The Dallas Cowboys are ruining my life

Okay, the Cowboys are not literally ruining my life. Like, I have not been kicked out of my home to make way for a bigger stadium and/or parking lot. That happened to a lot of other people, but it did not happen to me personally. They are just making life annoying at times.

The Rangers were annoying enough. Then the Rangers got a bigger ballpark and got more annoying. The Cowboys were in Irving, in a part of Irving right next to Dallas, and I hate Dallas, so I was rarely there. The Cowboys were still annoying, just not in the same way as the Rangers, as long as they were staying near Dallas were I would probably not have to deal with them or their fans or the traffic problems involved with games.

But then they moved to Arlington. They moved to Arlington right next to stores that I shop at and restaurants I eat at and so forth. So they are now a problem for me. And as I care nothing for sports, I don't remember which days they plan to be a bother, until it is too late to do anything about it.

So today was one of those days. But it was early in the day, and we safely escaped from it all (though it would have been nice to eat an early dinner in the area, but we decided against it). But they are still annoying, as right now I am not watching The Event and such on TV, cause my husband is watching the game. Yet another lie that he told me, so on top of all the other things I have to put up with from him, he now watches football games, even when there is something else to do or something better to watch.

Anyway, the main reason for the football fans being a problem that had to be dealt with earlier in the day is that on top of whatever ridiculous price the fans paid for their tickets, they are expected to pay yet another $67 to $82 for parking their cars (this amount will go up another twenty dollars for next year's dreaded Super Bowl Game). And, while they have somehow been persuaded to give up whatever amount they paid for the tickets, they don't really want to pay $67-$82 just to park their cars. And it is a really big parking lot, so even after paying the $67-$82 for parking the car, that doesn't guarantee that your car will end up being parked near where you want to be, and you might still be in for a long walk even after paying that much. So many of the local stores and restaurants were charging $35-$40 dollars to park in their parking lots, and from their you might have an even longer walk, but since you're going to have a long walk anyway you might as well get a parking space for half-price.

The best deal seemed to be that of Half-Price Books. If you spend $40 dollars or more that day, you got to park in front of the bookstore for free if you taped the dated receipt onto your windshield. And, to make things even easier, instead of looking all through the store for something that you want to spend $40 on, you can just buy a $40 gift card and spend the money later. So that almost makes the parking free, if you are someone who buys a lot of books, and if you are willing to walk the extra couple of blocks to get there.

Not that I picture many of these people being readers, but perhaps these people have friends who are readers, and they can give these bookstore gift cards to their reading friends for Christmas.

Then there were also people walking from really far away places on the other side of the freeway. I have no idea where they were coming from or how much they paid to park their cars, but I can't imagine that they got a better deal than what the bookstore was offering. And even if you really just do not like the bookstore and don't have any friends who read and therefore have absolutely no reason to go to Half-Price Books, most of the other stores and some restaurants had a similar deal, and you might find something that you would want to spend $40 on.

Anyway, now I'm going to find something to watch on Hulu or Youtube, because I can't watch The Event like I'm supposed to, because the Cowboys are still on.

Should I boycott Survivor?

I was a big fan of Survivor during the first season. It somehow wasn't what I expected, but after the first episode, I was hooked. A few weeks later, I was pretty sure that Richard was going to win, but I was pulling for Sue. Sue was not quite my hometown girl, but she was from Oklahoma or someplace that I could identify with.

I was so into this show that before the first season was over I was planning to audition for the second season. I was mentally writing a script for the tape I would send in. I was thinking up things that would get me noticed if I could audition in person.

Not that I did any of that. I was on the road all of the time. I wasn't home long enough to even make that audition tape.

I watched the second season with almost as much interest as the first. After about three episodes I guessed who would win. She did.

The third or fourth season there was someone on the show who went to school with one of my English professors. It is good luck to know my English professor if you're going to be on one of these shows. The woman on survivor got to the final four that season. And my English professor was a big fan of our college's wheelchair basketball team, so she also knew that one-legged guy who won the first season of Big Brother.

And then I started to lose interest. I had about given up watching the show when they found Rupert. On the first episode that season he started the game off by stealing all the shoes from the other team. Cool. He didn't win that season, and he didn't win the next season which was the All Stars, but he did win a million dollars anyway. Right after the All Stars, the audience voted for the person they thought should get a million dollars, and Rupert won that.

Okay, Rupert winning a million dollars was great, but I was still losing interest with the rest of the show. And then I was noticing a lot of things that I didn't like. There's been a couple of incidents that I would call sexual harassment, and they both ended with nothing being done to the man and the woman leaving the show soon afterwards. I don't think that should be part of outwit, outplay, and outlast.

I've also noticed a lot of people having serious injuries. Sometimes, people will get hurt, and that's to be expected. But most of the time, these people are getting hurt during challenges, mostly group challenges, and there's no need for it. The group challenges should be stopped. Now that I think about it, the group challenges are dangerous. It's like if you were playing pro-football, without a proper field, without safety equipment, with people you had just recently met, and without being allowed to practice. So people get hurt.

There's no need for this. They don't really have to have the team challenges like that. They don't have to rig up this stuff made up on the spot from bamboo and coconuts. They could use better quality materials and then have it made up to look like bamboo and coconuts later. They don't really even need the team challenges to be stuff that the whole team has to do together either. They can have stuff more like the individual challenges, but keep team scores, and that would be a lot safer. An occasional relay race might be okay, but the stuff where the whole team has to push or pull a cart usually ends up with someone falling and getting run over by the cart.

And it wouldn't hurt to maybe have people wear a team t-shirt or other uniform during the challenges, and have everyone put on some safety gear.

Anyway, I won't be auditioning to be on the next Survivor. I'm wondering if maybe I should even stop watching the show til they deal with some of these problems.

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.