How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
A reader suggested that I take a look at Charlie Sheen as being a Matt Damon Batch member, and I didn’t have to look long. There are certain characteristics that immediately jump out at me, among them the part on the left side of the head, the square jaw, and what has to be considered ruggedly handsome features of leading man quality.
Continue reading “My Sunday morning … wasted efforts and ramblings”
I am a sort-of baseball fan, one who used to be a real fan. The team I chose to brand on was the Cincinnati Reds. They are falling off the map. If the Major Leagues were formed today, that city would have, at best, a AAA franchise.
The Atlanta Braves inspired a bumper sticker years ago that said “Bring professional baseball to Atlanta.” Cincinnati now inspires such a sentiment. Its teams have been moribund, dreadful, boring, its managers uninspired and behind the times. The reason, I am told, or at least assume, is that this is a small market team doing all it can afford to do.
So this article by Steve Mancuso opened my eyes. Starting with the assumption that the Reds have to trade some viable young prospects in lieu of paying outright for proven talent, Mancuso took me on a ride.
Continue reading “A revealing article from a sports journalist”
Note to readers: After receiving the video from Kevin* today of Barbara Walters’ first appearance on the Today Show in the 1960s, I slowly came to realize I had much of that scam wrong. While Pamela Courson did indeed become Walters, in my view, what I thought were surviving photos of the original Walters were in fact, again, Courson.
*To be clear, though Kevin supplied the video, he does not see what I see in it, and is not on board with my conclusions.
So I have more work to do – it appears at this writing that the entire Internet has been scrubbed of photos of the original Walters, but that is the work that now lies ahead of me – to see if any survived. Just as an example, the photo to the left here, which I took to be the original Walters, is actually Pam Courson in a 60s wig and done in black and white. It was said to have been shot in 1960, but more like 1976. She will end up looking like the Walters we all know, shown on the right.
And, from Kevin’s video on the right here is the original Barbara Walters. Those with trained eyes should easily see that she looks nothing like the woman pictured above, and my work ahead will be to see if she looks anything at all like the Walters we came to know in the 80s and 90s. I doubt it. This is the woman who disappeared from view in 1976.
Continue reading “About the missing post … also a football discussion thread”
I don’t know if it is deliberate but Bill Belichick’s demeanor and dress remind me of the Emperor from Star Wars. It could be he is aware of this and likes such a negative image. It could be that the league promotes this image. Having an “Evil Empire” team is good for business. Baseball has done it with the Yankees for decades. It drives up ratings and attendance, as people want to see insult inflicted on teams that consistently win while theirs loses.
Baseball used to be considered that “national pastime,” but has been supplanted by football in the last few decades. Football easily lends itself to gambling. There are far fewer games and the results of those games, if deemed important, are easily controlled by referees and a few players and coaches under control of the league. Under orders, they can create illogical wins and losses.
[Update: The video cannot be viewed here, but do go to the YouTube link and watch it. Quite a few people are sure Parks stepped out of bounds. Watch what happens at 1:33 in the replay.]
[Update: I searched to find out how many cameras are used to cover a football game, and the answer varies depending on the game. 13 appears to be the norm for a regional game. Sidelines shots are of high importance, especially if a play is challenged. So they probably had better footage of this play and did not show it, instead relying on a shot from the end zone behind the play, sixty yards away. Indeed, at 1:02 or so they switch to an end zone camera on that sideline that probably had Parks all the way down the sideline.]
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All I can figure is that Brandin Cooks was not supposed to to catch that touchdown pass from Drew Brees in the closing minutes of yesterday’s Denver-New Orleans matchup. For Denver then to pull it out required shenanigans. Watch the video above as the snapper #47 (ah geez, really?), Justin Drescher, allows himself to be gently pushed down to allow Justin Simmons to block the extra point, thereby allowing Will Parks to run it back for a two point score.
I don’t quite buy that all NFL outcomes are fixed, as games are controlled chaos and anything can happen. Those key to determining the outcome are referees, who can call a penalty on any play, and perhaps just a few players on each team who can fall down on demand, as did Drescher, or fumble and then stand and watch, as did Cam Newton in the last Super Bowl. This much I know: Teams know how to block the other team on PATs. They practice this stuff.
Just remember, the NFL is one organization and teams abide by the script. There is nothing illegal about fixing games, as it is purely entertainment. Only advertising and gambling keep the game alive. Yesterday both were served.
The death of Mohammad Ali is a milestone, a remarkable man, but I will never forget his fight with Sonny Liston where he won by means of a phantom punch. The fight was rigged. I don’t know if Ali was in on it. He did not necessarily have to be.
I clipped this comment from Quora and reprint it – it is from Anonymous, and it echoes my suspicions after the last two Superbowls, two years ago with Seattle giving it to New England at the end, and this year with Cam Newton fumbling and just watching Denver recover. Fix is on!!!
ALL professional sports championships are rigged. And not just rigged by referees (as the controlled opposition wants you to think) but rigged from the top to bottom with the assistance of select players and coaches on each team.
Every Super Bowl you have ever watched has been rigged. Most playoff games and regular season games too. Some superstars are manufactured (such as Cam Newton) and some are repressed if they don’t play along.
Most veteran QBs are in on the fixes, ALL head coaches, most coordinators, and certain players in certain positions (CB, OL, RB, WR, etc.). It’s important to know that not all the players or coaches are in on it, although some may suspect but are not willing to risk their career or earnings over it. Most of the players and lower level coaches are dupes IMO.
This also includes owners and GMs. Some owners are actually a front for corporations, agencies, or secret billionaires who really own the team (Terry Pegula comes to mind). To them it is just an investment. They don’t care if their team wins or loses, as long as the fans show up.
Super Bowl champions have more to do with narratives and giving favors to certain owners than with the play on the field. It’s a racket that has cost working class fans billions of dollars over the decades. It has also cost most players their brains and bodies, despite the outcomes being pre-determined. It also explains how Vegas is always so close to the real spread. Vegas never loses, because they know who’s going to win.
For those looking to do more research and go further down the rabbit hole, try to find out why nearly all of the expansion owners of the 1960’s came out of the Navy. That’s right, the NFL is a military creation. The Navy is the home of intelligence. Football is subconscious military promotion, originating from elite schools such as Harvard and Yale.
NBA fixes every game. The NHL is better IMO but fixes a few regular season games to ensure favored or big market teams advance and fixes all the playoff games that need fixing.
In case you’re wondering, Spygate , Bountygate, and Deflategate never happened. All done for marketing, awareness, and controlled opposition purposes. Done with full consent of all parties. Why would people risk their reputations? Well, you need to start asking who these people really are and if the biographies we are told are actually true.
For those open-minded willing to go down this path, prepare for depression, then enlightenment. The entire world you have been told by newspapers, TV, and media is not what you think it is. In fact, Quora is not what you think it is. And some of the posters who you trust are not who you think they are (including some who answered this question).
Some thoughts on the Broncos/Panthers game last night:
I was idly watching a football game yesterday, Jets versus Patriots. My kids are avid Jets fans, so I was pulling for them. But predictably the Patriots and two amazing players, tight end Rob Gronkowski and quarterback Tom Brady put on a clinic at the end, and the game was tied. In overtime, I assumed the better team. the Pats, would win.
I committed a cardinal sin of writing yesterday … oh wait. I do that all the time. Up on the right above it says something about the difficulty of being concise. It takes work, and with blogging writing is throwaway stuff, seen once and forgotten. So I don’t put much effort into it. Anyway, my sin yesterday was writing about more than one topic in a post. I started off writing about football and gambling when I really wanted to write about that sociopathic monster. I’ll get better at blogging. I’ve only been at it eight years now.
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But I started to write about when I was young and in Billings and when we went to the horse races, drank beer, and when the horses were coming down the stretch if we had bet a winner, our brains were just lit up with excitement. For a measly $2 bet. Later I read that the sensation we experienced, the combination of beer and gambling, is the same nerve center lit up by cocaine.
Not too long after that I was the guy in charge of the office football pool. All we did was pick winners, and the person who got the most right won $30 or so. Again, small stakes, but we watched football as if there were a huge stake involved. A little bit of gambling goes a long, long way.
I have talked to a few people now about the Seattle/Green Bay game, and we are all in agreement it was an amazing athletic performance, but each person I talked to also mentioned the bet he made, taking the points, giving the points. Football is about four things, maybe in order of importance: gambling, drugs and alcohol, advertising revenue, and the game itself. That last item is in the right spot. The first three, I am not sure.
I watch a couple of talk shows on sports now and then, and have picked up a couple of insightful remarks. One had to do with the games that were broadcast from London earlier this year. The commenter, whose name I’ve forgotten of course, said that the league does not care if fans actually go and watch the games in London. What they want is an early morning Sunday game to go with the three others, so that Sunday from 9 AM to 9PM is all football. The NFL understands television.
On another occasion someone mentioned that perhaps 7% of NFL fans had ever actually been to a game. I have been to games in New York City, and found them boring. It was hard to see the action, half the time at the other end of the field, and the wind was freezing cold. The players spent an inordinate amount of time with helmets off just standing and talking. TV ads were playing.
Football is made for TV. TV is owned by advertisers, everything else secondary. Get a group of people with jobs and money in one place, and advertisers light up like they are high on cocaine. It should come as no surprise that the Superbowl is an advertising celebration more than a football game. They are spending hundreds of millions on those ads, which have become an event.
Back in the early 90s I was invited to join a new gambling enterprise called “Fantasy Football.” With a friend I formed a “team” of players we “drafted” and then “played” other teams each Sunday to win maybe a couple of hundred bucks at season’s end. By luck of the draw I was given the first draft pick, and so took Joe Montana. Our team did not do well. But eventually I ended up being the “league commissioner.” Each Monday morning I had to gather the stats off the sports pages and put out a sheet showing winners, losers, scores. I did that for two years, and burned out.
And dumb as I was, I thought that perhaps the NFL was not keen to the fantasy idea. After all, it was turning the game into a gambling spectacle. Little did I know that the NFL invented the idea. Football was already popular, but fantasy football took it to yet a new level. As Green Bay fan, I wanted to see their games. As an owner of a fantasy team, I had a stake in just about every game shown on TV. I now had a reason to watch football all day every Sunday. That is all Fantasy leagues are for – a way to get people to watch more games, out-of-market games.
I gave it up, and now only watch some football, usually with an iPad or a book in my lap. If I am interested in the outcome of a game, I record it so I can fast forward through the ads*. If I am really bored, I can fast forward between plays too, as a game is really only about 18 minutes of action.
As I watched the crowd reaction to Seattle’s impressive win, I realized that they were experiencing that rush I experienced watching horses – gambling fueled by alcohol, probably other drugs too. This nation is not addicted to football. It is addicted to gambling. It is like cocaine. That is all the NFL is – a gambling vehicle.
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*The NFL has to be concerned about fast-forwarding through ads and must be working on ways to get people not to do that. Here’s one I heard about recently: Texting. People are chatting about the game as it goes on with their mobile devices, and so have to stay in real time. Clever, eh? By power of suggestion, I expect texting to be part of each Sunday’s religious experience along with the booze, the gambling, the advertising, and – oh yeah, almost forgot – football.
Piece of Mindful 