Things that should vanish: UConn football, poverty and Kate Smith
It’s time for the
to say goodbye to intercollegiate football. I know you’re trying to remember whether there a team up there, they are so bad. There is. They are, and they cost $15.7 million last season, with $2.4 million in tickets sold.
It seems to me:
That it’s going to be great over the next few weeks when Gov. Ned Lamont finally realizes that to actually get something done, he’s going to have to say “No” to fellow Democrats and find $1.9 billion to balance the budget. Everything else up until then will just be honeymoon good times. Let the hornswoggling begin. That first veto is always such a cleansing experience.
Say what you want about the Mueller report’s findings, but there’s a lot more to the story of Donald Trump and his cronies that’s bound to come out in the dozen active criminal and civil investigations, not including whatever course of action the scaredy-cats in the U.S. House of Representatives may decide is politically expedient.
One landmark in the report was the president’s use of a term that rhymes with a waterfowl, which made the front page of the New York Times and which Hearst boiled down to “f - - - - ed” as the president described his predicament.
Just at a time when more people are realizing that teens and young-twentysomethings shouldn’t be prosecuted as adults for stupid things, along comes the knucklehead trio from Stratford and Shelton, accused of burning down the Shakespeare theater, and connected to fires at construction trailers in Silver Sands State Park.
The death of Lorraine Warren, the Monroe ghostbuster, now puts her in the perfect position to seek out and converse with the infamous “White Lady” ghost up there in the Stepney Cemetery on
Route 59, where her late husband Ed has been representing since his departure from this mortal coil in the summer of 2006.
That if you think Connecticut is in wonderful shape, you should read the “State of Urban Connecticut,” the tale of two states just published by Quinnipiac University and the Urban League of Southern Connecticut. It seems that economic disparities have never been starker between the suburbs and the urban communities, where housing, jobs and the cost of living are crippling multiple generations.
Sure, the governor is still locating the bathrooms in the Capitol, and he accomplished very little other than some important tonesetting during his first 100 days. But one thing he’s dead right on: the proposal left over from his predecessor to force wealthier towns to cough up 25 percent of their pension costs for their public school teachers, who are paid higher than average.
It’s about time that the New York Yankees finally ditched that scratchy version of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” every seventh-inning-stretch since the Sept. 11 attacks. The suspension is over Smith’s recording of racist songs that were hits before your mother was born. But it’s the phony nationalism that’s bugged me, with Yankee security guards telling “guests,” not fans, guests, to take off their hats during the late part of the game when crowds should focus on standing, seeing who else is there, and singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I’ll doff my Yankee hat for any National Anthem. I’ll sing along and maybe even cry a tear for this poor country of ours. But “God Bless America” is jingoistic overkill.
It’s time for the UConn Board of Trustees to say goodbye to intercollegiate football. I know you’re trying to remember whether there a team up there, they are so bad. There is. They are, and they cost $15.7 million last season, with $2.4 million in tickets sold. You know what a real research university could do with 16 million smackers? Create some jobs for Ph.Ds, rather than rattling the brains of young men.
If if there’s to be any eventual success for the full legalization of marijuana for use by adults, the General Assembly would be better off this year focusing on the parts of the bill that are achievable, such as the expungement of criminal records for those convicted of simple possession, and a study of ways to define and detect unacceptable levels of THC in intoxicated drivers.
The Stop & Shop strike is still raging and the parking lots are looking pretty empty around these supermarkets. While I don’t like what the strike is doing to employee paychecks, I am kind of proud to always avoid those self check-out registers. And I’m very proud that, during the last few weeks before the strike, I found myself standing next to those tall aisle robots and asking nearby human employees if I should punch the bots. Workers never said no.