I would furlough, but it isn't in my job description

Imagine a world where your 300-pound neighbor is walking his Pekingese and toy poodle down your street when, suddenly, out of nowhere, a giant piece of space junk comes hurtling through the sky at breakneck speed. The neighbor, with surprising cat-like quickness, prepares to dodge it when, from out of nowhere on the other side comes Madonna, whose extreme meditation session causes her to levitate thousands of miles from her home in New York, London, Abu Dhabi, or wherever the heck she is living now, and is now warbling back toward the earth. Madonna slams into Mr. 300, knocking him into the path of the space junk, which lands squarely on his legs. He survives, but is trapped. You run out of your house to help. Your other neighbors run out, too, but they refuse to help. One says he can't lift because he stubbed his big toe taking out his trash. Another says helping his neighbor is not in his job description as provided by the Succubus Homeowner's Association. Stupid? Yes, but amazingly, this is exactly how unionized labor in the United States works, well, minus the whole Madonna flying through the air thing.

This week, Ford, the only Detroit automaker to not take the government's bailout scam, announced that things were turning around. Ford is actually starting to make money, and Consumer Reports found that the quality of Ford vehicles was equal to or, in some cases, superior to Honda and Toyota. That's the good news. The bad news for Ford is that the United Auto Workers rejected contract amendments that would have saved the company money but, more importantly, would have helped rid Ford of something dumber than the B.C.S. and martinis made without gin. It is called job classification.

In a nutshell, job classification means that there are more job titles at a Ford plant than there are women who have slept with Wilt Chamberlain. If a piece of machinery breaks down, only someone with a specific job classification can repair it, even if someone else standing three seconds from the malady could take care of it. That means an assembly line comes to a halt, which means Ford doesn't make cars, which means Ford (and it's unionized workers) don't make money. I'm glad our Succubus Homeowner's Association hasn't thought of this; the idea that if my dishwasher breaks, because I am not a trained dishwasher repairman, I am not allowed to fix it and have to wash my dishes by hand until a Succubus-approved repairman arrives. This is the main reason the Ford Fusion, which recently received higher ratings that the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, is built in Mexico withOUT union labor.

I know what you're thinking, and you're right. It doesn't make sense to protect union jobs that may disappear anyway since the union rejected the deal. But what appears obvious to us is an eternal "Unsolved Mysteries" marathon to the union mind. Take what's happening with teachers in Savannah.

Yesterday, teachers' union members protested outside the Savannah-Chatham County School system offices. The reason for their demonstration, they said, was two-fold. First was the fact that the school board was holding a regular meeting on one of the teachers' state-mandated furlough days, and that is an excellent point. If we really are that desperate to save taxpayer money, the board's business can wait a few days or a week. But had corporal punishment not been outlawed by the EPA, USDA, NBA, AAA, and ESPN, the second reason for the protest would merit the big board.

The teachers say they received an e-mail from School Superintendent Thomas Lockamy saying more furlough days may be necessary to help balance the budget. The union leaders say teachers can't make ends meet with the estimated two-percent loss in their annual salaries caused by the three furlough days currently on the calendar, much less a few more. As someone who has been forced to make ends meet with an almost 100-percent loss in his annual salary this year, I will gladly present the world's smallest violin to the union members so they can Jack Benny their troubles away.

Secondly, I'm sure Alfreda Goldwire, local American Federation of Teachers President, and her counterpart with the Georgia Association of Educators would be happy to help the teachers make up that two-percent loss by refunding their union dues money. After all, if the school board should feel the pain of the teachers, so should the union that professes to represent it's best interest. However, if I were Kenny Rogers in "The Gambler 26, Dr. 90210 Scuplts The Perfect Poker Face," I would bet that President Obama will go hot-tubbing with Glenn Beck before any union gives up their moolah.

Why give money back to help your members continue to engage in what the union endlessly tells us is "The Most Important Profession.......In THE WORLD" when they can instead give some of that money, in the form of political contributions, to such lovely, hometown folks as the Service Employees International Union, which sent thugs to physically assault people at one of those infamous Congressional town hall meetings in St. Louis this past August. National teachers unions also regularly give teacher's money to such wholesome, milk and cookie-type groups as ACORN and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Wonder if the Rev. will foot a teacher a hundred or two so their power doesn't get cut off?

To be sure, unions are not the only problem here. American car companies have been mismanaged for decades, and no one, not teachers, not administrators, not politicians, not even many ordinary people have the guts to introduce true competition in the education system to improve schools (or especially to give me the $9,000 or so in my tax money that's being spent on my first-grader so I can choose how best to educate her). But when someone does come along with solutions to problems, it's a good bet that a union leader will try to be there to get their piece of the pie, and the solution (and the union rank and file) be damned. America needed unions many decades ago, when sweatshops and filthy working conditions were common. But while teaching and building cars aren't exactly cushy work, sweatshops they are not, and today's union leaders are the ones who more closely resemble yesterday's industry barons.

Leave A-Rod Alone

My hatred of the New York Yankees is similar to that which might be felt at a Sons Of Confederate Veterans outing to a Spike Lee movie. I haven't even remotely thought of rooting for the Yanks since my early boyhood hero, Reggie Jackson, went to the California Angels in 1982, and by that time I had become a die-hard Braves' fan thanks to Ted Turner's daily tubular injections. The need to make that abundantly clear will be evident with the next sentence I write, which is anathema to just about every non-Yankee lover in America, along with all the women who wish they were the Budweiser Derek Jeter Girlfriend Of The Week (you didn't know he had a corporate sponsor for his women, did you?). It is time to stop criticizing Alex Rodriguez for, well, being Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod began his career as a Wunderkind shortstop in Seattle, with many predictions that he might someday be the greatest player of all-time. While Cal Ripken deserves credit for making shortstop a position for power hitters instead of a place where five-foot-three guys batted .177 while catching everything hit between them and the stadium parking lot, Rodriguez was Ripken cubed. A very good fielder (much better in the field than Jeter, but that's another column), and power hitter extraordinaire, not too many people were surprised when A-Rod signed as a free agent with the Texas Rangers in 2001 for enough money to buy Hilton Head Island or to pay for the Texas electric chair's power bill for about a week-and-a-half.

The beginning of his Texas tenure is supposedly when A-Rod discovered the Power of Injection (wonder if that's going to be Dr. Wayne Dyer's next public TV pledge drive special?). Sure enough, Rodriguez averaged a third-more homers during his three cowpoke-land doping years, and I'm sure that the cat-turd-sized Arlington ballpark and the Texas summer heat had NOTHING to do with that, not to mention that virtually everyone across the majors was hitting more dongers during that period. Um-hmmm. When A-Rod's positive steroid test from all those years ago became public, this past February, the baseball world immediately grew long beards, put on those "End Of The World Is Nigh" placards, and paced up and down our TV's. This happened around the same time that Alex's manager during most of his Yankee years, Joe Torre, took the brave step of using his book to rip him. You know, man-to-man, or man-to-book.

So how did Rodriguez respond to all this? After missing the beginning of the season due to injury, he should be the Yankees' team MVP this year. True, Derek Jeter had a great season, even (for him) in the field, and Mark Teixeira was also great, but Tex didn't start hitting until he had A-Rod hitting behind him in the lineup. "Oh, yeah? Well, A-Rod plays like Nancy Pelosi governs in the playoffs!" Um, actually he played good playoff ball in Seattle. He did play as if Madonna had him in constant meditation during his first few Yankee postseasons, but so far this postseason, A-Rod is batting .360 (with a .484 OBP and.820 slugging avg.), six bombs and 18 RBI. Simply put, i fhe Yanks win it all this year, the reason they will do so is "A-Fraud." Also, no one seems to care that Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Jeff Bagwell, Stan Musial, and Ty Cobb all stunk it up during their playoff careers. Why is the bar for A-Rod higher than for some of the other greatest players ever?

Well, I know that answer. Unlike Rodriguez, those other guys didn't make enough money to bribe all the Facebook clones into actually complimenting Georgia Bulldogs' coach Mark Richt. "No one is worth all that money." Au contrare. The market has determined that A-Rod IS worth all that money. "Those other guys didn't use steroids!" Maybe that's true, but there have been many different ways of cheating since the invention of baseball, and if you believe that Hank Aaron never popped a "greenie" (amphetamine), in his career, you also probably believe that the cost of government entitlements actually goes down over time. Also, if A-Rod, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and others are permanently tainted by drugs, then for consistency's sake we have to throw out the stats of virtually every NFL player, and probably a lot of college football players in the 1970's and '80's. When an NFL'er is suspended for steroids, they should also be treated with the same public contempt given to A-Rod instead of being treated as conquering heros for your fantasy team when they return.

I would rather watch C-SPAN speeches or that weird polka show on RFD-TV than another Yankees ticker-tape parade this week. But one thing I am very glad to see this playoff season is Alex Rodriguez incontrovertibly establishing himself as perhaps the greatest baseball player of his era, or at the very least a close second to Albert Pujols. And if you ever mention steroids and A-Rod in the same conversation, I will give you three guesses as to where you can stick your asterisks.

Predicting the Sports Headlines...

A few that I am expecting from the anti-SEC sports media...

"USC drops two spots to 6th in new BCS standings after closer-than-the-score indicated, super narrow, really it was close until the 3rd quarter, the last quarter-and-a-half doesn't really count anyway, loss to Oregon. How's that Mr. Carroll? Can we still do lunch and a massage Wednesday?"

"Florida barely hangs on to top spot in rankings after failing to beat Georgia by 87 points. Biased officials force Bulldogs to wear black helmets and black pants, sealing their fate."

"Alabama drops three spots despite bye week. Voters in coach's poll dispute claims they are jealous of Nick Saban's paycheck."

"Texas vaults to number two in BCS after sterling victory over super-double-stuffin-tough Oklahoma State. What Cowboys' loss to Houston? Who is Houston? Everyone gets to have an off week, except SEC teams. After all, Ok State beat Georgia! Yeah, Georgia was good back then! Wait, I just complimented an SEC team. Dang it!"

Quotes Of The Week

Quotes Of The Week:

1) The First-Grader, with an example of why it might not be a good idea to hold "Red Ribbon Week" at school the same week as Halloween. She told us on Thursday, "Tomorrow at school, we're having a rock concert to celebrate Halloween and drugs!" So, rock concerts at school are the same as rock concerts everywhere else. THAT'S a relief.

2) A Production Director for a radio cluster in Savannah, reading a short commercial after a newscast. I won't mention where he works. I'm only snarky enough to do that if it were my old employer, and it wasn't! Anyway, the commercial asked me to "come to the Con-Coarse Dee-Ele-gants in Hilton Head..." this weekend. The Alabama pronunciation of Concours D'Elegance invades Savannah! Is that how they speak in the South of France?

Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson My Eye

It's official. Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon is now The Joker. I caught him the other night on one of those Time-Life Music infomercials. I believe it was the "We Used To Have Roadies Carry Suitcases of Aqua Net and Groupies With Only One Disease, and Now We're Lucky To Get a Gullible, Failing, Corporate Classic Rock Station To Believe There Are Still Five People Who Give a Crap About Us; I Guess We'll Wait To See If Celebrity Fit Club Comes Calling" collection.

Those Time-Life infomercials are addictive. The guest shots by the old celebs are priceless. Mickey Gilley doing the "When Country Music Was All About Beer Drinkin', Coon Dawgs, and How Much I Love My Beer and Coon Dawgs More Than My Woman" collection, Cuba Gooding, Sr. with the "You Know My Son, Don't You? Well I Ain't Him! My Son's a Lot More Famous Than Me, Don't Remind Me! No, I'm Not Doing that Jerry McGuire Thing, That Wasn't Me, That Was My SON, DAMMIT" collection, and the great Bobby Vinton co-hosting the "I Have So Much Vibrato, My Uvula Looks Like a Boxing Speed Bag" collection.

I just saw a couple more, and it's interesting they were shown back to back. The first was the "Best Of The Midnight Special: The In Our Prime, Doing Lots of Cocaine, and Lovin' It" DVD set, which I have to admit looks pretty awesome. Right after that came the "Rock And Roll Hall of Fame Concerts: The Post Rehab/Mortem, Blondie Ain't Blondie Any More, We Have To Sing Everything An Octave Lower Except For That Fro'd Punk Leo Sayer" DVD set.

Speaking of rehab, I obviously need some, because this Time-Life addicition is either out of control or I am just a big, honkin', grotesque loser.

I'm Goin' Straight To Hell

The old Drivin' N Cryin' song from my college years is never more appropriate than this time of year, the time when ghosts, fairies, pirates, Gene Simmons, Spider Man, and Transformers arrive at your doorstep with the Adam Sandler commandment "Gimme some candy!" on the tips of their tongues. It is also the time of year when the costume industry absolutely insists that every woman in America wants to dress up as, to paraphrase the Mrs. and some of her friends, a whoooooooooore. So what do candy and ho's have to do with me and my destiny to shake hands and play poker with Mephistopholes when my number is up? Well, to believe the Halloween antimatter cottage industry that has developed over the last couple decades, everything.

When I was growing up, my then-church (First Baptist Church of Trenton, GA) threw a Halloween party every year. Don't worry, you haven't had too much S'Mores Schnapps. You read that correctly. A HALLOWEEN PARTY was given by a Southern Baptist church in the buckle (or maybe the fourth or fifth hole) of the Bible Belt every year in the 1970's and early 80's. It usually included loads of candy that made us behave like, well, (imagine this) kids, bobbing for apples, and (GASP!) a haunted house! I must say with all modesty that, having personally worked in many of those haunted houses, they were some of the best in Trenton year after year. They were also some of the most painful because instead of running away while screaming, those who go through Baptist haunted houses tend to leave you with shiners and loose teeth while screaming.

(Completely random thought: Can you scare the bejesus out of someone in a Baptist haunted house? Just wondering.)

I might have missed their conception, but I first remember hearing about alternatives to Halloween parties and to Halloween itself during my college years. One of the loudest and (at least for a while in the South) ubiquitous of these alternatives was the "Judgement House." In a nutshell, Judgement Housing was designed to scare the bejesus INTO someone by showing them, often times graphically, how'd they'd be whittling away their time with The Devil if they didn't come to know The Lord. I could make a comment about a loving God dressing up for Halloween and going "Boo", but I won't. Folks are free to believe what they want and to share those beliefs as they'd like. What gets me more than the Judgement House alternative to All Hallows Eve are the folks who sincerely believe that I will end up in the final scene of the Judgement House simply by taking my kids trick or treating.

Those folks will claim this isn't the case. "We only hold 'Fall Festivals' or 'Harvest Festivals' or 'Trunk or Treat' or 'Keep Your Kid Out of Hay-ell" events on Halloween to keep children safe." After all, for the last 70 years, there has been a long line of deranged adults who eat the corpses of children for a living. They spend 364 days a year preparing the poison to be injected into copious packages of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and other treats, which, when you think about it, may explain the flavor of Candy Corn. I am not trivializing bad neighborhoods or the rare occasion when something bad happens, but do we need 8,000 alternatives to one of the most fun nights of the year when all that needs to take place is for parents to (get ready for one of my few Einstein moments) stay with their kids and only go to decent 'hoods with lots of lighting? I know. Not all parents are decent parents, which makes the victims my kids since only a handful of homes in my neighborhood actually welcomed trick-or-treaters last year.

If the purveyors of Halloween alternatives really wanted to help, they would turn their own neighborhoods into a giant welcome mat for kids who just want to have fun and give themselves a three-day sugar coma. But they don't want to help Halloween, they want to kill it, and usually it's because of an e-mail they received from their mother-in-law; you know, the one that has obviously been forwarded to about 97,000 people. That e-mail says Halloween comes from ancient pagan rituals which included the worship of Satan, raising your pinky when drinking a cup of tea, turkey bacon, the burning of Lee Greenwood records, and worst of all, the cancelation of college football games! And of course, since everything we read on the internet is true.....and you're going to Hades, too if you don't forward this to 50 people!

So, I humbly ask for your prayers, as I obviously need them. Because even though there may be fewer places for them to collect their chocolate booty, I can't wait for this Saturday. My older kid will be dressed as a doctor, so she'll be ready to perform animal sacrifices, while my toddler, dressed as a pumpkin, will surely be screaming "Yoo hoo, Satan, I'm here to serve you! My pumpkiness is your pumpkinness, oh evil one." My guess is that, in the end, my personal religious beliefs won't be worse off.

Oh, the first time I heard the song "I'm Goin' Straight To Hell" was at a Drivin' N Cryin' concert at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, circa 1991; a show I attended with some friends.....from the school's Baptist Campus Ministries chapter, who screamed the lyric at least as loudly as I. Well, at least I will have some good company.

Better choices to rank college football teams

Another week, another collective college football voter Cialis moment for Pete Carroll. Maybe its just me, but year after year, it seems that the cerebrally-challenged folks who rank the teams for college football's top 25 polls are simply trying to win the favor of the USC coach (by the way, that's the real USC in Southern California, and you South Carolina folks just need to stop right now). Guys, you remember how you desperately wanted to hang out with the cool guy in school, the leader of the pack, the man who got all the chicks and passed out the ones he didn't have time for to his buddies? That is how the hot dog eaters (hat tip to my pally Kevin Miller for that term) of the college football media and coaching world treat Mr. Carroll year after year, and this week there is yet another downright embarassing example of guys willing to be Pete's urinal hand-man.

Don't get me wrong. Pete Carroll has restored greatness to USC football. The program that was dominant throughout much of the 60's and 70's went through a swoon in the 80's, generating win-loss records that are only acceptable at places that believe they are big time but aren't, like Ole Miss or every ACC school except for Virginia Tech and, lately, Georgia Tech. But the Trojans has been mostly glorious over the past decade, and Carroll gets most of the credit for paying good money for....., errr, for rebuilding them. But Carroll also always gets a pass for losing games that USC should win in about the first five minutes of the first quarter, such as the Washington game this year. The reason for this is, well, he's just so dang cool. Instead of the 50-something guy that he is, Pete acts as if he's 23 and doing Red Bull/Crunk Juice shots on the sidelines during the game. Members of the media act like women trying to catch the garter at a wedding reception as they beat the snot out of each other just so they can inhale three seconds of the Carroll aura. How else to explain the fact that, despite suffering the worst loss of any top-ten team this season, Carroll's Trojans are ranked ahead of not one, not two, but THREE unbeaten teams in the new BCS standings.

I know what those pollsters who are desperate seeking some Cinemax skin-flick time with Mr. Carroll would tell me. "Do you really think Cincinnati could beat USC?" Well, Cincy's thugs beat Oregon State on the road by a larger margin than USC's thugs beat the Beavers at home. "Come on, Ray. TCU and Boise State ahead of USC?" Answer: Boise beat an Oregon team that may go to the Rose Bowl this year, and you have been shopping at those Cali Pot Shops too much if you really believe the Pac-10 is better than the Mountain West. "Who wants to see that dang blue field, again, or something called a Horned Frog when you can watch (cue the Marilyn Chambers music) Matt Barkley, the sexiest...errrrrrr, the best freshman QB in the country?" Bow-chicka-bow-bow. I always thought there was something pornographic about guys who follow football recruiting so closely. Now, we see that extends to media folks and other pollsters living their vicarious "Animal House" existence through those guys after they start their college careers.

Since the powers don't have the cojones to implement a playoff, the only way to fix the fight for college football's mythical national championship is simple. It is time to ditch all the pollsters and only allow a small "blue ribbon" panel rank the teams. Who would be on this panel? Glad you asked.

1) Me. Since, as should be obvious by my earlier analysis of media lust for Pete Carroll, I know everything.

2) Adam Van Brimmer, Savannah Morning News, the only pollster worth his salt. Even though for whatever reason he isn't allowed to write about sports on a regular basis any more, and the SMN's sports section is much worse for it, he is still an Associated Press Top 25 voter, and his rankings actually make some bit of sense. Adam can also defend his rankings with the best of them, using actual on-field results as his guide, not some hypothetical "but seriously, do you think..." rationale that so many other pollsters apparently use.

3) My kids. They are smarter than me. My first-grader could probably crank out a computer program that could correctly predict the results of every football game as well as the number of bribes your elected officials will take while running the country into a ridiculous amount of debt. My toddler, by simply walking up to the computer whenever one of those annoying espn.dot.com auto-play videos starts on every single web page, already watches more football every week than at least half the current pollsters.

4) My cats. I would talk to them about each school, then see how long it takes them to poop on the floor after the talk to determine the rankings. Yes, on the floor, as they apparently believe the litter box is a one-use item.

5) My Magic 8-Ball. I used a radio station contest several years ago to successfully prove that the 8-Ball could predict the outcome of football games as well as any human. Ranking a top-25 with an 8-Ball would be easier than the CEO's version of Marco Polo; "Budget Cuts! Everyone's Fired!"

"That isn't a representative sample of the nation, Ray. You have to have lots of people from all over the country pick the teams to be fair." No, you don't, because that would just lead to what we have this year, a bunch of guys desperate to sleep with Pete Carroll and desperate to keep two teams from what overwhelmingly is the best conference in the nation, the SEC, from playing for the mythical crystal fuball. Also, the beauty of the Steele system is that no one would know who was behind the rankings! We could just pretend that there are still a gazillion pollsters, not tell anyone the truth, and get something that actually resembles the best teams in college football competing for the fake national title every year. No one would ever have to know the truth!

Sure, it's ludicrous. So are this week's BCS standings.