Weekend Wrap-up 11-19-2006

"TomKat" wedding
I wish I could find the poll regarding how long the viewers or readers thought that "TomKat's" (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, in case you didn't already know) marriage would last but I found it very insteresting. I forgot what the other two options were (I think it was "Less than a year" and "More than a year"), but the one option that caught my eye was "Who cares?", which got 73%. I wholly agree with the majority: Who cares? I've lost all respect for the man, and I wouldn't have even brought up Tom here, but the poll's results were just too good to not have at least a brief mention, and now that mention has passed.

Democrats again
I've had at least a couple of people ask me just what it is that I expect the Democratic Party to do, seeing as how I complain so much about them on my blog. I gave that some thought, and perhaps the mistake here is having expectations at all. The Dems are a political party, and "the nature of the beast" for political parties is to get elected - and usually by whatever means works at the time. So is it wrong to expect the Dems to do only what political parties generally do? I don't know - maybe so.

The GOP certainly operates by the same principle as well. For instance, the GOP claims to the the "prolife party", and yet, more often than not, their efforts in the prolife cause fall short of expectations (there's that word again). What this means is that the GOP is the "prolife party" largely because the Dems are the "prochoice party", and not much else. Basically, each party strives to be what the other party is not - one is "pro-" this and the other is "anti-" that. This makes the Dems and the GOP essentially two sides of the same coin. This is not the stuff that inspires people to believe in their leaders.

However, this topic deserves a more thorough discuss of what I expect from the Dems and why I feel that they have fallen short. I'll give this more thought and post here probably later this week. If you have other thoughts on this, let me know.

Sports
I haven't discussed sports on my blog in a long time, so let's take care of that today, shall we? :-)

College football is starting to get down to its final weeks, and once again, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) does everything to rob the postseason of its potential drama, especially when compared to the postseason structure of the college basketball postseason. In college basketball, a selection of 65 teams is picked into brackets, and they all play each other until there is a final two to compete for the championship. This format allows a team to see how far they can go riding soley on their heart and their guts.

In other words, the little team from Slackjaw, Mississippi has just as much of a chance of being the national champion as the big team from Georgetown (usually a basketball powerhouse) provided that they make it to the "Big Dance". Keeping up with little Slackjaw U. to see how high up the bracket it goes is part of the familiar American underdog story. We love the underdog story. When Slackjaw U. beats Georgetown, we just love it to death. We'll put the Slackjaw team on the Today Show, the Tonight Show, and perhaps even make a movie of the week of their story. They might even make a visit to the White House, and we'll follow their victory tour the whole way.

The football postseason set-up, however, favors the big schools with the power and money, and politics totally slants in favor of those schools. In other words, the football team from Slackjaw U. will never get the chance to be the national champion, because it doesn't belong to a "BCS conference", which is an arrangement guaranteed to favor the big schools against the little schools.

In fact, since some of you asked me about what I consider the difference between the Democrats and the GOP, then these two types of postseason formats does it pretty well: The March Madness format is a Democrat style, in which anyone can go the distance provided that they keep winning, and the BCS format is a GOP style, in which only those that are in the "in" (that is, the BCS) conferences have the chance to go the distance - everyone else has virtually no chance unless an extraordinary and highly unlikely set of circumstances somehow puts them there. And to date, no team other than a BCS conference team has been in the national championship in the entire time that the BCS format has been in place.

That's it for now, folks. Have a great week!