Black Sunday

I guess some hardy souls braved the rain last night for Lee Ann Womack, the headliner for this little festival. But by the time I dragged my protesting honyocks to the Festival of the Trails this afternoon, it had petered out in a pitiful way. It was very comfortable weather, and no longer raining but the festival was a ghost town. Part of that may have been that instead of a country singer people have heard of a Christian rock band I'd certainly never heard of was on stage. But mainly people were all choosing their solution to the Chiefs game.



Some started the car in the garage, others ate pills, still others improvised gallows and hanged themselves.



And don't give me that 'just a game' shit. This was the Raiders* and it was a home game. It's never okay to loose that one, and this is two years in a row. And this wasn't just a loss, we were humiliated. Nearly shut out.



I got to thinking of the Thomas Harris novel Black Sunday, where Islamic terrorists hatch a scheme to blow up a blimp over the Super Bowl, sending lethal projectiles everywhere. It was in many, many ways a prophetic work that captured the spirit of 9/11 clear back in 1975. Except in the novel a Mosad hero manages to avert the attack, saving America despite America's lack of any understanding of what they were up against. It's been a while since I read it, and far longer since I saw the TV movie adaptation, but I think that's what the book was about.



Thing is, a blimp explosion would have improved this football game. Partly because we were playing our third string QB, a rookie who doesn't know if he's ever seen a defender run at him quite that fast. The Griefs have 15 rookies on their 58 man roster, so I guess you have to expect some of this, a building year and all that. But the Raiders are, from what I can see, equally banged up and/or inexperienced, and an undisciplined organization to boot. And they took us to school.



But I was writing about the festival. Or was I?



We didn't stay long. There wasn't much to do if you're not into Christian Rock or listening to your twelve year old daughter complain about how cold she is when it was her bad idea to wear a skort instead of pants.



We went from there to the Dollar Tree, which my kids both like much better than under-attended festivals in unseasonably cool weather.



I got to thinking as we walked aisles of shit. It's shit nobody needs, the only selling point of anything in that store is that it's a dollar. And then about how I'd heard last week that 10% of China's GDP is invested entirely in mortgage backed securities from Ginnie Mae & Freddie Mac, the bundle of debt Uncle Sam took into foster care last weekend. A bundle of debt even bigger than Uncle Sam's cosmologically enormous debt.



What this means is China is making a bunch of cheap plastic shit we don't need, and because they have all these dollars and nothing to buy off us with them, they've decided to loan these dollars back to us so we can build McMansions. Or in my case, live in a tear-down that appraises as if a sane person with a job would want it.

It's all based on a web of faith, and not being a very faith oriented person myself, I have a problem with that. There's no such thing as a trade deficit, really, everything all balances out or else one side is giving stuff away. And if you can run that kind of trade deficit, power too you, Willie Sutton.



I love markets, sometimes to the point of thinking markets can do no wrong. But when markets decide we should all be in perpetual debut so we can import plastic knight helmets, skull necklaces, foam rubber footballs and decks of magic cards, I can't see that's infallible.

Anyway, we ended up grilling burgers for supper. And I tried a combo I should have tried before: a cheeseburger with extra hot horseradish, mayo and sauerkraut. The cheese was Cabot white Vermont cheddar, very sharp, too. Good stuff.

*As a Chief's fan, you want to win every game, of course. But if they have to go 2-14, those two wins have to be against Oakland.