Who listens to bloated aging Baby Boomers who took all the jobs and made all the rules so that Gen X’ers could never get ahead in the marketplace anyway?

Posted: Saturday, May 29, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Baby Boomers, Generation X | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Mike Francesa is basically the king of sports talk radio in the New York City area, which, by definition if you live in ego-centric New York City or its environs (within 100 miles), makes him the king of sports talk radio.

Based on reports, Mike Francesa, age 56, ripped into one of the leading Mets bloggers, first by insulting his hygiene (this from a man, whom I’ve seen in person, who could generously stand to lose a few pounds). Still, that sort of classlessness is de rigueur for talk radio, particularly sports talk radio, and is sadly endemic to our society. So I’m not going to debate its appropriateness, or complete lack thereof.

No, Francesa added to his talk: “who reads blogs anyway?”

Well, Mike, plenty of Gen X’ers do, particularly those who write them and who couldn’t land jobs in traditional media (or get promoted or get new ones at bigger papers) because of bloated, egotistical, aging Baby Boomers like you who sucked up all the jobs, then changed the rules and qualifications for entry level and mid-level promotions, which might have been fine except that those rules never applied to you, Boomers, in middle and upper management and in the even-slightly-higher profile jobs.

No, asshats like you have made a career out of “do as I say, not as I do,” while fucking over the economy to fatten your wallets and bellies, and then had the temerity to cry about your retirements drying up in a poor economy that you created. Yeah, Mike, I read blogs. I write for two of them. So do a lot of Gen X’ers who got shut out of your fucking industry and others because of your bloated, whirlpool-sucking presence.

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Social media, sports and politics

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Politics, Sports | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The Democrats took for granted two aspects of American life in 2010 for granted this week — sports and social media.

As I wrote 11 months ago, beyond President Obama, the Democrats have a short bench — no up-and-comers that can excite The Base and also offer anything appealing to Independents, no Rock Stars.

But, as the results of last week’s Senate election in Massachusetts showed us, most of them are also living in an old world of campaigning. Meanwhile, conservative Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers alike used Social Media to their full advantage in resoundingly beating the Democratic candidate in perhaps the most Democratic state in the union.

True, there’s only so much you can do against the forces of the more-Patriotic-than-thou bullies that have shouted their way to the top of the news hour since the day after President Obama took office a year ago.

But we’ve also seen centrist voters coming to their side since the summer. And actually, they’ve been slowly losing this battle since Nixon’s Silent Majority and Lee Atwater’s gutter-bottom tactics in 1988. While President Clinton brought in the blue-collar voters in 1992 and 1996, it’s been hard to bring these voters back since. As Jon Stewart noted, it sure didn’t happen this week, especially if you didn’t know what team Curt Schilling played for in your home state.

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Youth sports and the bliss of limitless potential

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Sports | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Speaking of new cabinet names and posts, the president-elect ought to run and hire Donna Lopiano as Secretary of Youth Sports or some sort of Youth Sports Czar. In a speech in August at the Chautauqua Institution (it was rebroadcast the other day on the local public radio station),  the good doctor related the connection between success, health, and sports for all children as Title IX hit its 36th anniversary.

Lopiano makes the case for youth sports as a healthy lifestyle booster, which, along with our views here on smart, natural farming and food-making, sounds good to us. But despite the gains of Title IX, the lifestyles of today’s youth — encouraged by their parents — are leading them to an unhealthier way of life, with too much TV and computer time and not enough exercise. The result is a sedentary existence that, Lopiano predicts, will lead today’s generation of younger children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents and “if we continue with two out of three kids not getting even the most minimal physical activity, then one out of every three children born in the Year 2000 is going to be a type-2 diabetic. And economically, we cannot afford to deal with that kind of a health statistic.”

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You can take our Wiffle Ball, but you can’t take our Freedom

Posted: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Baseball | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

With apologies to Defiantly Dutch, who would assuredly disagree (thanks for the plug, Double D), what the hell is wrong with Connecticut these days? Earlier this summer you had some overly aggressive moneyed homeowners in Greenwich trying to shut down Wiffle ball-playing teens and kick them back into the Great Indoors where they apparently belong.

Now we’ve got a youth baseball league in New Haven booting a 9-year-old pitcher and probably his entire team because he’s too good a hurler.

After reading about these back-to-back fiascoes, I have to ask, why doesn’t Massachusetts annex the Northwest Corner and add it to the Berkshires and let tiny Rhode Island have everything else from this crazy state? (In a battle of disgraced politicians, I’ll take Providence’s Buddy Cianci over former Connecticut Gov. Rowland.)

Let’s see, here are some things that Connecticut cursed us with: the Hartford Whalers, Joe Lieberman, Carl Pavano, Benedict Arnold, and the movie Mystic Pizza.

Good things to come out of the Nutmeg State? (nicknamed after something you put in your apple cider, I might add.) You have Katharine Hepburn, no arguing that. I’m OK with Meg Ryan, too. Wiffle Ball itself was alleged to have been invented in Fairfield. And then, … um, the Danbury Mall was pretty cool for a week in, like, 1987 (this once was the site of an even cooler fairgrounds). That’s about it.

And, no, I didn’t forget the worst offender in Connecticut’s lineage — no, not the various other corrupt elected officials from the self-named Constitution State. It’s that all-consuming monolithic sports Galactus in Bristol.

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