Go, Agribusiness seasonal employees!

It's that time of the year, campers:

School has started, the pools are beginning to close down, amusement parks are scaling down because the kiddies are back in school, and in some parts of this great nation the leaves are glowing with russets and oranges and golds.


It's Football Time.

Of course, you can't have Football Time without politics--meaning that someone is going to get their panties in a twist for some reason--and that reason is team mascots.

I'm not talking about those oversized abominations that patrol the sidelines of every team from Pee-Wee to pro--as the self-appointed Czar of Sensible Mascots, I intend to rid ourselves of said mascots with a very select few:

Bevo--GREAT mascot, even though he's pretty heavily tranked for game times.

TOM--stands for "Tigers of Memphis". He gets to stay in because the folks at the U of Memphis realized that it was folly to have a fully-grown Bengal tiger on the sidelines of a football game where he could mistake the lineup of players for a buffet spread (and the cheerleaders for dessert), and instead installed TOM at the Memphis Zoo, where he lives the life of Reilly.

The Florida State Seminole--Fabulous mascot, rides around bareback on a paint horse and plants a speak in the enemy's endzone. Gotta stay.

Reveille--The pooch that barks his head off at College Station--like so many traditions at A&M, Reveille is filled with pseudo-religious silliness. As one enters the stadium/cathedral, one passes by the burial spots of former Reveilles, all buried specifically so that they can watch A&M play. Ew. Get rid of him.

The Red Raider. Swish. Lose him.

The Sooner Schooner--chaos and really bad craziness waiting to happen: load up a miniature prairie schooner with cheerleaders hanging precariously out, and careen wildly down the field. Oh, yeah, gotta stay. No one at OU has to teach Chaos Theory, they just have to watch the Sooner Schooner. Another fun thing for Chaos Theorists is watching a bunch of Colorado cheerleaders running down the field with Ralphie, a full-grown BISON. It's trample-time in the mountains! One mascot has to stay because he illustrates the creativity of some folks at the University of Georgia; UGA, the bulldog mascot, has his own student name, George Leroy Tirebiter, his student number, and his student ID--this is necessary for travel arrangements. So far, he's never graduated, but he HAS walked during commencements in his own cap and gown. The mortarboard looks a little silly on him, but then they look silly on everybody.

The Billikin--My first Alma Mater, St. Louis U, has a mascot called the Billikin. Very few people at SLU, which was founded in 1818, know what the Hell a billikin is or where he/she/it comes from, but they still bow down. Apparently it means "a good luck charm" and may be Alaskan, but NOBODY KNOWS. Gotta stay, because when you have a mascot that is a bloody mystery it just HAS to stay around.

The Badgers, the Wolverines and the Golden Gophers (oh, for goodness sake!) all look like giant rats and have to go. When you've been to a Wisconsin-Minnesota game and witness a Badger and a Golden Gopher fighting over Paul Bunyan's Axe, you know you're in mascot Hell. You're outa there.

Elegant mascots that have to stay include the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, the Harvard Crimson, and the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers. Classic and unique. Who cares that only Rutgers plays decent football?

Lots of schools have yielded to pressure from various and sundry lobbyists and changed their names; Stanford, which was early in its history a school for Native Americans, called their team the Indians until they were forced to rename themselves the "Cardinal". Lots of minor-league baseball teams are getting on the controversy-neutral bandwagon, leading to some interesting nomenclature such as the Lansing Lugnuts, the Altoona Curve, the Toledo Mud Hens and the Savannah Sand Gnats. I am not making this up. Perhaps the Savannah team would be more fearsome if they named themselves after the actual name of the Sand Gnat, Ceratopogonidae . Get 'em, Pogos!

Of course, pro football is apparently immune to controversy, and continues to feature the Redskins--but I predict that some day in the future our preoccupation with euphemism will feature the Dallas Agribusiness Seasonal Independent Contractors versus the Washington Indigenous Peoples.

Let the games begin! Let's go, Iowa Park Hawks!

Here a ring, there a ring. . .

The Beijing Olympics is fittingly underway, and the opening ceremony showed us the following:

1. Dem Chinese sho do have some nifty gaming technology. How about a two football field-sized Koala pad?
2. A totalitarian government can, indeed, get large numbers of people together and get them to do ANYTHING it wants, and in a simultaneous manner.
3. 20 years ago, there was officially NO confucianism in China. At least that's what the government of China told us. Last night they brought 2,008 of 'em, funny hats and bamboo scrolls and all, and paraded 'em before the World. Hmmm. . .
4. Even though China endeavored to prove to the World that it's light years ahead in technology, they still featured cheerleaders in Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader autograph-model white naugahyde thigh-highs. Apparently kitsch, like Dim Sum, is universal.
5. Even though you can put on the most spectacular production the World has ever seen, George and Laura Bush will STILL be bored. Did you notice him slumping in his chair and checking out his watch a couple dozen times? They are soooooo ready to git back to Crawford. And so am I.

As the Canadian Olympic delegation marched in, Bob Costas and Matt Lauer discussed the practice of paying ringers to join an olympic team and paying said ringers for medals. Canada does it, and Brunai and the good ole U.S. WTF are we having an olympics FOR, anyway? As Jerry Seinfeld says, we're just cheering for laundry here, for any merc who can fit into a uniform just so we can have national pride that we didn't earn. Therefore, I have switched my allegiance during the Olympics to those nations who have entered the Olympics in the true spirit of fair competition and the thrill of competition at a higher, faster and braver level. Nations like Andorra and Swaziland and the like, nations with no organized sports program because they'd rather buy CLOTHING and FOOD, nations who have no freakin' hope of even competing against the Big Boys and Girls but who dress up in their wild costumes and parade around the Bird's Nest anyway and have one Hell of a time celebrating all that's RIGHT about sports. And don't get me started about doping and steroids. Yet. Go Lichtenstein!

Useless emotions

Emotions are good. They help open our hard shells, the armor we build up to defend ourselves from the World. During the Romantic Rebellion of a couple hundred years ago, it was thought that plays and other entertainment that created tears in the audience were the most healthy form of recreation. Tears, you see, were an acknowledgement that we were after all human, subject to the same animal instincts and weaknesses. And everyone talks about needing "a good cry". Even Aristotle claimed that the end result of producing tragic plays was katharsis, or a purgation of emotion.

If a smart cookie like Aristotle gets on the side of emotion, than who is a szhlub like me to argue?

Yet there are useless emotions that dirty up our lives, and sometimes cause us to end our lives unhappily and even desperately. I know, because I was one of les desperes subject to those useless emotions. And it made me opressively sad, old before my time, and physically ill.

One of the useless emotions is envy.

The other is regret.

Envy is difficult to deal with because our entire culture is based on it. Capitalism is founded in this emotion, and television advertising is a perfect example of envy at its worst. Dove soap has even instituted a program that untrains grade school-age girls from envying the body types we see so constantly on television, and encourages them to think of themselves as beautiful in their own way instead of wishing they were Miley or Paris some other "The Week's Blonde". Envy is what happens when we see someone's new car, house, fashion statement, significant other, or dog and determine that we MUST have one of those. Our current economic system encourages this kind of rapacious consumerism, and we follow blindly in the futile hope that THINGS will make us HAPPY. Got a problem? Get a new model! Consumerism fuels our system, and it's an inexhaustible supply of energy because as Stephen Wright says: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

George Carlin's lovely rant about "stuff" sums up our hamster-in-a-treadmill mentality in a haiku: we need a house to keep our stuff safe from other people while we go out and get MORE STUFF.

Stuff won't make you happy, muffin.

Only YOU can make you happy. And maybe other people, but only if you love yourself first.

Remember that Buddha said, "the more possessions a man has, the more careworn he becomes." Thanks, Gautama.

And now, campers, we come to the most insidious emotion of all: regret. Henry II of England lived longer than most of his peers, conquered England and most of France, and ruled a kingdom as large as Alexander's or Napoleon's--and Henry died despairing, regretting his failures. For that matter, so did Alexander and Napoleon. Regret will kill you, bubba.

Now Regret and her sister emotion Shame have an essential place in our society, or any society--they keep us from doing sociopathic things that would really screw up the fabric of civilization. But mulling on regret, and feeding on it, is a real sickness. And it's useless at base, because the idea is to:

1. f*&^k up.
2. LEARN from it.
3. Don't do it again.
4. There is no 4.

We find regret most evident in personal relationships, and it can murder a present relationship because of missteps that happened in a past relationship.

We call these things "baggage", and some people bring an overnight case while others bring a big honkin' steamer trunk. It's insidious, because regret is a GOOD thing, but too much of it, an obsession with it, is poison. Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches are really yummy, but too many of them will cause you to explode. Ask Elvis.

So mess up by all means, learn from it, and move on. You'll be surprised now light you feel when you get rid of that baggage, and how relatively easy it is to travel when you travel light. That lightness is the lightness of your own heart.

Now Excuse me while I go and mow my back yard, because I wish I had a lush green lawn like my neighbor has, and I'd really regret it if I put it off till next week.