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The Fragile Legs of the National Football League
Ask a sports reporter about the future of the NFL (such as the way Peter Robinson asked Andrew Beaton of The Wall Street Journal on this week’s Ricochet Podcast) and one usually gets a recitation of the latest Nielsen ratings. Yes, football dominates today’s airwaves. But that is like complimenting a paint job on an old home where the timbers in the basement are a rotting mess of leaking water and a banquet for termites. The old place has charm – but for how long?
If you don’t like the building metaphor and wish to stick with sports, the National Football League is a thoroughbred racehorse, beautiful, sleek, and very powerful and yet dependent on very fragile legs that are sometimes asked to bear up to ten times the pressure of the horse’s weight. A slight bump, an entanglement with another animal, a sharper than anticipated turn and it collapses into a fall that is over 80% fatal.
As Peter noted in the podcast, more and more parents are saying “no” to the sport. Participation in youth leagues has been steadily declining, losing almost 40% of its participants since 2008. This has led to a decline in the high school game as well, but with the reductive nature of sports (most kids bail on organized sports by the time they turn 15) it’s off a more modest 3%.
We all have at least one Christmas song we truly despise. Some can’t stand “I Saw Momma Kissing Santa Claus” for bringing hints of adultery into the Yuletide Season. Others hate “Last Christmas” because it really makes no sense. (This year the protagonist is giving his or her heart to someone special? Surely this person thought last year’s heart recipient was special as well at the time.) I’ve never understood the hate for “Wonderful Christmastime” but surely anyone who had anything to do with the creation of “The Christmas Shoes” should only receive stocking coal for a lifetime.
Set aside the revulsion or shock over what Weinstein did. Set aside too the anger over the hypocrisy of those who knew of what he did and let him get away with it anyway. Instead, spare a thought for those whom Weinstein damaged without ever meeting them. I speak of the very youth of America who will ultimately bear the brunt of the punishment for the fools and power brokers who ever have covered for the creeps among the powerful.
First, kudos to you if you caught the reference to one of the great Halloween movies. Second, let’s talk about the latest installment of PC insanity now happening at Wisconsin high schools across the state.
If you have kids and plan for them to step from high school straight into college without any work experience, take a seat: I’m about to disabuse you of that idea. I’ve got three kids, two already through college, so I have done this before. We finally figured it out with the last kid. Allow me to give you the new strategy, because we are bucking the trend.
John Ratzenberger was one of the first people I met on my first day in show business. For those of you under, say, 40, he played Cliff Clavin, the talkative fantasist letter carrier on 
As I end my month-long internship, I’m looking back on all the opportunities I had to write for Ricochet and to learn about running a website. My first task was to help create a Ricochet style guide. Before I had started this internship, I had no idea what a style guide was but, with the help of one of the editors at Ricochet, I learned fairly quickly. The process taught me various grammatical rules and even what should and shouldn’t be capitalized to make Ricochet consistent and aesthetically pleasing.