DAMN THE TORPEDOES, FULL SPEED AHEAD

So here we go.  And speaking of speed, let's begin with Boston traffic.  It sucks and speed is not the operational adjective.  I get it that construction has to happen before the wet cold winter arrives.  I get it that the roads and bridges need fixing.  I do not get why these projects occur during rush hour. We are now a one car family and on some days I take Barbara to work in Waltham--maybe, as the crow flies, it is 10 miles.  Why does it take nearly 45 minutes each way? Because the roads are totally messed up, the towns have allowed the construction to begin at 8 in the morning, and the assigned police are just watching and sipping coffee.

Our slow as a turtle Gaming Commission neglected to discover that the winning bid for the Boston casino included land purchased from a known member of the "Mafia".  Missed that but managed to kill horse racing and took three years to do it.  I am feeling a bit better that the override will fail mostly due to the construction jobs it will create and because everyone in Western Mass. will want downtown Springfield to survive.  But the Commission is a joke and now say they want to broker some kind of deal to keep horse racing alive some place--a day late and way more that a dollar short.

The election is less than a month away and I have thrown in the towel--the Dems will not control the Senate. Which probably means the final two years of Obama's presidency will be a total stalemate.  No immigration reform, an attempt to repeal Obamacare, every effort made to limit anything Obama wants, and god forbid if one of the Supremes steps aside.  Yikes.  And if you say, "its about the economy stupid", you are wrong. Because, considering the mess he inherited, Obama has really salvaged the economy.  Unemployment is under 6% and thanks to energy efficiencies and the North Dakota boom, I paid under $3 a gallon for gas. Not enough for those haters out there.

The Turks are NATO members and want to be part of the EU--but they don't want to dip their military toes into the battle to confront ISIS.  So, literally, their soldiers watch the current battle on the other side of a fence separating Turkey from Syria.  There will be retributions somewhere down the line if they continue to sit on the sidelines.  Meanwhile those medieval fanatics are about to behead another person.

I barely understand the Ebola crisis--but I know this--Bill Gates gave $50 million to help in the fight against the spread but a lot of those African countries cannot even use the money since they have no infrastructure that can manage it.  I will say they better stop sending these patients to hospitals ill prepared to deal with them.

Speaking of nurses, though, can someone tell me why nurses at Brigham and Women's in Boston can choose not to get vaccinated against the flu and other contagious illnesses?  It is now a union bargaining issue.  I mean they are fucking nurses and they don believe in inoculation because of some screwed up sense of the unproven negatives. Bargain my health away if I am an inpatient there?

I want to end on a positive note.  We saw Richard Blanco at a reading last week.  He is the Cuban American gay man from Maine who happens also to be a poet.  He was the guy who read his poetry at Obama's inauguration in 2012.  He was wonderful in person and I promptly went to my library list and ordered up all the stuff he has written. Just inspiring--especially when he talks about the town of Bethel where he lives now.  Loved him.

SPORTSTALK
It has finally gotten through my thick skull--those sports talk shows are not really about sports; they are simply entertainment pretending to be about sports.  And if there is no sports news, they make up issues like Brady and Belichik hate each other which they have created out of thin air.  Yikes, it took me long enough.

And Michigan sucks losing to Rutgers and barely beating Penn State.  They will lose to both OSU and MSU and Brady Hoke will be kicked to the curb.

If there really is a monsoon tonight, the Pats will struggle but the Jets are so bad, they still should win.

Sayonara.