any choice in the matter.

Being Ready To Die

If all the recent deaths around me have done anything, they have reminded me that I need to go ahead and get some kind of burial insurance. Sounds morbid, doesn’t it? Yet, all of my experience tells me it’s a smart move. My parents had burial insurance. They bought it when they were in their 30s. They were able to pre-pay for their funerals, including the caskets, so that when that time inevitably came for them my brother and I didn’t have to worry about the cost or wondering what they might have wanted. That act alone was one of the kindest things they ever did. When you have a parent die, the details of paying for and planning a funeral are not where you want to spend your time.

There’s something about actually making such a purchase, though, that feels uncomfortable, as though we’re tempting fate. In my mind, I know that my parents lived another 40 years after pre-paying for their arrangements. Yet, there’s this nagging feeling that if I take the same precaution it’s like thumbing my nose at death, taunting it to come and get me. The same applies to life insurance. Both make the lives of our families so much easier, especially if our death is unexpected. Still, there’s no getting around that icky feeling that if you make that purchase you’re tempting fate.

Being ready to die is as much an attitude as anything, though. We have to be comfortable with death, okay with the concept of no longer existing in this world. I no longer think that we need to know what happens next. If we were meant to know the universe would provide a reliable, believable way of telling us. It hasn’t. We’ve made up our own myths over the millions of years, but when we get down to it, we have to be okay with just going. Period. Let whatever comes next, if anything, take care of itself.

Remembering to Live

Like the Mark Twain quote at the top of this page, being satisfied with our life makes it easier to be okay with the inevitability of death. No one should obsess over their own death; it’s not only unhealthy, it prevents one from making the most of life. I’m not talking about being happy, mind you. Happiness is a temporal state and in that moment when some jackass cuts you off in traffic “happy” isn’t exactly the emotion one feels at the time. Rather, contentedness is more what I’m going for; that sense that my life isn’t perfect and I’m okay with that.

Are we content? I’m not, not really. There are still things I want to be doing, not bucket list things like winning a Pulitzer and such, but everyday things such as finding the next great supermodel and teaching my youngest son to drive and regaining some fluency in French and Italian. I have in my mind a level of activity that I’ve let slip. Having been there once, I know it can be achieved. I let go, though. I want that contentedness back.

What about you? If a chunk of that Chinese space station were to fall on you today (don’t worry, it won’t … yet) you’d certainly be disappointed that you didn’t have more warning, but would you be content with where your life is right now? What would it take to get you to that point in your life?

I fully expect to live long enough to be a pain in the ass to my grandchildren, assuming at least one of my sons gets around to providing some. I’m not expecting to die.

But then, not many people ever are. Perhaps we all need to do better prep work. Try to not die today, okay? I think our quota is full for the rest of the year.

Fashion / Personal / pop culture / PotD

Is There Life Outside Fashion Weeks

September 17, 2016

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. —Soren Kierkegaard

charles i. letbetter - is there life outside fashion weeks

The crowded schedules of fashion weeks are totally consuming, but we try to not miss the important stuff.

Life gets incredibly busy, doesn’t it? There is always an abundance of activities available and one has to pick and choose carefully which gets our attention. Well, at least we try to pick and choose. At this particular moment, there is a kitten on my desk. His name is Fred Fredburger. Two weeks ago we weren’t sure this little guy was going to make it. Now, not only is he healthy, he has decided to join “guy time” with me, the dog, and the older male cat we call Fat Guy. Fat Guy and the dog are sound asleep, as is their usual activity for 5:00 in the morning. Fred, on the other hand, is on my desk, peeking over the top of the computer, and batting pens onto the floor. He’s rather insistent that I give him my attention.

I am wholly consumed by fashion weeks this time of year. Even as I’m writing now, I’m waiting for the Jasper Conran runway presentation to start in London. I’ve already walked the dog (in the rain), cleaned the kitchen counter, and am well into my second pot of coffee. The fashion schedule from this point forward is packed and keeping up with the elements of life transpiring outside the fashion world is challenging.

So,we took a few moments this morning to look through some headlines and, with Fred’s help, we’re going to take a moment to consider things that probably should be full articles in themselves, and would be if time was more in our favor. Any strange words you see are Fred’s.

Happy Birthday, Zach

Talk abut full schedules. 25 years ago today we welcomed our first baby boy into the world. He didn’t make it easy on his Mother. Me, I sat there and ate cheeseburgers until he finally got around to showing up. He changed our world, turned it upside down in the most wonderful ways, and managed to survive despite the fact we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Zach is at that age now where giving him any advice is rather trepidatious. He is at that core Millennial age and as such life is a very different experience for him than it was for his parents at that age. I was engaged and married his mother when I was 25. He’s taking a more non-traditional path in no small part because the choices that were easily available to me are simply not there for him and I can’t change that. College doesn’t look so good when his peers are graduating thousands of dollars in debt and still not able to find decent jobs. I don’t blame him for taking a different path.

In a lot of ways, Zach has a better head on his shoulders than I did at his age. Sure, he makes mistakes, those are inevitable; but any errors he’s made are understandable and reasonable for who and where he is. He’s carving out a path for himself in a world that isn’t all that welcoming. He’s doing well for 25 and I hope he has a wonderful day.

A Bit Of Good News

Cancer rates in children have declined by one-fifth since 1999. This is a good statistic. Sure, we’d rather there not be any childhood cancers at all, but the fact that the overall numbers are going down mean we’re doing a better job of preventing this horrible disease from affecting our children. The numbers are down across the board regardless of race or gender, which is even better news. Boys are still at more risk than girls, but the rate of decline was similar for both.

Especially promising is the fact that Leukemia is no longer the leading cause of death among children. Those numbers have decreased substantially. This can be attributed to a number of things such as improvement in infant health care, fewer parents (and grandparents) smoking, and better overall living conditions. If ever there were an argument for spending more federal funds on early childhood healthcare, this would be it.

Of course, when one disease leaves the top spot another takes its place. In this case, brain cancers have taken over as the leading cause of death in children 19-years-old and younger. Causation for this one is a lot more difficult to diagnose. Hereditary conditions play into some forms of brain cancer, but so do things like environment and mother’s nutrition. There is still so much about brain cancer we don’t know that putting a dent in its numbers is extremely difficult. No one wants to think about children dying, but they do. We need to make this a priority.

Light ‘Em Up

I know, it seems rather counterproductive to talk about smoking anything after mentioning that Leukemia rates are down, but this is important. The LA Times editorial board published a piece yesterday supporting the legalization of recreational marijuana use. The question is on California’s ballot in November as proposition 64. This comes six years after an unsuccessful attempt that the Times opposed.

A couple of quotes from the editorial caught my eye:

It is ultimately better for public health, for law and order and for society if marijuana is a legal, regulated and controlled product for adults.

By sending mixed messages, the federal government has effectively ceded its role and left it to states to create a new national marijuana policy that legalizes marijuana with minimal harm and meaningful protections.

There a lot of untested claims about marijuana and THC that deserve legitimate study, not shady articles from questionable magazines. There are a lot of young black and Latino men in prison unjustly who this law would benefit. Four other states in addition to California are voting on similar measures. The time has come to legalize recreational use of marijuana and set a new national policy toward use of the plant. Even if you don’t smoke, this makes sense.

Oh, And Football

This afternoon is the Oklahoma/Ohio State football game. The season is still young and the fact that OU dropped its first game against Houston shouldn’t be taken as any indication that the Sooners won’t be ready when the Buckeyes show up in Norman. I wish I could say I will be awake for every moment of the game, but I probably won’t. As much as I love college football, I’ve already been up long enough to be needing a nap. By game time, I’ll be looking for a bed.

At least I’m not at the University of New Hampshire where anger against their new scoreboard could make their game this evening against Dartmouth actually worth watching. Okay, maybe not the game itself, which is likely to be a snoozefest for anyone who’s not an alumni. There’s more spirit in Durham surrounding that damn scoreboard. Why? A very frugal library employee died and left his entire $4 million estate to the university. Now, one might think that the university would spend the majority of that on the library. Nope. They bought a new scoreboard for the football field at a cost of $1 million. The library got $100,000. I can see where the alumni might be pissed.

I enjoy college sports and consider them an important part of university life. They give thousands of young people the chance at an education they would otherwise not receive. At the same time, though, the fact that college football, specifically, has become the strongest revenue source for almost every Division I school is disgraceful. The list of moral wrongs in that situation is wrong and the fact that UNH could justify spending a million dollars on a scoreboard while academic programs suffer says very bad things about us as a society.

But, There’s Still Fashion

So very much fashion. Three shows have walked in the span of time it has taken me to write this article. The parade is never ending and the more I try to ignore it the more fashion makes itself unavoidable. I mean, I just saw a model nearly hog tied by her own skirt as she attempted to walk. How the hell am I supposed to ignore that?

So, let’s just leave it with Happy Birthday, Zach, glad you don’t have brain cancer, and GO SOONERS! We now return you to all the reviews on Pattern.

PotD / Social Commentary

Why Football Has To Change

February 8, 2016

Football is an incredible game. Sometimes it’s so incredible, it’s unbelievable.—Tom Landry

If the NFL is going to make it to Super Bowl 100, the game has to fundamentally change

Late in last night’s Super Bowl game, the NFL ran a ten-second spot where they asked children who might still be alive what they think Super Bowl 100 might be like. The answers were cute if not a little outrageous including things like hoverboards and other stuff I don’t remember. Coming at the end of the game, I doubt too many people noticed the spot at all, but I couldn’t help thinking that unless the NFL makes some serious changes, there won’t be a Super Bowl 100, and there may not be an NFL at all.

Let’s be very clear, growing up in Oklahoma, I was immersed in sports, even though I was too clumsy and uncoordinated to actually play. I love watching a good game, whether it’s baseball, basketball, or football. I love being at a game live, I enjoy being passionate in supporting a team, and I have this strange thing for hot chocolate from a concession stand. I’m not anti-sport by any stretch of the imagination.

However, I noticed something at the beginning of last night’s game that almost made me cry. Being the 50th Super Bowl, someone thought it would be nice to honor the MVPs from each of the preceding games. The names were those from my childhood, the men I’d watched battle on Sunday afternoons, the champions that defined the game in my imagination: Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Roger Staubach, Larry Csonka, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann, Terry Bradshaw, Jim Plunkett, Joe Montana. I watched as they took their places, crossing a corner of the field and I couldn’t help but notice that every one of those men who had played more then ten years ago had something in common: They were hurting. Sure, some handled it better than others, but you could see it in how they walked, how they held themselves, and how they stood, uneasily, on the risers. This is what football does to you.

There has been a tremendous amount of overdue attention this past year to the physical dangers imposed upon those who play football, especially at a professional level. Most critical among those is a problem with concussions, resulting in Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. CTE is caused by repeated traumatic brain injury, the kind frequently experienced from concussions received while playing football. While advances have been made in regards to better helmets and other protective measures, concussions are still the game’s most dangerous injury. Even during last night’s game Carolina lost a player in the first half due to concussion.

CTE has only been identified in American football players since 2002. CTE is a degnerative disease that can lead to alzheimers, balance issues, severe changes in mood, blindness and hearing loss. There are multiple on-going lawsuits against the NFL from players, but the league has still been reluctant to fully address the problem and make significant changes to the game. Doctors are beginning to draw lines between CTE and erratic player behavior. Already, several retired players with CTE have committed suicide. There is even some speculation that O. J. Simpson has CTE and that it may have factored in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

CTE isn’t the NFL’s only problem, though. Millennials are not embracing the sport in the same way Boomers did, and the Generation Z kids coming up behind them are even less enthused. While stadiums are trying to digitize in an effort to keep millennials in their seats, a handful of old-timers charge that millennials are soft, the reality is much more severe. Millennials are a problem for football because millennials don’t trust the NFL.

What we’re looking at are generations of young people who are more connected to what’s real, more adverse to taking risk, and place greater value in day-to-day life. They are less concerned about making millions (though several of them already have) and more concerned about doing better by the planet, society, their friends, and their families. As a result, when they come across an organization, whether it be the NFL, the GOP, cable companies, or Wall Street Banks, they tend to walk the other way and find alternatives.

How can football survive if upcoming generations refuse to attend the games run by corrupt owners? What does the NFL have to do to survive at all? Of course, opinions vary, but here are some critical elements that simply must change:

Acknowledge that in-game concussions are a serious threat to every player and not only change equipment but change rules to prevent them from happening. Yes, this will fundamentally change how the game is played, but it is necessary.
More closely monitor behavior of active athletes. Cincinnatti Bengals quarterback Johnny Manziel is the poster child for this one. Fans are tired of off-field aggressiveness and won’t pay to watch childish brats being paid too much money.
Provide more thorough and complete medical and mental care for retired players. One of the greatest scars across the face of football is players who are permanently disabled by the time their 40 and in financial trouble trying to pay for care.
Lower ticket prices. Millennials and those behind them aren’t keen on paying $100 a ticket for nosebleed seats to a game that only marginally holds their interest in the first place. The same applies to basketball and most concert venues. They’re going to find seats increasingly empty if this doesn’t change quickly.
Teams need to stop leaning on host cities and sponsors and learn how to pay their own way. Football teams, both college and professional, rake in billions of dollars, yet they don’t pay for the facilities in which they play, and in most cases they demand tax expemptions and other favors as well. Millennials and others are tired of footing the bill for the 1%. Let team owners and the NFL pay for their own damn stadiums, practice facilities rather than sucking host cities dry.

Dont’ let the excitement over last night’s game fool you. The writing is very clearly on the wall. Fans are not happy with the state of football and more than just millennials are ready to walk out the door and do something else with their Sunday afternoons. We love the sport and would like to see it continue, but the bullshit needs to stop. Football has to change.

Got that, Roger Goodell?

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Candy, Condiments, And Celebrities

February 3, 2016

Candy is childhood, the best and bright moments you wish could have lasted forever.—Dylan Lauren

Covering people in candy is one thing. Making portraits of them, however, doesn’t always work

The little ones in our house won’t be watching the Super Bowl this Sunday and that has nothing to do with the violence of the sport. I’m going to have a difficult time myself, though, as the ads that we’re beginning to see really go out of their way to ignite the yearnings of that ol’ sweet tooth. We’ll be careful to have plenty of real-food alternatives on hand to go with the craft beers that won’t be part of the ad parade, either. The folks paying $5 million per spot for air time during the big game probably won’t like us a lot, but we’re not planning on taking it personally.

Actually, CBS has apparently been working all year on getting us to watch this game. They played their first spot right after last year’s game and haven’t let up. They’ve included every major celebrity from their network in the spots leading up to Sunday’s game, and we can expect the be continually inundated with reminders with increasing frequency the rest of this week. CBS has gone out of their way to make this the biggest game ever, even pulling footage from the very first Super Bowl for this ad:

With a big build up like that, one might think that advertisers would step up their game a bit, and in a way, they have. We will see more celebrities making the rounds of ads this year than ever before. Big names, people we don’t normally think of as product endorsers, are showing up in ads, doing things we might not normally expect them to do. Not many of the ads are all that impressive, unfortunately, which might cause the same celebrities to back out of spots for next year.

The early favorite for celebrity spots has to be the #GiveADamn ad from Budweiser featuring British actress Helen Mirren. The full ad was released on Monday and is already getting a lot of attention. What’s important to note, and well worth mentioning here, is that for every tweet that includes the hashtag #GiveADamn, Budweiser will donate one dollar toward free ride programs to help those who’ve had too much get home safely. Given the amount of alcohol I know some of you consume, we will be tweeting heavily on your behalf. In case you missed it, here’s the ad:

https://youtu.be/Rb2VXVmUga4

One of the more surprising pieces we’ve seen going into this year’s game is the one Miami ad firm David created for Kraft Heinz. How does one sell ketchup? We typically don’t think of condiments as sexy, so that direction was out. Scenes of ketchup being poured onto food has been overdone. What else was there? Dachshunds! Dozens of little wiener dogs dressed in wiener costumes running as fast as they could across a field to a waiting family of Ketchups. Can you feel the love? Here’s the full 60-second spot:

https://youtu.be/LOlfhBT8i9I

For all the various celebrity ads, both good and bad, my favorite so far has to be Steven Tyler’s appearance for Skittles. There is no better pairing. The flamboyant singer is so colorful in his own right that putting him together with colored pieces for fruit-flavored sugar just feels right. To make things better, he even allows the commercial to poke fun at him a little bit. At 30 seconds, it almost feels a bit short. Maybe Tyler could have done a duet with those candy lips. Here’s the ad:

https://youtu.be/21ivbtgqJkg

Of course, the best ads are likely to stay sequestered until Sunday, but we will continue to keep our eyes peeled for the best and, of course, we’ll share our opinion as to who won the war for best Super Bowl ad next Monday. Keep watching!

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Bolder Than Bold: Excessive Celebration

January 21, 2016

Business is about people. It’s about passion. It’s about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.—Tom Peters

charles i. letbetter - bolder than bold: excessive celebration

“Through The Window” Reflection of a colorful celebration at Red Bull’s Big10 event in 2008. Body paint by Pashur

Football likes a good party and none in recent memory is likely to be any bigger than the NFL’s Super Bowl 50 coming up in a couple of weeks. As one might expect, this is bigger than the average Super Bowl, which is one of winter’s biggest parties in the first place. Neither is it surprising that advertisers are going all out for their game-time ads which are costing a rumored $5- to $6 million per 30-second spot. Battles for a share of the attention in what may be the most-watched sporting event all year are bound to be severe. Expect boundaries to be pushed.

To that end, no one may be going further than Nestlé’s Butterfinger brand and their “Bolder Than Bold” campaign. We watched this past December as they started teasing their Super Bowl ad by having a skydiver take a 30,000-foot leap live on Periscope. For the big game, the brand has signed on former NFL running back Terrell Owens for a spot that has yet to be released, but promises a big, bold statement of its own.

Taking “Bolder Than Bold” to whole new levels, though, Butterfinger is, in effect, giving the finger to the NFL with an offer that raises some serious ethical concerns. The candy brand has announced they will pay up to $50,000 in fines any player might receive for incurring an “excessive celebration” penalty during any of the final three games. No, the NFL wasn’t consulted. We’re guessing the folks at Butterfinger assume it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. We have to admit, the move is definitely a bold one.

Encouraging players to deliberately break rules and incur penalties is a very risky proposition, though. The NFL takes all its rules seriously and we’ve seen them hand down fines this year for doing things seemingly as insignificant as handing a ball to a kid in the stands or wearing the wrong colored shoes in support of a specific charity. Some of those fines can easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars and while NFL stars typically pull down several million per season, the penalties can add up quickly for both a team and players.

Even more serious, though, is the fact that excessing celebration penalties can also, at the referee’s discretion, come with yardage penalties. There’s nothing Butterfinger can do to take back a critical 15-yard penalty, no matter how bold they might want to be. A late-game penalty, when emotions are high and the score is likely to be tight, can make the difference between winning and losing.

Butterfinger’s offer challenges team discipline. Obviously, team management and coaches are going to tell their players to ignore Butterfinger’s offer and play by the rules. Will that be enough, though? NFL players can be pretty bold on their own and, as Terrell Owens showed during his heyday, they often don’t mind breaking a few rules, especially in the area of excessive celebration.

While we understand the sentiment made in the Butterfinger offer, this is the first time I can quickly find where an advertiser has outright offered a reward for breaking the rules. Sure, we like to see some celebration, too, but if players take Butterfinger seriously the result could be much more serious than what $50,000 can cover. A wrong move at the wrong place in the game could result in a team losing. Theoretically, the NFL could also ban Butterfinger, or any other Nestlé brand, from advertising during NFL games indefinitely. We have seen the NFL hold some long advertising grudges before.

Of course, all we can do for the moment is wait and watch. The NFL has not responded to Butterfinger’s offer and we’re not sure they will; acknowledging the act might have a backhanded way of encouraging someone to take Butterfinger on the challenge. Are there any players willing to take the bait? If nothing else, Butterfinger has assured that we’ll definitely be paying attention during the games. The challenge may be all they need to win, and that’s pretty damn bold.

Fashion / Music

Ciara & The Double Standard

January 12, 2016

You Can Create Your Own Life Story With The Things You Say, So When You Speak, Say Good Things.— Ciara

Spin Me (2012). Model: Angela Denton

There was, apparently, a football game last night. Apparently, Grammy award-winning artist Ciara sang the national anthem. Apparently, the only thing some people noticed was her dress.

This is one of those times when a portion of American society is being so incredibly stupid that I wish I could reach out and give them all a collective slap right across the face. Apparently, not everyone has gotten it through their heads that shaming women for having breasts isn’t cool; in fact, it is a very disgusting habit that demonstrates severe ignorance and perpetuates the kind of culture wherein rape is always the woman’s fault. Stop. This type of behavior is not acceptable in contemporary society.

Just how offensive is this dress Ciara wore? Take a look at this gorgeous gown for yourself:

Getty Images

How in the world some people dared to call this nude is beyond me. Do they have x-ray vision or something? The trolls hit Twitter so fast it was infuriating. Making matters worse, they were led by former ESPN analyst Bonnie Bernstein who should know better than to make a statement as offensive as this:

Dear Ciara. You’re stunning. But this is a National Championship Game. Kids are watching. Cover up.

— Bonnie Bernstein (@BonnieBernstein) January 12, 2016

That was all the cue Twitter trolls needed. Within seconds, the pile on became heavy and increasingly ignorant. The diatribe continued even after the game was over, as though, somehow, Ciara wearing this dress was going to bring about the fall of civilization. Quite to the contrary, it is such narrow-minded, sexist opinions that are more likely to be our undoing.

What’s even more glaring, though, is the double standard such outrage presents. While, apparently, it’s okay to give Ciara grief over wearing such a wonderful gown (I mean, come on, the arch of that cape is perfect), no one says a damn thing about college students running around the field looking like this:

I wonder if the University of Alabama offers a degree in Objectifying Women or if it’s just an extra-curricular pastime on campus?

Quite honestly, it shouldn’t matter one bit if Ciara opted to walk out onto that field bare-ass naked; that would still be no just cause for attempting to shame her. We, as a nation and as a society, need to get the hell over this bad habit and realize the long-term harm such attitudes do to women, to the violence this attitude perpetuates.

Whoever dressed Ciara for this occasion should be congratulated on choosing a gown that was beautiful, flattering, and looked spectacular under the stadium lights.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m the only one who noticed the 0 in the 2016, which was a significant part of the game’s marketing, looked a bit too much like a vagina. And if you still want to really be upset by something, consider the fact that Coldplay is doing the Super Bowl halftime. Now that is offensive.

PotD

Total Determination

November 11, 2015

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.—Calvin Coolidge

Benjamin (2015)

[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]There are times when I am frustrated by the lack of audience here. I look at yesterday’s numbers for example, the lowest all month, and wonder what the hell I have to do to get people’s attention on a regular basis. I question why I bother getting up so damn early in the morning, seven days a week, to make sure the pictures and articles are all here for you first thing. The answer: determination. I’m not willing to accept failure. We’ll re-tool around the first of the year, re-format, and keep trying.

Determination is one of those traits that tends to make itself quickly noticeable on a person’s face. Watch Lionel Messi’s face as he’s taking the ball downfield and you’ll see determination; he’s not going to be satisfied until that ball is in the goal. Watch Jason Heyward’s face when he steps up to bat for the Cardinals, or whomever he ends up playing for next season; the ball is going to be hit. And have you seen Peyton Manning’s face when he’s forced out of the pocket by a defensive lineman? He has no intention of going down with that ball.

Sports are not the only place where one sees such determination on a face, though. Watch the dad trying to change the diaper of a wiggling infant while using the baby changing station in a public facility; that is determination. Look at the face of a young woman as she prepares for her first job interview after college; you’re seeing determination. Better yet, admire the face of a young child as they build they attempt to build that tower of blocks higher and higher; physics be damned, they are going to put the red one on the very top, even if they have to stand on someone else to do so.[/one_half]

[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Benjamin has always been a determined individual, no matter what he was doing. He hates to lose (you really don’t want to play Monopoly with him). He sets a goal and isn’t satisfied until he reaches it. I still remember those painfully early Saturday mornings on the soccer field when he was six. The coach finally had to take him out of the game because Ben had to score every time, and more often than not, he did, much to the dismay of the other team. He’s a U.S. Marine now, and that same determination shows on his face more than ever.

Determination is what moves the world forward; people who refused to give up even when facing insurmountable odds. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were determined to form, “a more perfect union.” Lewis and Clark were determined to map out the wilderness West of the Mississippi River. Dr. Jonas Salk was determined to find a way to prevent polio from ruining so many lives. Sure, mistakes, miscalculations, and unexpected changes in condition can at times thwart the best of plans, but those who ultimately win pick themselves up, along with those around them, and keep moving forward.

I have a great number of concerns about the future for a host of reasons I won’t list at the moment; the obstacles we face are significant and the current game plan hasn’t worked as well as we’d hoped. I have been so incredibly tempted to just give up. Don’t worry, we won’t. We move forward, adjusting, changing, re-tooling, and maybe even tearing some things down so we can rebuild. My face is as set as Ben’s. Hmm, I wonder where he get it.[/one_half_last]

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Sports Are Not Art