HOW DISAPPOINTING FOR SO MANY WOMEN

And if you went to McDonalds just for that purpose, then I guess there are other places to look.

Many try to find boy toys at bars.  Others choose grocery stores.  I've heard some frequent laundromats for that said purpose.

One of the most popular places is at a shopping mall because of the sheer numbers and possibilities.  Ballgames, golf courses, bowling alleys and churches round out the inexhaustive list.

That is absolutely all I know or care to  discuss on this topic.

Except,  I'd imagine that disappointing a woman at McDonalds would be a whole lot worse than disappointing a young boy who wanted a SpongeBob guy toy.

A FANATIC?  oH yEAH
So just what kind of guy goes to a game looking like this Mav fan?  And why?

Mr.Basketball Head went to a lot of work to achieve this special look. He had to have a lot of help with the paint, too.

But why?  Did he really need attention that badly?  After he got noticed, was that really the way he wanted people to see and or remember him?

Just how does that help the team?  Do you think they noticed him?  Would he be able to ignite crowd support?  You know, like those guys who stand up and turn around and try to get others fired up?  Don't they have cheerleaders for that?

I'm not talking about a rite of passage that fans from grade school through college go through to show support and gain attention.  But they're finding their niche.  They're having mostly good, clean fun.  The old Mav fan pictured is too old to have fun, right?  Well, at least to dress that way.

I have trouble with the NBA finals anyhow.  I grew up a St. Louis Hawks fan.  They won one championship, made one stupid, stupid trade of Bill Russell and fled to Atlanta.  Then after awhile it was the Bulls and Jordan.  I never liked that team because primarily of its location, but I never much cared for Jordan and his walking baseline move that refs allowed him to take, so our son and I chose the Bad Boy Pistons of Bill Laimbeer and Zeke Thomas to support.  Again one championship.

Then we moved to Arizona where the futile Suns tease at times but never have won a title.  Never going back to 1969 when they let them in the league.  That's a drought starting to get Cub-like in nature.

So when this season's finals began, I mostly ignored.  Five minutes is about all I watched.  LeBron Vs Cuban.  What a choice.

I suppose the lesser of two evils prevailed, but the Mavs won hands down for the dumbest looking fan. 

FNL
If SNL can stand for Saturday Night Live, then FNL can stand alone for Friday Night Lights, one of my all-time favorite tv shows.  With one of the stupidest programming schedules I have ever seen.  And they wonder why the show didn't eat up the ratings.

First, they from NBC, couldn't decide what night to show FNL.  In it's 5 seasons, it was on Friday night (duh) three times, I believe.  Once on Wednesday and once on Tuesday, if I'm not mistaken. It could be just two seasons on Friday. 

This season it didn't premier with the other shows or even the mid-season pick-ups.  It started in April.  Well, that's a creative move.  Every viewer gets pumped up about the April sweepstakes.  It must have worked great because this is the second year they've chosen that iconoclastic pattern.

Yet if you subscribed to a dish, then you could have watched it in the Fall.  Talk about divide and conquer.  It came out in DVD in March.  Divisive yet again.

I couldn't wait for the final season so I became a DVD devotee and have already seen the entire series.  It was worth the price.  Just to fast forward through commercials.  One night this boring tv week I started with our HD channels and with the exception of Paid For programs, I clicked on 25 different channels to see how many were showing commercials.  I didn't get in a hurry just to prove my point, but I allowed enough time for regular regulated commercial breaks.  Some channels included sports, too, but the final result was 15 were airing commercials: 10 were showing dramas, news, sports, comedy, something like soaps in Spanish, and re-reruns of shows in syndication.

Oh for a rabbit trail or two. 

FNL will be missed.  I spent 19 high school football seasons announcing varsity games.  I understand the draw of the games, the crowd, the marching band, the half-time shows.  It's all good stuff.  FNL brought a little of that back to me and I will greatly miss it.

Next March when it won't come out on CD.

FINALLY AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION THAT HAS PLAGUED GOLFERS FOR A LONG TIME

First, the situ.  The golfer will hit a bad shot now and then.  The worse the golfer, the more now.  If said golfer could eliminate what I call the stupid shot, his score and psyche would improve tantamount.

Somewhere along the line (probably in Scotland where they invented golf and still seem quite erudite about it) someone added the mulligan.  A great idea.  A do-over at no cost to the player.  All he does is announce something like, "Mulligan time," and drop another ball.  Brilliant.

Except even that has been stretched to include a mulligan on each 9 holes, or taking mulligans whenever one chooses.  Which reminds me of some friends I have played with that regularly take 3 or 4 foot puts for themselves, but expect me to putt two footers.  But I digress.  Somewhat.  When my wife and I play and have not had a chance to practice putt, we take a  mulligan putt on the first hole if needed.  The Q-rule, I call it.  But I digress, again.

The traditional one mulligan per round can be used as a "breakfast ball", where the golfer can hit two shots off the tee, if he is displeased with the initial drive.  In many foursomes, that is the only mulligan for the round.  Others have a breakfast ball and a floating mulligan to be used at any time during the 18-holes.

The mulligan can, and probably should save the player 2 strokes if he hits the ball out of bounds or into the water. But on occasion, a guy gets so angry at himself after looking up, for instance, that he opts to hit another ball and pocket the errant shot.

As an incentive not to use a mulligan, I have come up with the answer to the age old problem and the beauty of it is it only distorts the score by one stroke, not two. If you play a mulligan-free round, you get to subtract one stroke from your final score as a reward.

It makes perfectly good sense, it speeds up  play, and it turned my 79 into a 6-over par 78 in one of my better rounds this year the last time I played.  I already have the Q Rule so this one I'll call the Big M.

THE MAN, 1959, BASEBALL CARDS

Last night in the Republican Debate, they called it the ObamaDepression.  I made it one word on my own.  But maybe that's why I'm stuck in another long ago decade this morning.  A retreat to a safer, better time, maybe only because it's past and I got through it with relative ease.

Stan Musial was my first baseball hero.  Along with Kenny Boyer and Don Blasingame and Sad Sam Jones and Larry Jackson.  Telling me about my heroes was Harry Carey on KMOX radio, along with Buddy Blattner.

That's when baseball cards were really cards.  That is cardboard, not plastic, not like credit  cards.  Yes, the kinds kids stuck in their spokes on their bikes to make them sound louder, like the little motorcycles/mopeds that flooded the SIU campus back then.

Or maybe my nostalgia was started by a FaceBook post by a friend that generated 85 responses about stores and businesses in our home town about that time.  Of course, I added my two cents worth recalling a clothing store that wouldn't hire me as high school senior and the next door barber shop I went to for a friend's dad to chop off excess hair and to give me the just right modified Beatle cut.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or it just might have been the closing of all the city's Marie Callendar Restaurants as announced in today's paper.  No more pies for me (although it's been over one year since I tasted their superior lemon pie.)  Hey, maybe that's why they closed. At least that's going to be my argument for the next DQ Blizzard I want.

Maybe that should have been used in last evening's debate.  "Obama said he was going to outsource Dairy Queens to China.  Not if I'm elected.  We have enough P.F. Changs here already."

I AWAKENED A BUTTERFLY
Two large butterflies frequent our backyard.  One to the east and the other to the west.  They're yellow from the family Lepidoptris.  I don't know for sure, but I seem to remember that genus from Biology. 

As I was wondering where they go at night, because I've never seen one at night anywhere, and I was wondering why they don't seem to travel very far, at least not as far as some mosquitoes which can log 25 miles in a day, I woke one up.

I got so close to him before he awakened that I thought him dead.  I could have picked him up, but I remembered something about animals that don't like human touch.  That is, they will be rejected by their mothers if they smell our scent on them.  I'm not talking about dogs and cats and domestics that like our contact.  Since I didn't want rejection for the Lepidoptris, I just waited and watched.

I thought back to my high school insect collection.  I had a butterfly, but it wasn't very good.  Actually, it was one of my better ones, but none of mine were any good except my fly.  I was great at catching flies and throwing them to the ground and watching them spin around like crazy.  I'm glad butterflies don't do that.

I also thought about butterflies being free.  I rejected that notion, because of my wife, daughter, and oldest granddaughter.  If they didn't travel any farther than a butterfly, they would feel in bondage.  They need their wings to spread and grow and, well, go.  I imagine our youngest granddaughter will be more like them than the butterfly.

I also thought of moron jokes.  They were terrible jokes when I was 8 or 9.  One I recall was "Why did the moron throw the butter out of the upstairs window?"  Ans. "He wanted to see the butter fly."  That's really the only one I remember.  Now, I guess, besides being not very funny, it's probably offensive to morons everywhere.  Maybe that's why those kinds of jokes died out.

He awoke.  No more story.  He didn't seem rattled to see me occupying his space.  He didn't seem embarrassed that he had been caught napping near some lantana.  He just flew away, cool as a butterfly can flitter.  No doubt refreshed.  If he had a thought, it might have centered around what was that moron doing so close to me anyhow?