Jewish-Mexican Cheerleaders Right's and Educational TV

Ever notice the NFL's copyright notice on football games? Supposedly, not only am I not allowed to record a game and sell tapes of it (no-brainer), or capture photos from a broadcast and post them to my blog or whatever, but get this: 'Descriptions of the events' are claimed to be the property fo the NFL and require express, written permission.

What? I'd grant you that if I was pirating content developed by, say, CBS, under contract with the NFL, I can see where that'd violate copyright law. But a 'description of the events???'

First off, it's a public spectacle. In most cases, games are held in stadiums owned by the public sector (something I have a beef with), so if Arrowhead Stadium, paid for by the taxpayers of Jackson County, MO, is not a 'public' place, what is?

And an account of events? Does that mean it's an infringement for me to say I had my heart broken Sunday, when I saw Lawrence Tynes miss a field goal that would have tied the Chiefs game and put it into overtime? What about if I mention that missing field goals is not something you expect out of this guy: I think he's only missed one other this season, and it wasn't a long or weather-challenged shot. Maybe the NFL will sue me for saying that it wouldn't have come down to the damned kicker in the first place if it wasn't for a dip-shit holding penalty that gave Dallas four more downs on the 1-yeard line inside two minutes of the end of the game (at which point they were LOSING, as they damn-well were supposed to).

Anyway, I know anyone who gives a flying fuck about the game probably watched it, or will read a much more detailed 'account' or 'description' of the 'events' in something like a daily newspaper or a sports magazine. No one is coming to Lobster Land to learn what happened. Only two or three people come here at all and at least one finds the NFL a dreadful bore.

But the 'events,' does that only include the plays of the game? What if I described, in minute detail, the activities of the Gatorade guy? Or the cheer leaders? Or some guy in the stands who gets drunk and has a 'wardrobe malfunction?'

For that matter, this is something that has pissed me off for a long time: the cheerleaders in the NFL get a raw deal. It's not that I find them all that delicious, but precision dancing by a group is way more interesting than seeing John Madden's gut while he gasses his fully licensed 'account' of whatever happened on the field. The cheerleaders are more interesting than a player sucking on an oxygen mask after a long run, or waving off the Gatorade guy.

The cheer leaders don't get paid much from what I've heard, it's a hobby level thing. Having attended a game, I can tell you that most of the fans in attendance wouldn't know if you swapped them out with a 'La Cage Aux Folles' review-troop of drag queens. Not because the women aren't pretty, most of them are, but you'd need binoculars. Some come off as 'rode-hard, put away wet,' but there's a local PE teacher who is a 'retired' Chiefs cheerleader. She's not really my type, and I'm not single, but I can't say she isnt drop-dead gorgeous. The moreso because, to the extent I've heard her speak, she's intelligent and decent in addition to being a life-size Barbie Doll.

Anyway, whether they're pretty girls fresh out of college, borderline matrons of desperate housewivery, or men in skirts, they're athletes. This is football, an athletic event. Not only can I not move my body the way they do, aside from a certin PE teacher mentioned above, I don't think I know anyone who's that limber and agile. Plus, with a group, there's the precision element. One woman kicking her foot over her head should probably have the keys taken away from her: she can come back for her car in the morning. Or if you have a spare bedroom, maybe she can sleep it off. But a group of ten or twenty women not only doing that but doing it in unision, that's sober work.

You catch glimpses on TV of the cheerleaders as they come in and out of breaks. Usually, a Nextel logo or some other commercial message is placed over the face, giving rise to such apparitions as a Coors Light logo with boobs (to the delight, I'm sure, of the marketing people at Coors).

Today, I caught glimpses (and this probably infringes on the NFL's supposed rights, mentioned above), of the famous Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. I've never been a big fan of the squad because I associate them iwth Jerry Jones, who is rivaled in pure evil only by Al Davis and Art Modell. But the first time I saw any of them (for a split-second) they were wearing the regular uniform (some sort of hybrid between Daisy-Dukes and string bikini, in white on bottom, and something in between a halter top and a bra on top, in the team's accursed colors), but the next time I saw them they were dressed in a Santa's Workshop version of it, presumably for a half-time show that doesn't acknowledge the ACLUs challenge to even the most secular celebrations of Xmas.

Why not show the women doing their thing instead of broadcasting an aging zebra watching the replay you already showed eight times? These women are wearing outfits almost skimpy enough for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in single-digit temperatures, at least give them some screen time, alright? They've worked hard on their routines, get paid less than the refs, and they're willing to freeze their long legs off.



I've bitched before about public financing of stadia for multi-millionaire's teams playing a game that pays millionaire salaries to the Elect who can prove they're one of the best 1200 to 1800 players of a particular sport. As beautifully explained in the movie 'Baseketball,' it leads to such abusrdities as the Minnesota Lakers moving to Los Angeles, a town that is sans-lake. The New Orleans Jazz moving to Salt Lake City, which isn't exactly friendly to jazz, black people (aside from the starting five) or dancing. The Chicago Cardinals move to St. Louis and then to Phoenix, and no one in Chicago remembers they had a football team by that name. The Raiders and the Rams have both whored their franchises to Los Angeles, easily the largest market the NFL now has no team in. The Raiders went back to Oakland, which technically was already provided with a franchise by virtue of being battery-throwing distance from San Francisco; the Rams went to St. Louis to fill the void left when the Cardinals went (with no love lost) to Phoenix. A void St. Louis didn't even know it had as far as I can tell.

Here's how bad it gets: when I was a kid, we had an NHL hockey franchise in KC. My Dad got tickets (probably by accident, no hockey fan he), and I saw the Kansas City Scouts play the Detroit Redwings when I was a wee-lad. We had great seats, too, as Kemper was only about 1/3 full despite apparently giving school teachers or men who bought Mix-n-Match sport coats and slacks from JC Penny, free tickets.

In the time since, the Scouts moved. I think to Denver for a while, but the Denver team of today is eiter an expansion or a team stolen from another NHL market. The KC Scouts, I believe, are now the New Jersey Devils. And KC has gone through two hockey teams for less prestigious leagues and is still trying to attract another. Or they spread their cheeks for another, I forget. The mayor of the namesake city (the urban core, rotten, wormy and without tax revenues sufficient to pay off what they've already borrowed) wants to put an arena in what they pass off as a 'downtown' which mainly succeeds in the 'down' part. Nevermind we already have the Folly, the Lyric, Bartle Hall, Municipal Auditorium (big enough to accomodate a Shriner circus in conjunction with a travelling Les Misérables, plus wannabe suburbs that have built convention centers and trade centers and so on.

No one who grows up in KC grows up on hockey. Even the ones who grow up playing soccer dont' buy Wizards tickets, and none of us really wants to see anything on ice that doesn't wear pantyhose, hair extensions and capped teeth.

But there's a cure (I hinted at it above) to the public financing of sports. The Bastille Day mentality of ACLU secularists can be used to advantage here. Before CBS cut away from an ugly blowout in Jacksonville, I saw Jacksonville's kick returner cross himself as he awaited the kick. Logical enough: it's the old saw about atheists and foxholes. Except a foxhole is a place of seclusion and relative shelter, and a kick returner stands waiting to catch a ball while eleven steroidal freaks in armor charge hell-bent to smash him.

It got me thinking: I've seen televised instances of players kneeling in a group to play, often (ecumenically enough) players from both teams, who just spent three hours committing mayhem upon each other.

Since these stadiums are in most cases public property, owned and maintained by a government entity, surely the ACLU can strike up a great legal fury at the establishment of state religion. Then the NFL would have to choose between religion and privately held arenas...

I know at least one of the people who visit this blog thinks I overstate the anti-Xtian zealotry angle. I'm an odd apologist, as I am not a person of any particular 'faith.' And to the extent I ever had a faith, it was the faith that there was no such thing as the supernaturual.

But you don't have to listen to talk radio to hear the squabble. Dig it: Em told me of her great ambitions to start a rock band with a friend down the street. They don't presently play any instruments, but being not quite ten, Em can't be bothered with technicalities. And she's right, in a way, it's not as if Kurt Cobain ever learned to sing or play guitar, and he made a good deal of money at it. The criteria for this band is you have to have had a broken bone (both girls in question have), because they're hooked on the name 'Busted Bones.'

But wait, she has another band she wants to start with her cousin, a 'faith band' she refers to it as. She proceeded to tell me about how they were, like 'Busted Bones' of a mind that two people aren't enough to make a band, and want to find additional members. I forget the name of the 'faith band' she mentioned because it was blocked out by what she said next:

'I guess I could tell my friends at school about it and see if anyone wants to join. Except I can't tell ______ because she's Jewish.'

Em went on to explain to me that Jewish people celebrate Chanukah but not Christmas, and you can't talk about Christianity around them because it would make them uncomfortable.

I told her Jesus was a Jew, who presumably celebrated Chanukah (I may be wrong, is that a more recent holiday that I supposed?) It shut her down, just trying to think about how she wouldn't be able to tell Jesus about her 'faith band' if she saw him on account of his being a Jew. And that Jesus didn't have a Christmas Tree? We didn't even get to the bit about Santa not being born yet (the Bishop of Turkey being, what, four centuries younger???)

Friday evening at dinner Em posed the same arguments David Sedaris parodies in his analysis of the Dutch Xmas. He objects that Santa is not retired, and didn't 'used to be' anything. And he lives at the North Pole, not in Spain. Oh, and in Amsterdam, instead of reindeer, Santa comes with 'six to eight black men' who were recently described as his slaves, but in recent decades transmogrified into good friends. Sedaris rightly points out that the transition from slavery to friendship is not quick, easy, or unmarred by violence.

But wait, there's more!

I watched 60 Minutes for the first couple of segements, owing to a really good trailer on sharks. The first segment, though, was about the supposed illegal immigrant crisis.

Here's what I took away (Em is always telling me TV can be instructive when I hint at sending it to the landfill):

When Bill Clinton took his odious office, Mexicans gate-crashed their way in on a daily basis. They did this at places like San Diego while U.S. Govt. employees did what they don't do enough of, cowering and running for cover.



With a totally porous border, a Mexcian who knew he could make more money North of the border and come back in tact (in time for dinner) was stupid not to get in the herd and run for the border.

What to do? In a move befitting Pat Buchannan, they put up steel walls with barbs and nasty bits at places like San Diego to keep Mexicans from sneaking back to their stolen homeland for honest work in a country built on (in apart) the promise to take all comers. Billions for a Berlin-Wall type structure, not a dime for common sense.



The TV segment proceded to highlight such 'successes' as the U.S. crackdown on midwestern meatpacking plants who hired illegals to do jobs born Americans turned their noses up at. It was considered a victory to run 3500 willing workers off the job to benefit...nobody! No Nebraskan was waiting in line for that vacancy, and no American anywhere was willing to pay the price for a Big Mac to make the job pay enough to make a difference. So it's better to have illegals on the dole instead of working as they meant to whent he snuck across the border?

France's recent riot trouble is not the result, by the way, of uncontrolled borders: it's the result of uncontrolled safety-net spending.

Now that the logical points of entry/exit for Mexican workers are fortified, you have poeple setting out not on their own but with their whole families in the Arizona and New Mexico dessert. Mostly they die because two gallons of water in that situations is like 35¢ in a strip joint (if the dancers could kill you for not being profitable).

It's a big 'come here, stay' order given to a dog. You can elude the border patrols for a shot at much better pay, but instead of running through the streets of San Diego you have to wander into the dessert and hope for a bit of luck. Since you can't be home for dinner, people bring their families, resulting in senseless deaths of women and children who die in the dessert of Arizona instead of fixing dinner in Tijuana.

If you have to build a wall to keep people back, and they sneak off into a formiddable stretch of dessert on foot with two gallons of water and a bit of hope, what does that tell you? Americans who won't accept competition for jobs from Mexican immigrants are like the French Aristocracy who would not yield to even modest reforms in the 1780s, the result being the indiscriminate slaughter of everyone with the modern equivalent of a high school education and the rise of Napoleon.

And in a final testimony that Em is right, TV can be instructional, the shark segment of 60 minutes that I tuned in for, if it wasn't educational, it at least reinforced my ideas about the limitations of the state and the stupidity of masses.

Shark attacks are on the rise, this according to the teaser segments. Last year, nine people were killed by sharks. Nine people! Toasters kill more people.




17,000 people die in the U.S. from illegal drug abuse, which is nothing compared to the 500,000+ who die of tobacco and alcohol abuse. 29,000 from firearms, which makes guns more dangerous than cocaine but less dangerous than booze or cigarettes.

Shark attacks? Nine people in the WORLD? Get serious. First off, swimming in the ocean, you are in the shark's territory. If you get eaten, deal with it. Hundreds of thousands of sharks get hauled up out of the water, their fins cut off, and, still alive, dumped back in the drink to sink to the bottom (and to attract more sharks) to feed China's hunger for shark fin soup.

And if you pay to get in a shark cage of Seal Island in hopes of seing a Great White up close (why not? I'd do it), you have to accept the risks you're necessarily taking. Even if those risks are nothing compared to skydiving or driving to work. Yep, that's a flying lobster you see. No Photoshop trickery. I dont' think I could have Photoshpped me into the frame in '94: that was the days of Photoshop 3.0 (or so) when you had one 'undo' and hard drives smaller than an IPOD's RAM...