Taking Note of Few Things, Episode 6: I Can”t Dance

I understand the reluctance to want to escalate matters with Vladimir Putin. It’s nice to see cooler heads prevail and rely on nonmilitary solutions to stopping him from destroying Ukraine. Still, when this is all over, someone, somewhere, needs to take Putin out to the woodshed and teach him a real lesson.

Apparently, both COVID and drinking alcohol can cause the brain to shrink. Since most men’s brains are south of the border, it means more than just cold water causes us shrinkage.

Why isn’t Colin Kaepernick’s name being mentioned as a viable quarterback to the many teams needing an upgrade? It’s a weak draft as far as quarterbacks go and let’s face it, Kaepernick can’t be any worse than some of the quarterbacks that teams are signing.

Phil Collins has been reduced to sitting in a chair while he sings for Genesis on their current tour. He has a vertebrae problem that makes it so he can’t play the drums or stand to sing. It makes me wonder if they perform,I Can’t Dance.

If you thought that was bad, Collins has changed the lyrics to one of his biggest hits and now sings, “I can feel it coming in the chair tonight, hold on.”

Enough of the bad jokes, seeing Collins reminds me just how fragile classic rock is. The genre has long been replaced by other forms of music and the great bands of the past are dying off. Many bands have only a fraction of the lineup that made them famous while others have grown old, tired, and given up on touring. If you have a chance to see an artist or band, go see them while they are still around.

I can’t dance to save my life. I never could. I have no sense of rhythm and never had much sense of balance. I once sprained my ankle dancing in High School. It didn’t help that there was a TV crew filming our school dance and I was showing off. Somehow, they saw my writhing around in pain as some sort of new style of dancing.

That’s not the most embarrassing way I sprained my ankle. In 5th grade, I sprained my right ankle throwing away a piece of paper in class.

I have danced my way out of a few tight spots in my life. However, those required me to rely more on my wits than my feet. The tightest spot had to be being stuck in a classroom after school let out trying to calm down a student with a gun in his back waist. That’s two hours I will never forget.

Most of the tight spots I have gotten into were my own fault. My mouth is much faster than my brain. It gets me into situations most people are smart enough not to get into. It’s a good thing my wife is usually with me when I am stuck in a slow checkout line.

Major League Baseball’s lockout ended after 99 days and all we learned from it is players need a shorter spring training season to get ready for what is a way too long regular season. The players and owners are still going to be very rich from the game and fans will still get a full season. This means the only losers of the lockout are the spring training venues that rely heavily on fans coming from all over the country to get close glimpses of a bunch of spoiled athletes standing around and chewing tobacco. And baseball wonders why it is losing its appeal to sports fans.

It’s nice to see Clayton Kershaw sign a one-year deal to remain a Dodger.

I recently saw an advertisement for one of those products claiming to slow down the aging process in men by helping them maintain more muscle mass. I am sure it was a coincidence they relied on a hot looking woman who couldn’t have been more than 35 as their expert spokesperson. I have no idea how the product works or how much it costs, but Amber certainly seemed to know what she was talking about.

Trumpster Trash are people who support the former president and go about making fun of President Biden when he speaks. Our president has a speech impediment for those who may not know it. When he struggles with a word, his brain has been trained to search for another word in its place.

It takes courage to stand before millions of people and give a speech when you have a speech impediment. It takes a moron to make fun of that person.

I used to teach public speaking and witnessed the fear some teens had of making a speech. More people list speaking in public as a greater fear than dying.

Public speaking was a required course at the high school I taught at. I was the only teacher who argued with the administration to change this policy, but strangely, my pleas went unheard. I finally had to fudge my grading system and automatically pass any student with a legitimate fear who would come in and give me a speech.

I still remember the student with a sheep. The boy’s mom told me her son wouldn’t even go shopping because he was afraid the check-out clerk would talk to him. I finally convinced him to give me a speech after school about something he really liked. “This is my sheep,” was the extent of his speech. He passed the course.

The trash can outside my classroom door was on the receiving end of vomit more than once from students who got so freaked out during a speech.

Then there are the opposites. I videotaped every speech so students could critique themselves after hearing our critiques. Countless students refused to believe me when I told them the five-minute speech they were to give ran two or three times over the limit. The tape never lied.

Speaking of tape, is there enough of it to wrap around the mouth of Marjorie Taylor Greene, to keep her from talking?

Deshaun Watson is breathing a huge sigh of relief now that he found out he won’t face any criminal charges. With complaints and detailed accounts from twenty plus women and him pleading the fifth to all questions asked by a grand jury, he somehow escaped charges like they were pass rushers on a football field.

Watson is not out of the woods, but knows he has a future in football. The NFL will suspend him for his “behavior” toward women he sought out under the guise of needing a massage and then he will get his wish and be traded to a team of his choosing. *

It’s only appropriate NFL teams are swarming over Watson like flies attracted to a fresh pile of crap.

How insane is the NFL? Colin Kaepernick did not commit any crime or inappropriate behavior and gets blackballed for his views on a controversial topic. Aaron Rogers lies about his not having a COVID test and is rewarded with $200 million dollars. Deshaun Watson is a predator of unsuspecting women who were just wanting to do their job and will select his next team while going on to earning hundreds of millions of dollars. Daniel Snyder and Jerry Jones run organizations that are not much more than what you see in the film Animal House and go unpunished.

Football fans don’t care either which is why this stuff continues. Women, if you want change, cut the cable cord, or disconnect the internet every time an NFL game comes on. Make it difficult for your man to watch a game. Annoy the hell out of him. Do whatever it takes to hurt the NFL because as things are now, they are tone deaf when it comes to how women are treated.

How does a country accidentally fire a missile into a neighboring nation? How do you explain your way out of that one?  Makes me glad I live next door to Canada and not India.

Too much is made of bracketology, the term used to predict where college basketball teams are seeded in their annual [NCAA] tournament. I think it would be more interesting to see teams randomly seeded using ping pong balls like the NBA does with their draft lottery.

Actually, I don’t care how the NCAA seeds teams. I follow their tournament about as much as I follow other sports. I am content to read about the results but no longer care enough to watch their games.

Greg Hardy has left the UFC after losing his third straight fight. I guess the former NFL star thought mixed martial arts fighting was perfect for him after no one in the NFL wanted anything to do with him. He learned it’s much easier to beat the crap out of his girlfriend than it is to do the same to a man who is a trained fighter.

The Brady Bunch is returning this fall to the NFL. I guess Tom Brady is not ready to retire and has decided to return for a 23rd season. It shouldn’t come as a shock like the headlines made it out to be. As soon as he announced his retirement he was rumored to be planning to return. He never went away.

Dolly Parton did the right thing by removing herself from the voting for this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame vote. I love her music and she is an amazing woman, but she has no business being in the rock hall.

Congratulations are in order to Andrew Whitworth of the Los Angeles Rams after announcing his retirement from the NFL at the age of 41. Whitworth held up for 16 seasons at a position where there is nothing but constant contact while being responsible for protecting a quarterback’s blind side. Whitworth gets to retire as a champion after oddly enough defeating the team he spent most of his career with, the Cincinnati Bengals.

You see, I can say nice things about the Los Angeles Rams players.

Russia can’t win a war with NATO, but Putin also knows NATO is not likely to come to the defense of Ukraine. Consequently, this leaves Ukrainians on their own while innocent citizens are killed, and cities are destroyed. There is no end game that spares Ukrainians and unless Putin does something stupid, the world will merely watch a nation destroyed.

Cutting off Russia from the rest of the world inevitably leaves China to decide what is in their best interest? They can help Russia overcome some of the fallout from sanctions and provide them with military assistance or they can broker a deal with the west to keep from escalating this mess.

Hawks are always quick to go to war while doves go to all lengths to avoid it. In between, are leaders who listen to experts and exhaust all efforts possible before sending troops to battle. I think President Biden is displaying why it is nice to have a leader who is making sure all the groundwork is done before calling on a military solution.

We are an easily distracted nation and our leaders really like it that way. Today is a great example. Free agency began in the NFL, so players are getting cut by their teams and signing with new teams. The NCAA tournament is set to start and there are betting pools at work sites all over the country.** It could just as easily be the release of new iPhones, video games, films, or Netflix shows. Anything to take our minds off the potential for WWIII or just the fact gas prices are soaring.

A society with enough nice distractions will remain complacent which plays into the hands of puppet masters who pull our strings.

A society with enough legal vices won’t give a shit what leaders do.

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*Deshaun Watson was traded to the Cleveland Browns for some draft picks and he is expected to sign a five year deal worth $230 million.

** The NCAA Tournament — March Madness — has started. Next weekend we will be down to the “Sweet 16.”