Monday Morning Quarterback 1.17

Although I spend about three-times as much time on the other articles, these quickie little Monday Morning Quarterback postings are getting all of the attention. The 17 collections of thoughts that I usually throw together during my Monday lunch hour have had more readers than the other 70 stories collectively, that sometimes take me many hours over several days to complete. This doesn't bother me because I enjoy either one as much as I do the other and I have learned, over the years, that a client (or your boss,or the public, or any end-user) doesn't care how much time you put into something. They are only concerned with the end product and if they like it or not. In fact, I will put as much effort into a project as is needed, but I usually start with a "less is more" philosophy because if the end product is the same no matter how much  you put into it you might as well save that extra energy.

Note to all you men out there however: you can throw this whole concept out the window if your wife is the person making the request. Here are my notes from the week:

• Being from St. Louis and a Rams season ticket holder, I have seen a lot of mixed emotions in this town about the Superbowl this year. Most people love Kurt Warner on one hand and, I think, most dislike the Cardinals and their ownership on the other. Either way, it is really a great story and, I hope, it will be a great game.

• A couple of times, while hearing reports on the plane crash landing in the Hudson River last week, I heard correspondents corrected when they said Canadian Geese. Apparently, the proper name of the bird is Canada Geese. I'm not sure if it was the Canadians or the geese, but one of the groups was upset (I guess they didn't want to be blamed for bringing down that plane) and was sure to make a point of it.

• In similar news, in order to be certain to not accuse any other countries of involvement in accidents with non-resident subjects, we will refer to so-called subjects in the non-possessive vernacular. For instance: France Toast, Germany Potato Salad, India Giver, Brazil Wax and Poland Sausage. 

• Just to remind me of how soon our little baby boy will be here, MLW's cousin went into labor two-weeks early on Saturday. Welcome Olivia Joy. On our way to visit baby and Mom, my wife mentioned that M3S and she could marry because they are forth-cousins but I quickly convinced her that these families are already screwed-up enough to start messing with the gene pool any more than we already have.

• Talk around the Sunday Dinner table last night (after we were finished eating) turned to babies and deliveries and C-sections and stuff. The only one at the table that had not been through a birth but was still able to understand what we were discussing was my 22-year-old niece, who commented, "I wish we could just throw them up!" As freaky of an experience natural birth was-- and I wasn't even the one having the baby-- her idea may be even more bizarre.

• My Mom thinks I should write a book called Sunday Dinner. I explained to her that I am basically doing that by writing in this blog. I think she would enjoy reading it but she refuses to own a computer... or fly in a plane.

• Barrack Obama's Inauguration price-tag is somewhere around $150 million for four-days of events with 1.5 to 3 million attendees. This is more than three-times the amount that was spent for the most recent Bush bash and more than five-times the amount for Clinton's first-term inauguration bill. I don't feel like messing with the math but I think that is a more expensive ticket than the Superbowl... and I would think the taxpayer is taking care of the bill. Where are our priorities?

• I understand that they are re-naming Delmar in our fair city-- Barrack Obama Boulevard. This for a man that has not served a day in the presidential office yet. You would think that the St. Louis planning commission would have learned their lesson from when they named a stretch of I-70-- Mark McGwire Highway, only to have the muscle-bound slugger lay an egg in the Congressional hearings on steroid abuse in baseball.

• Do not try this at home... or anywhere else for that matter... and don't read this one if you have a weak stomach. I recently heard of a disgusting (even by my standards) practice young people have been participating in order to get high. They actually poop in a bag, let it ferment for a while and then snort the fumes produced. What is the world coming to? We did some pretty stupid things as kids for some pretty stupid reasons, but none even close to this stupid! I have a real hard time believing this one because if someone asked me to come up with the most gross, disgusting, stupid thing in the world, I would have a hard time thinking this up. Why can't they use this energy and experimentation with methane gases to develop alternative fuel choices-- if your going to play with poop-- it should at least be for a good cause.

• Similarly, I can't believe that their is a certain frequency that only humans under the age of 18 can hear and that they are making ring tones in these frequencies for the kids' cel phones. I believe that this is a giant conspiracy that has gone mainstream with stories on the national network newscasts. Millions and millions of kids across the globe are laughing at all the big dumb adults behind our backs. It is like a giant 21st-Century snipe hunt.

• I was looking at my niece's friend's and my sister's pierced noses yesterday and noticed something peculiar (I mean something besides the fact that my sister is 41-years old and has her nose pierced)-- their piercings were on opposite sides. I thought this might be another one of those things that I didn't know about because I was old but, because my sister too was old, this may be my opportunity to get an honest answer and I asked what was the significance of the locations. She gave me some long drawn out explanation of how a young girl of Indian descent told her that her mother told her about the meanings in ancient India and it turns out that there is no difference in the meanings of piercings on the left or right side of the nose... they both mean that you're a hussy.

Oh well. Read this. Buy T-shirts. Peace.