Catching Up Vol. 5: Random Ramblings

Rather than trot out a bunch of filler, here are a few scraps of fall that I couldn't throw away.

Walt moves over for Headless Ted
Fact: Walt Disney was cremated, and does not frozen awaiting revival in the distant future. Fact: I wish Ted Williams' family cremated him so his embarrassing saga could have ended. I can't remember the last time a final resting place drew so much attention then revulsion, but the sad saga of post-mortem Ted Williams got uglier this year.

The short version: Skipping a funeral, Williams' unscrupulous son, the late John-Henry, flew the baseball legend's body to an Arizona cryogenics facility, where the son would later be interred as well. Seven years later, allegations about abuse of the Red Sox great's head knocked him back into the headlines. I won't repeat those horrific tales of corpse abuse here, because I prefer to hold onto the last public memory of Williams - being mobbed by players on the 1999 All-Star team, where rejected all bureaucratic attempts to get them to clear the field. That spontaneous remembrance of baseball's rich history beats a head in a metal box any day.

Skipping American Government 101
The House bill is a gesture, and will looking nothing like the completed version. How many times did the Republican-led Congress from earlier this decade pass bills overturning the restrictions on drilling in the Arctic? How much new drilling has begun? Unless the Senate acts in kind, the House accomplishes nothing. This is Civics 101, yet people go ignorant.

Pieces from the House bill will survive; the public option probably won't. The problem of a Democratic majority is it relies on moderate and conservative Democrats, many of whom won't go along with any step toward a single-payer system. Every votes counts there, unlike the shepherding common in the House.

Beating down the once-beloved Browns
For 10 years, football-loving people largely looked away from the Browns, chalking them up as blandly mediocre to downright awful. But as bad as it looked in 2008, the Browns have transcended all previous ceilings for awful football. The secretive, arrogant Eric Mangini enters, and suddenly the team transforms into an epic trainwreck, with Mangini and owner Randy Lerner each vying to play Casey Jones. It's so painful to watch the team of my youth, which too often had great seasons winnow down to heartbreak, collapse into this wretched mess.

But like everyone else, I cannot avert my eyes. Watching his puffy coach act like he's the smartest guy in the room when he clearly knows little about the game has proven more entertaining the football his lackluster team produces.