Should Tennessee Take Bailout Money?

That’s what Blue Collar Muse is asking.  Here’s my take..

If bailouts are bad, they are bad. If people think they are good, they are ok still bad.

But here’s the thing….if Tennessee (or any other state) were to refuse the bailout money, does that mean those dollars wouldn’t be invested spent in another state? Someone is going to be standing there with their hand out.

Wouldn’t we be better off to take the money and then, ahem, “invest” it for an interest in future revenues of another state? For instance, why not buy 1% of Georgia’s state income tax for the next 10 years, or a piece of California’s lottery action, a some of Florida’s sales tax?

I’m just thinking out loud here.  I’m sure what I’m proposing is either illegal or would be deemed so pretty quickly by an executive order–can’t have the States exercising this kind of power and making these types of decisions, right?

I know I’m wrong here…tell me why.

Tennessee Martin vs Tennessee (Tennessee)

I DVR’d the game so I could badoop badoop it and not have to spend a ton of time watching it. I feel a little bad for Lester Hudson. He’s obviously a great player–you can tell just by the way he moves. But the Vols pretty much shut him down until late in the second half when, oddly enough, the Vols started playing pretty sloppy themselves. It’s too bad, because this was probably one of the few nights a lot of people in the state would get to see him play.

I think the real story of the game was Brian Williams who was getting it done everywhere on the floor. That dude is looking a lot better than last year. I can see J.P. Prince and him both having big years as everyone tries to contain Tyler Smith. Should be a fun season to watch the Vols.

Tennessee Football–What I’d Do

Actually, it’s what I’d do in just about any situation. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about football at all. I mean, I played for 10 years, but most of the teams I played on weren’t very good, so it’s safe to assume that most of what I learned was wrong anyway. On top of that, I don’t really care if Tennessee decides to fire Phil Fulmer. I love hearing the drama on local talk radio, so if he stays that’s fine with me.

But if I were tasked with the difficult job of recruiting and coaching in a state that’s not really known to produce a huge amount of talent out of high school, I would adjust my strategy and get the top talent in the region by doing something no one else in the league is doing.

I’d do what no one else in the league is doing.

I’d take the same contrarian approach to football that people take to investing–do what no one else is doing while it’s cheap and easy to get in. Wait until that’s the fad, then get out and do something else.

No one in the league is running the option? Sweet–that means I should have no problem recruiting the best option quarterback in the region. Yeah, some of those guys would choose to go to another school to play a different position, but in most cases quarterbacks want to play quarterback. Why not give them the opportunity?

It could be–and this is just speculation–that the coaching staff can’t do anything else, so they are forced to compete for the top talent to fit them in to the only system they know.

Fire Fulmer! Redux

Here that?  That’s the muffled sound of cars running in closed garages all over East Tennessee.  There are big problems in the area.  Well, big problems unless you advertise on sports radio here and want your ad heard in between the “Fire Fulmer” calls.  It seems like I wrote this exact post exactly one year ago.  Oh yeah, I did.

After the stats about how long it’s been since the Vols won an SEC Championship, coasting since 1998, and how good Florida is every year, we’ll be asked that age old question…

“When are we gonna get somebody in here that can get it done?”

No items matching your keywords were found.

Community Standards

First of all, a few housekeeping items…

Thanks to all of the new readers I’ve picked up in the past couple of days for subscribing. Nothing like a naked chick in a public park to boost readership, huh? And thanks to all of my readers who were with me long before this latest bit of urgent news hit Tennessee. Sorry if you guys were locked out yesterday–we had a little bandwidth issue while people were flooding the gate.

Something that came up in the discussion about the naked woman on the playground in Barlett was whether or not this woman had actually done anything wrong. Lots of folks were throwing up the fact that there are nude beaches in city A or this had been challenged in city B and that the Baptist minister should get a life. Others were saying that she’s unequivocally wrong and damn her to hell. So who’s right? I think it really comes down to community standards.

Yeah, this is the United States where we take everything to the Supreme Court that may involve free speech, but let’s just step back for a minute and look at this calmly. What’s wrong with a community setting its own standards of decency, and what’s wrong with respecting that standard? It’s not as if the fine folks in Bartlett want to outlaw bumper stickers or women showing their wrists. They just don’t want hot naked chicks playing in their parks.

I know you may be thinking, “why would you want to limit the presence of hot naked chicks anywhere?” Well, if you’ve ever been to a topless beach, you are well aware that for every hot topless French chick there are about 15 disgusting old German women who are topless as well. All of your hopes and dreams about a topless beach are quickly vanquished. All of a sudden, you are perfectly ok with everyone just putting their top back on. That becomes the standard you wish that community would set. But you don’t get to change the standard. You just have to stare directly at the sun until you have not only burned your eyeballs out, but hopefully the image of that herd of beasts you just saw thundering down the beach collecting shells as well.

Here’s another example–If you’re like me, there are certain words that you use around your friends that you don’t use around your parents. Actually, if you’re like me, there are lots of these words. I call it “parent vocabulary”. You may have a “kids are around” vocabulary that is similar. Do I think it’s a little silly that these words offend them? Sure. But it’s not big deal for me to refrain from using those words around them, even when we are on my turf…nothing lost.

In fact, that’s why I rarely curse when writing on this site. It’s not because cursing offends me at all. It’s because I’d rather set a standard here of saying what you want to say without cursing. There are times when that’s really the only way to get your point across, and in these times the use of naughty words makes the post more effective, at least in my opinion. I don’t have to explicitly state that–it’s implied, and most people with half a brain pick up on it.

And by the way, I really appreciate the fact that most of the people who comment here are respectful of that standard, even if the standards on their own sites are different.

I’m not personally offended by, well, anything. However, there was some stuff posted yesterday that I had to chop out of the comments. For my community standards, language isn’t the ultimate determining factor, it’s whether or not anything is being added to to the discussion. So yesterday I ended up deleting comments that were nothing more than links to the girl’s site and a couple that were just curse word laden without saying anything. Those would probably have been deleted even without the cursing. No one will miss them anyway.

But I’m perfectly ok letting a comment like, “all these prudes wouldn’t be here with out perverted thought from their horny dads muttered to their whore moms” from a commenter named “dickinyourdaughterdown” stand. Why? Because it is funny. My community standard (at least for that post) is that if I was amused, it’s a good comment. In this case, the post wouldn’t have been nearly as good if he hadn’t used the phrases “horny dads” and “whore moms”.

So summing all this up (I’m sure you couldn’t wait for that), I’d bet most people in sleepy ol’ Bartlett probably wouldn’t have cared if she’d shot this video in her house, or her backyard, or behind a WalMart at 3:30 am. Their problem with it was the fact that it was on a kids’ playground in broad daylight. A little prudish? Maybe by your standards, but you aren’t being loaded onto a truck and forced to live there either.

What would I think if this happened in the park where we take our kid? I doubt I’d think much of it if my kid wasn’t there to see it–no harm, no foul. And if we were there? I’ll give these folks the benefit of the doubt and say that they probably wouldn’t have shot the video in that situation anyway. Besides, I have enough to keep me occupied to bother getting upset over something that hasn’t even happened.

Chemical Spill Shows Us the Sequatchie Valley

We didn’t pay much any attention to the news while visiting the midstate over the weekend, and were really surprised to find I-40 east closed from Cookville to Knoxville because of a chemical spill.  There are a couple of ways to react to something like this.  One is to kick yourself in the ass for not paying attention before you left.  We did that for about 30 seconds, but it’s not very productive.  The suggestion from safety workers was to travel down highway 111 to Chattanooga, then head back north on I-75 to Knoxville.  Coming down 111 into Dunlap I remembered that my buddy used to live there, so I gave him a call and ask the fastest way to Knoxville from there.

Sequatchie ValleyEven though it took us a lot longer than we’d planned for our trip, we really enjoyed the scenery of the Sequatchie Valley by taking Hwy 27 to Hwy 30 and over to I-75 at Athens.  It’s really beautiful and quiet down there, and if I didn’t know that everyone in the world reads this blog I’d recommend the drive, but I don’t want to cause a major traffic jam, so I’ll stop short of doing that.

East Tennessee High Schools Among Best In Country!

From the KNS:

Three East Tennessee schools are among the top 1,300 U.S. public high schools, according to a 2008 ranking released this week by Newsweek.

Oak Ridge High School in Anderson County is ranked 892, Farragut and West high schools in Knox County are ranked 1,031 and 1,042 respectively, according to the listing.

3 out of 1300?

0 out of 891?

Umm…yay?

Is this article supposed to be a pat on the back for area schools or a hit piece?  Lots of people are asking about Maryville High School in the comments.  Why wasn’t it included on this list?  Supposedly it is the pinnacle of high school football education in this state.

Remember that girl in high school that everyone thought was hot, mostly because everyone else thought she was hot?  Did you ever go back and look at your yearbook and realize that she wasn’t all that pretty?

Just wondering…

Smoking Still Legal Near Hospitals

From the KNS:

Burchett and the House sponsor, Rep. Johnny Shaw, D-Bolivar, said the measure would help protect the health of hospital patients, their families and medical staff.

That’s funny, because every time I drive by a hospital I’m utterly amazed at the number of supposedly educated health care professionals who are standing outside puffing away and turning their faces into catchers’ mitts and cooking themselves from the inside.

The real shame is that hospitals don’t currently have the legal right to decide where people can smoke on hospital property, right? Right?

Hospitals already have the power to block smoking on their property if they wish, he said.

Power? Wish? This guy makes it sound like the hospital could handle this on their own. How preposterous! How can anything be decided or handled without the gov’ment?

I’m not complaining…this measure failed. I just can’t believe it was ever even considered.

Big Oops for Former Electrical Engineering Professor

J. Reece Roth was allegedly involved in providing sensitive data to the Chinese.

I had professor Roth for a class.  Here’s how remarkable the guy was–I’m not 100% sure what class it was.  Plasma engineering maybe?  All I remember about him is that he was slightly on the tubby side, the suits he wore included a vest, and he seemed very disinterested in dealing with undergrads.

My class attendance record probably insures that he remembers even less about me.