FTT Off-Topic: America, I'm Sorry

So for the last four days, I've been working the day job in the middle of America. Adding to the trip's, um, merits is the fact that the hotel's wifi has combined the strength of a butterfly with, well, the concentration of a butterfly. I'm clearly down on butterflies this week. Add my post-40 nature, need to be sharp in a new office and overall loneliness without the wife and kids, and it's been a pretty work-intensive week. But, well, so be it. I don't travel for business very often, and there are worse things than living on an expense account.

But then, there's this: four days without sports, because the All Star Game barely qualifies as sports. A Dish TV fight on networks that has made multiple channels on the hotel cable system go away. And so, for the first time in something like decades...

I'm channel surfing through mass market American television.

Folks, tell me something.

When did it mainstream TV just give up?

Either it's a talent show that should cause your spine to constrict in sheer embarrassment with being a mammal like them other mammals on the television... or it's a fake documentary that's devoid of anything relating to actual honest humn life... or it's a not funny fake documentary comedy show... or a train wreck obstacle course. That last one was actually the closest thing to entertainment, in that I got to watch terrible people get hurt. And I suppose I should just be happy that it made me get up and go work out of sheer indifference and boredom, and that it's all a good thing, since it means that I won' t ever be tempted to waste my time in this way again...

But good grief. This is really what passes for entertainment these days?

Top 10 takeaways from the Dwight Howard trade talks

10) According to insiders, Howard is going to to be the first player in NBA history to play for a half dozen teams at once

9) Shockingly, none of the teams that are interested in him seem too worried about his back problem, which basically means they are all OK with mortgaging their teams to get a guy that quit on his longtime teammates

8) You have to admire how much Howard is committed to driving down his trade value before leaving

7) It's a little known rule that all trades in the NBA have to happen by early July, or they totally don't count

6) When you'd rather sign brittle non-rebounding Brook Lopez, that's kind of saying something

5) On some level, you kind of hope that the Magic trade him to the Bobcats, just as an object lesson to other superstars that try to pick their team without being free agents

4) Orlando would have probably already traded him to the Lakers if it weren't for their past history of sending big men to LA

3) There's no truth to the rumor that Orlando is trying very hard to send him to Portland or Houston, just to make sure he gets brutally hurt

2) If you're not sick of this story by now, thanks for reading the blog, Mr. Howard

1) As soon as a trade gets down, no matter what gets given up, the team that acquires him will see its odds of winning the title drop in Vegas

Top 12 takeaways from the All Star Game

12) Tony LaRussa kept R.A. Dickey out of the game long enough that most of America was asleep before he got in the game, but because this is baseball, that could have happened in the second inning

11) Someone might want to inform Royal Fan that Billy Butler really isn't worth all of this hubbub

10) If Justin Verlander doesn't have a chance to give six or more innings, he doesn't really care enough to pitch well

9) ESPN's chuckleheads mostly went for the American League in their predictions, which should have been our first clue that this would be a NL rout

8) That anguished sound you heard around the third inning was from the Fox execs who saw their meager audience melting away

7) The Nationals are going to deduct Stephen Strasburg's inning from his yearly allotment

6) Kansas City Fan is sure that the rout is all Robinson Cano's fault

5) Fox mic'ed up Matt Kemp, just so that we would get his pearls of wit over how guys who had just gotten a hit, can hit

4) Bryce Harper lost a ball in the lights, prompting roughly 7.5 million "That's a clown play, bro" jokes

3) The only reason this game was a blowout was because Chipper Jones willed it, the National League All Stars had such love for Tony LaRussa and Dave Duncan, and, um, random chance small sample size killjoy killjoy killjoy

2) Maybe it's OK that Giant Fan stuffed the ballot box

1) America is far too great of a nation to have a four-day period when the only game of note to watch is a three-hour-plus blowout that delivers unending dosage of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver

Top 10 reasons why Eagles RB Dion Lewis got arrested for pulling a fire alarm at an Albany hotel

10) Abstract act of free speech

9) In his defense, who really thinks that the fire alarms at a Hampton Inn would actually work?

8) Drew the short straw among the team's skill players for embarrassing the team in the off-season

7) Was short on material tor his upcoming appearance at the Boys & Girls Club

6) Wanted to add drama to the upcoming camp battle for the backup RB job

5) Dodging people as they flee a hotel from a fire alarm is great off-season practice for returning kickoffs

4) Meant to not pull the fire alarm, but as Eagles Fan can attest from last year, his hands aren't all that great

3) Just does crazy, crazy things after his second Fuzzy Navel

2) Needed some juice for his blog / Twitter feed / YouTube account of wackity hijinks

1) Is, um, a 22-year-old asshat who thinks that the laws of ordinary society don't really apply to him, which makes him all kinds of unique among NFL players

A Brief Note Of Staggering Meaninglessness

This week, I'm on the road for the day job. This means that I get to train some poor young person in all that I know and do, which surprisingly, will take up a considerable amount of time. (I know. Shocking, isn't it?)

Also, the next two days will involve the perfect encapsulation of all that ESPN is, which is to say, feverish coverage of things that are Not Sport.

As I write this, I'm struggling with a Wifi connection that's so weak, I think it is being powered by a 1200 baud modem. With rusty connection points, and one of those phone cords with the dongle yanked out.

So posting at the hotel, on my off hours, seems fairly unlikely. As I'll be in the office for the day job, in front of any number of people who I work with but do not often see, there's really not going to be much in the way of time to post there, either. (This is also why today's posts don't have images.)

Oh, and there's also this: blogging, which was never terribly lucrative, has gotten dramatically much less so in the past couple of years.

So.

Posts might not be so frequent for a few days.

You just spent a couple of minutes reading that.

I just spent the better part of an hour writing and uploading that.

Clearly, we have better ways to spend our time, no?