Tampa Bay Raves and Rants is a weekly airing of national and local politics, sports, lifestyles and nostalgia items from a very politically incorrect viewpoint. As always, beware - much of what is printed here should not be taken literally.

Baby boomers are out of touch

We’ve read a few “essays” on baby boomers recently, and they got our attention. We (we use we because a vast majority of our misguided readers are boomers – their first flaw) are khaki and New Balance wearing out of step individuals who visit malls (we haven’t been in a mall in two years), drive square American-made cars and still read books and some of us don’t even have smart phones – in short, a useless segment of society. We would hasten to point out a few other characteristics of boomers – we pay our bills on time; those of us who still work show up for work even when we don’t feel like it; we somehow managed to pay off our student loans; we still communicate face to face; say please and thank you; attend church and, despite its many flaws, love our country – characteristics we strain to find in most Millennials, Gen-Xs and whatever other generation has followed us.

Great Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

The following from the “unofficial” 5:05 Newsletter pretty much sums up this out of touch “boomer” thing: “If you think you are smarter than the previous generation… 50 years ago the owner’s manual of a car showed you how to adjust the valves. Today it warns you not to drink the contents of the battery.”

Number of the Week: One dollar a gallon – the increase in the cost of gas in the Bay Area since the first of January. More on this next week.

So let us get this straight, the lack of support for Joe Biden’s 3 trillion dollar plus giveaway is simply because people don’t understand it. He is going on a campaign to educate us, the unwashed masses.

By the way, one of the nuggets in his spending plan is many million dollars for a “tree equity” program. Yeah, we don’t either.

If it weren’t so incredibly wrong, you might chuckle at the use of “reproductive rights” or “pro-choice” to lessen the grievousness of killing unborn babies.

A bit of wisdom “borrowed” from a friend: Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Sports, media and lighter stuff:

A baseball thought from a longtime fan, “MLB can spend 2 years planning for a baseball game in a cornfield but can't find the time to properly execute their replay system. It really is as simple as investing in 360 degree video technology.” Note: this technology is already employed at the highest levels in Japanese and Korean leagues.

The cheer you heard earlier this week had nothing to do with a particular score, but the announcement that 68-year-old MLB umpire “Country Joe” West is retiring. West is annually voted among the five worst umpires in baseball.

Back in the day of college football scoreboards on radio and TV, it was practically mandatory to slip in (no pun intended) the Slippery Rock score. The small (7500) public university in Pennsylvania does take their football seriously – witness their 75-0 thrashing of Clarion last weekend. Clarion is also a small (4000) public university in the Keystone State.

As the NHL season prepares to start up this week, that fancy thing you see on the ice dates back to 1949. Frank Zamboni created the original machine to speed up the resurfacing of his skating rink in Southern California.

Topping the charts this week in 1968 was the biggest song of the decade – The Beatles Hey Jude.

If after this life, you are condemned to TV hell, there will be one channel featuring only Judge Judy, The View, Ellen, Doctors Phil and/or Oz and anything involving Oprah.

There are football programs - then there’s USF

When you think of great football programs over the years, you naturally think of Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame, Oklahoma and our two Florida schools – UF and FSU. On the other end of the spectrum are Northwestern (have lost more football games than any other Division I school), Indiana, Rice and Dry Gulch A&M. Okay, the last one is a fictitious school made up by our oldest friend years ago. Soon to join this list of schools you want at your homecoming is USF who opened the season with a 45-0 loss to N.C. State – hardly a football power. Then came the Gators and a three touchdown loss. Then a two touchdown win over Florida A&M, a College Division opponent, then two more losses. The Bulls have won six games over the past three years. They do have a winning record over their 22 seasons, but that is mostly the product of their founding coach Jim Leavitt who had nine winning seasons in his ten years at the school. Having spent an outrageous amount of money on the program, they can’t simply go quietly into the night as their cross town neighbors, the University of Tampa, did some thirty years back. But it is quite apparent that USF is not ready for prime time and needs to make serious adjustments to their program.

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