Sunday, May 27, 2007

Monday Morons--Superbowl 2011

Well, they were talking about it last week, but luckily I seemed to have missed most of it. It wasn't the media circus that happened when Tom Laundry was fired. They interrupted my soap operas for most of the week when that happened. And now that we're on that subject, why did they interrupt soap operas for a week with that breaking news? Did they really think that the people truly interested in the politics of professional sports were at home watching The Guiding Light? Or did they think that the fans of fictional Alan Spaulding would rather hear about real life Jerry Jones?

But never mind. The announcement last week was that the new football stadium will host the Superbowl in four years. The new stadium being built at all has been annoying enough. On the one side I have all the traffic and such that bothers me about Dallas, but now I'll have to deal with this new football stadium a bit down the road in Arlington. And it's going to be right on Collins, near I-30, and I just don't care for it at all.

I have all kinds of nasty things to say about organized team sports being a waste of time and money and such, and how I hate getting stuck in traffic when a game lets out and so on. And I hated that they tossed people out of their homes to build the new place. But in addition to that, I was just thinking that it was a bit stupid to plan to have a Superbowl in a stadium that isn't even built yet.

Every once in a while, somebody builds something and it doesn't turn out the way that it was planned. I'm sure everyone has seen the film of "Galloping Gertie" bridge. If you don't know what I'm referring to, look here http://www.ketchum.org/bridgecollapse.html And I heard on the news a couple of years ago about a building that no one uses except for like the first two floors. Somehow when the planners were doing all the math, they forgot about the people who were going to work in the building and the furniture and stuff that would be in the building. The building just can't handle the extra weight of having people and furniture in it.


I doubt that anything that bad would happen with the new football stadium, but I'm sure that there's all kinds of little things that could go wrong. And if something major did go wrong, if the place collapsed the first time they had enough people in it, that could kill thousands of people. But more likely there's just going to be a lot of little annoying things, like maybe they needed to put in a bunch of extra traffic lights and stuff like that. If it were me I wouldn't be getting rid of the old stadium until maybe a year after the new place proved to be okay, just in case.


I just can't imagine choosing a site for the Superbowl that hasn't even been built yet. If it really takes four years to plan the Superbowl, and something goes wrong with the new stadium that they don't find out until after it's open, what are they going to do then? I suppose that something similar happens every time they choose a place for the Olympics, and that usually goes okay, but it still seems like a really bad idea.

2 comments:

Mrs. Hairy Woman said...

About 20 yrs ago they built this monster Coliseum here in the downtown core.. and I use to go and watch the progress every so often.. My only beef with it was when it was finally opened they would have a horrible time with parking.. They had at the time one lot plus parking under the mall. Not only do they charge an exorbant amount of money for parking but they charge you just as much if not more to buy tickets to the event. I have only been there maybe three times over the course of the years and I would walk or bus it..They host many events here year round and I don't make it a priority to go due to high gouging of tickets and cost of drinking or eating there.. it's double the price..

dmarks said...

Nice mention of Galloping Gertie. I guess they used to drive from miles around just to drive on the thing.