>>>How am I supposed to watch the NFL draft in prime time tonight and still get up in the middle of the night to watch The Royal Wedding ( oh God I hope they will be as happy as Charles and the People's Princess !)
>>>
>>>Here in Cleveland the Indians are in first place ( what? ) and all anybody can talk about is the Browns and the Draft.
>>>
>>>Welcome to the NFL.
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>>They will probably work out the labor dispute. The owners clearly think this is the time to stick it to the union. Ultimately, though, they are businessmen and have to recognize a lost season would be a disaster for both sides. Just ask the NHL. Ask major league baseball and their own NFL predecessors about the bile fans tasted after outages in the 1980s. It took years to get all the way back. Neither side can be this stupid, can they?
>
>They know the fans are stupid. The fans are the ones that pay the outrageous prices to see the illiterate steroid-mutated millionaire players chase a ball around the field. If the players wind up in jail they have a better chance of making player of the year and the fans cheer them on and pay the big $$ to them.

We're not stupid, we're more creatures of habit. Changing habits is not a bad thing and I almost hope they do call off the season.

Inspired by the side topic with Charles about David Halberstam, I just reordered "The Best and the Brightest" from Amazon. It's been a long time since I read it. The original was donated to the local library in one of my periodic basement purgings. Have you read it? Definitely a classic of both history and journalism. It's no lefty tract. The main theme is that JFK and his team of brilliant advisors led us badly wrong in Vietnam. As a history of that war and that time, where Halberstam filed dispatches as a reporter on the front lines, it's hard to beat.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Brightest-David-Halberstam/dp/0449908704/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304004568&sr=8-1