It's Cryin' Time Again

Someone thanked me for helping her start the day yesterday with a jig, specifically the jig known as "All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir". She didn’t say whether the Patriots’ fate in the Superbowl had anything to do with her needing a jog toward a jig. She didn’t even say she was sad. I know I was sad when I composed that post but not because of football. God doesn’t care about football I always say though I don’t say it too loudly, especially in crowds of diehard fans who’ve been pounding down the beers.

I felt sad because of a few things that began falling apart on some other fronts. I had turned the Superbowl off after seeing Madonna, that schoolgirl-thin athlete. I had watched something on Public Television during the first half of the game, and then didn’t watch the second half at all. I really can’t bear to witness situations where the winners and losers are so cruelly labelled. I have to look away from the set altogether when they announce the Oscar winner for any given category and just for that nano-second the camera still lingers on the face of the nominee whose name has just been read. I can’t stand it if the person doesn’t win I mean. I can’t bear the expression, however fleeting, where rising Disappointment gets stuffed underwater; pushed in the face back out of sight while the person struggles to muster that pleased good-sport look.( Poor humans I always think. Poor, poor humans with all their brave trying!)

That’ll be the next thing: the Oscars.

I just saw this video of a woman whining like a spoiled child because her Patriots lost. (Check it out here; you just want to send her to her room without any supper, don't you though? You hate to hear losers cry; it’s bad form as we’ve been told – well, unless you’re longtime public servant Edmund Muskie and you’re crying in the snow because the press said your wife drinks and uses crude language. (The 70s were a spiteful time in politics.)

What I love is to see winners cry. It’s funny, right? Who can forget Sally Field when she won an Oscar for Places in the Heart?!The audience claps and she just falls apart: "You like me! You really like me!” she blubbered. Poor lamb. They liked her til THEN maybe; but after that boy did they make fun of her! Here she is that night with her cute apple-red cheeks.

I'll say this: it's really tough to be in the spotlight, whatever is happening to you...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_8nAvU0T5Y]

Rounded with a Sleep

This winning and losing is such a silly measure in my mind. We all have our place. We all have our work to do and we do it as best we can.

Millions – can it have been millions? - rooting for their teams in yesterday’s big contest wore that certain sweater or sat in that certain chair, convincing themselves that they could influence their favorite team’s fortunes, even knowing how unlikely it was that their actions would have any effect. It made them happy and I hope they all had a great time watching.

I guess half of them are happy again today, with bragging rights guaranteed for the next 12 months. But I hope even the fans whose team didn’t win are happy enough as well. It’s only a sort of make-believe in the end, these contests. It's as that aging magician Prospero says near the end of Shakespeare’s last play: We really are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep

Well we'll all sleep again tonight at the end of another day’s efforts and feel ourselves part of that great big chorus Bill Staines was thinking of when he wrote his song, here sung by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcG1JNpazN4]

Thnax Grill Fiend!

Angry man writes me a letter, wonders where I got the nerve to take valuable newspaper space so that my ridiculous words could  stand in the place of actual news. He’s referring to last weeks’ column, versions of which you can see in papers from Harrisburg PA to Redwood Falls MN to good old Nebraska City News as well as right here at the top of my home page. My thesis there: that texting is doomed simply because when applied to a keyboard no bigger than a credit card the  thumb is one mighty blunt instrument.An example: the text you might find yourself sending to your colleague Tammy the night before that crucial meeting. It just shows what happens when those fat little thumbs miss their mark even by even a centimeter:"Tummy! Ate rou teady for the bog neeting? I’m feeping domewhat wirroed becalm my nimbles son’t seed to be adding up right. Con rou take a loop at them before hunch today?  Thnax grill-fiend!"Or the text I actually did send to my daughter the night Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” opened and Dave and I went to it:"Ho Hiney! Poops and I just saw “Malice in Wanderlust” wit Johnson Deep as the Mud Hitter, amazon! Fuzzy thong though: I kelp boing remanded of  some other actor,  I thank becalms of the bog spice between Johnson’s two frump teens. Who DOZE he look like? Mike Tyson? Lauren Hutton ? Waist, I know! He loops like Madonna! Minus the bivalves, bipeds, biceps ha ha.”My answer to the angry letter writer? Columnists really don't take space that would otherwise be devoted to the news. The papers set aside this space for us, come hell or high water, in the belief that our job as commentators is just as important - which it is, my friend, which it is.

Now for some good Tuesday fun, ponder these pix and you’ll see what I mean about a resemblance in the smiles. Pretty striking, right? I’d say “OMG!”, “LOL” and so on but call me old-fashioned: I still prefer whole words.

And,  just for fun, the Ear-Fillet-and- a-Side-of-Fries king himself  Mike Tyson, who has the ultimate in quirky smiles: