Bailout, Blue Eyes, Wine & Baseball

- posted by Bill

Musings from the weekend. Wanted to put something in the blog and thought I’d offer some thoughts from the weekend even though it may not have much, if anything to do with Ultimate.

For those of you who have worked in the Coast Guard, with the Coast Guard or some other service sector organization you may have heard the expression “Your poor planning does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Well, in reality, if often does, usually from the top down. And so it seems, it has happened on a grander scale as I’m perusing through the 110 page “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) 2008”. Now, even though it doesn’t state it in any of the “purposes” of the bill, we all know it is to bailout Wall Street which has gotten itself into some unfathomable amount of debt which can not reasonably be explained or paid off in any other fashion. I heard this weekend that credit is basically frozen right now for items such as houses, cars, college tuition, etc…you know, only the non-important luxury items of our society. Is anybody else having “3 Stooges” movie flashbacks every time they see the trio of Bush, Paulson, Bernanke parade across the TV?

Okay, speaking of movies and television, let’s talk about something more pleasant while I try to figure out how to have all my assets transferred to the Bank of Venus or traded in for bales of tobacco and soy beans in preparation for our return to an agrarian economy. Want to bid a Buzzard farewell to Paul Newman who died this weekend. My Top-5 Newman roles were Henry Gondorf in The Sting, Butch Cassidy in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Dodge Blake in Message in a Bottle, Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, and Doug Robers in The Towering Inferno.

And I have a movie recommendation for the rest of you Buzzards. For any of you who enjoy British humor, not the Benny Hill genre slapstick but the more dry “Colin Firth-ish” type, you need to go rent or have Netflix deliver Death at a Funeral. If you have ever had to endure a dysfunctional family gathering of any kind, wedding, reunion, holiday, or funeral, this will make you laugh out loud that somebody had it worse than you.

I watched it Saturday night after having sloshed around at the Smith Mountain Lake 20th Anniversary Wine Festival. When I say slosh, I’m referring more to the rain, than the drinking, though not excluding the latter. My personal favorite from the 28 winery tents of Virginia wines was the 2007 Viognier from Veritas Winery. I confess that I’d never even heard of Viognier before going but it’s my new favorite white. Also, my shopping spree (and all the other soggy festival attendees) on wine was arguably a more effective way to “maximize overall returns to the taxpayers of the United States” than this ridiculous EESA 2008…Don’t you like how the wording of this bill’s purposes makes it sound like it’s some humanitarian effort for the middle class citizenry rather than the “golden parachute for the wealthiest 1%” that it really is.

Speaking of wealthiest 1%, in the world of professional athletics, there were some interesting notes this weekend beginning on Thursday with USC’s (please don’t try and tell me they aren’t paid) loss to the Beavers of Oregon State. And there were some good pro games too. I caught the 2nd half of the Redskins-Cowboys game on tv (a rarity for me to sit down and watch sports on tv for that long anymore), and as a former Redskin-aholic, I enjoyed that outcome. I also notice from the highlights that a guy named Brett Favre completed 70% of his passes yesterday and had 6 TD passes! Not bad for a “washed up” QB.

Apparently some good baseball action this weekend as well. The Brewers are going to the playoffs for the first time since 1982! I watched them beat out my beloved Orioles that summer by a game in the AL East with a lineup that included four future Hall of Famers on that team, Don Sutton, Rollie Fingers, Robin Yount, & Paul Molitor. Good to see them beating out the larger market choke artists of Shea Stadium.

Okay enough rambling. Let’s have a great game today.
Pull!