Why the NFL's Ratings Are Declining

There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on because the NFL’s TV ratings are declining. Some want to blame it on that 2^nd string QB (maybe 1^st string this week, who can tell?) who won’t stand for the national anthem, but while I think that turned a few people off, I think it was just one piece of the puzzle—one more straw, if you will—in an overall picture of decline.

Why is it happening?

Could it be that the NFL did this to themselves?

Well, not them alone. Part of it’s our culture, and I’m not just referring to the fact that the NFL now has to compete with so many other offerings (movies, other sports, etc.).

Walk yourself through the last football game you watched. What did you do when it went to commercial break? If you’re like most people, you went either to the kitchen or the bathroom. (Maybe not on the first commercial break, but for later ones.)

There was a time, when there weren’t quite so many commercial breaks. During a change of possession, for instance, rather than going to a commercial break, we might hear the announcers talk about … whatever it is that announcers talk about, but presumably it was something about the game or its players that made us want to listen. Except during the Super Bowl, no one wants to watch the commercials, so we leave the room to either go take care of important matters or just because we’ve been conditioned to get up when the commercial starts.

But now, they’ve added commercials where they didn’t used to have them (or didn’t used to have so many of them). We get a commercial break during every change of possession, time out, injury on the field or—it seems—every time someone falls to the ground.

As proud Americans, we have trained ourselves to zone out through most commercials so … see what’s happening here? The NFL has trained us to zone out more often and then seems surprised when we don’t come back.

Really, I think that’s the crux of what has happened with the NFL: they trained us to step away and then it occurred to us over time that if we could leave that easily there wasn’t really a strong reason to return.

So we went to the restroom or the kitchen or just another channel and eventually we stayed there. Combine this with the cost of the tickets to see the game live, the poor quality of officiating (leading to the perception that the “sport” is no more real than professional wrestling), the spectacle of someone who makes 10x what most of us will make in a lifetime for one season of playing a game complaining about some injustice and the surprise to me isn’t that the NFL’s ratings are declining these days but wonder that it didn’t happen sooner.

Why Didn't God Save that Guy?!?! He COULD Have You Know. Blah blah blah

The truck just fell out of the sky and crushed that man. One minute, he’s walking along, no thoughts to his imminent demise, the next he’s a body on the way to the morgue.

I don’t know what kind of guy he was. Maybe he was a wonderful, church-going, wife-loving, kid-hugging saint. Maybe he was a jerk. The kind of guy you want to drop a truck on. Maybe he was somewhere in the middle.

For the sake of this blog, here’s the question: why didn’t God stop that truck?

I’m not here to debate predestination, free will, or anything like that. I’m just thinking of the time when I was asked, along with an elder in the church where I served as minister, to pray over a woman who had cancer. She’d already been diagnosed with it and it was bad. She was to see the oncologist the next day and find out how much time she had left, presumed to be something along the lines of “a few weeks”. So we anointed her head with oil, prayed over her, and the next day she went to the doctor and the doctor couldn’t find any sign of cancer. Not a one. The woman lived several more years.

I can think of another time when the story is almost identical but the believer in question went to the doc the next day and found that their cancer had spread. A week later, they were in a coma and a week after that they were dead. Maybe a month later. I don’t remember exactly, I just remember that—in spite of the whole church family gathering at the church building and holding a prayer vigil, the beloved believer died.

Someone might say the first person had more faith, or that the second one didn’t really believe. What about the people who laid on hands? Were that elder and I somehow more pure than the elders and I from the second story? Not that I could tell.

This question has caused a lot of people to abandon their faith: why didn’t God ___________ ? [fill in the blank] “Heal my son?” “Get my cousin out of that war?” “Stop [fill in another blank]?”

I’ve asked this question myself. Sometimes about people I have known, and sometimes just about that stranger I heard about on the news who had a truck fall on him. Why didn’t God stop it? He could have, right? So why didn’t he?

Besides not knowing the whole picture (to say that God is working even when the circumstances seem evil to us is true, but it doesn’t ameliorate the fact that what happened was still just flat-out evil). Why didn’t God stop it?!?!

OK, I said earlier this wasn’t going to be about free will, but I guess now it is, because the question that keeps coming up in my mind is, “How much could God do about this situation and still leave us with free will?” [If you don’t believe in free will, you might as well stop reading now because I take both free-will and predestination as givens.]

Here’s what I mean: a lot of factors went into that truck falling on that guy. The man’s choice to be walking down that sidewalk at that moment, for instance. The truck-driver’s choices—which may have included such things as texting while driving, drinking while driving, driving while upset, a surprise flat tire, etc.

So, saving that guy from that truck is more than just God catching the truck like Superman and depositing it somewhere else; it’s negating a lot of choices that free-willed people make/made. Even if we take the case of, say, a five year old girl with an incurable disease, why doesn’t God heal her? Sometimes he does! but not every time, right? Why not?

I don’t have a complete answer for that, maybe not even a partial one, but I’m still back to my question of, “How much can God do in these situations and still leave us with free will?” So God heals the little girl today, praise God!, does that mean she will never die? Does God also step in and protect her from cancer 30 years hence and heart disease 40 years after that?

“But I’m not asking for that! I know we all gotta go sometime, but why can’t my grandma just have five more years now? Five good years, I mean. Not five sucky years in the care home. Why can’t grandma have five—even four! more good years?”

Maybe my heart’s in the right place when I ask for healing for that little girl. Good motives and all that. Except that maybe, way deep down inside, the real issue is not just that I don’t want to let her go. I’m praying that she’ll get better because I don’t want to lose her. Maybe I’m even throwing in, “And God, heal all these other kids in the children’s wing, too,” so I’ll look magnanimous and pious, but deep down inside I may not really care about them. I may not even care about her as much as I care about getting things my way.

I’m not saying this is unnatural, or that praying for our children’s health is unrighteous. I’m just saying that we’re looking at one tiny piece of a million-piece puzzle and thinking we are qualified to tell the puzzle-maker what it all looks like. Maybe we’re even trying to tell the puzzle-maker what it should have looked like.

Death of the Newspaper

Newspapers are going away.

I don't think that's news to anyone. If you live in a big city, like Dallas or Denver, you've watched in the last couple decades as the number of major city newspapers was cut in half. Some places, the newspapers have gone from 50 pages to 32.

Silverton, CO ... they probably had a lot of newspapers, too.

And admit it: if you're reading this blog you may not even know anyone who still subscribes to a newspaper. The young people view them as a quaint, old-people's thing. The middle-aged people see them as still a nice thing, but not necessarily something to subscribe to. That leaves the elderly, who are still the newspaper's most reliable source of income. (Sad news, though: the elderly are dying off for some reason [we need a government study on this]).

What happened?

The obvious and easy answer is the internet. This is true, but it's only part of the problem, in part because finding local news is not always easy on-line. You can find out what mud a Kardashian is currently rolling in with two flicks of the thumb on your smart phone, but finding out whether the local city council voted to outlaw gypsies last night is going to take some digging. The newspaper is still the best place to find out the details of the local haps, but most people in our world are content with either a] not really caring about the local haps (most popular answer) or 2] (less popular but still more popular than the newspaper) finding out about the local affairs by having the TV news on while they order take-out.

It didn't used to be this way. I remember reading about the little gold-mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado--it's little now, anyway. Back when it was a booming mining town of 10,000 residents, it had ten different newspapers! The New York Times and the New York Post still wage something of a war, but the only people who care about it are the employees of the New York Times and, occasionally, the New York Post.

Now, instead of getting their misinformation from the NYT, most people would prefer to get their information from whatever squirrel writes the news for the internet or, barring that, just skip the news entirely and play Pokémon Go! (is that still a thing?) or watch reruns of "Game of Thrones Porn" on their phone while telling their friends at church they only watch it for the storytelling.

Is there a way to get back to those old days, when newspapers mattered? Short of the kind of disaster I champion in my novel series "The Last Valley" (buy it in paperback or for Kindle or Nook by clicking here), I don't think so. For one thing, go to a museum (check your GPS to find the one nearest you) and check out old newspapers. You know what they had in them?

News!

Back in the day when Cripple Creek could support ten newspapers, all ten of them were either one broad sheet of paper, or maybe one broader sheet of paper folded once to make a four-page newspaper. Almost no pictures (sometimes none at all), very little advertising, just news. Column after column of tightly written, sometimes sensational, news and commentary. They still had the baseball scores and recipes, but what they didn't have was three pages taken up completely with an advertisement for a dress shop. Once they started running pictures, the pictures were part of the story, not just a hook that replaces the story.

I don't think our world could go back to that. We don't have the desire or aptitude to read the kind of long articles they wrote back then (with long paragraphs and long sentences to boot). We have short attention spans (most people bailed on this blog long ago) and want quotes that could appear in Reader's Digest because they're both pithy and short (as opposed to succinct, which is really different entirely).

Addendum: I thought about adding something along the lines of how most newspapers (especially those with "Globe-News" or "Avalanche-Journal" in their title), if you submit something to them like, oh, I don't know, a comic strip, won't even bother to write back. No, "Thanks but no thanks", even. I realize they're busy drowning in debt, but maybe if they had a little more courtesy toward their public it would help their relationship to the public?

10,000 Years

I love the song "Amazing Grace". One of the most beautiful songs ever written, and a wonderful encapsulation of the gospel message.


I thought I should say that first before I mention that the last verse bugs me.


"When we've been there ten thousand years ... "


This is poetry, so maybe that's poetic license. It probably is.


But here's what bugs me: there is no night-time in heaven, so there is only one day. Therefore, there is only one year ... for all the rest of eternity.


I get what he's saying. That eternity won't be long enough to get all the praising of God done that we'll want to do, or need to do.


Maybe the poem needed something and "One really long year for all eternity" didn't fit the meter.


On the other hand, depending on your view of the end, years may be counted in heaven for at least the first thousand, so maybe this is a referent saying that ten times the earthly reign of Christ will not be sufficient time to get all the praising done.


Just something I was thinking about in church while we were singing another song.

Political Debates as Kabuki Theater

Watching the political debates, what little I could stomach, anyway, made me think about what I knew was coming:


-- Everyone who already supported him was going to say he won.


-- Everyone who already supported her would say she won.


-- Almost no minds would be changed.


-- The media would spin it the way they were going to spin it no matter what happened within the debate itself.


It's interesting to be a Tuesday morning reader of this stuff, especially to read comments or headlines like, "Trump unquestionably won" or "Clinton the undeniable victor" ... sometimes on the same front page of the same newspaper (do they still print those) or web site.


Not like sports.


We may argue that the referee blew the call and the ball was definitely in the air before the buzzer, or that the umpire should have called that ball a homerun, but the outcome is what it is. This team won and that team lost.


In the real sports, I mean, not those genned-up, fake ones, like pro wrestling or the NFL.


Somewhere, there is probably someone who has created a metric that tells who won a debate, but it hasn't caught on, and probably won't. Our debates aren't even debates. Whoever you thought won the most recent presidential debate (and I'm thinking it was probably Jill Stein, for getting kicked off campus before it even started), neither one of the participants would have even qualified for a high F in a debate class.


It's theatre. It's Show. It's a chance to pretend that the candidates are knowledgeable, acceptable potential leaders of the country. It's a chance for the media to act like they care about both sides of the issue(s).


It is, in this most recent case, anyway, a ratings bonanza.

Glasses

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." ~Dorothy Parker


"My grandmother lived to be ninety-five and never needed glasses. She always just drank right out of the bottle." ~unknown


I am fifty years old now and wearing my first pair of glasses. I don't know that it makes me feel old (everything is doing that!) but it is making the world seem like a moonscape. The ground is too close and has rolls in it, the table tops are trapezoid shaped and leaning away from me, and peripheral is a fun-house mirror.


But it's not as bad today as it was yesterday. Even as I look to this computer screen, I am seeing the letters better than I was yesterday. I have no-line bi-focals and there is supposed to be a range in the middle of the glasses for looking at computer screens. Yesterday, it seemed like it was about half a pixel wide, but today I can actually see the screen pretty well. Yesterday, reading was difficult as well because the "sweet spot for reading" was at the bottom of the frame. Way at the bottom. Like one line of text at a time, just above the rims, bottom of the frame. It's still not great, but already it's getting better.


The glasses haven't changed. And, honestly, the glasses work best when I don't try to find that sweet spot. See, if I stop thinking about it, I realize my head tilts to just the right angle for best visibility through the lenses. If I think about it, though, then I start tilting my head like a bobblehead, trying to find the exact right spot where things become clear.


And then the sweet spot seems to get smaller.


If there's a meta-message here that applies to something beyond glasses, I'm not sure what it is. Probably something about "trust".


But not blind trust, because that that would counteract the glasses.

Why "Home Improvement" is the 5th-greatest show of all time

There are pop-up ads—I’m sure you’ve seen them—that get your attention just because they purport to show or tell something outlandish. I got sucked into one of those recently about “Worst TV Shows of the 1990’s” because the show it used for its click-bait picture was “Home Improvement”. This got my attention because, of course, “Home Improvement” was not only the best show of the 1990s, it was the 5th best show of all time.

The great thing about the internet, like “the good thing about toe fungus”, is that we can throw these things out there without fear of repercussions, mostly because no one ever reads my blog, anyway. There are so many other blogs, articles and—of course—porn, out there, why would they stop off here to read what a used-to-be-minister and former-writer thinks about … anything?

Another click-bait article (can’t remember what the attracting picture might have been) was a nonsensical article from the wonderful folks at the “Crawfish Boxes” (a web site dedicated to articles about the Houston Astros) about how the Astros are actually better than the Texas Rangers. After beginning with a premise better suited to The Onion, the author went on to detail how, position-by-position, the Astros were actually better than the Rangers. An innocent reader could be forgiven for thinking the writer had any idea what he was talking about, but only if they could prove conclusively that they were completely oblivious to the fact that the Rangers regularly beat the Astros like the proverbial rented mule. As of this writing, the Rangers have won 9 of the 10 games played against their cross-state “rivals”.

The purpose/dream of all such articles, though, is that such outlandish or inflammatory headlines will attract readers. Why we want them I’ve forgotten, but most bloggers do. So, anyway, here’s my list of greatest TV shows ever and why whoever put “Home Improvement” on a worst list is—probably nice as can be and uber-intelligent in all other matters—wrong.

1.       The Andy Griffith Show There is, of course, no disputing this assertion. Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Sheldon Leonard, et. al. created television’s perfect show. From the opening theme music (admit it: you’re whistling it now), we are taken back to a perfect time that never was. Even though some argue that the show was somewhat inferior after Don Knotts left (they’re right), it was the number one rated show during its final season, so even a “weak” Andy Griffith is better than anything else on TV.

2.       The Dick Van Dyke Show Almost as perfect, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and (notice a pattern here?) Sheldon Leonard created another great show. It’s funny, it’s quotable, and what red-blooded American male isn’t in love with Laura Petrie? Richie Petrie gets a bad rap sometimes as not being a good actor, but I think the reality is that he’s always held up against Ron Howard, which is like being compared to Babe Ruth on the ball diamond.

3.       Maverick At a time when there were 31 other westerns on TV, Roy Huggins presented a new kind of western with James Garner (then, soon after, Jack Kelly) that soon rose to the top of the ratings—ahead of all those other westerns, as well as every other genre. Every episode is like watching a big screen movie with the excellent scripts and top-notch acting. Some have said that every anti-hero who followed—in the movies or on TV—owes a debt of gratitude to Garner’s roguish gambler who, when all else failed, could be counted on to do what was right (and get the girl).

4.       The Rockford Files Garner and Huggins struck again (though Huggins didn’t stay with it very long) in creating the best P.I. show of all time. Rockford was as quick with his wits as with his fists and was as likely to solve the case through guile as through wits. And it’s been written elsewhere (not by me, but the premise is correct) that the episode “The House on Willis Avenue” may have been the best episode ever written for television due to it’s incredible prediction of the shape of things to come, especially the crime of identity theft. (Go watch it and remember: this was made in 1977 before even Al Gore had heard of the internet.)

5.       Home Improvement Based loosely on Tim Allen’s stand-up routines about the emasculating of the modern male, HI provided eight years of hilarity. But go back and watch them if you haven’t seen them in a while and you may be surprised to find that they also found ways to deal with subjects like menopause, mid-life crises, hospice and what to do when you accidentally glue your head to a table. HI is a great, funny show, it just wasn't able to topple the four listed above (an impossible task, when you think about it).

While there have been other shows produced for television, of varying degrees of value, those five are the best the medium has ever produced. If I had to list the next 15 best shows (and why not, it’s my blog), I might say (and might change tomorrow, only the top 5 never change): 6. Grizzly Adams; 7. The Waltons; 8. Star Trek (TOS); 9. Seinfeld; 10. Lois & Clark; 11. Chuck; 12. Blue Bloods; 13. JAG; 14. Gunsmoke; 15. Gilligan’s Island; 16. The Simpsons; 17. Matlock; 18. 6 Million Dollar Man; 19. Get Smart; 20. Coach.