The Never-Ending Story?

This is getting ridiculous.  Have we, many of us, become wooden-headed?  (Thanks to Barbara Tuchman for that great term.)

Over the course of the past few days, the NFL and other kneelers have been likened to "Martin Luther King," "Rosa Parks," and other civil rights leaders.  Give me a break!!!!!!  Do these people not want to be taken seriously?  Talk about an egregious example of hyperbole!

One letter writer asked for "the courage to take a knee."  Yeah, right.  An editorial in today's newspaper rightly ripped on the Ann Arbor city council members who took knees during the opening Pledge of Allegiance.  Yeah, in snow-flake village Ann Arbor that too real "courage."

What's so courageous or anything but divisive about guys kneeling for the National Anthem and then going right out and playing, er, working (sorry--ha ha ha) to make several hundred thousand dollars in three hours, if that?

Here, want to be "courageous?"  Want to be likened to King and Parks, rightly honored for putting their lives on the line?  (After being released from jail after refusing to give up her bus seat, Rosa and her husband were sitting at their kitchen table.  He said, "Rosa, you know they'll kill you."  Yeah, you kneelers are really brave!)  Try this.  Kneel if you want; if your employers are fine with it, that's OK with me, too.  But instead of playing your games, er, working for the afternoon, walk out and lead demonstrations on the city halls or police departments.  Better yet, take your protests--on Sunday afternoons!--to the known drug dens and gang clubhouses.  Yeah, try that.  Then maybe you'll gain some credibility with me.

One conservative think tank in Michigan is trying to get access to the e-mails of the president of the  University of Michigan.  (I think they have some, if not all.)  This president should be severely reprimanded and punished, if not fired, by the university regents.  (Of course he won't be; nothing will be done.)  According to an op-ed the other day, this guy has admitted creating speeches to students so they were "deliberately anti-Trump" because he didn't want to "waste an important opportunity to influence students' votes."  Huh?  The guy is entitled to his opinions, his private opinions.  To work this way with students is reprehensible.  Turn the tables.  Suppose a university president would have worked equally diligently toward an "anti-Obama" or "anti-Clinton" campaign?  (Of course few academics would because, to the arrogant elitists, Obama and Clinton remain "the Messiah" and "the world's smartest woman."  And, after all, they are academics......)  And to think that, until I was a senior in high school, I wanted to be a student at the University of Michigan.  Actually I was accepted there, ready to play ball.  (I only applied to two places.)  Boy, was I lucky--in more ways than one.

I remarked somewhere that the fall colors were lacking this year, fearing we might miss Mother Nature's wonderful annual art show.  One popular (poplar)/cottonwood is completely leafless, while my half dozen or so maples were still full of their leaves--green leaves.  I noticed for the first time this AM, on my run, quite a few reds, yellows, and oranges.  It's as if they came overnight, from out of nowhere.  Now, I hope the forecast rain doesn't knock these colorful gems off their branches too soon.  That happened a few years back and I was surprised at how disappointed I was.

BTW, I'm very glad for Justin Verlander.  Oh, I wish he was still a Tiger.  But the success he's having as an Astro is great to see.  He was the ALCS (?) MVP with a microscopic ERA.  I might have read this last week or so.  In series-clinching playoff or World Series games, Verlander's ERA is something like 1.40.  Isn't that close to impossible in this day and age?  That's sort of Sandy Koufax-ish!  (I still remember Mickey Mantle, striking out for the fourth time in a Series game vs Koufax, muttering as he threw his bat in the bat rack, "How're we supposed to hit that sh*t!"  It wasn't a question.  And to top it off, I think that was a game Koufax had arm troubles and couldn't throw his curve or slider, only his fastball--and the Yankees knew it!)