The Yankees, the Red Sox, and J. Lo.

Absolute silliness....

Last night Amy and I were home watching some TV and enjoying a dinner of fresh salad and Papa Johns Pizza and I was mastering the remote. I was jumping around a bit, looking for something to settle on, but was primarily attracted to WGN because they were showing the Phillies and Cubs game (the Phillies won!) and Fox for the start of the NASCAR race from Phoenix.

So ordinarily they show all the pre-race activity such as the invocation, the National Anthem (usually by a big-name singer) and the grand marshall saying :", Start your engines!"

I assumed they must have had a weather issue because I flipped back to the pre-race and they were showing coverage of a baseball game, in fact it was the Yankees and Red Sox. I don't understand what elevated this game to the point that they interrupted regularly scheduled coverage of a live sporting event to feature this overblown rivalry. Here's the thing. It is the end of the SECOND week of the season. Evry team has about 180 more games to play so this game has ZERO bearing on the finish of the season.

What makes this even sillier is that they kept running a graphic in the corner of the screen showing the approximate time of the start of the race, and that they would return to the race for the start. So I happened to have switched back to see what might be the final out (it wasn't) and suddenly they switch over t=and there is the race, almost done the second lap, so they skipped the prayer, the national anthem, and the first two laps! It gets worse.... the people at Fox decided this game was so important, they announced on the race that you could watch the end of the game if you turned over to the FX network on cable TV. So I flipped to FX and found they interrupted the broadcast of Terminator 3 : Rise of the Machines in order to finish this unimportant ball game.

So that was last night's silliness.

Today we went to church and I worked in the bookstore. After closing the bookstore I went to Winston's to play cards knowing I had to go to Publix to get ingredients to make spaghetti for dinner. When I got to the checkout I noticed one of the entertainment news magazines had a bold-typed headline advertising they would tell us how Jennifer Lopez (read as J-Lo) lost 40 pounds.

I can tell you how she lost 40 pounds and I dont need to buy that rag to do so. She gave birth to twins! If you gave birth to twins, you'd lose 40 pounds too! Duh!

As far as Sunday and church and such, our pastor today referenced Jack Bauer in the sermon. Cool! Then while playing cards a passser-by noticed Jose at our table and greeted him and they were discussing which service they each went to. Somehow this lead into a discussion about the authors of the Bible, Old and New Testaments and the differences in rules and laws like how a man could have 100 wives but a woman could not have 100 husbands (not sure where that came from). And someone said that Moses had sex with his own son (never heard anything about that). And eventually someone said something about Hell not existing, based on the fact it was not mentioned at all in the Old Testament and how it is a creation of the church to inspire guilt. Don't ask me, I was just there to play cards. Oh yeah, the whole thing began with the question as to whether or not gambling is a sin.

Oh yeah, I came in about 7th place today and now that we've had dinner we are watching Across the Universe. I did catch the end of the Masters to see a brief glimpse of a long-shot of hope for Tiger Woods. Despite the fact he came in second place I did stop to think that I am living at the time to see the greatest golfer of our generation and possibly of all time. The man is amazing at what he does, trivial as that may be to some people, but then again some people are intently interested in how J-Lo lost 40 pounds or what Britney Spears or Angolina Jolie are doing..... sigh.

It makes it that much more powerful that after watching some sports last night we watched an old movie that I feel everyone should see every few years as a reminder of what humanity should be about. If you have never seen it, you need to rent, or better yet, buy Cry Freedom. It came out around 1982 I think and stars Kevin Kline as Donald Woods, the editor of a South African newspaper who meets and then fights for the truth about the death of Steven Biko, an activist who was first censored by the Apartheid government and later was taken into custody, beaten to the point of brain damage and died in police custody. Officially, they said his death was the result of a hunger strike (which he was not on). When Woods fought for the truth and a public reckoning, they censored him and he had to flee the country in a dramatic escape, taking his wife and 5 kids with him.

I was in my early teens during the anti-Apartheid movement, but if you watch this true story and see the horrific ways this government treated human beings, you will never think about other races in the same manner.