Fall

Fall, so named for leaves which do and golf putts which don’t, has arrived.

Yes pholks, that’s my annual greeting to the start of Autumn. But this is one of those special Autumns which “falls” every fourth year--an election year and an olympiad.

Every year fall brings the baseball playoff and the World Series, the start of college and professional football, piles of leaves along with cooler mornings and shorter days. But every fourth year we get a bonus--and that bonus can be good or bad depending on your personal outlook.

This year’s Olympics were spectacular--what little I bothered to watch. Outstanding athletic performances and great pageantry from Australia. Our U.S. teams and individuals were great and so were those of lots of other nations, some of which I had to go to a modern map to find.

But pholks, I was not alone in my skimpy watching of the Games due to the 18 or more hours of delay enabling us Americans to see the taped, edited and packaged results in prime time. I love sports and would have been in front of the tv at 2 a.m. to watch it live if offered the opportunity. But watching the morning news and listening to the radio on the way to work and getting the results of what was to be shown that night on the tube really took the excitement out of the whole thing. Watching a race which is interrupted by several commercial breaks along with personal profiles of the athletes while already knowing who won and who lost took a lot of the shine off  a great event.
Millions of others apparently felt the same way and the networks had to throw in hundreds of additional ads for the sponsors who didn’t get the audiences they were promised. That, of course, added to the disruption of the already “after-the-fact” coverage.

So this Olympic Fall fell short for me.

So now we have the Election Year Fall. And we have the debates. Well pholks, I gotta tell ya that having those things broadcast “live” certainly doesn’t make them better than the “after-the-fact” Olympics.

I only caught a few minutes of last night’s first debate and that was more or less planned. First of all I had to work late and second of all if I had been home I would have had to leave if I had wanted to watch the Bush-Gore contest. That’s what my wife had made perfectly clear more than a week earlier.

That aside, I really didn’t want to watch or listen to the thing anyway. My plan was to go to my normal early morning coffee club meeting in the Country Chicken restaurant in Woodlake and catch the real debate about the debate. Of course the Gore-Bush and Democrat-GOP battle is waged in the coffee shop every morning. There never is a winner and no minds are ever changed but it is entertaining. So far this year there have been no fisticuffs just a couple of shouting matches and only three times has any of the debaters stormed out without finishing their coffee. But we still have a ways to go and things should heat up soon.

Another thing which makes these morning “discussions” better than the national debates is the mix of olive and orange farming arguments which get thrown in with lots of other juicy topics.  Government regulations, campaign promises, the price offered for olives and oranges, the spraying of pesticides, irrigation, politics, and import and export regulations and dozens of other items are all factored into these discussions. Heck, Bush and Gore don’t even mention these things in the debates. How is a person supposed to know whom to vote for if they don’t know how the candidate stands on regulating ladder height or how often olives should be pruned or how to make sure none of the growers gets fined for having an oil leak on his tractor?

Although this “Fourth Year Fall” is less than a week old, I admit it doesn’t look to good. I saw less of the Olympics than ever before, the Presidential Debates are off to a slow start, the damned Giants not only finished ahead of my Dodgers but are in the playoffs and the Rams will finish way ahead of the 49ers and maybe repeat as Superbowl champions.

I guess this is just goin’ be a regular fall. The leaves will and my golf putts probably won’t.