Debt, Tall Guys, & Oil

A few observations about current affairs:

1. I hate seeing the commercials on the tube regarding debt reductions. The folks are all so pleased to announce that they had a $34,000 credit card debt and through the wonderful efforts of “Debt 10000,” they had to pay only $12,400. And others echoing the same pleased result for their credit card debt or their state or federal income tax obligations. “Whoopie!” they are all saying, “look how much I got away with.” And then there are the lawyers specializing in bankruptcy. Once upon a time, declaring bankruptcy was a major embarrassment, considered on the same level as declaring to the world that you had syphilis. Not any longer.

2. The Phoenix Suns finally got the Spurs monkey off their backs, hammering the Spurs in four straight games. Which leads me to the old argument about who are the greatest NBA players. I say, no big man in the center can be considered great unless he can make free throws. I remember the contortions Wilt Chamberlain had to go through from the free throw line. He may have been a great scorer, but then, he was huge for his time, simply catching passes under the basket or rebounding under the basket and then throwing it down. If I were seven feet tall with an arm span of ten feet, I could also stuff the basket with abandon. That wouldn’t make me a great player, just an inordinately tall one. There are others in the past, but I’ll complete my argument in the present. Shaquille O’Neill would have everyone believe he’s “The Greatest.” Well, he’s not. He’s just a huge tree camping in the middle, and he, like Chamberlain, can’t shoot free throws worth a hoot. The same goes for Ben Wallace, Dwight Howard, and Tim Duncan. They can’t be considered great athletes or great basketball players if they can’t make free throws. Steve Nash is a great basketball player.

3. And a quick note about our ridiculous dependence on unfortunate sources of energy. BP is criminally responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf. They should have had so many safeguards in place that this oil bath couldn’t have happened. But it did, because we make it too lucrative for oil companies to find rich oil fields and then pump oil out in the most profitable yet dangerous ways. Our reliance on coal is also stupid, sending men miles underground to bring up coal to be used in power plants, which then leave behind this gray sludge that gets dumped in huge toxic ponds, just waiting for disaster to happen. Where are the efforts to find safe sources of energy—wind, solar, vegetable oil?