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.

Life after Wal-Mart

This week a bit of an addendum to last week’s piece on gift cards. After being ripped off for $50 in fraudulent gift cards at Wal-Mart last holiday season, we decided we probably could live without them. We were never much of a fan in the first place, watching them replace small, locally owned businesses and squeeze every penny out of their vendors over the last couple of decades. But last year after buying the gift cards for two great people at our favorite restaurant, only to have them go to the store and find out the cards were valueless, we took the cards back to the store where we purchased them. There was a lot of lip service, the taking of our contact information and nothing more. The cards never left our hands from the time of purchase until they were given to our valued servers. There is no nice way to say it except theft either by dishonest employees or sloppy security allowing the cards to be scanned in the store by other miscreants. Likewise, there is no other way to describe Wal-Mart’s attitude than “we’re so big we don’t need to care.” How did that attitude work out for K-Mart? Well, it’s been almost a year and we’ve found out that we can survive nicely without Wal-Mart and the few products we liked that were unique to that store. Nothing is too big to fail and Wal-Mart may well be one of the next examples of that in the future.

Great Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

Political commentator David French recently cites a University of Virginia poll that showed a near majority of both Biden and Trump voters either somewhat or strongly agree that it is time to split the country. That, of course, will never happen, BUT if it should happen, put us down for slicing off the west coast and all of I-95 north of the Carolinas.

Speaking of Virginia, a political ad by our current second in command is scheduled to air regarding the upcoming Governor’s race in some 300 Black churches in the two weeks prior to the election. If only we had a law calling for the separation of church and state.

Annette Taddeo’s entry into the Democratic gubernatorial primary is a plus for Charlie Crist and a minus for Nikki Fried who could very quickly slip to number three among Democrats.

Idle thought – the Democratic Party is identified as Blue and the Republican Party as Red. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Okay, here we go again. If we can willy-nilly move a significant day like Memorial Day (celebrated on May 30 for over 100 years) to the last Monday in May, then we certainly can move Halloween to the last Friday of October so kids don’t show up at school the next day dead tired or all sugared up.

Another angle on Halloween from the creative mind behind the 5:05 Newsletter: Is Halloween even necessary anymore? I've been wearing a mask and eating candy for 18 months now.

Sports, media and lighter stuff:

Just wondering how many calls and emails fired Washington State head football coach Nick Rolovich and his assistants have received from law firms thus far.

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of the IPod – a device whose time has apparently come and gone. Being somewhat behind the techno curve, we still listen to the some 5800 tunes we have packed on ours while continuing to use our flip phone.

One of the local TV stations recently ran a piece showing that taking the time to select a TV show or streaming movie adds up to 55 days in a person’s life. We can only imagine how much time we lose looking up and typing in passwords for our bank, our insurance companies, medical facilities and so on.

Happiness is – seeing the driver who blew by you at 20 MPH over the limit parked on the side of the road a few miles ahead along side an SUV with pretty flashing lights.

Two mentions in two weeks! A belated happy 75th birthday (October 20) to Lewis Grizzard, who left us much too early in 1994, just a year after the passing of his beloved dog, Catfish. If you don’t know who Lewis Grizzard is, you are functionally illiterate and we suggest you correct that by reading perhaps his finest book I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962.

Gas station’s circle of life – a few years back all the Hess stations became Speedway facilities, now many Speedway stations are re-branding to Exxon. In a few years, will we circle around to Gulf, Phillips 66 and Pure?

Speeding up the game

Baseball is the only major sport without a time clock. Some would say that is one of its charms. Others say its three hour plus games are driving a lot of folks away from the sport. An experiment was held in the minor leagues in this just completed season. It involved a 15 second time clock between pitches – eliminating pitchers from taking strolls around the mound and hitters adjusting the suits of amour they wear after every pitch. The result - game times were shortened by 21 minutes – back to the lengths of over twenty years ago. This should be a no-brainer for owners and the player’s union when they try to craft a new bargaining agreement this winter - and an extra half-hour’s sleep for their fans. By the way, the length of major league games increased again this year.

UP NEXT: 80s hit makers; Brooks Brothers; The EST Blues

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