Steve Young Wearing A Tablecloth

... perhaps one he took off a picnic table.

Watching MNF last night, we were assaulted by this sartorial horror from the old 49ers QB, Steve Young.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Hideous. Simply hideous.

Snow In The Rockies

I shot this one with my phone from the plane's window yesterday as we flew back from Chicago to San Diego. I left it pretty big, so it might be worth a click. Enjoy!

What's Next, A Game Show?

I saw this and I still don't believe it.

"Racist Sandwich": This podcast wants you to think critically about race and food https://t.co/oQEjGDpBlv via @NBCAsianAmerica pic.twitter.com/EJlSrRRLRu

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 16, 2017

Next up on NBC, "Let's Make A Diversity Deal" where contestants attempt to assemble the most diverse team to accomplish mundane bureaucratic tasks while combating racism!

The elites who run NBC have completely lost their marbles. Why do I need to think critically about race and food? Why can't I just have some pho or wings or Pad Thai or fish and chips, drink a beer and watch the Monday Premier League match at lunch?

Who is the audience for this podcast? The only group I can think of is people who are just like the podcasters - educated, woke, hip and utterly disconnected from reality. All the while they're working on their podcast, kids by the millions in single-mom homes are falling farther behind their peers who come from traditional families.

It's so detached from the serious problems of the real world that it makes me want to rant on and on and on. Don't worry, I won't. I'll just stop here before I go completely off the rails.

We're in the Windy City for a family wedding this weekend and, of course, we went to a tap room to sample the local suds. This is what it looked like.

They have lots of local, Midwestern craft beers at The Brass Tap in Chicago. All of their IPAs were horrible, probably because they were brewed without first critically thinking about race and hops.

It May Not Be Spoken

... but it's OK if it shows in their behavior.

The Boston Globe recently did a series of articles probing Boston's reputation as the most racist city in America.

But this much we know: Here in Boston, a city known as a liberal bastion, we have deluded ourselves into believing we’ve made more progress than we have. Racism certainly is not as loud and violent as it once was, and the city overall is a more tolerant place. But inequities of wealth and power persist, and racist attitudes remain powerful, even if in more subtle forms. They affect what we do — and what we don’t do.

I haven't read the whole thing, but it triggered my thought from yesterday - there are topics we can discuss, like racism, and there are ones we can't discuss like cultural rot. When I started reading the Globe's work, I wondered, "What if there's a basis for the feelings? I wonder if they deal with that in the series."

I have a friend who is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive. They love to talk about racism and they have the obligatory lefty hatred of the South, particularly of southerners who still like the Confederate flag. In San Diego, there's an excellent soul food restaurant in one of our few black neighborhoods. The prog won't visit it because they don't feel safe. Personally, I've got no problem going down there and getting my fix of deep-fried okra. The prog will preach to you at length about how racist America is, but their actions show they feel there is merit to the racists' arguments.

There's the elephant in the room again. We can talk about the Stars and Bars, but we can't talk about the reality of communities where the traditional family has broken down. We clearly know what it means in terms of crime and ruined lives because we quietly avoid those places, but we dare not say what we're implicitly thinking.

Going back to Boston, how many of the readers of that series will be nodding their heads, thinking about how terrible it is that so many of their neighbors are such racists all the while never having shopped, eaten, worked, lived or gone to school in those neighborhoods because, well, look at them, they're such cesspits!

It feels like our conversations about race are really all about ourselves and whether or not we are virtuous. What would we discuss if our first priority were the people who live in those neighborhoods?

A park in Boston. There are no statues of Robert E. Lee, but plenty of racism. Hmm.

You Can Only Solve The Problems You Can Discuss

When my wife and I teach the remarriage class for the Diocese, we talk about the elephant in the living room. That's where a couple avoids discussing a major issue and it gets bigger and bigger until it's like having an elephant in your living room that you pretend you don't see. You never bring it up because you're afraid of the argument that will result.

I've been trying to put my finger on what really bugs me about the destruction of Confederate monuments. The two thoughts that keep returning to my mind have been:

• If the monuments are so horrible, why are the pathologies in the black community the same everywhere, whether there's a statue of Robert E. Lee present or not?
• What are we hoping to gain from this? Is there some metric of black success we expect to rise once the monuments are all gone?

I do understand that to some people, removing them itself is a good thing because of the nation they represent. I can respectfully accept that while disagreeing with it. To me, they represent men fallen in battle and removing those monuments is essentially telling the descendants of those soldiers, "Your ancestors were scum."

But that's not the elephant in the living room. Nor are any of the other Social Justice fads like cultural appropriation, whiteness, white privilege or what have you. No, the elephant in the living room is our debased culture.

I'm using black America here, but understand it's a proxy for all of American culture. It's handy because the statistics are stark and the national conversation is obsessed with race. I have argued before that skin color is irrelevant and I don't see the need to recap that here.

Going back to the culture and things we don't discuss, try this on for size. About 50% of all black pregnancies end in aboriton and of the remaining half, about 3/4 are single women having babies. That means that 7 out of every 8 times a black woman gets pregnant, her man won't commit to her and the child.

Civilization is built upon the family. Those stats reveal a foundation that is rotten to the core. I've likewise blogged incessantly about the problems that arise from broken families - crime, drugs, education, etc. Compare the effects of some statues in a park nearby and having your parents, grandparents, friends' parents and neighbors' parents unmarried and in transitory relationships. It's insane to suggest that the two have even vaguely equal value, but we discuss the statues/racism all the time and the culture almost never.

I don't know any racists and I'm a pretty gregarious person who travels all over the country. If racism was a serious problem, then statistically, I'd expect to know at least a few. I don't know any, as in zero. I know plenty of children from broken homes, though. It looks to me like one problem is solved and the other has been allowed to grow until it's huge.

That's because American family culture is the elephant in the living room.

We'd sooner pay for a massive remodel than discuss what it's doing in our house.

A Little-Known Theology Fact About Bacon

We recently celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is a little-known fact that during one of Mary's visits with Juan Diego, she told him, "Cuando cocinas tocino, el bebé Jesus sonríe" - "When you cook bacon, baby Jesus smiles." He told this to his neighbor, Maria Consuela Roberta Chata Lupe Garcia-Garcia*. Recent research has revealed that Maria was granted a vision after Juan told her this crucial Catechetical fact. An angel of the Lord came to Maria that night and told her, "Cuando cocina tocino con manteca de tocino, el bebé Jesús sonríe con ángeles cantando, también" - "When you cook bacon in bacon grease, baby Jesus smiles with angels singing, too."

And now you know.

The Catechism is silent about what happens when you chargrill oysters, but St. Catherine Labouré was convinced it involved Cherubim.

* - Maria Garcia-Garcia was a proto-feminist. Although it was the 1530s and the patriarchy reigned supreme, she was a fiercely independent woman and refused to take her husband's last name, hence the hyphenate with her maiden name.

The Problem With Being A Good Cook

... is that most restaurants disappoint.

I'm way down south in Dixie this week, my favorite part of the country with my favorite cuisines and outside of pilgrimages to Waffle House, where the company is more than half the attraction, and some fried chicken at Po Folks, it's been disappointing.

That's not unusual, most of the food in San Diego is disappointing as well. In the end, we go out to eat because we're tired or we want to go to a tap house for uusual craft beers. There are a couple of Italian joints in SD that my wife adores, but I can't tell them apart. Tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, basil and some pasta is all it is to me. Meh.

Yesterday, I had some Crawfish Etouffee. It was good, but mine is much better. I use homemade seafood stock and I do a lard roux that takes about 50 minutes. No restaurant is going to be able to do that.

Where local Southern eateries shine is when they can serve something you just can't find in SoCal, like crawfish. A crawfish boil, man that's some good eating and unless you want to pay big bucks to have them shipped in live, you can't get it in San Diego. Meanwhile, the rest of the food is pretty good, but I wouldn't go out to those places if I lived here. I'd stay home and cook it myself.

As for the fried chicken and biscuits at Po Folks, they were unreal. I do a triple coating for my chicken: seasoned flour, beaten eggs and Panko crumbs, but these guys look like they did a buttermilk soak and then just the seasoned flour. It was the best fried chicken I've ever had. The crust was crunchy and delicious, but not thick like KFC or mine. The biscuits simply dissolved in your mouth in a wash of buttery goodness. Fabulous.

OK, enough is enough. I need to get in to my local work site. It's going to be a 22-hour work day for me today, what with early morning work at the hotel and then flying home late tonight. Sigh. I wish I was taking some time off so I could scoot over and spend some time in Alabama. I loves me that state, I surely do.

Have a great day and I'll post again tomorrow.

I believe that an excellent way to understand Southerners is to spend time hanging out with them at a Waffle House. Try it a half dozen times and I would bet that any lingering prejudices you have about Dixie will be washed away.