Postscript to my post about Imus, and a postscript to it (in which Tami and Eric Taylor are nominated as America's Hottest Couple)--and one last PS

Thanks to everyone who's chimed in re. my earlier post. I think we really do need to talk about, well, stuff.

I've pretty well had my say, so I just want to add a couple of notes.

First, I want to put the time frame I was writing about in perspective. By the time there was an Imus show to watch, the end was near for me. The handwriting was on the wall. That already represented an advanced stage in the process of the I-man's self-reinvention as a posh Connecticut right-winger.

Does anyone remember when there was such a thing as an NFL blackout? When we couldn't for love or money get the home games of our home teams on TV? When the true crazies actually drove outside the 75-mile blackout radius to someplace where they could watch their local heroes on the tube?

I can hear the young uns out there moaning, "What's the old coot going on about now? Didn't he know how to turn on the damn TV?"

Trust me on this one, young folk, there really was such a time.* And back then it was my habit to listen to New York Jets games on WNBC radio on Sunday afternoons. Which meant that when my clock radio turned on on Monday morning, there was Imus. Of course I remembered him from the even older days (like, before the First Cleveland Exile), but he was at the top of his form then--decades before there was any thought even of syndicating the radio show nationally, let alone simulcasting it on TV.
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*Just for laughs, I looked it up. The NFL's old absolute local blackout policy was changed in 1973. Yikes! Hmm, I notice that I don't seem to be laughing. Not even smiling.


POSTSCRIPT TO THE ABOVE POSTSCRIPT--RE. THE TAYLORS

In case anyone wonders about the reference above to listening to Jets games when I couldn't get them on TV, hard upon my diatribe about the corrosive effect of our worship of athletes, let me make clear: I love sports. Baseball is probably as close as I get to a religion. What I hate is both the commercialization and the mindless deification of the performers.

That's one of the great things about Friday Night Lights. Nobody could love football more than Dillon High coach Eric Taylor, but his love is for the game--the beauty and intensity of it, the pleasure of teaching it to his players and watching them develop. Unfortunately, that gets largely lost in the obsessive, life-or-death worship of the town's fans, and the disfiguring effect it has on the socialization of the school's students, which falls smack in the bailiwick of his guidance-counselor wife Tami. (And the Taylors also have a daughter attending Dillon.)

In addition to being hands-down America's Hottest Couple, Tami and Eric Taylor (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler, above), have been engaged in a struggle for their family's, and I think the country's, soul. Seriously, it's a great show. (And there's so much going on in it that I haven't had a chance to touch on.)


OH, AND ONE LAST POSTSCRIPT--ABOUT CLEVELAND

We don't seem to have heard yet from any outraged Cleveland boosters, but I just want to say that, really and truly, no disrespect was intended to what I'm sure is a fine city. My older brother was born there, in fact, though the family had gotten the hell outta there, I mean "moved on," by the time I came along. I'm fairly sure I was once dragged, er, taken there, to visit old family friends I'd never met and surely didn't give a damn about. That's about as much as I remember about the event.

Um, say, that's a fine orchestra, that Cleveland Orchestra [above]. Though I can't say I care much for that Franz Welser-Moest fellow. (He's still the music director, isn't he?) I liked that George Szell. I guess he hasn't been there for a while, though. (1970, you say? Oh.)