Hope

There are those of us who have spent our early years sitting glued to baseball on a black and white television. We also stored our mitts by rubbing them with linseed oil, putting a baseball inside them and wrapping  them with a rubber band. And now we can remember more players from the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals (even if we weren’t even Cardinal fans) than we can for the 2021 team that we now root for. Those of us I describe always linked “hope” with the start of the baseball season. In other words, with now.

Baseball starts in less than two weeks.  This is the time for every fan, regardless of their team, to have “hope” that this will be their year. It doesn’t matter how unlikely it is that this hoped-for event will actually happen. This year, Dodger fans have good reason to hope. Actually, they may not even have to hope.  The touts who decide such things have determined that the Dodgers will win 103.5 games this season (that’s out of 162). If you are wondering how you can win .5 of a game, it’s because this is a betting line – the Dodgers have to win 104 for you to win the bet. If they win 103, you lose. On the other hand, those same “experts” have the Pittsburgh Pirates as the worst team, winning only 58 games. I’ll bet you, though, that if you wander in to have breakfast at Pamela’s Diner on 21^stStreet in Pittsburgh, you’ll bump into plenty of people who are “hoping” just as hard for a World Series at PNC Park as the Dodger fans are for one at Chavez Ravine.

So, in that spirit, I offer these “hopes” for the near future;

• That the crew of utterly obnoxious characters in the Progressive Insurance commercials are found to have actually lowered sales and are removed from our screens – forever! Especially Flo.

• That the only women who file sexual harassment charges do so when they are actually sexually harassed, not just when they have their arms patted.

• That a workable and long-overdue health care bill is passed and people in this country no longer have to die for lack of a doctor.

• That at least part of Mar-A-Lago has to get shut down because of Covid  (Hey – I already got one right)

• When the Covid vaccine has been available to everyone, States require people to show their Covid vaccination card before they enter a public place. That way the mental midgets who have refused to get the shot have to stay away from the rational people.

• That we find out that Tucker Carlson has been kidnapping infant girls and holding them hostage in a rat-infested basement. Sadly, though, only 10% of his audience will stop listening.

• That a new movie rating be established for docu-dramas and biopics. They should be rated – BS.

• That the law be changed so that if you have watched more than three episodes of The Kardashians, your vote counts for ½ of a regular vote.

• That CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post apply the same standards of criticism for President Biden as they did for What’s-His-Name. So far, it doesn’t look like it.

• That we think about whether we could reduce prejudice over racial and ethnic divisions by stopping from pigeon-holing  our such similar selves into those very divisions.

•  That the unmarried children of the billionaires whose parents have entered into the “Giving Pledge” that syphons off  from them most of their inheritance, go on a new show called, “No Longer A Rich Bachelor”. That way they will find out how unattractive they were in the first place.

• That Melania Trump divorces Donald and that Steven Mnuchin divorces Louise Linton. Then, Melania and Louise move in together and post a salacious lesbian tryst between them, while they carnally roll themselves all over the Lincoln Bedroom.

I could go on, but, I’m having too much fun and I don’t want to take up too much of your time. Maybe in another blog I’ll post some additional hopes.