Mister Fun Solves the Problems of the World!

The world would be better off without you, really. Unless you are doing something to increase the overall carrying capacity of the planet, then you are just another lug nut too many. Since so few of us are engaged in any endeavor which might exponentially increase food production or expand humanity’s elbow room, some of us are just going to have to go. Way back when we could count on the old mainstays of war, disease and ice ages to trim mankind’s number, but no more. Thanks to a wildcard in the dissemination of science, the people who contribute least to the weal of the world are the most likely to self elect into the burgeoning reproduction cycle. In fact, the more backwards, poor, war-like and starving you and yours happen to be, the greater your likelihood is of having eight children. And most of these people aren’t even Catholic.

Not that being Catholic, by itself, makes one prone to multiply or more susceptible to becoming  losers. The Italians, who are losers in every way one might imagine—and who invented Catholicism--are not multiplying. (Pleas from their mothers to stop living in the basement notwithstanding.) Nor, really, are the Irish, although no one has checked. If mere Catholicism and loser-ness were actually the only factors in the desire to produce more miserable masses, we would  already all be Irish and Italian. Instead we are all increasingly Asian, sub continental and sub Saharan.

What, we wonder, is the tipping point? Answer: Not having so much as a bucket to piss in. If you have at least a bucket to piss in, you don’t want to share. The more constant such things as your very own bucket to piss in, a language with actual punctuation, roadways that connect to other places, access to internet porn, a government not manned by someone else’s relatives and a reasonable expectation that you will not wake up with your skull crushed in are, the less likely the drive for eight children is. No bucket? Screw it. Multiply away. Misery loves company!

Several obvious solutions spring to mind, providing you accept the above as fact. (And why shouldn’t you? THE INTERNET NEVER LIES!)  If you are a Republican “Kill the poor” comes to mind. For the rest of us some permutation of schemes air dropping buckets and cell phones are conjured.  If there is a universal common ground in all of this it is that any such solution should not involve the expenditure of “my” actual money. (By this I mean my actual money. How you feel about your own money is of no consequence.) Overcoming narrow minded interests such as my own and forming the type of universal consensus needed to start a plod in the direction of an equitable, sustainable future will require substantial prolonged effort. Which is why I have decided to talk about fixing Sears Department Store and the National Football League instead.

In case you’ve missed it, both Sears (where America shops) and the NFL are in deep trouble. And for entirely different and unrelated reasons. McDonalds and KFC (Kentucky Fired Chicken) are also in trouble, but it’s for the exact same reason. The Chinese have discovered that these two chains serve dog food. Since McDonald’s and Yum Brands (KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut) have issues dismissed in one sentence whereas Sears and the NFL have problems which will fill up word hole—and we do things in twos here—like Noah—we will be diagnosing their issues in an entirely non actionable way.

It’s what we “do”.

To start someplace, once upon a time there was a company that sold everything a human might possibly need. You placed an order, sent it in with your payment and what you bought would show up on your doorstep. And this firm wasn’t Amazon. It was called Sears. As opposed to the internet, they mailed out a catalog. But it essentially was the same business as Amazon. The only difference is that Sears came to manufacture most of its more popular types of merchandise. They had “knock off” brands, much like your local grocer does. Unlike your local grocer’s canned beats—which are crappy compared to Del Monte’s—the Sears brands were generally better than whatever it was they were imitating. On top of this, Sears stood behind everything they sold. If that sounds like the makings for a big time successful business it is only because it is. Sears was huge.

Recently Amazon announced that they would be opening up a string of stores. They are doing this to attract shoppers who may not like waiting for the mailman to drop in. Or who simply want to physically see some of the many things Amazon has to sell. Having physical stores also lessens potential warehousing costs as well as helps move merchandise about your distribution network. (It is cheaper and faster to ship a toaster from your store in Atlantic City to a buyer in New York City than it is from a central warehouse in Nashville. Also, the toaster has a better chance of being sold while sitting on a store shelf.) This is also the same reason Sears began building stores 100 years ago. Since Sears had a 100 year lead on Amazon, Sears bought up all the best store locations.

Flash forward 100 years and Sears is closing its stores while Amazon is looking to put stores up.  If both businesses were still essentially in the same business this would raise some questions. (It might also suggest a synergy: Amazon buying out Sears.) Sages will turn to the intervening 100 years to point out various distinctions between the two businesses. But they are wrong. Stripped to the bone, both businesses are essentially the same.

I love telling the sages that they are wrong. (Psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, too!)  The sages do, however, have some groundwork from history to point to. One of the reasons Amazon is looking to build stores is the same reason Sears originally built stores: they are in competition with stores. As old fashioned as stores are, they are still the place that most people shop. Many of these “store” places are quite pleasant, too. This has engendered in the public a desire to “shop”. If you want to reach most “shoppers” you must build them a place to perform this activity. One of the earliest of the successful chain shops was called F.W. Woolworth’s.

Woolworth sold junk. Cheap junk. It was what we would call a Dollar Store. Due to inflation it was at the time known as a five and dime. Price nomenclatures notwithstanding, the dollar store concept has never really gone out of fashion. Then as now, there were bunches of little independent chains and a few national firms involved in this space, such as Dollar General and Family Dollar.

It’s not the best space to be in, but it is a fairly broad draw. Current behemoth Wal-Mart started life as nothing more than a pale imitation of Woolworth’s. Since Woolworth’s was such a large operator in the dollar store space, its competitors made certain changes to distinguish themselves. In Wal-Mart’s case, they decided to become larger, as in having bigger stores. Wal-Mart was still a junk shop, it was just a really large one.

Out of fear that Wal-Mart was going to eat the dollar store space, Woolworth itself moved to become more like Walgreens, a pharmacy chain. This turned out to be not a great move. As opposed to eating the dollar store space, Wal-Mart began stocking some “not junk” and essentially left the lowest rung of retail. Dollar General and its peers, all essentially Woolworth imitators, stayed put and ate the five and dime space.

Leaving Woolworth’s in the dust. Most people reading this have probably never heard of Woolworth’s. The company did diversify at one point. Today they operate Foot Locker. But its fate is the result of a series of mistakes.

Had Woolworth’s held still it would have owned the dollar store space.  This is hard to do when you think your entire category is about to be Wal-Marted into oblivion. Woolworth’s biggest mistake was to act proactively, to abandon a space they had been in for more than 100 years before they  knew what the impact of their competitor’s moves were. That’s freaking cowardice.   

Cowardice is also the sole explanation for every single move Sears has made during my entire life. Quick, what the hell is in a Sears? What do they sell? Most people don’t know. A few may dimly remember hardware and lawn mowers. The reason most people don’t know what is in Sears is that most people haven’t been in one in years.

In the mass retail world there are today essentially four disparate levels. Utter Crap (Dollar General), Slightly Shoddy (Wal-Mart), Not Soddy (Macy’s, Target, Kohl’s, Best Buy, ect) and Premium (Lord & Taylor, Needless Markup, ect). The way things have been playing out, it is only the Slightly Shoddy sector that is really under pressure—primarily because it is a one horse town. (Once occupied by K-Mart, it is today the home of only Wal-Mart.) Why Sears has been running from the Not Shoddy space that it invented is beyond me.

For those of you not in the know, Sears is Macy’s and Kohl’s and Target combined with Best Buy and Home Depot. Only they don’t sell junk. And they have a reasonable return policy. I have now provided you more information than the LAST DECADE OF SEARS TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS.

The people at Sears can thank me later. 

(For the rest of how to save Sears, kindly dump all of your mall properties that can’t somehow become padded sites. Or go ahead and merge with Amazon. One warning. Sears may be bleeding red ink, but Amazon has never made a dime.)

On a lighter note, the national pastime has been killing people left and right. When it isn’t beating folks to stupid pulps in front of television cameras. Although some people may think that our most popular sport is violence itself, it is actually Football. By Football, we don’t mean soccer, we mean rugby. Like the Australians, the Canadians and the Americans have invented a slightly more violent version of rugby.

To use a politically incorrect term, the game of American Football is a overly rule bound version of  Smear the Queer. In the American version, two sides of eleven people run at each other. In the Canadian (North Pole) version, it’s twelve people. I’m not sure how many people are involved in the Australian version, although that variant also has occasional breaks for fist fights—like hockey. At any rate, as with rugby, its quite fair for everyone on one side to commit various acts of violence on whomever it is who has the ball. The person with the ball is free to fling the thing to someone else on his side, should his need for self preservation become intense. There’s also some violence stopping scoring going on, but you get the picture.  

This may come as a shock, but people get hurt doing this. (Perhaps more shocking is that this is considered a sport suitable for children.) Compounding matters somewhat is that from the High School age and up, most of the football players are extremely large people. For most football aspirants, all participation in the sport comes to an end around age 14 or so. This is when the JV Football coach looks you in the jock and tells you, matter of factly, that you are too small to play. The upper 10% of the body mass blokes may move on. For the regulation sized it is over. This process then continues well up the football food chain. By the time you get to big time college football, everyone involved is huge.

The football food chain itself then dead ends for most of even the large people by age 22. This is when the colleges boot you out of school, degree or not. A little under 1% go further than this, either into Semi-Pro Football or Professional Football. But even there the whole thing dead ends by the age of 34 or so. In short, even if everything goes absolutely right for a football player, his career is over at about the same time that your average used car salesman’s is just starting to gear up.

Even such a bleak optimal outlook is occluded by the realities of the activity. Most people who are qualified to play football at any organized level (Junior Varsity and up—in short, high school upperclassmen) do not leave the sport voluntarily. Most are carted off at some point, too injured to continue.

It’s not a pretty picture. But people love the game. And being large is pretty obsolescent otherwise, so why not let the freaks have some fun while they are young? Answer: because they have mothers who don’t want to see them get all mangled. 

Mothers have ended many a sport.(*)  Mothers are the reason only ex convicts and orphans box. At a certain tipping point, there is really no stopping them. Since preparing Junior’s funeral is never going to become fashionable with the Mom Set, something must be done to save the national past time.  Or we face a future of watching Team Rhythmic Gymnastics.  

The National Football League, employer of the 1% of the larger people who were not injured playing football in college,  has been perusing a two part “Distract Mommy” strategy. The first part involves making the rules too difficult for the female brain to understand. Offered up is a “new” “heads up” brand of teaching football along with a slew of special rules that can be called in reaction to various female expressions. In short, the NFL is assuring the women (the dickless) that injuries will not happen during what is effectively a one hour group fistfight because there are specific game laws against it. This is, at best, a delaying tactic. Common female understanding is all of one week away from calling BS on the entire parade. Which brings us to part two, having doctors go on television to deride soccer.  Yep, soccer is just as bad. Kids get them brain hits just as bad in soccer. As propaganda goes, this isn’t so  much half assed as it is both half assed and mildly tardy. It may have worked about twenty years ago.

Unfortunately most modern Mommy eligible women have played soccer. Thanks to Title 9 and years of compulsory gym classes, the average Modern Mommy can discriminate between soccer—a giant kickball version of croquet—and two eleven person teams of people in crash helmets running into each other. In fact, most women can distinguish between soccer and field hockey. For the normal girl person there is a dawning moment in their progression of sports involvement. It comes about at the time they choose their sexual orientation and goes one of three ways: (1) Sports are entirely stupid and I will never have anything to do with one that remotely involves intentional bodily contact (Women are weird about not wanting to be maimed);  (2) In limited doses, certain aerobic sports like kick ball and soccer are fine as long as I don’t get too sweaty and can wear a skirt doing it; and (3) hand me the field hockey stick I am a rug muncher. I think it’s the introduction of weapons into the thing that separates the girls who want to be mothers from the girls who will go onto more self-focused destinies. Sadly for football there are a lot of weapons involved. It is a Rubicon that the average Mother can easily grasp.

Recognizing that Mommy is the enemy of Football is the basis of my proposed reforms. Mommy knows what weapons look like. So all of the weapons have to go.  No more plastic hammer pads. No more crash helmets and cage masks. For better measure, the uniform is now flats and leotards. The helmet is a boxing helmet with a clear plastic face shield. Flak jackets are fine, but the closer we can make this look like gymnastics the better.

Next, a few rule changes. Unlimited forward passing. Beyond the line of scrimmage, the ball is dead from the last place a pass was attempted from. This essentially differentiates the focus of violence. The defender’s focus is split from creaming the ever living snot out of the person who caught the ball, to worrying about where the ball may be thrown to. As opposed to merely having the option to tackle, the defender now also has the option to deflect or intercept. And it gives the person who caught the ball downfield a dignified way to pussy out.  Offensive linemen would be free to do whatever it takes to protect the ball carrier, short of linking arms (with eash other) and kicking. In short, there’s no more holding.

Finally, socker boppers. For those of you not in the know, a socker bopper is an inflatable boxing glove which sheathes the hand six inches on the side. In my minor repair, any player can wear one. Mostly these are for the offensive and defensive linemen. The offensive linemen are perhaps compelled to wear them. In any case, it makes line play more of a fist fight with pillows than a mashing match.

I believe these changes will preserve the game. Or we could go with the virtual version proposed below.

(This is indeed a striking cover. It does, howver, not propose that football be played by robots. That's what the cover of the magazine I wanted to post said. But it wasn't anywhere near as good of a cover as this one. And I found this one.)

Not only does Mister Fun think that these changes are essential, but also inevitable. No major national sport can long exist on an intake of orphans alone!

*Mothers killed fencing and horse racing and polo and race car driving. We could add wrestling, too, but that has never been all that popular of a sport. When it came to boxing and fencing, the sports were essentially indefensible. No you may not beat each other stupid or stab each other. Ditto dueling, although that never was so much a sport as it was out of control dick wagging. The mommy standard appears to be “It’s fine if you run yourself silly but you have to come back in one piece.” I fear that any sport that does not in some way cling to this standard has no place in the future. Women have truly ruined everything.

The opinions of Mister Fun do not represent the stated positions of Hil-Gle, its Wonderblog nor anyone remotely affiliated with the Quality Creative Mind Rot Newsstand Fiction Unit. They are his own and he is advised to take them with him when he leaves or we will have to start charging storage. This constitutes legal notice in a publication of mass distribution for the purpose of enforcing any future liens.