Founded in 2014, Tampa Bay Rants and Raves (TBRR) is a weekly chronicle of politics, sports, lifestyle and historical notes from a politically incorrect viewpoint. Some of this content should not be taken literally.

First thing on our mind:

Will it be the first ever major league stadium to be built on a college campus? Stay tuned.

Leading off: The city has lost its way

If you’ve lived in Clearwater quite a while, the recent turmoil at City Hall reminds you of the mid-nineties when the city was buying and then selling very expensive buildings, fussing and feuding over trivial matters and holding meetings that stretched into the wee hours of the morning. The electorate took care of that eventually and now is the time for them to do it again, starting in August. The current council has run off the tracks, wanting to buy electric companies, botching what should be a simple solution to the Garden Avenue issue and picking its resident’s pockets with outrageous utility rate increases, some as high as 250%. Come August, two seats come up for election. One council member is termed out and the second wisely will not seek re-election. The time for more fiscally responsible city council members can’t come fast enough.

Tampa Bay, politics and notes:

Related to our lead article, unfortunately voters will have to wait another two years to vote on the other 3/5 of the council, but a strong message sent this August might convince the other three council members to change their ways.

One of the nation’s oldest daily newspapers, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is scheduled to shut down in less than four months (May 3). It leaves the Steel City with no daily newspaper.

Related note: Last Friday’s Tampa Bay Times was a grand total of 21 pages.

Read this somewhere – a somewhat late, but easy to do New Year’s Resolution. New Year, New You, Use Your Blinker.

We know this is a shocker, but Disney prices are going up again. We can’t help but think that Walt, who was trying to create a family gathering place, would not be happy.

New item on the shelves fifty years ago: the VHS tape recorder. The last VHS machines were made in 2016. Twenty five years later, the new big item in electronics was the iPod. The last iPod was made in 2022.

From the 5:05 Newsletter: In its ongoing effort to make watching football as difficult as possible, the National Football League announced today that each quarter of all the remaining playoff games will be exclusively streamed on different streaming networks with the first quarter streamed on Hulu, the second on NFL Network, the third on Amazon Prime, and the fourth on Al-Jazeera Plus.

This week in 1944 (1/20), FDR is sworn in for an unprecedented fourth term.

Sports and random notes:

The head coaching job we wouldn’t want - following Tomlin, Cowher and Noll in Pittsburgh. And don’t discount the possibility of Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman somehow untangling himself from his lucrative Irish contract.

More Pittsburgh news: stellar relief pitcher of the 60s and 70s, Dave Guisti passed away last week at age 86. All-Star and World Series champ with the Pirates, Guisti featured a pitch no longer used today, the palm ball, a variation on a changeup.

Our Hall of Fame ballot is a bit late this year but put us down for Felix Hernandez, Andruw Jones and, we guess, Carlos Beltran. His numbers are deserving, but the trash can incident in Houston still sticks in our craw.

Those of us who consider the SEC the premier football conference may have to adjust our thinking after the SEC was shut out of the national championship for the third straight year and went 2-7 in bowl games.

Don’t you think with the Dodgers’ payroll, you or I could assemble a championship team? But then there’s the Mets.

Ken Burns has a new series on the American Revolution. Previously he produced similar documentaries on two subjects we know inside out (two of the few). In both, we experienced errors in fact and downright fabrications. So if those were contained on subjects we know what about those we don’t?

Idle thought: A lot of so-called self-help books could just as easily have been a pamphlet.

Someone we’d like to meet: actor and game show host, John Michael Higgins.

A follow up to our “ad blast from the past” of last week: Robert Norris, the horseman who portrayed the Marlboro Man in those Magnificent Seven – themed commercials, never smoked. He lived to be 90.

Tops at the box office fifty years ago was The Adventures of the Wilderness Family about a family who abandons LA for the wilds of Colorado. The film spun off two sequels.

One last thing: The dynasties

Why not stir up a little January controversy as we try to select the top four sports dynasties of all time? Let’s start with the easy one, The New York Yankees – 27 world championships, names like Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Jeter. Need we say more? Football is a little tougher. In recent years, it’s hard to ignore the Patriots, but over the long haul, the Green Bay Packers have amassed 1452 wins to go with their four Super Bowl wins, including the first two. They are truly a model franchise. In the NBA, two franchises stand out – the LA (formerly Minneapolis) Lakers and Boston Celtics. The Celtics, with one more championship and a hundred more wins, get the nod. Light one up, Red. In the NHL, although they have not been to the Stanley Cup finals since 2021 when they lost to the Lightning, the Montreal Canadians’ 24 Stanley Cups are equal to the next two franchises (Toronto and Detroit) combined. Of the “newer” franchises, the Edmonton Oilers and Pittsburgh Penguins have five titles each. Our Lightning have three.

NEXT UP: Confronting bad guys; Growth; Muscle cars

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