Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

College football’s two-day Bacchanalia of conference football championship games is over and despite imbibing heavily in the festivities, I’m not too hung-over to offer some thoughts on what we have learned from the Saturday offerings.

James Franklin did it again, coaching his Penn State team to yet another loss against a highly ranked opponent, in this case falling to Oregon. 45-37, in the Big Ten championship game.

Franklin apologists will note that his Nittany Lions are 11-2 and still will advance to the college football national championship playoffs. I will note that Penn State already has suffered its annual loss to Ohio State, likely avoided losing to Michigan only because the Wolverines were not on the schedule, and very easily could have lost to Minnesota (a 26-25 win) and Southern Cal (a 33-30 comeback win). This team is a few plays away from being 9-4.

All that having been said, Penn State will host a playoff game and, according to a late projection from USA Today, might end up having ACC champion Clemson, a last-second, 34-31 winner over SMU, coming north days before Christmas. Considering that Clemson has a decimated running back corps, and would be a team from warmer climes forced to play in unfavorable weather, this is a good matchup for Penn State. Early forecasts for that time period in State College call for temperatures in the 30s and that sounds about right for that time of year. The wild card is whether there will be snow, or maybe freezing rain and ice. And the question becomes, can the weather give Penn State enough of an edge to offset the Franklin coaching curse?

But, regardless of what happens next, at least Franklin has the joy he got from having his team throw for a touchdown on the final play of what became a 44-7 win over Maryland in the regular-season finale.

Beyond Penn State, the question of the moment, one we raised yesterday in this space, is how the all-seeing and all-knowing selection committee will interpret the conference playoff results. The ABC announcers for the SMU-Clemson game were very vocal afterward that 11-2 SMU should not be sent packing from the 12-team field in favor of 9-3 Alabama, which didn’t need to play this week, having failed to qualify for the SEC title game. I agree that SMU should be in the 12-team field and Alabama should be out, but that’s not what I’m expecting to hear later today. Hope I’m wrong.

Georgia-Texas for the SEC title was an epic battle, won 22-19 in dramatic fashion in overtime by Georgia. But all the SEC loyalists who pan the ACC in making the case for Alabama, would do well to note that in just the previous game, the SEC champion Bulldogs needed a miraculous fourth-quarter recovery and eight overtimes to edge Georgia Tech, 44-42. That would be a 7-5 Tech team from the ACC that was not good enough to qualify for that conference’s championship game.

And that Georgia team now has beaten Texas twice this season. Texas has played a soft schedule. Consider that Texas led the SEC standings at 7-1. Eight other teams finished 5-3 or better. Texas lost to Georgia (6-2) in the regular season as already mentioned and beat Texas A&M (5-3). But Texas did not play any of the other six teams with winning SEC records. Thank you, Mr. Schedulemaker.

Arizona State, despite playing short-handed at wide receiver, sure looked impressive in a 45-19 beatdown of Iowa State in the Big 12 championship. The good news is this likely will get the Sun Devils a first-round bye and they won’t get sentenced to a game in some far north outpost where they would be at a considerable disadvantage.

And, finally, I can only hope the powers-that-be are done expanding the playoff field. Despite the griping we will hear this year from those who don’t make it, 12 is enough. As one analyst noted Saturday, all the whiners had to do was win another game and they would be in the field. Well said!

The first installment of the two-day feast of major college football conference championship games is in the books as of late Friday night. The highly anticipated Saturday portion remains.

Already we’ve seen Jacksonville State thump Western Kentucky for the Conference USA title, Army pound Tulane for the American Athletic championship, and Boise State throttle UNLV for the Mountain West title.

Having watched significant portions of both the Army and Boise State wins, several thoughts occur to me:

• Army quarterback Bryson Daily, with four rushing touchdowns in the game and 29 for the year, is a throwback to what we used to think of as the typical college football player. It’s his physical, no-nonsense playing style and love of the game for its own sake, along with the notable fact he gets zero name, image, likeness (NIL) revenue. That’s because Army players cannot take the NIL financial handouts that are further sullying already shady recruiting and making college players millionaires even before their pro football careers begin.

• Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty deserves to win the Heisman Trophy because he’s the most dominant player who also plays on a team that’s going to the national championship playoffs and would be nowhere close to accomplishing that without him. It doesn’t even bother me that Jeanty is reported to make $1.4 million in NIL money because, by all accounts, he is just as great a person as he is a football player.

• Former West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez might appreciate the irony that he has won a conference championship with a 9-4 Alabama-based team, but won’t be making the national championship playoff field.

And now, some thoughts on the Saturday games as well as the national championship playoff field in general.

After the Boise State game, FOX analysts made their picks to win the national championship. The two fan boys on the panel picked the schools where they played, Alabama and Notre Dame. The two serious pickers, former USC quarterback Matt Leinart and former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, both took Oregon.

Bottom line, there are no great teams this year, so any team could win. Yes, Oregon is unbeaten, but has had close calls along the way which suggest a certain measure of vulnerability.

The expansion of the playoff field to 12 teams in this year of relative parity was timely.

Despite the lofty seed, at least until the Big Ten title outcome is decided, Penn State still would not be among my picks to win the national title. To do so would mean James “Can’t Win The Big Game” Franklin would need to go against his form, multiple times.

But I think Penn State could beat Oregon for the Big Ten championship because even blind squirrels sometimes find the acorn.

Texas and Georgia in the SEC title game figures to be an interesting contest, a rematch of a regular-season game won by Georgia. Despite that win, this Georgia team is nowhere near the caliber of its recent national championship squads, lacking consistency and firepower on offense and big play people on defense.

One of the flaws of the national championship bracket as currently seeded, Georgia and Texas could end up meeting yet again in the second round of that playoff. Also, Oregon could need to play Penn State and Ohio State yet again in its half of the bracket.

You would not be totally insane to ponder Alabama making the 12-team championship field, losing in the first round, then being reinstated to the field despite such a loss based on a superior strength of schedule. After all, that is the rationale for stashing Alabama in the field in the first place.

Speaking of that strong schedule, the Crimson Tide’s 9-3 record includes a 40-35 loss to Vanderbilt in early October and a 24-3 loss to Oklahoma Nov. 23. Both Oklahoma and Vanderbilt finished at 6-6. But they were strong .500 records!

If I were a fan of another SEC school, South Carolina for example, I might wonder why my 9-3 Gamecocks, winners of six straight games, a team that crushed Oklahoma, 35-6, in mid-October and lost 27-25 at Alabama the week before that, isn’t getting more playoff consideration.

Oh, South Carolina is not the TV ratings draw that Alabama is. Now I understand.

With players earning NIL millions, why should we expect the movers and shakers of the sport not to bow and scrape to the almighty dollar god too?

Watch these people eagerly demote SMU if somehow Clemson pulls the upset in the ACC title game, or cast aside the winner of the Iowa State-Arizona State Big 12 championship due to double secret probation for not delivering big TV numbers.

Rodriguez might want to remind the committee that his championship team is Jacksonville, ALABAMA, State. Don’t laugh.

Response to the assassination of insurance executive Brian Thompson has produced the usual schizoid response from the left.

A man is gunned down on a New York City street early Wednesday morning, apparently in premeditated fashion with said man as the sole target, and the typical leftists rush to social media to out themselves as delusional maniacs endorsing it all.

Oh, they don’t have the guts to put themselves on the line and actually commit such crimes. Instead, they celebrate those who do, lament the ineptitude of those who try and fail (as in multiple would-be Donald Trump assassins) and attempt to encourage others to attempt similar acts by bombarding the simple-minded with a neverending stream of hyperbolic invective.

These keyboard warrior lowlifes face no punishment, at least not yet.

Consider a defrocked Washington Post “reporter” who both seemed to be endorsing this killing and promoting the prospect of others with her diatribes on social media, the megaphone for morons.

Thompson had been CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a behemoth health insurance company whose stock trades at $582.25 a share as I write this Thursday, down $28.54 on the day. Even so, UNH, the stock ticker symbol, traded at $206 a share in March 2020 and a lowly $6 a share in March 2000.

One analyst who appears on CNBC’s “Fast Money” show characterizes this as a “God-like” stock chart.

As an aside, I have made a few bucks – I stress a few – trading small amounts of UNH stock, buying on sharp declines.

When I was in the market for health insurance, after retiring but before qualifying for Medicare, I contacted United Healthcare in the pursuit of the best deal. Remember, I also had acquired a health insurance license, so I was a bit more aware of products than the average person.

When my calls to United Healthcare produced a stew of bad attitude and information from DEI-sounding types, I went elsewhere. That’s what others should do.

But, judging by the performance of the stock price, they do not. Just remember, such stock performance is not produced on the generosity of the insurer in paying any and all claims.

And that is where supposed motive enters the assassination speculation, The killer is said to have left some spent shell casings on the ground, hand-lettered using some manner of marker with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” These supposedly are legal shorthand for how attorneys seeking more money from insurers contend the insurers seek to deny paying claims.

In the immediate aftermath of this killing, many were quick to describe it as a professional hit. But more measured types noted it was not likely the work of a professional. They reasoned a lack of sunglasses indicated an unfamiliarity with avoiding facial recognition software.

This killer is reported to have used a 9mm handgun with a silencer. And people jumped on the silencer aspect as indicating professionalism. But just as there are an abundance of stolen/illegal weapons on our streets, so it is that nonprofessional bad people also can get silencers through other than legal channels.

Also, professionals using a handgun are said to favor a .22. Yes, this is best used at very close range, as in barrel touching just behind the ear. But that small-caliber bullet also tends to bounce around inside the cranium and deform, doing great damage to the tissue and itself, thereby making ballistic identification tough.

Leaving spent shells and rounds at the scene as a message also doesn’t speak to a professional, except perhaps a professional trying to appear unprofessional.

And the fact the guy’s unobscured face has shown up on various surveillance cameras also speaks to a lack of professionalism.

Reports in recent hours suggest police might be closing in on the identity of the shooter. Hopefully he is arrested and does not commit suicide before the entire story is revealed.

That’s assuming Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg doesn’t free the man without bail just because that’s what they seem to do with violent types in New York City.

I’m just back from a walk, taken in an attempt to digest our crazed world — from pardons, to rampant hypocrisy, to the prelude of World War III.

Along the way, I indulged in nostalgia regarding deer hunters out and about today in pursuit of the animals who have a nasty habit of crashing into our cars. It happened twice to me years back, in a six-week span.

I’m fairly certain one accident resulted in a deer fatality. The other, which happened along Route 22 between New Alexandria and Blairsville weeks earlier, had been a case of a Clueless Joe-like deer walking into the side of my car. I’d slowed probably to five miles an hour, having seen him coming, and he bumped into me and slid along the side of the car, pruning my driver side mirror in the process.

Said deer walked away seemingly none the worse for the experience, living perhaps to pardon his bad seed son down the line.

As a young man, I had ventured into the woods pursuing deer – unsuccessfully – with a firearm. I gave it up when other activities of life took precedence.

But, for those of us who attended the Greater Johnstown School District in the increasingly distant past, opening day of antlered deer season was the holy grail, the chance to skip school with parental approval.

We have written before here about holiday creep, which has turned Thanksgiving into a week off work or school, maybe longer. Similar expansion has seen other holiday celebrations swell to elongated weekends and the like.

Pennsylvania game officials, capturing the spirit of the thing, moved the opening of this particular deer season (trust me, there are too many other specialized deer seasons in the state to enumerate them all here) to Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Now, nimrods burdened by traditional jobs or school calendars and therefore are expected to be back in harness the Monday following Thanksgiving, can hunt the first day without shunning those obligations.

The state also identifies three Sundays that hunting is allowed and one of those was yesterday.

Bottom line, those who are off work or school today, are free to return to the woods if they failed to bag the elusive white tail Saturday or Sunday.

Ah, but what they missed from the old experience. We didn’t get the Monday off school following Thanksgiving. Period. End of discussion.

The former Johnstown High School was a sprawling structure, four full floors and a large fifth-floor multipurpose room know as the Audion.

The main office was Room 211. The attendance office, Room 422, was two floors up and at the rear of the building, overlooking the elevated highway. That was where one went to get a slip to return to class after having been absent.

On the Tuesday following the opening of deer season, the line from that office stretched well down the main corridor toward Napoleon Street.

The air was festive and although technically teachers didn’t have to allow students to make up work from an unexcused absence day, generally those of us who skipped school to go hunting were not penalized.

In retrospect, we were just a bunch of minor league Hunter Bidens, ahead of our time.

Good thing all the Clueless Joe Biden apologists have moved on to other futile causes, because Joe once again has showed his lack of character and this latest proof of same would be a tough defend.

These liars have assured us for years that all the stumbles, bumbles, brain freezes, getting lost on stage and assorted mis-statements from Clueless Joe in no way indicated he was not fit for the job as president.

Sharp as a tack, Runs rings around the rest of us. Smartest guy in the room. And, toward the end, there was the ridiculous assertion that Clueless Joe deserved a place on Mount Rushmore.

I want some of the stuff these people were taking.

All of this didn’t stop the Democrats from running a coup on the clueless one when it became all too evident to the general public with that pathetic debate stinkfest that he was out to lunch mentally. Amazingly, they subbed in equally mentally challenged Kamala Chameleon, who didn’t even have Joe’s excuse of extreme age to explain her inability to communicate coherently.

Clueless Joe now has proven he’s totally unable to speak and understand English considering that this time he’s pardoned his bad boy son, Hunter, despite vowing over and over again that he would not do so. So did Biden’s mouthpiece Karine Gay Paree, among other Biden sycophants.

And, in the written statement of the pardon, Biden had the gall to stress his commitment to the truth. Clueless Joe insisted it was all the fault of the mean justice department picking on Hunter to get Joe.

That would be Joe’s justice department, the one he put on the persecution path regarding Donald Trump. You explain Joe’s tortured logic on this one. I cannot.

Republicans have got to be holding their aching ribs from laughing at this pile of verbal garbage from the Democrats.

This pardon should be hung around Clueless Joe’s neck, and around the necks of his many supporters and enablers, as a lasting reminder how this tribe will urinate on your head and try to convince you it’s raining. Such is their utter arrogance.

Oh, how they tried to give Hunter a pass. All those “intelligence” types vowed Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

Then Clueless Joe’s justice department tried to give Hunter a walk on all other charges if he just admitted to spitting on the sidewalk, or some other ridiculously innocuous charge.

When that gift plea bargain deal was pulled, when Hunter was exposed for the FELON that he is, and very possibly might again become, Clueless Joe stewed and planned the big pardon, even while denying the suggestion.

Oh, how Clueless Joe vowed no pardon for Hunter. Now we’re asked to believe Joe had to do it because life is so unfair.

Talk about life being unfair, how about the child Hunter sired, then denied fathership of, until the courts forced him to do so?

How about Clueless Joe denying the child as a grandchild?

How about Hunter getting all those jobs without appropriate qualifications just because he was a Biden and kicking some back to the “Big Guy?”

Clueless Joe’s legacy already was a mess. This Hunter pardon on the way out the door is the cherry on the top of a garbage sundae.

Way to go, Joe, feckless to the end.

I can only hope that Donald Trump hops on this political opportunity and pardons all the political prisoners, say, from the Jan. 6 protest.

I’d love to hear the hypocritical Democrats whining about that, while defending to the death Hunter’s pardon.

Again, congrats Clueless Joe. You continue to amaze with your ability to limbo even lower with each passing day.

It’s the eve of turkey day, with the promise of joyous family get-togethers to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.

Traditionally, the only downer on this day of thanks is the customarily tepid slate of football on the menu. That is true in spades this time.

But, in 2024, it also is just a few weeks after a presidential election, and the losers are feeling, shall we say, butt hurt.

They are the ones who cannot accept the outcome, taking to social media to shave their heads, promise to deny sexual favors, and run off to some far land, all in sad, futile protest. Be gone, I say to them, on topics of hair, sex and residency.

This is but a small percentage of the far left population, admittedly. Most of them just plan on avoiding on this holiday friends and family who voted MAGA, or, even worse, they will show up at family gatherings to dispense their typical harangues that are long on emotion and short on fact.

My first topic of thanks on this occasion is that the small knot of family who will share our feast numbers exactly zero crazed leftists who voted for Kamala Chameleon. By the way, did you also think she looked a tad off in her recently released video? Has anyone checked the liquor cabinet recently?

There will be no one at my dinner table putting canned goods in socks and wielding them like weapons, as one online video proposes as a way for leftists to show their disdain for Trump and all things MAGA.

I’m a bit sad on that front, because I’d love to give such a person the chance to pay the physical price for such absurdity. But, I digress.

In the past, when I wrote for money, I often would offer up a Thanksgiving column in which I took the liberty of sharing my list of things for which I would give thanks, along with suggesting to others items for which they should be grateful.

Let’s start the 2024 example.

I’m thankful for a loving family and the ability to pay for the meal, despite the 30-percent inflation over four years visited upon us by Clueless Joe and Kamala Chameleon.

I’m thankful for the generally good health of the family and friends.

I’m thankful a guy named Trump is headed back to the White House, and that an increasing amount of the population seems to be getting it in that Woke is comatose living, that DEI is DIE, that borders should not be open gates, that committing crime should have consequences and that traditional values upon which this nation was built are not figurative pinatas to be smacked at every occasion.

On a lighter note, I’m thankful I’m not Prince Harry, who’s thrown his royal family under the bus for an attention seeker who now will show him the underside of public transportation with a “professional separation.”

I’m thankful I don’t live in Minnesota, where Tampon Tim has been banished to ruin the lives of those there.

I’m thankful I no longer wager on sports because it would be hard to resist putting a few bucks on the 8-3 Steelers as three-point underdogs vs. the 4-7 Cincinnati Bengals, even if the game is being played on the Bengals’ home field.

I’m thankful I’m not Robert De Niro, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen, Rachel Maddow look alike Mark Cuban, or any number of leftists who went all-in for Kamala Chameleon, berating Trump and his supporters along the way, and now have to look at themselves in the mirror. And, as far as we know, they didn’t come away with a spare $2 million for the exercise as Oprah did.

I’m thankful I never went hunting with Tampon Tim or Dick Cheney and never will.

Now for suggestions to others.

Hunter Biden should be thankful Big Guy Joe is likely to grant him a pardon on the way out the door. Admittedly, if Clueless Joe is successful in touching off World War III, a pardon would be the last of Hunter’s concerns.

Alec Baldwin, while he’s in Italy describing Americans as clueless and uninformed, should be thankful his act of being clueless and uninformed on a movie set (he didn’t know the gun was loaded!) was enough to get him out from under an involuntary manslaughter charge, for now. That dismissal is being appealed.

Hosts of The View should be thankful the ABC lawyers are keeping tabs on them and requiring them to read on-air an ever-increasing list of disclaimers and clarifications to avoid legal redress for their absurd claims.

A lot of prominent Democrats should be grateful that Jeffrey Epstein “committed suicide” five years ago, ironically while under suicide watch. Alas, Diddy lives, and Trump is coming into power, which just might mean some embarrassing revelations will be forthcoming.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now I understand those television commercials in which dolts, often young, are stunned to be informed of the number of subscriptions they have that they are paying for, but are not using.

Today, I discovered I’m a variation of such a dolt, admittedly an elderly one.

As recounted here a few days back in a screed about television, I use DISH for my television signal and had recently called to receive a $40 credit due my signal being unavailable for what turned out to be nine hours, plus or minus.

The DISH telephone agent I contacted then had indicated I would see the credit on my bill in about a day or two. I checked online numerous times since and saw nothing evident and so I called again today to check, this being four days after the fact.

Again, I used my loyalty phone number and again, the wait was minimal. This time, a bubbly sounding female who identified herself as Jo Hanna in Texas (we’re guessing at name spelling, but there was a definite pause between Jo and Hanna) walked me through the web side to some unlabeled, virtually hidden click points that produced a PDF copy of my billing.

She then pointed me to the small paragraphs on the extreme right side of page 2. I discovered, with her guidance, that I was at the end of my 24-month service period, entered into two years back to save some money.

Since I am on automatic billing and automatic pay as it is billed to my credit card, which in turn is automatically paid from my checking account, I receive no hard copy of my bills. And, I confess, I don’t read them word-for-word monthly online to pick up on any looming surprises.

In this case, my billing will be going up about $30 or $40 a month. This is how I missed the $40 credit. It’s been applied to my increased charge, which is delineated nowhere on the billing.

I was pleasant with Jo Hanna, but noted one would think DISH might send out an email reminder to those of us being billed electronically that the rate was changing. Jo Hanna remained bright and bubbly, but didn’t really buy this.

In a case of happy coincidence, Jo Hanna was not only technical support (neither she, nor I was sure why I’d gotten tech support), but also cross-trained in account services. Unfortunately for me, there are no inducements these days in which you lock in a commitment period of a couple of years and are rewarded with a lower rate for your loyalty.

I can, she happily reminded me, get the free upgrade to the Hopper satellite receiver, which in the past I have been told is free for the upgrade but costs more per month than my current dinosaur model. Jo Hanna assured me this is not true – the increased monthly fee.

Regardless, my television status stands at a crossroads. I watch a lot of television, as mentioned in the previous post. So do my wife and my two granddaughters, who are around quite a bit.

Our local cable television provider – which I use for internet access – should have a logo of masked individuals, such is their pricing policy. Also, customer service tends to be, shall we say, lacking. That’s why I’ve been with DISH for about 17 or 18 years.

I have come to this unfortunate juncture just as DISH is in turmoil. How it can struggle financially astounds me, but it seems to be true. As of the end of 2023, the DISH subscriber base was 6.47 million, down almost 1.75 million over the previous two years.

It’s been a long-term decline. DISH stock was about $80 a share in November 2014 and was $5.73 when the stock ceased trading.

That event occurred on Dec. 29, 2023, when DISH was delisted as a stock after having merged with EchoStar.

In recent weeks, there was a proposal from rival DirecTV to acquire DISH and Sling TV from Echo Star.

The price offered was $1, ironically the symbolic amount of the bet between two millionaires that was at the heart of the plot in the movie “Trading Places.” Also, DirecTV proposed to take over approximately $9.8 billion in DISH debt, an amount about $1.6 billion less than the total amount outstanding.

DISH debt holders balked at absorbing the $1.6 billion haircut and so, as of Friday Nov. 22, the deal reportedly won’t happen.

In the past, I have checked in on DirecTV and its offers paled in comparison to those offed by DISH. Maybe that is why DISH failed/is failing. Perhaps I will check in again with DirecTV, or hold my nose and call the cable people to find out if some sort of bundling of internet and television might save me money. Or maybe the TV just does dark?

Help!

Recent events have me turning introspective regarding my consumption of traditional television programming. I find, as increasingly has become the case in many areas, my age group can be characterized as dinosaurs on the matter.

This is nothing new, across the board. At 69 years of age, I’ve seen oh so many changes in the audio world. Just the other day I was explaining to two granddaughters that the falsetto chipmunk songs were the result of playing 33 rpm records at 45 rpm.

Albums, the big vinyl discs played on turntables, used the 33 rpm speed. Smaller discs, with one song on each side, used 45 rpm. Many an hour was wasted in my childhood playing records at the wrong speed.

And then there were people who actually played the records backward looking for hidden messages. I did not indulge in this.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had to change my listening library storage method from vinyl, to 8-track tapes, to cassette tapes to CDs.

No, I’ve not moved on beyond CDs because, at this point, I’m tired of paying for the same music over and over and over again. Trust me, you will become tired, too, eventually.

Let us move to television. A recent story from statista.com, posted on zerohedge.com, notes that young people watch precious little traditional television (broadcast or cable). A full 50 percent of those 18-24 say they watch zero traditional TV.

This is the same sort of bad demographic news I noted decades back as being a death knell for newspapers.

Younger people watch podcasts and various other nontraditional entertainment such as streaming services. Repeat, the younger they are, the less they watch traditional broadcasts or cable outlets.

Meanwhile, oldsters such as me, defined as those aged 65 and above, watch about 10 times as much TV as the young people.

But, increasingly, that’s becoming an ordeal. For example, I subscribe to satellite television – DISH – because Johnstown area cable TV is so overpriced.

One of the tradeoffs is where once satellite dishes were huge, maybe 16 feet in diameter, now they are small, at maybe 3 feet. Size does matter when it comes to signal acquisition.

That means signals are lost in periods of heavy weather (thunderstorms, snowstorms, even very high wind with thick clouds) and one gets the dreaded blue box of total signal loss.

Because they are overly bold. DISH managerial types have come up with a signal guarantee. Lose your signal and call them for an account credit.

I don’t usually do this. But the past Friday (perhaps you remember big snow in the Johnstown area) I was five hours into an outage when I called. Using my special loyalty phone number, my wait was short and eventually I was told I’d be receiving a credit. The signal returned after about 9 total hours of being AWOL.

Saturday was spent watching copious amounts of sports. Shortly after 11 p.m. I was killing time awaiting the late night Formula 1 race from Las Vegas by checking in on the UCLA-USC football game. This was on the area NBC outlet that thinks it’s located in State College.

Imagine my surprise when they went to a commercial – United Airlines, I believe – and the screen froze on a guy in the ad grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

When I went to bed four hours or so later, after Max Verstappen had secured yet another World Driver’s Championship, grinning guy still was frozen on Channel 6. I emailed a cousin who awakens much earlier than me, and appreciates these Channel 6 funnies, to alert him

Said cousin would go on to email me periodic updates, noting the channel still frozen on laughing boy.

His last missive noted that as of 11:15 a.m. Sunday, still smiling.

I checked at 12:12 p.m. and, voila, regular programming was running, Predictably, it was an infomercial.

What amused me by all this is the problem with a frozen Channel 6 signal seems to have created little in the way of a fuss. Where once such an occurrence would have had neighbors in the streets comparing notes about the malady, there was nothing of the sort as far as I could tell.

Even worse, as noted by my cousin who partakes of social media, the station’s Facebook page had zero comments early in the morning.

Could it be no one missed them? Was this the electronic equivalent of the philosophical chestnut asking if a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, did it make a noise?

In this case, I guess not.

The common element to investing, sports and life in general is human emotion. Simply put, the emotional pendulum in each example spends precious little time at the point of equilibrium.

More often, that pendulum is to the right or left, which represents periods of excessive pessimism or optimism.

Witness events of recent days.

Begin with sports. In the span of a few days, the Steelers and their partisans went from extreme highs to extreme lows, having beaten Baltimore, then somehow losing to lowly Cleveland.

We’d addressed the subject of the Steelers earlier this week, noting they were on the rise with an asterisk, that asterisk having to do with inconsistent offense. While the Steelers attack eventually did find the end zone on a snowy night in Cleveland, it was relatively late in the game.

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin displayed yet more curious clock management. The Steelers defense almost bailed out the offense with two late takeaways. But it added up to unexpected defeat.

What does it all mean? Not as much as some would think. The Steelers still are a 93 percent pick to make the NFL playoffs according to metrics from the New York Times – even after the Cleveland loss.

What was reinforced by this setback in Cleveland is the take expressed here previously, that while the Steelers will make the playoffs, they are not likely to thrive there.

Emotions have been hitting extremes elsewhere.

The annoying hosts of The View have plunged from outrageous Kamala optimism to crushing, Donald Trump-induced pessimism. Along the way, the panelists’ screeds against Trump’s cabinet nominations have prompted the adults in the room – ABC’s legal team – to force misnamed Sunny (looking like her dog had just died) to read disclaimer announcements several times on-air noting that the people the crew had defamed were not really guilty of the charges.

Can legal action from a certain bakery, or yet another public mea culpa, be far behind?

Meanwhile, leftist cable outlets were orgasmic that Matt Gaetz had withdrawn his name from consideration to be attorney general.

Trump was quick to sub in former Florida AG Pam Bondi, an impressive person as judged by her record and some TV appearances that I’ve witnessed. A bit of sanity was introduced to the MSNBC celebration by a panelist who informed his crew they should “fear” Bondi since she’s “competent” and “actually knows how to do this job.”

Simply put: Perhaps the leftists were spiking the football prematurely celebrating the Gaetz withdrawal.

Here in Pennsylvania, systemic over-reach hit a peak in Bucks County when an elected official proudly proclaimed she would be ignoring election law. Leftists celebrated.

Then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court weighed in – again – and pointed out these petty dictators cannot ignore the rules. The chastised egomaniac was forced to get off her emotional high and admit to reality.

Soon after Robert Casey got the memo that illegal votes were not being considered in the recount, he belatedly conceded the Senate race to David McCormick.

The left had hopes of 2020 redux, when demands to count “all the votes” didn’t specify that the votes be legally cast examples. They were optimistic briefly, then plunged back into despair.

Finally, imagine the emotional swings of a prosecutor in the office of far-left New York district attorney Alvin Bragg. Presuming all such types in that office to be far left, we can only speculate about her joy at how her office has dragged Trump through a sham trial.

Perhaps she had joked that criminals roam the streets freely while the man about to resume the presidency had been persecuted in their bailiwick.

Emotions would have been different after that prosecutor reportedly was robbed and subjected to a “lewd act” by an import from Venezuela, one left to prey on the New York City innocent despite SEVEN!!!!! arrests since arriving in this sanctuary city a few months back.

Ah, but this time the alleged attacker is being held without bail. It couldn’t only be due to him having allegedly attacked a member of the politically protected class, could it?

And I wonder about the mixed emotions leftists must be feeling since this time one of the questionable immigrants they defend to the death has dared to attack one of them.

To these people I say, that’s life.

One of the grifts that keeps on grifting arising from COVID-19 hysteria is working from home. But the bloom is coming off that rose.

Take note, you 1.3 million federal workers who, according to CNN, are approved to “telework” – translation: avoid the office.

The same petty bureaucratic dictators who brought you six-feet social distancing (just because) and masks (same reason), who shut down the nation with the aim of hamstringing Donald Trump’s re-election prospects in 2020 by tanking the economy and opening the Pandora’s box of massive mail-in voting (these met desired aims) and shut down schools (never mind the consequences), along the way shamed employers into allowing employees to work from home to stem a pandemic not a whole lot more dangerous than a common cold or the flu.

It was the greatest ever real-world example of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The scam was perpetuated because of government lining up with all-powerful social media to crush anyone who had the intestinal fortitude to note the emperor was, in fact, naked.

This was the cornerstone outcome that set the inept Biden-Harris regime on its path to massive over-reach. The tone-deaf duo, and their elite puppetmasters, presumed that if the American populace was gullible enough to hand over constitutional rights for this COVID panic, they’d bow and scrape also on matters ranging from wide-open borders, illegal immigrants enhancing Democrat voter roles, transgender indoctrination and a general agenda somewhere to the left of Chairman Mao on the political scale.

I confess to having despaired that the genie was out of the bottle, the toothpaste was out of the tube, whatever metaphor you want to use to describe a situation that has reached critical mass and therefore was/is unstoppable.

Today, I’m happy to admit that I have come to believe that I was wrong. The left went too far and Donald Trump was just the man to cobble together a populist coalition intent on taking back control of the nation.

We won the election and we’re going to win the fight to drag the United States back into a state of reality.

This feeling was fortified at a luncheon arranged Wednesday to touch base with former co-workers. In all, eight of us (my son joined the lunch) convened at Main Moon Restaurant, discussing the state of our former (for some current) employer, The Johnstown Woke Gazette, and the national mood in general.

The topic turned to working from home. After I had left the local Woke Gazette, to work for Tribune-Review Publishing, I came to cover Penn State sports and often worked from home two days a week during football season.

It was very easy for my bosses to know I was not leaning on the oars despite being out of their immediate eyesight. All they had to do was look at the stories I composed. In the strange world of writing for newspapers, that output might not just include the items that ran the next day, but also weekend stuff for Saturday and Sunday editions, which often are put together in advance.

I actually worked longer hours from home – at least during football season – because the demands were such that it was necessary.

The Washington Post recently angered even more of its whiny, leftist staff by telling them that going forward they would be expected to show up at the office for work shifts. This after the paper refused to endorse Kamala Chameleon, producing the expected level of outraged whining.

The Post ownership did give the staff the option of resigning if they found the office demand too strenuous. Ironically, the Post edict comes hard on the heels of similar action from Amazon, which is owned by the same guy.

Working from home has failed for the same reason Communism fails wherever tried. That would be human nature. Some people work just fine without supervision and peer pressure, or the prospect of being rewarded for working harder than the rest of the staff. An unfortunately high percentage does not.

There also is something to be said for being around co-workers in that ideas can be kicked around, trends can be discussed, sources and methods can be shared.

Working in virtual isolation at home doesn’t provide this sort of interaction. It does, however, present the distractions of life.

I presume state workers get the same ability to not show up at the office as federal workers, and that could help explain why dealing with the state bureaucracy has become such an ordeal.

It certainly is true with the federal government. Try getting in touch with someone at the IRS, for example.

Trump’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, warms the cockles of my heart. I’m tired of hearing stories of $200 hammers or $70,000 conference tables bought on the taxpayer dime and just laughed off in the vein of what-can-you-do-about-it?

Here’s what you can do about it, lop off some heads. Musk very famously fired about 80 percent of Twitter staff when he bought that social media outlet and re-instated free speech. Cue the screaming and dire predictions. But it seems there was a lot of dead wood acting as censors, because Twitter continues to thrive – with about one-fifth the staff.

I suspect the government could be leaned down similarly, without any negative results.

Merely demanding workers return to work could prune the staff without the need to fire people. These entitled types likely would quit rather than having to resume giving an honest effort each and every work shift.

This is much the same as reports making the rounds that some illegal immigrants, shocked into reality by promises to deport them, are heading for the nation’s exits on their own.

We don’t care how it gets done – whether trimming government waste or sending illegals packing – just that it gets done.

As an aside, some of us lingered in the parking lot after lunch Wednesday, talking and inadvertently blocking two people looking to back out of their parking space.

All three of us – retired Woke Gazette employees, not present ones – were wearing MAGA hats and I had on a bright red Detroit Red Wings jersey one might have mistaken for something MAGA.

The man and woman in the car, apparently Chinese, rolled down the passenger side window as they backed out, smiled and told us, “Thank you for making America great again!”

We voted for Trump, expecting him to make good on campaign promises and do exactly that. I’m encouraged that he looks to be hitting the ground running.