The Daily Dose/April 4, 2024
By Gaylon Kent – America’s Funniest Guy™
Leading Off
Notes from around the human experience.
OH HELL, HE’S ON HIS HIGH HORSE AGAIN: One of History’s most relentless lessons is that times change. Usually, this is good. You want to change, you want to advance, you want to be better than you were before. One change hit us over the head recently, after gnawing at us for a while:
More and more, pictures of athletes are of reactions and not the plays that caused those reactions.
Dry, Technical Matter: Think about it: how many times nowadays do you see a picture of an athlete with knees bent, fists clenched, and mouths wide open? A lot. Take a look the next time you’re reading a sports page or a website: you will see more pics of athletes reacting to something than of the plays that caused those reactions.
Here It Comes: This is hardly a surprise, though, as we Americans increasingly prefer the superficial to the substantive. All the proof we need is that Donald Trump – a man of no political, moral, or intellectual substance – is now taken seriously.
Incoming!!!: Where we once appreciated photos of athletes doing things, now we are content with pics of fist pumps, postsuring, and witless, probably exaggerated emotions. All we want to see now are the rewards; we can’t be bothered with the work it took to earn them. A once substantive people – a people that once put men on the moon – has devolved into a country where two-thirds of us are fat and spend about 15 years of a 78-year life watching television.
The Bottom Line: America has lost her way. Collectively we are fat, dumb, and happy, content to be entertained, and accepting what our preferred vendors choose to spoonfeed us. This has led to a partisan, fractured, and bickering citizenry being led by a partisan, fractured, and bickering government. This is not sustainable, friends, and there will come a time when we will no longer be able to govern ourselves. When that happens, someone will come in and do it for us.
Today At The Site
Writing worth reading. Usually.
The Diary of a Nobody – Over lunch, Sparrow talks about an ancestor who was in service to a queen. Today’s Diary.
…if he was a typical Sparrow male he was probably always looking to knock off early, made passes at the married women at court, and probably ended up getting beheaded.
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On This Date
Extra, extra, read all about it.
In 1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. King was leaning over the railing outside of room 306, talking to the Rev Jesse Jackson, when shots were fired from across the street. James Earl Ray, would be arrested in London in June, extradited to the US, and would later plead guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison, where he died in 1998.
In 1981 – The Philadelphia Flyers establish a new NHL record for most penalty minutes in a season following a 7-1 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Flyers finished with 2,261 minutes, breaking the record of 1,980 they had established in the 1975-76 season. Pittsburgh broke the record in 1988-89, and the mark is now held by Buffalo, which had 2,713 penalty minutes in 1991-92. The Flyers mark is now good for fifth on the all-time list.
In 2020 – The Weeknd is at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the first of four non-consecutive weeks with Blinding Lights, his fifth of seven #1 songs. The song went to #1 in over 40 other countries – including Bolivia, Norway, and Great Britain – was in its first of eleven non-consecutive weeks at #1 on Billboard’s soul chart, and was Billboard’s #1 song of 2020 and it’s 3rd-biggest song of 2021. The song established a still-standing record for most weeks in the Top 10 (57) and its record of 90 weeks on the Hot 100 was broken in 2022.
Some Philosophy Crap
The wisdom of the ages. Whatever.
More likely he had died as he had lived – without ever learning who he really was.
Alex Haley
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
Knowledge is power.
The US officer who surrendered US and Filipino forces to the Japanese at Bataan was US Army Major General Edward P King.
Today’s Stumper
Match wits with Gaylon. It’s not that hard.
What song holds the Hot 100 record for most weeks on the chart? – Answer next time!
