Tag: Sports

The hotel bar is showing local sports

The hotel bar is showing local sports

I travel a great deal for my job. It is not unusual for me to be in a hotel 1-3 days a week. I don’t enjoy the travel, but it is part of my life and my employement so I tolerate the effort and inconvenience.

With that travel schedule, I am frequently having a late dinner in the hotel bar. Invariably, I am accompanied  by salespeople and business travelers from all over the US. We are sitting in the hotel bar, having a drink, and trying to find something decent on the menu for dinner. We don’t really want to sit in our underwear in our room with room service.

In almost all cases, the hotel bar television is playing a game.  That game is a NBA basketball game, a NHL hockey game, or a MLB baseball game. The kicker is that 90% of the time, the game is the local team. It is rarely the best game for the evening, but rather the local team regardless of the sport.

The problem with this is that no one in the hotel bar is from that city. If we were from that city, we wouldn’t be at the hotel, and we definitely would not be at the high-priced and poorly stocked hotel bar. Why in the world would we want to watch the local team?

My advice to the management of the hotels and their included hotel bar across the US, turn your TV to the best game that night. Most of the patrons are too bored to encourage you to change the channel, but we all wish that you would. We can survive if our favorite team is not on the TV, because we know that there are others in the hotel bar you need to accomodate. We just don’t want to watch the local team because we simply are not local.

If the bartender wants to watch the local team, he should ask off of work for that evening!

Giving a finger to socialized medicine

Giving a finger to socialized medicine

So it seems that the discussion of medical care and national coverage has become so contentious that a physical fight broke out resulting in one person biting the finger off of another individual. Bill Rice was probably not acting as a model citizen but I doubt if he deserved to lose a finger!

This sounds like a replay of a bad Michael Tyson fight!

iraq_vote_purple_finger When we see images of the two most recent democracies of the world (Afghanistan and Iraq) we often see the image of a purple finger identifying a recent voter. Now in the United States we will be showing the lack of a finger to depict our political process.

Why can’t we just have a civil discussion of the issues and concerns? Is violence really necessary?

 

 

 

 

Don’t let Vick back into the NFL until Pete Rose can play baseball

Don’t let Vick back into the NFL until Pete Rose can play baseball

Michael Vick was released from prison today to continue his sentence in house arrest.  I know that there is a lot of desire to say that he has paid his price for his mistake and therefore should be allowed to play in the NFL.

I sympathize that a man or woman should be able to move on after they have paid for their mistakes. However, sports should be held to a different level of integrity.  We should not allow Michael Vick to play professional sports until Pete Rose is allowed to play baseball again.

As I discussed several times, we need to hold athletes to a standard that at least is equivalent to everyday life and they probably should be held higher due to their incomes. Check out the following articles:

RANT! Drugs and bad conduct in professional sports

RANT! Drugs and bad conduct in professional sports (again)

Professional athletes and entertainers need to wake up to their responsibilities and stature.  Don’t let Vick play football and if he does – boycott his games.

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