Guy Chamberlin

1974 Lincoln Basketball Championship. East vs. Northeast at Pershing. Nothing to do with the State Championship but Pershing is literally packed to the rafters, roughly 7,500 people. Incredibly close game won at the last second by East. Not sure I've been to a louder or more exciting sporting event since.

Well yeah, and they got there with some extreme canceling, including sporting events. In the meantime India and most of South America has spiked hugely. The gist from some folks is that the egghead beancounters of the University world might actually enjoy canceling sports, but I think the institutions are just freaked out about kids dying on their watch and will change their minds if the prevailing sentiment helps cover their a$$. Also: the money.

Getting back on topic: do you know how they overcame The Darkness at Pershing auditorium? They shot the spotlight on a mirrorball hanging from the ceiling. It was pretty awesome.

Would that have been the concert where a young John Cougar opened for KISS? I was at that show, which was a little different from most Pershing rock concerts. KISS had a huge following with young boys, who treated them like comic book characters. So there were tons of Moms at the show chaperoning their 12 year olds. John Cougar starts this chant that echoes throughout Pershing: "What do you say to your teachers? F*CK YOU! What do you say to your parents? F*UCK YOU! " And you could almost hear all the middle aged moms' sphincters clench.

In fairness to all parties, I don't think a canceled football season is "getting his way." Nobody wanted a global pandemic.

The NFL isn't even hedging. Other than cancelling pre-season games nobody really wanted, it's full steam ahead. The prospect of watching a football season play out on TV every Saturday and Sunday while your university and conference sits on the sideline suddenly sounds like a nightmare. You generally don't get in trouble by considering the safety of your students first, but clearly The Big 10 expected more support and less backlash. Will There Be a 2020 Football Season? is the thread that won't stop giving.

It is interesting what kind of deaths we choose to overlook, and which ones spark outrage. We're pretty inconsistent that way. American soldiers, Coast Guard and firefighters will often risk multiple lives in order to save a single life, and we generally celebrate that. 4 Americans died in Benghazi in 2012, while 951 were killed by lawnmowers. But the pandemic has proven to have a life of its own, regardless of media coverage. Remember, Japan sussed out the situation in March and promptly postponed the Olympics for a year, a decision that dwarfs college football and was unaffected by American media.

Tom Brokejaw sounds like a Canadian name. Hey, where'd he run off to, anyway?

I thought my post went out of its way to say the pandemic doesn't have to change everything. That's what the "new normal" line of thinking is about -- reconsidering the risk factors. My baseball example was meant to be optimistic. But COVID ain't nothing, either. Numbers hold steady that it's far more contagious than the flu and five times as deadly. There are a lot of deadly things out there, but this one didn't even exist a year ago. So yeah, it changes things. We just have to decide what we have the stomach for. In the early days of college football, a dozen or so players died every year, many considered it unacceptable, U.S. Presidents got involved, and major changes were made. Agree that no analogy is perfect, but to run with the drunk driving analogy; imagine knowing there are five times more drunk drivers on the road than before, and you're driving somebody else's kids to a game in order to make money for yourself. You would take every extra precaution possible, but you'd also know that any death on your watch would weigh more heavily than a random twist of fate.

Or..........not! That's what makes this thread a thing of beauty.

Ryan Reynolds? Nickelback? Get off my lawn, millennial!

It now appears that a COVID outbreak doesn't necessitate a cancelation of anything. MLB has players testing positive, quarantining for 8 - 10 days, then rejoining the roster as they would with injuries and other illnesses. It was a story early when the Marlins and Cardinals had some widespread positive tests, but it no longer seems to be news. The games go on, the competition seems legit, the stats and standings count, and TV gets some ratings and ad revenue. I think we're looking at this as the new normal for at least a year. On that particular week in those particular circumstances, the Big 10 made a perfectly defensible decision. But like everyone else navigating this s#!t, they should be open to reconsideration. The wild card, of course, is death. If a young person who tests positive shows no symptoms or mild symptoms, life goes on in the new normal. If there's a single death or even lasting organ damage, people might not have the stomach for this.

I see you trying to be that better person you promised, but I already miss the old you. If Step Brothers has taught us anything, it's that you gotta be true to yourself:

Yes.

They would come from the massive block of non-voters or disgruntled Republican who have grown increasingly worried about the Democrats' radical leftist agenda. For some reason you omitted the voter who voted for Trump in 2016, who is thinking about not voting at all, but might similarly be swayed by the fear-mongering around a leftwing putsch. So far the lawless Democrat playbook has been working, and Hillary Clinton declaring the Democrats shouldn't concede (correct as it may be) is free candy. Your premise is also a tad janky: it's like saying one fumble isn't the reason Nebraska lost to Purdue. But it's still a bad play.

Wings? Every Democrat I know voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Almost every Democrat I know thinks she was treated unfairly, and most think misogyny played into it. But no Democrat I know wanted Hillary to run again, and everyone I've spoken to gets nervous when she becomes the face of the Democratic Party again. Not sure the correct proportion this needs to be blown, but there's already a lot of vigilance, activism, and publicity around fairness and fraud in the upcoming election, advanced by a variety of able people and organizations. Having Hillary Clinton speculating on a worst case scenario that hasn't happened yet pushes a couple buttons that are actually counter-productive.

Not to belabor the point, but I contend that literally anything Hillary says hurts Biden, and not only do people care, the GOP is actually thrilled to unleash this Clinton Resistance meme to their base, and Democrats are wildly conflicted about what to do with this particular party stalwart. Correct.

Gotta agree. Even people who didn't like Trump used Hillary as an excuse to vote for him. Fairness and rationality having little to do with it. Inserting Hillary into Joe Biden's campaign, with even a hint the Democrats wouldn't concede, is a gift to the GOP, who would love to run against Hillary every year for perpetuity.

She is definitely more threatened by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than she is Donald Trump.

I had an online argument with an old Nebraska buddy. His source was a guy on Facebook. Mine was FactCheck.org. He said the guy on Facebook told him not to believe FactCheck.org. And there we were. Two sides of the argument.

This thread started out horribly, but is really picking up steam.

And tiny crab lice.

Because virtually 100% of our arguments are based on the sources that agree with us, and we constantly use them to prove our point. There's a misperception that Brietbart, OAN, Ben Shapiro, Newsmax, InfoWars and other even tinier rightwing news sources are the equivalent of the leftwing's Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, Politico and Slate. But they're not. They're the equivalent of the bipolar leftist shouting on a street corner in Berkeley. Mainstream media shows a liberal bias by what it choses to cover, highlight, and omit. Rightwing media is just making s#!t up at this point.

Hey, you just said everything I was going to say. Thanks.

Okay. Back to the original post. Uhm....