Do God or Jesus really care who wins athletic events? 

I would guess that any regular follower of televised athletic events knows why I raise the question. 

On a telecast following a Boston Celtics’ victory on their way to the National Basketball Association championship, for one example, the inevitable female post-game interviewer asked Paul Pierce how he could explain a Celtics’ comeback victory after being down by 24 points in the third quarter. 

Pierce looked skyward and pointed a finger in that direction before replying.  He didn’t offer any explanation as to why he felt the Celtics’ victory should be attributed to divine intervention. 

(And speaking of “the inevitable female post-game interviewer,” I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t gender discrimination involved here.  Does any network have a male down on the arena floor conducting those halftime and postgame interviews?) 

Another recent example of what I’m talking about:

On the recent “ESPY Awards” program, a spokesman for The New York Giants football team involved “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” in his remarks accepting an “upset of the year” award for the Giants because of their victory over the Boston Patriots in the National Football League playoff.

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Some Obama Fans Need to Grow Up

Obama-supporters working to win at least one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes for the Democratic presidential candidate may have lost ground with two recent performances.

Sen. Barack Obama is, of course, the choice of a good many  younger voters among other liberals, but I doubt that juvenile campaign tactics by some of his supporters will do anything but turn off voters in the “moderate middle” where independent-minded voters traditionally decide elections.

Certainly the most offensive of the Obama-supporters’ juvenile antics was the performance by a local band, The Good Life.  The band opened a recent outdoor concert in Omaha’s Memorial Park with a two-minute diatribe about being embarrassed by Nebraskan’s conservative voting record and how young people in the crowd should buck their parents and vote for Obama for president.

The Good Life, despite the fact that the free concert crowds in Memorial Park invariably draw families with young children, proceeded to shout a song featuring the f-word.

Certainly in much better taste but still juvenile was the effort by 70 or so Democrats, including State Democratic Party officials, to upstage a fund-raising event for Republican Sen. John McCain at the Strategic Air & Space Museum west of Mahoney State Park in Cass County.  Sponsors said they wanted to show a contrast to the big money that was being raised at the McCain event at the nearby museum.

Presumably to show a contrast with the large donations being raised at the McCain event, the Democratic cookout at Mahoney State Park featured five-dollar hotdogs.  Apparently the Democratic hotdog purveyors felt the public would not recall that Obama has solicited multi-millions from large donors as well as smaller amounts and that he attended a fund-raising event in Nebraska sponsored by Omahan billionaire Warren Buffett.

In fact, Obama’s campaign is so cash-rich that he can afford to set up his own campaign staffs in Nebraska and other less-populated states and start running television ads in the Omaha market more than three months before the November general election. 

 Adding to the juvenile tone of the Democratic hotdog fund-raiser was a sign suggesting Obama is so popular in these parts that he has figuratively changed our city’s name to “Obamaha.”

Perhaps “adolescent” is too charitable a description.  Perhaps “puerile campaign tactics” would be more accurate.

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Adm. Nelson And His Flagship
Deserve Much More Respect

What a nauseating way to treat the memory of Great Britain’s legendary naval hero, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson.

I refer to plans to fill the fourth corner of London’s Trafalgar Square with a “ship in a bottle”—a big bottle—purported to hold a smaller-than-life replica of Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory.  It was on the deck of HMS Victory that Nelson was fatally wounded by a sharpshooter in the rigging of a ship in the French fleet which Nelson’s fleet decisively defeated in a battle off Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast in 1805. 

It’s bad enough to use the “ship in a bottle” method of displaying a replica of Nelson’s flagship.  But the ultimate in bad taste is the fact that a Nigerian-raised artist, Yinka Shonibare, will make the sails of the replica of Nelson’s HMS Victory from a variety of colorful, “African-inspired” textiles.  Shonibare said the work celebrates the cultural diversity of London.

Nelson’s victory didn’t have anything to do with celebrating London’s current “cultural diversity,” a diversity which has only blossomed with modern-era immigration.  His victory at Trafalgar had everything to do with helping beat back a Napoleonic threat by defeating a combined French and Spanish fleet which supported the French emperor.

It’s one thing for a Nigerian-raised artist to propose defiling an image of Nelson’s flagship.  But it’s quite another thing for officials in charge of finding a suitable piece of art for the unfilled fourth corner of Trafalgar Square to approve of such artistic nonsense. 

The mayor of London,  Boris Johnson, said he thinks “it’s an incredible idea” to have the “modern depiction of Nelson’s boat” in a position where it “will be gazed upon by a statue of the great admiral himself.”

It’s an incredible idea, all right—an incredibly bad one.

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“Omaha Tops Long Beach
As Swim Trials Host”

Omaha continues to get rave reviews for the way it hosted the recent U.S. Olympic Swim Trials. 

In a summary of the trials which appeared in a recent issue of The Los Angeles Times, reporter Lisa Dillman wrote that among the “As Expected” performances was Omaha’s “rolling out the carpet of Midwestern hospitality and putting on a fabulous show.  Long Beach raised the bar four years ago, and by all accounts, Omaha met the challenge and then some.”

Attendance at the swimming trials in Omaha more than doubled the crowds which turned out four years ago for the Olympic Swim Trials in Long Beach in Southern California, which has lost its cachet as the swimming talent capital of the United States.  Evidence of the switch away from Southern California’s dominance in the field of producing champion swimmers:

One of the strongest teams competing in the Omaha trials is associated with the University of Michigan swimming program.  (Michael Phelps is a member of that team.)  Another of the stronger teams taking part in the Omaha trials is affiliated with the University of Texas.

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She Agrees: Laugh’s on Marian

This “Life With Marian” had to be approved by her in advance of publication, for reasons you will understand. 

Read on for another example of the fact that my invariably upbeat roommate enjoys a good laugh, even when it’s at her expense.

Marian went to the freezer one day to retrieve some doughnuts which she had placed there in the customary freezer bag, Marian was surprised and delighted to find a missing set of house keys.  They had somehow wound up in the freezer bag with the doughnuts.

Then there was the recent day when she was about to place some more magazines in a sack headed for street-side pickup for recycling.  At the bottom of the partially-filled sack she found one of her cellular phones.

In neither case, Marian said with a laugh, did she have the slightest idea how the missing item wound up in such a surprising place.

I told her it must have been something like the way my cellular phone, which she had borrowed, wound up lost for several days.  She had not simply dropped my phone into her voluminous purse but had somehow managed to get it into a small, seldom-visited side pocket in the purse—the place where she keeps her chewing gum.

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