KC’s Big Day

As a followup to the Red Friday installment here on Blogorahmah the other day, the Kansas City Chiefs did win the Super Bowl game. It was a very close game, and therefore exciting. The Chiefs won the game with eight seconds to go. We watched on TV while eating popcorn and guzzling hot chocolate. Sorry, not beer. Then came the victory parade, which took place yesterday. A Super Bowl victory parade was held here in 2020, and about 500,000 people participated. This year, the temperature being roughly 40 degrees warmer than three years ago on the same day, estimates are running close to a million. Could be. Everything went remarkably smoothly, as far as I can tell. We watched on TV, but before the parade began we walked around the north (beginning) end of the route, where we live, to watch the gathering hordes. It was kind of fun which I freely admit even though I am kind of a cynical guy.

The obligatory kids-on-the-lampost shot. The guy with the sunglasses is obviously a covert CIA agent fleeing from Libyan terrorists. If you so desire, you may use this picture as a prompt and let me know!

Here is the crowd gathering near the parade’s starting point. You may have already guessed that the Chiefs’ colors are red and yellow, but mostly red.

More red and yellow apparel a block from the parade route in front of my normally serene building entrance.
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Thoughts on Red Friday

The Kansas City Chiefs won their AFC Championship game so now they will be in the Super Bowl on Sunday. I am not a big football fan and I know little about the game, the teams, the players, so let me put that out there right off. I’ve already heard that Kansas City is not the favorite this time. This doesn’t stop all the hooplah surrounding it. Red Friday refers to the custom of wearing “Chiefs red,” their color, on Fridays that precede games. Or, hell, any Friday during the season, for all I know. I don’t participate, mainly because I don’t own a red article of clothing, that I know of. Maybe some boxer shorts but, if so, they must be down at the bottom of the pile that I never get to.

If we win on Sunday, there will be a big parade soon after. Schools have already preemptively closed for the day–whatever it is. Following weekend? I don’t know. I guess whenever the team arrives back home. I live downtown, so I can’t avoid it, but I am thankful I’m on foot. There’s probably no parking within a three mile radius.

The NFL Draft proceedings and adjoining ceremonies, etc. will take place in Kansas City this year as well. This is an even bigger deal. Three days of total chaos, most likely. They are building a stage in front of the Union Station, where all this will take place. Interestingly, Union Station itself will be closed to the public during all this. Now, the Kansas City Election Board occupies rooms in the station, and they were told they would have to shut down for the duration. There is an upcoming election that demands they stay open for early absentee voting. They, the KCEB, brought this up, and the NFL said no, you’ll just have to close. This, they were apparently thinking, is more important.

Wow.

Flashback Friday

I’m not much for reviving anything I wrote in the past, really. With the blogger mentality, as opposed to that of the accomplished novelist, I think of what I write down as “throw-away,” in the same way I think of anything I might say out loud. This is of course not good, as every blogger wants to write a novel. (Probably not true, but by the next paragraph, I’ll forget I wrote it anyway.)

Were was I? Kidding. Now I’m trying to figure out if any memory from my life that I conjure up at this moment could be something I had never remembered before. Something that happened, say, that just . . . happened . . . and I went on with my life, never to remember it until February 3, 2023.

I’m gonna say, no. I read somewhere, a long time ago, that after a certain disturbingly short time, memories are actually “memories of memories.” As if a first-order memory, if you will, only happens within a day or two of the remembered thing. I don’t know. This is all sort of weird, and a bit pointless as well, except it does sort of explain why memories become so fallible if they are re-written each time they are called up.

It means that flashbacks–at least the unwritten kind–are actually a form of fiction. You take something that happened, more or less, or at least the perceptions you experienced during something that happened in the past, and fill in all the gaps so it makes sense to you, and then relate it other people around you. And, the key, they are always inaccurate, sometimes to a degree that would make them totally unrecognizable to anyone else who might have been there. It can be in the form of a blog post, but generally most effective at a smallish party where beer drinking is involved.

So fiction is a “thing.” It seems, maybe, a fundamental, human thing. It’s what we DO. And since we’re all either novelists here, or aspiring novelists, it is something to ponder, to tap into, possibly nurture, even though in a sense this makes us even more unreliable than we started out. I think maybe the difference between writers and non-writers (to make a broad and suspect generalization) is that writers have more fun with it.

Punxsutawny Phil

I clicked on a link “find out what Punxsutawny Phil saw.” This led me to a page with a video in it, front top and center, which started playing an advert, natch. I clickly, or quickly, closed the window because the answer to the question is either “saw his shadow,” or “didn’t see his shadow.” This does not require a video preceded by an advertisement.

I think we agree Phil is a boy groundhog, so, no need to refer to their shadow.

So I still don’t know. However, for reasons I will outline, I don’t care. Phil — we will call him simply, Phil, since not only is it difficult to spell the name of this Pennsylvania town, but even harder to type it without error — and his shenanigans have been recorded for 135 years now, or so, and in hindsight, it is easily ascertained that his accuracy for these predictions is only 39%.

If you’re a betting person, that means you can safely bet against him for even money, and you’ll come out ahead over time. Statistically, that is. Maybe 135 isn’t a big enough database. Because this also means that you can assign some slight predictive value to believing the opposite of what Phil says. And it’s real hard to believe the premise for this whole myth can make any sense no matter how you spin it.

My prediction, based on nothing at all, is that winter will be over soon, no matter what Phil says.

To sum up: Bill Murray came around eventually only by realizing that it’s OK to be sort of crazy because we’re human and that’s what we do best.

Mocking the AI

Hello world! This is my blog. This is where I present interesting, thoughtful details from my life. My S.O. is interesting, but not thoughtful. Ha ha. It is a nice day. The current temperature at the airport is 28º F, and the high later today will be 43º F. Significant ice and sleet accumulations will continue to have impacts across portions of the South and Southeast through Thursday. For locations across the Deep South and Southeast, the threat of heavy rainfall increases as the storm tracks across the region.

This morning I walked my dog, and we met many interesting people along the way. I had a thoughtful discussion with a person I met in front of a building.

Tomorrow I will walk my dog again. They like to go on walks. I like to walk, too, because it is good for my heart health.

Please like my post, and click on the advertisements that appear on this page.

AARP

If “Kia” is the sound a hamster makes while being sodomized, AARP is the sound a dog makes when it’s fooling around with a tennis ball and accidentally swallows it. Just a thought. Anyway, I got some physical snail mail from AARP today, and I was so relieved. I haven’t heard from them in three days, and I was worried sick. Mainly, because even though it’s just 2023, we mustn’t drop the ball on our goal of receiving one ton of AARP mail in my lifetime. There are trees out there, clogging the environment, that need to be utilized, to realize their fate, as it were.

I kid AARP. They do serve a purpose, and a good one, for the most part, but I don’t understand why all the physical mail. And did you know there is no way to make them stop? OK. If you die, but it still takes awhile, and it’s not unusual to go to any cemetery and see a fairly sizable stack of AARP envelopes piled up by the newer headstones.

Then I thought, maybe since they are targeting retired people (hence the name) they think that all old, retired people don’t know about the Internet and still relish seeing mail in the box every morning when they trudge through the snow out to the gate by the highway. I see a fundamental flaw in their reasoning, since, let’s see, people who turn 55 today and begin receiving their AARP mail were born back in 1968 and were still teenagers when the Internet was invented by that Gore guy. AARP marketing department seems to be operating on an old model.

I know I’m being curmudgeonly, as is my wont. I can easily imagine my counterpart back in the 1790s bitching about how AARP keeps sending a messenger on horseback by the house to yell out their latest insurance offerings, when Ben Franklin invented the post office quite awhile before. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

So, half a ton of paper so far. Fingers crossed.