My Solution to the Washington Redskins Name Controversy

Redskins primary logo 1972-1981, 1983-present (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I grew up a Washington Redskins fan.  For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan of the team.  My earliest recollections were in the late 1960's when they were a horrid team.  I lived through the George Allen years, and thankfully, the Joe Gibbs era.  I have remained a fan even through the mostly bad years of Daniel Snyder's tenure as owner of the team.

Now, these days, my beloved Washington Redskins are under attack.  I live in the DC area, and it seems like you can't watch a local news broadcast without somebody bringing up the team name.  Even President Obama, when he should be more concerned about the government shutdown, is chiming in saying that the Redskins should consider changing the name because some groups think it is racially offensive.

This isn't the first time that the question of whether or not the Redskins should change their name has been brought up.  It is the first time that it has gained the traction in the media that it has.  Naturally, those that stoke the fire are the liberal, politically correct, elitists of the world.  I don't have to tell you how little use I have for that crowd.

Years ago, when Tony Kornheiser of ESPN was still writing for the Washington Post, he suggested that rather than change the name of the team, the team should change their mascot.  Instead of the noble looking Native American that adorns the helmet, he suggested to change the logo to a potato, as in redskin potatoes/  A humorous concept but then we would have to re-write the team fight song. Here is my first pass at it:

Hail to the Redskins, Hail to Victory, Spuds on the Warpath, Fight for old DC.  Run or pass and score, we want a lot more. Bake 'em, Fry 'em, Touchdown! Watch the point soar. Fight on, Fight on, til you have won, Spuds of Washington!

It just isn't the same.

Instead, if things persist, my suggestion would be for the Redskins to take a page from the musician Prince.  Remember when Prince decided to change his name to a symbol?  Until he went back to using the name Prince, everybody always referred to him as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince."  The Redskins could do the same thing.  Instead of the Washington Redskins, they could become the Washington the NFL team formerly called the Redskins.

Quite frankly, I hope it doesn't come to that.  I am so tired of the liberal mindset where anything that is offensive to anybody has to be forbidden.  I find the name Barack Obama offensive but you don't see me calling for him to change it (though I thought about Tweeting that).  If the NFL does cave in and forces the Redskins to change their name, I may be done with the NFL.

Hail to the Redskins!

Related articles

• Democrats want to outlaw 'Washington Redskins' name (dailycaller.com)
• PETA Suggests Washington Redskins Keep Controversial Name, Change Mascot to Potato (nesn.com)

I Think the Coffee Machine at Work is a Dude!

Flavia Machine via dickster1961

We have a Flavia machine in my office.  For those of you who do not know what it is, it is a single serve brewer that uses individual pouches to brew a cup of coffee or tea.  It can also be used to make cappuccinos and mochaccinos by combining two different pouches.

Unlike my Keurig K-Cup brewer, the Flavia machine has a sensor under the spout to prevent the brewer from brewing if there is nothing beneath the spout to catch the hot liquid.  I hate to admit this, but there has been more than one occasion when I began brewing a K-Cup and forgot to place a mug under the spout.  What a mess!  Sometimes you just operate on automatic first thing in the morning, and accidents happen.

Recently, I have been having a few issues with the Flavia machine at work.  As you can see in the picture above, when the machine is brewing, the liquid flows straight down, directly into the mug.  On more than one occasion, the machine has been a little less than accurate with the brewing of my beverage.  Instead of the drink flowing straight down into my mug, the drink sprayed either behind the mug or off to the side.  Not only do I not get a full beverage, but then I have a mess to clean up.

It reminded me of my when my son was learning to urinate in the toilet.  Let's just say that his aim wasn't the best.  Not that I myself am not subject to occasional bad aim, especially if I wake up in the middle of the night and need to relieve myself.  Sure, I have all sorts of reasons...er excuses.  Perhaps I didn't turn on the light because I didn't want to disturb anybody, perhaps I was sleepwalking, or I just didn't put on my glasses and couldn't see.  So that is the reason I think the coffee machine at work is a dude.

Is Customer Service Dead?

I started working when I was 15 years old.  At that time, the concept of customer service was instilled into my psyche.  I was taught that the better I treated the customers, the more they would return, resulting in more hours for me, and therefore more money.  Consequently, I tend to spend my money at businesses where I am treated well.  Conversely, I avoid those places that don't.

My wife and I have recently had some very bad experiences. The first occurred when my wife went to get her eyes examined.  She had her exam and got her prescription from the doctor. She picked out a set of frames and wanted to find out how much her glasses were going to cost before committing to purchasing them.  The customer service representative refused to help her saying it would take too much time to figure it out if my wife wasn't going to buy the glasses.  We took our business elsewhere.

On another occasion, my wife and I went out to eat at a local brew pub.  We have been regular visitor of this brew pub since they opened several years ago.  Over the years, I have built up a sizable collection of pint glasses and t-shirts from the various seasonal beer launch parties that they have every month.  Unfortunately, after our most recent visit to this establishment, we will never be back.

I ordered a salad and my wife ordered the seafood cannelloni.  When they brought our food, my wife's dinner wasn't hot.  She complained about it and asked to have the dish remade.  Our server was very apologetic and seemed willing to help.  Unfortunately management wasn't so helpful.  He came out and told us they could not remake her dish.  Instead, he argued with us, telling us that the dish was made correctly, brought out hot, and the best they could do was reheat it for us.

We objected saying we wanted a fresh dish as a reheated dish would not be as good as a fresh dish.  Eventually, the server came back out with another plate.  This time the food was hot and you could see steam coming from the sauce.  Unfortunately, it became obvious that it was the same dish heated in the microwave.  The pasta was overcooked and hard.  The cheese looked like a frozen dinner that had not melted completely.

We came home from dinner and I went to the corporate website and sent a complaint detailing what had happened during the evening.  In the past, whenever we have complained about service in a restaurant, we have either received a written apology, and in some cases gift certificates to visit again to give them another chance.  This time, we received no acknowledgement that we had a problem.  We won't be back to that establishment ever again.

Still Around

I have not been around here in the blogosphere much lately.  It isn't that I haven't had anything to talk about or that I have decide to abandon blogging. I haven't fallen off the face of the earth or have had anything disastrous befall me.  I just have been busy doing other things.

I have been very active in other areas of social media and interaction.  Twitter has been my main form of communication in that arena.  There is just something about being able to share brief thoughts quickly that has been appealing of late.  The ability to see an article I like, share it with my followers with a brief comment, without having to sit down and write a blog post has fit in with everything else that I have been up to.  You can find me on Twitter at dickster1961.

I have also been doing a lot of reading lately.  My Kindle is by my side constantly.  I make it a point to read during my lunch breaks at work and in the evening.  There have been so many free and bargain books that I have downloaded from Amazon that I have really enjoyed.  Mostly, I am reading theology and Christian living, but I am also enjoying books by Brad Thor and James Rollins.

Last year, when it became apparent that Mitt Romney was running an ineffectual campaign and that Barack Obama was going to get re-elected, I made the decision to cut back on my consumption of political news.  I instead decided to pursue things of a more spiritual nature.  Now, instead of listening to conservative talk radio like Sean Hannity, I am listening to Family Talk Radio and pastors Michael Youssef and RC Sproul and their radio programs.

Just before the election, I made it my goal to read through the Bible in a year.  I have read the entire Bible in the past, but not as part of a dedicated reading plan.  I downloaded the Bible App from YouVersion on my tablet and used one of their Bible in a year plans.  I am happy to say that I actually finished reading through the Bible in about 9 months.  If you want to read the Bible, a highly recommend the YouVersion app.

Still, I have neglected this blog for too long and it is time for that to change.  About a month or so ago, one of my old blogging buddies from the Adgitize days sent me a message through Twitter to check up on me.  I assured him that I was alive and well.  He also helped me to work through an unnatural links penalty from Google.  You can find a link to his website Ask the Blogster in my blogroll.

So, I hope to be updating this blog on a more regular basis.  I don't think that I will ever get back to updating nearly everyday like I did when Adgitize was up and running, but I do hope to update it at least two or three times a week going forward.  I also have another project that I hope to start soon which I will share here when it is up and running.

 

Related articles

• 41% Reading Bible Online (foxnews.com)
• YouVersion's 100 Million Downloads (wycliffeusa.wordpress.com)
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Not so Family Friendly Family Channel

I am not a prude by any stretch of the imagination.  While I consider myself a conservative Christian, I fully appreciate that not everybody in the world shares my views.  As such, I am not easily offended by viewpoints in popular culture that run contrary to those beliefs.  Those that do not share my beliefs are free to express their own beliefs, but I feel it should be done in the proper place.

I bring this up because of something that I saw yesterday while visiting my son at his school.  Most of his dorm mates were off on an outing, but several kids stayed behind.  We gave our son the choice of going out for lunch or having a pizza delivered.  He decided that he wanted to stay in the dorm, so we went ahead and had a pizza delivered for our lunch.

While we waited for the delivery to arrive and while we ate our lunch, the other kids in the dorm recreation room were watching some Disney movies on the ABC Family station.  At one point, I was watching the television and I saw two women engaging in a romantic kiss.  The station was promoting one of their new programs which features a lesbian couple raising a family together.

I was shocked.  Not because there was such a show being produced, but because it was being promoted and shown on a station that proclaimed to be a "family channel."  I was even more shocked because the promo was occurring during kid friendly Disney movies.  Had the advertisement occurred on a station like Lifetime or Bravo, I wouldn't have batted an eye.

It used to be that subject matter of a more controversial or mature nature would only be shown later in the evening when kids would typically be sleeping and not watching television.  Promotions for those shows would never be broadcast during what would be considered kid friendly programming.  I guess those standards no longer apply.

I am not one of those who would call for a boycott of the channel or those that advertise on it. I don't watch the ABC Family channel, nor do I watch anything on ABC.  After seeing the promotion yesterday, I am more inclined not to watch anything on those stations.  It just shows that the entertainment industry is continuously trying to promote their liberal worldview on us, and forcing it on our kids with no regard.

Related articles

• An Open Letter to the Disney Channel (herlifeinspired.com)

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mothers Day #family #fam #mom #dad #TagsForLikes #brother #sister #brothers #sisters #bro #sis #siblings #love #instagood #father #mother #related #fun #photooftheday #children #kids #life #happy #familytime #cute #smile #fun via dickster1961

First off, I want to wish all of the Moms out there a very happy Mother's Day.  This morning, we got up early and I drove my wife out to my son's school on the Eastern Shore so that she could have lunch with our boy on Mother's Day.  We decided to just have a little visit with him on campus.  We had a pizza delivered and after lunch we walked around campus and spent some time on the playground.  He was more interested in going back into the dorm to watch some DVDs that I had burned and brought for him.

That was not our original plan for Mother's Day, nor is it our usual routine when visiting our son.  Our original plan for Mother's Day was to pick up our son for an unscheduled weekend home and to take him to a Bowie Baysox game today, then drive him back to school.  Normally, when we visit our son, we take him off campus for lunch at Golden Corral and then either to Target or Walmart to get a new CD or DVD.

To explain why we changed our original plans and normal routine, we had to go back one week to our last visit with our son.  It started like several successful visits of late.  We picked up our son shortly after 11:00 and headed out to the Golden Corral in Easton, MD.  He ate three plates of his favorite foods from Golden Corral; pot roast, bourbon chicken, mashed potatoes, and macaroni & cheese.  So far, it was the start of a very pleasant visit.

After lunch, we got back in the car and headed to Target.  Once there, my son headed straight to the back of the store to the music department to find a CD or DVD.  He walked up and down each aisle looking for something, but just couldn't find anything that he wanted.  With my son's autism, even though he is very verbal, he sometimes has a difficult time telling us what he wants when he can't find it.  That is when things took a decided turn for the worse.

One of my son's undesirable behaviors is one we refer to as dropping.  If he doesn't want to do something, or is upset for some reason, he will drop to the ground, make himself dead weight, and refuse to get up.  When he drops, it can last for a few moments, or in some cases quite a long time.  This particular incident was one of the longer ones.  We spent over two hours trying to calm our son down, figure out what he wanted, and get him back to school.

We tried singing to him, stroking his hands, bringing him CDs and DVDs of acts that he has enjoyed in the past.  Nothing worked.  We got a few smiles and responses but we just couldn't get him off the floor.  At one point, we called the school to see if they could send somebody out to try to help get him back.  At long last, my wife came back to where we were with something that got our son off of the ground.

One of the things that my son likes to watch is, of all things, infomercials.  He particularly likes the ones that feature vacuum cleaners.  My wife came back with an inexpensive, rechargeable portable Dirt Devil.  That did the trick.  He got up, grabbed the vacuum, and headed to the front of the store just as the back up from the school showed up to help.  Now, he has his own personal vacuum in his dorm.

After an incident like this, it usually takes us a little while before we try to venture back out.  We were very hesitant to bring him home for the weekend for fear of a repeat performance at the stadium.  We were also very hesitant to try our usual routine of lunch at Golden Corral.  As it turned out, we had a nice little lunch and visit on campus, and he was in a great mood when we left.

Area Rug Cleaning Works Wonders

There are many reasons why people may need area rug cleaning services.  It can be a result of the wear and tear of a rug, a pet or just a lot of people using the same space.  Since there can be very many spills onto carpets, it will really help when a homeowner accesses an area rug cleaning service to clean the place up.

Using an area rug cleaning service has a lot of pluses.  Since it is done to the part of the rug that is dirty, it doesn't cost as much as a whole rug cleaning.  It is also specific to the type of rug, which makes it work extremely well.  It can restore a rug to its original state before it was dirtied by stains or other means. 

Having access to an area rug cleaning service online is really beneficial.  It works well for the people that need it because they are able to access it at any point of the day or night.  When they need assistance, they will be able to reach someone online.  It is really simple for them to use, and they will find the service to be commendable.

Anyone can use an area rug cleaning service if they need to.  It can be done in big houses or in small apartments.  The space is not the issue, the rug is.  They will find that this service will save them money in the long run because they will only be charged for the rug in question.