The Brief Sunday Post

This is pretty cool…if you’re a hockey fan: The NHL Tournament of Logos. And you can vote for your favorite! Do NOT, repeat, DO NOT come back here and tell me you voted for a team other than the Red Wings. Some things are simply unacceptable in life… and this is but one. No ifs, ands or buts.

Apropos of nothing…Detroit is the proud possessor of the NHL’s oldest logo, worn proudly on red/white jerseys since 1948. Second oldest? The Habs — 1952. Both, coincidentally, are Original Six teams, and both logos are classics. Cue up Tevye, if you please…

Gerard posted one of his better essays yesterday (“Back to School”), which is both funny and ALL too true. The essay is difficult to excerpt, building as it does from one point to the next. But I’ll try:

YESTERDAY I HEARD OF A YOUNG MOTHER who came downstairs early in the morning to find her fifth-grade son dressed for school but flat on his back in the middle of the living room staring in despair at the ceiling.

MOM: "What on Earth do you think you're doing?"

BOY: "I can't do it. I just can't go to school any more."

[…]

Today, after mulling the lie-down strike a little more, it seems to me there's more than a little to be said on the side of the fifth-grader's strike. After twenty years of schooling and more than thirty on the day shift, those early grades seem -- looked at through society's grubby glasses -- to be an idyllic time. After all, weren't they?

[…]

But if we try and shift our point of view a bit, and if we try to remember all those things the haze of our twice-told childhood fairy-tales hides from us, we might see it -- just a bit and just for an instant -- from the point of view of the fifth-grade boy flat on his back in the living room staring at the ceiling in utter despair.

Here he lays. He's been going to this job of his for as long as he can remember. Unlike my experience which didn't start until kindergarten, today's boy has probably been working in the education industry since age 3. They started him out on basic blocks and why he shouldn't nail somebody who took his cookie. Those are hard lessons. How to stack something up so it doesn't collapse in a heap at the first shudder in the earth. How to "share" limited and personal resources. Why you don't just paste someone who irritates you with the nearest blunt object. These are basic lessons, and we forget how hard they are. Some of us don't learn them at all. Those people are either in prison, running Fortune 500 companies, or assembling bombs.

Do go read the whole thing…including the 19 comments, as I write…you won’t be sorry. And have a little pity for your 12 year-old the next time he says “I don’t FEEL like going to school today…” He just might have a point.

Today’s Pic (Gearhead Division): An immaculate Rat Motor from a 1967 Chevelle SS 396, the first new car I ever bought and one of perhaps four or five cars I’ve owned that I wish I still had. Even though I wouldn’t ice down a case of beer in the back seat and go looking for drag races on Highway 90 in and around Biloxi, Mississippi. Not that I ever did anything that stupid, to begin with. Much. One of life’s greatest mysteries is how we (most of us, anyway) manage to survive youth.

Car show in Amarillo, TX. March, 2004.