FINALLY

A Plea to Old Fogies

Please don't ever retire.

I'll come right out and say it - I hope Brett Favre plays another season. Two or three, even. Not because I particularly like him, but he's the last remaining skill position player in the NFL who was playing at the time that I really started following sports, around 1991 or 1992. Once the entire league turns over completely, I'll officially be old. And you know those annoying old guys who are always like, "Well in my opinion, nobody holds a candle to Otto Graham," and you kind of roll your eyes and regret that anyone ever invented Social Security? I've become that guy! The other day I was lamenting that I miss the days of less flashy, more fundamental basketball with Michael Jordan and John Stockton.

But as long as SOMEONE from 1992 is still playing, I still feel like I'm young. But these guys are dropping like flies.

MLB: We've got Jamie Moyer, Matt Stairs, Omar Vizquel (who is hitting .289!), Tim Wakefield and Jim Thome.
NFL: Favre (maybe), Matt Turk, John Kasay
NBA: Shaquille O'Neal
NHL: Mark Recchi, Mathieu Schneider, Teemu Selanne, Robert Lang, Doug Weight, Mike Modano, Adam Foote, and a whole bunch of other defensemen.

Now get off my lawn!

Stop Using Time Travel As a Plot Device!

Utterly preventable.

Of all the technologies that humanity has yet to perfect, time travel and seedless cherries have been particularly captivating to the imagination of the average person. That's presumably why every sci-fi television series has to have the requisite time travel episode, and also why the Back to the Future flicks have grossed nearly 1 billion dollars in aggregate. Trivia time: in Back to the Future II, the era with the flying cars, hoverboards, and self-fastening shoes is 2015, just 5 years from now. Did anyone in 1989 really think that we'd have flying cars in just 26 years? Sorry to disappoint you guys.

Due to the nature of the time travel, it is exceedingly difficult to craft a story that actually makes a modicum of sense whatsoever. To wit: in Back to the Future III, Marty sees Doc Brown's tombstone from 1885 and goes back in time to prevent his death, which he successfully does. But if that is the case, then the tombstone will never exist for Marty to see in the future, so he wouldn't go back in time to save him in the first place. It's a strange paradox.

But some movies make an even greater (and preventable) mockery of time travel and our intelligence. I recently re-watched Star Trek: Generations, for which, as a kid, I possessed unabashed love, but has now been attenuated down to mild tolerance. Basically, a scientist named Soran walks around on the Enterprise for a while, escapes and blows up a star system to redirect a stellar phenomenon called the Nexus right into his face. The Nexus, you see, is kind of like a space cocaine gateway into dreamworld. Picard gets caught up in it too and frantically recruits Captain Kirk to come back with him into real life and stop Soran. When they do decide to go back to reality, they can choose any time, because "time has no meaning in the Nexus," whatever the fuck that means. Let me reiterate. THEY CAN CHOOSE ANY TIME IN HISTORY TO RETURN TO, and they choose the few minutes right before Soran launches his space missile. Of course, there's a frantic struggle in which the protagonists almost fail and Kirk dies (spoiler alert). But none of that would have even been necessary if they had just gone back further in time to when Soran was putzing around on board the Enterprise with nary a care in the world. Or hell, go back even further and kill his parents, I dunno. Really disappointing. And who cares if you fail anyway? Just get back in the Nexus, go back in time and then try again.

The Great Equalizer

I have been, let's say...lackadaisical...in maintaining my level of fitness, which at one time was relatively high. It's especially easy for me to neglect my health because I don't ever gain weight, but I do sometimes worry that that only means that all the crap I eat is being deposited straight into my aorta. Anyway, I accepted a long time ago that I'm not the athlete that I used to be, but I always figured that I wasn't too far behind, maybe 75 or 80%.

Well, I was wrong, and today I hit a new all-time low. I want to preface this by saying that every time I played softball while I was in grad school and earlier, I never thought it was strenuous, ever. I once played five games in a row in law school. But today, after just four innings, I was so tired that I didn't even take a warm-up swing when I was on deck, to conserve energy. Then when I actually went up to bat, I swung at nothing and took the free pass because then I could walk to first base instead of putting the ball in play and having to run. I spent my time in the field praying that nobody would hit the ball to me so I wouldn't have to move. It was real sobering. If I was just fat, I could be on one of those maudlin Weight Watchers commercials.

Even worse, I actually do run on the treadmill occasionally, and I walk about 1.5 miles a day to and from the Metro. I thought that would be enough, but it's not even close. Everything takes so much longer now that I'm old. I really wonder if it's better to bust your ass every day trying to stay healthy, or enjoy life and high fructose corn syrup and accept that you'll only have 40 years of that. Me, I haven't decided yet.