If you’re one of those people who laments that nobody at the Plain Dealer sports page has taken a remotely courageous or otherwise significant editorial stance for at least the last half-decade, you must just not be reading closely enough.
And admittedly, it was hard to catch this among the latest round of “LeBron never went to college!,” “Lance Armstrong is a liar!,” and “ballplayers get paid so much money, how could they ever get used to it!?” jokes littering Bud Shaw’s most recent “Sports Spin” column (again!). But look:
A fantasy football group wants to petition President Obama to declare the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday, saying it would make the streets safer, promote a productive environment for work on Tuesday and recognize America’s most popular sporting event.
Thank you much, said the Chinese.
The Chinese.
Bud Shaw finally writes about something interesting, a good idea in Washington, and the first thing he wants his readers to do is worry about the Chinese.
We know it’s supposed to be just a joke directed mainly at dimwits, but again, that just makes this all the more important. Can we — you, us, Plain Dealer editors — all agree that the idea that the U.S. is losing some kind of important race to China isn’t funny but actually a mendacious canard, and that to the extent it has any traction at all, it’s only because the powers that be in China don’t let things like environmental regulations or human rights slow them down any?
Only dimwits would disagree and there are all kinds of easily foreseeable problems with them doing just that, but even if we can’t come to terms on the above, someone at the PD’s China desk, or just someone who knows how to use a basic internet connection, should have at least figured out that an extra day of vacation couldn’t possibly hurt we Americans vis a vis the Chinese no matter what, if anything, we’re competing for. This is only because China’s national holidays take up some 25 days on the Chinese calendar, as opposed to just 7 or 8 days off for holidays for the majority of working people in the U.S.
So of course the fantasy footballers who want to petition President Obama are even more right than we thought. The answer is fewer ill considered references to ”the Chinese” on the sports page and everywhere, and not just more national holidays, but A LOT more, with Super Bowl Monday a fine place to start adding.
You may and should, of course, do your part by RSVPing to our Super Bowl either at the Cleveland Frowns post here or the facebook page here. Especially if your name rhymes with “Chud bawww” in which case the first three cups of whiskey on are us.
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In other news, the results are in on Tony Grossi’s #ArtIn or #ArtOut poll, and they’re only surprising in that so many Ravens fans were able to troll the vote. Anyway, thankfully, Grossi concludes that “doing anything less” than “represent[ing] the case of … [generations of Browns fans who know that #ArtOut is the only conceivable answer] to the Hall of Fame committee” would be “irresponsible.” We hope he issues a summary statement and will stay tuned for that;
As expected, the Orange helmets did not disappoint last evening;
And finally, to come full circle on what’s keeping Bud Shaw on China in your newspaper, here’s an excellent read from Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker on what’s behind grossly disparate respective media reactions to the Manti Te’o story and the one about the Church of Scientology “advertorial” in The Atlantic.
Hope everyone’s week gets off to a decent start.
