The Problem is not the Problem

[Whyjerry]

It's a sockeye. Caught on a 6 wt. Fly rod. Nushagak river, Alaska.

Outstanding. Was just in Captiva and got into Snook. Reel Therapy.

 

[jday]

Yup.

Nuff said.

 

[dallasdave]

Nuff said.

short and sweet

 

[Verdict]

That was a marathon, not a sprint.

 

[ESisback]

The Problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem…savvy?


~ Jack Sparrow ~


One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:


Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?


But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?


Then your problem really is a problem.


Why?


Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.


People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.


It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.


So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.


For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.


For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.


Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.


Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.


Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.


Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”


Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.


What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?


Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.


Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.


In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?


As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.


But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.


If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:


Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.


Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.


That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.


The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.


Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.


For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.


In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….


Thoughts?

I have a lot of thoughts after reading your post:

1)Many/most that post here won't even bother to read it, for all kinds of reasons. Some are too lazy, while others lack patience, or intelligence, or the attention span, or some kind of combination of those factors. Some aren't willing to invest the time or effort because they're not invested enough. Some just don't have the time to BE invested.

2)I like the Jack Sparrow thing. It WAS profound. The problem itself ISN'T really the problem. It's how we react to it.

3)My overall take is that although this team IS flawed, ALL teams are flawed. Most of us want them to be successful, but many have trouble with the amount of importance a game should have.

4)I'm guilty of arguing endlessly, refusing to back down, for a number of reasons--right AND wrong. I realize I'm flawed, but I'd like to believe I'm mostly reasonable or halfway logical a good portion of the time. Bottom line for me is having fun.

5)I love to read also, but alas, I lack the patience to type all my thoughts on this here new-fangled "smartphone". My apologies.

 

[ESisback]

One of the things I really like about this site is I am exposed to some really thoughtful opinions on the Cowboys. Some align with what I believe and some do not. I like to think I am the kind of person who is open to learn and even change some of my thinking when challenged thoughtfully by some other person’s well reasoned opinion. And thoughtful posts like many of yours Jday have served to broaden and challenge my thinking.

But I am am also occasionally dismayed at the occasional keyboard bully who walks in here with an opinion that if even remotely questioned, brings out the darts as if “being right” is something any of us need on an opinion forum! Lol! Sadly, it is not unlike the way things are in our culture nowadays. Too many of us don’t like hearing a dissenting opinion that doesn’t line up with what we already believe or want to believe. And..emotional or angry responses are much more common when the responder is behind a keyboard.

Truth is this site for me is for fun. If I feel a little frustrated or worse, I know it’s either time to take a break or remember that following football and the Dallas Cowboys is neither brain surgery nor as important as health, family, and whatever else is really important to us.

Keep writing dude. You are an excellent, thoughtful writer. None of this really matters in the end. Except having fun and hoping the Cowboys one of these days finally put it together again. And all of us who call ourselves Cowboys fans can and should respect each other first and foremost on the basis of having that in common. It’s all good!

Well said, Hazey!

 

[Cowboys_22]

The Problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem…savvy?


~ Jack Sparrow ~


One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:


Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?


But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?


Then your problem really is a problem.


Why?


Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.


People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.


It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.


So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.


For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.


For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.


Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.


Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.


Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.


Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”


Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.


What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?


Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.


Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.


In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?


As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.


But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.


If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:


Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.


Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.


That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.


The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.


Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.


For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.


In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….


Thoughts?

So is the problem not the problem because there is no answer or because there are many answers?

 

[jday]

As it pertains to the Cowboys, the latter...

 

[cern]

Outstanding. Was just in Captiva and got into Snook. Reel Therapy.

Great. I fish the keys a lot. Things are getting back in order after hurricane Irma. Going back in a couple of weeks for dorado, yellowtail, and black fin tuna.

 

[sbark]

We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -Carlos Castaneda

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. Sir Winston Churchill

"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who do not believe, no proof will suffice".

 

[Beast_from_East]

The Problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem…savvy?


~ Jack Sparrow ~


One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:


Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?


But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?


Then your problem really is a problem.


Why?


Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.


People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.


It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.


So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.


For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.


For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.


Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.


Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.


Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.


Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”


Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.


What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?


Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.


Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.


In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?


As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.


But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.


If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:


Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.


Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.


That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.


The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.


Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.


For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.


In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….


Thoughts?

Very interesting post my friend...................and for those that want the Reader's Digest version.......this quote perfectly sums up this post.

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it"....................Charles R Swindoll

 

[ESisback]

Very interesting post my friend...................and for those that want the Reader's Digest version.......this quote perfectly sums up this post.

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it"....................Charles R Swindoll

Good quote, Beast!

 

[atlantacowboy]

Who likes bacon ? I like it a little bacon dripping in iron skillet green beans. Now that is some tasty stuff!

 

[jday]

Who likes bacon ? I like it when a little bacon dripping in iron skillet green beans. Now that is some tasty stuff!

Thanks for the bump, sir!

 

[ESisback]

Thanks for the bump, sir!

He's clever like that! Besides, this thread needs bump maintenance to tramp down the proliferation of tiresome Dez threads!

 

[dallasdave]

The Problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem…savvy?


~ Jack Sparrow ~


One of my all-time favorite quotes, I think people tend to miss the significance of that truth. It is profound, really….life-changing, even. Take all your problems and write them down. Then, ask yourself the question:


Is that really a problem…or is it the way I’m looking at it that makes it a problem? Should I instead be seeing an opportunity, be it to self-improve or to simply move on?


But what if your problem is Dallas Cowboys fandom related? What if you are Pro-player/coach/front office and your problem is all those knuckleheads who believe differently?


Then your problem really is a problem.


Why?


Because there is nothing you can do to change the mind of people who have decided to think the opposite. Nothing. You can try sharing stats, but please know the other side of this conversation has just as many stats to support their belief too, and stats only prove what you allow them to prove; if they don’t fit the narrative, most disregard them. You can post video’s that provide visual aid, but, alas, all to no avail; they, too, have their videos complete with visual evidence to prove otherwise, as well. And failing that, they will instead attack the validity of said stats/visual evidence you provide, if not your overall intellect to dismiss your arguments. There is absolute no winning in these blog-battles.


People will believe whatever they want to believe…and when emotions get involved, they are usually wrong anyway…which is another important truth to grab ahold of and never let go…especially if you are married. Remember that and one day you will thank me.


It all really boils down to one question: Why do we care so much what other people believe? What other people believe is the combined result of culture, environment, and experience…it’s personal and adheres to a unique formula for each individual on this planet. But if others believe differently, we arrogantly assume they are ignorant when in fact acting like you know better on a topic that truly is unknowable is the height of idiocy, religion perhaps being the principal example of that particular phenomenon.


So here’s the problem, as it pertains to the Cowboys and that capsized half-submerged ship that was the 2017 NFL season. It is actually everybody’s fault; from the ball boy all the way up to Mr (Nothing can stop him, he’s) All the Way Up himself, Jerry Jones. The real question is, who is more at fault? And the answer to that question you will find, my friends, is a needle in a stack of needles.


For every play where Dak threw a duck of a pass to no one in particular, there is equally compelling evidence that suggest he is one of the more accurate passers in the league. I’ve seen both types of passes leave Dak’s hand. I didn’t keep count. Nor do I have the requisite motivation to go back and check. And if you decide to check yourself, remember that sometimes to avoid a sack, throwing the ball away is a good decision and should not be considered an errant pass, but moreso a smart live-to-win-another-play judgement call that great QB’s utilize on every Sunday.


For every route Dez runs where he does get separation, there are likely close to an equal amount of routes he has ran where it looks like the Corner is the Dummy and Dez is the Ventriloquist, which is another stat I’m not keeping track of…especially if you factor in all those routes he ran where the ball did not come his way.


Garrett and his infamous scheme certainly deserves blame. But that scheme earned the Cowboys a 13 & 3 record in 2016 and since 2010, he has had a top 10 offense 4 times, and came close to 5 in 2011, ranking 11th. So, while I completely understand the complaint and from time to time parrot some of those gripes myself, he still is, more often than not, doing better than 2/3rd’s of the league, which is noteworthy, if still not good enough for the Cowboys adoring fans.


Rather it is a symptom of Garrett’s scheme or ineptitude on Linehan’s part, the world may never know, but the Cowboys have been offensively predictable over the years. If you were to ask me to assess the value of Linehan based on how he has coached here, I’d say he is not innovative enough and doesn’t know how to get the most out of his players. But the problem is when he became our new OC I did a little research on him and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man is absolutely capable of outside the box thinking as it pertains to how NFL teams use offenses and the various players that make those scheme’s work. In fact, were it not for Linehan, you probably would have never heard from Reggie Bush again after he left the Saints; Linehan’s use of Bush for a moment invigorated his otherwise failing career, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he can get the most of players even using unconventional approaches.


Jerry is Jerry. Of all the problems this franchise has had since he took over, he has ultimately been the common denominator; no escaping that judgement. Rather you agree with his methods or you don’t in the scheme of things it really doesn’t matter. It’s his team. He can do with it whatever he wants. If you choose to follow his team, you do so at the expense of having no control over its direction. So if you are going to choose his team to follow and accept those conditions, there really is only one question you can ask: Does he really want to win or is he in this just for the money? And the answer is absolutely he wants to win. His motivation behind why he wants to win I’m sure are numerous (including padding his already illustrious wealth), but he does want his team to win and nothing short of winning a Championship again before he leaves this earth will do.


Then you factor in an offensive line that lost two pieces a year ago (Free to retirement / Leary to Free Agency)….miscellaneous injuries that occurred to key positions (Tyron Smith, Sean Lee, etc)…Zeke’s suspension and the media circus that attracted…ball bounces that just didn’t go our way…and my growing suspicion that God might be mad at Cowboys nation for impeding his once treasured view of his favorite team with a Jumbotron and you are left with what we see transpiring every day here in the blogosphere: A world run amuck with snarky comments, insults levied at peoples intelligence and people stomping up in down the internet, king konging their chest screaming far-reaching platitudes that suggest, “As long as (insert player/coach/fo member here) is with the Cowboys, they will never win a Championship!!!”


Since I’ve rode these blog-waves for quite some time, I’m personally for the most part done arguing with people. Oh, I’ll clown people for my own personal entertainment, feigning conviction about the many abovementioned paradoxes and discuss at length what I think from time to time. But that’s not the same thing. You see, I’ve found a new way to enjoy my blogging experience. Rather than dive into the never-ending hamster wheel that is the various and notorious arguments of the blogosphere, I find it far more entertaining to instigate the arguments and watch it take on a life of its own with little to no tending-to required of me. All I really have to do is wait until the topic at hand starts crawling down the fan page and just when it’s about to jump to page 2, I throw in another incendiary comment and like a dying fire subjected to a poke or two, the topic sets ablaze again and provides hours and hours of what has become a guilty pleasure for yours truly.


What I have realized is that in these epic bouts of Pro-player/coach/front office VS Anti-player/coach/front office is rarely if ever do you see anyone concede defeat or change their beliefs accordingly….so, why then do we bother?


Beyond reading and writing, I am also a grill-enthusiast. I have quite the culinary setup in my backyard, resting underneath my covered-but-open back porch. Whilst grilling, from time to time, I’ll observe my canine BFF run back and forth, growling and barking at the dog who lives behind us. Back and forth they go as though eventually they will find the end of the wall and the likely end to my best friends life; I have a mutt and my neighbor has a pit bull; I operate under no pride-induced illusions in regards to my dogs ability to hold his own in that fight.


Anywho, in many respects, that’s a pretty good everyday life microcosm of what transpires in the blog world. At this point, your opinion about the player, the coach, the FO or the draft prospect has most likely solidified and will not change until their play on the field or the results of their decision making suggest you should believe otherwise. But being the war-centric creatures that we are, we just can’t help but fight the unwinnable fight. Because winning really isn’t about who is right, but who changes their mind first, right or wrong. And if no one changes their mind (which is the norm here), nobody win’s, regardless of who made who look like an idiot; which I suspect is the ulterior motive of many here.


In hindsight, it is an unavoidable evolution all bloggers eventually undergo; that moment where you ask yourself if you really should care what your fellow bloggers believe/think? My own answer to that question is probably fairly evident at this point and a big reason you see lapses in my contributions here. Because that question for me bleeds into another question: What would I rather be doing right now? As a general rule, at work I have two options: read or write?


As you may have guessed, I love to read…clearly I owe me penchant for writing to that favorite pastime. And so, as I try to figure out different ways to fill up my day between work-related activities that demand my attention, the decision I tend to lean toward is reading. Be it Cowboys related or some assorted fiction, my preference as a general rule, is to sit back and take a mental-vacation exploring some other characters infinitely-worse-than-my-first-world-problems problem.


But from time to time, I will experience a sort of mental jet-lag to those stationary vacations and have to instead unburden my mind or take a mental dump, if you prefer, which results in what you are reading now or the aforementioned activity of what I will going-forward affectionately refer to as war-baiting.


If you have noticed that this contribution has gone on and on longer than what was necessary, there is a reason for that: I purposefully have made this long as a sort of profiling tactic. I suspect the people that this applies to won’t take the requisite time necessary for reading this far and my ultimate hope is they don’t catch on to this new hobby of mine:


Yesterday I dropped Why Dak is the most accurate. NFL Network. In it was a video where some NFL Network nerd claimed Dak was the most accurate QB in the league based on the amount of separation from the defensive back his receivers have when his pass arrives. I’m guessing here, though I don’t know for sure, that these guys went through every pass that was completed by every QB in the NFL and measured the distance from the receiver to the individual responsible for covering him and ultimately decided what QB had to throw in the most tight windows in 2017 and further assumed that by that fact, that made them more accurate than their peers. For those of you who have already put together how ridiculously illogical that assertion is, you may unburden that deep and pronounced eye-roll here.


Whether this is a viable way to determine a QB’s accuracy is irrelevant. But for those of you who truly want me opinion on that, I’ll simply say no, it’s not really because separation, in my opinion, has more to do with both the receiver and the scheme being employed by the offense. A few posters noted that the failing of the list compiled is that it excluded the top-tier QB’s Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, and Drew Brees, who are considered to be among the most accurate QB’s not just in the league currently but in the history of the NFL.


That is certainly a fair criticism, but the QB’s in question also benefit from offensive schemes that help manufacture separation. The Cowboys scheme is seemingly predicated on receivers winning their personal battles, where playaction or double-moves fails to create separation for them…which is most of the time if Zeke is not on the field and a big reason the Cowboys struggled during his suspension last year.


The important take-away is that as I was having my morning coffee yesterday morning and happened upon this recommended video on my Youtube wall the first thought that entered my deviant mind was: “This is going to make a bunch of people’s head explode!” As quickly as I could I chose a title that was sure to catch eyes, dropped the video without any further commentary and watched as it took on a life of its own…my own little blogworld Frankenstein and I’m happy to report 13 pages later it is still going strong. Hours and hours of metaphorical dog’s running back and forth along the back fence getting absolutely nowhere.


Again, the trick to it, if you’re interested in this social-networking-experiment is to wait until it starts to lose steam, select a poster you determine is the most emotionally invested in their belief, and hit him or her with a response that is sure to illicit an emotional response. If they have strong feelings, make no mistake, they will respond and send the topic right back to the top of the fan page. The more bloggers that enter the fray, the less you have to babysit the thread as it grows.


For that post, I was unfortunately benched due to a cuss word appearing in one of the videos I posted to catch that emotional response I was looking for, but fortunately that did not matter. By that point, the topic was a full-on forest fire…and that fire continued to burn until around 1:20 this afternoon, which was when the last post as of right now was made.


In closing and in essence, at one time my problem with the blogging experience was my own inability to change the minds of my readership, despite the logic and facts I employed to prove my point. The ugly truth is you either came into my contribution already thinking accordingly or you didn’t. And if you didn’t agree with my way of thinking, that did not change over the course of your read. It was infuriating. But then I realized my problem was not the problem….


Thoughts?

Dallas will resolve the problem so it no longer a problem to all parties concerned.

 

[jday]

I have a lot of thoughts after reading your post:

1)Many/most that post here won't even bother to read it, for all kinds of reasons. Some are too lazy, while others lack patience, or intelligence, or the attention span, or some kind of combination of those factors. Some aren't willing to invest the time or effort because they're not invested enough. Some just don't have the time to BE invested.

2)I like the Jack Sparrow thing. It WAS profound. The problem itself ISN'T really the problem. It's how we react to it.

3)My overall take is that although this team IS flawed, ALL teams are flawed. Most of us want them to be successful, but many have trouble with the amount of importance a game should have.

4)I'm guilty of arguing endlessly, refusing to back down, for a number of reasons--right AND wrong. I realize I'm flawed, but I'd like to believe I'm mostly reasonable or halfway logical a good portion of the time. Bottom line for me is having fun.

5)I love to read also, but alas, I lack the patience to type all my thoughts on this here new-fangled "smartphone". My apologies.

I, too, have been guilty of running back and forth barking at the dog on the other side of the fence. There's really no shame in it...after all, as you pointed out, it can be fun...all the way up until that thought pop's in my head that I am getting no where fast. Then I have to make a decision: Do I stick around and continue to poke the proverbial bear or do I abandon it completely and find something else to do?

The answer to that question solely depends on what that something else to do is and how entertaining the otherwise useless argument has been up to that point. In the event that I'm bored with whatever I'm reading and the individual I'm arguing with at least has a sense of humor, I'll probably stick around. As you may have noticed from some of my responses on this very thread, I have a very dark sense of humor and can be rather cutting in my remarks at times. The important consideration for me is whether or not the individual I'm directing that humor at has thick enough skin to handle it. If they don't, I likely won't stick around because I honestly don't do this to hurt anyone feelings (as contradictory from the OP as that may sound). It's pure entertainment for me and acts as a forfeiture of time when work is light and my only other option is twiddling my thumbs.

 

[jday]

He's clever like that! Besides, this thread needs bump maintenance to tramp down the proliferation of tiresome Dez threads!

The Dez threads is certainly part of the reason I contributed this in the first place. When you have been on that treadmill of an argument for as long as it has gone on, it can be disheartening to jump on the zone and see nothing but more of the same topics still being hashed out to no avail. So, I start writing with the hope that I can add something new to the conversation and give people a break from the monotony of a conversation that will likely be made all the more trivial following Dez's meeting with Jerry tomorrow.

 

[jday]

We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -Carlos Castaneda

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. Sir Winston Churchill

"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who do not believe, no proof will suffice".

I like those quotes, but the best one, imo, is in your tag line. "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement!" Yet another profound truth you unearthed there, sir and awfully applicable to the conversation at hand. I'll probably be using that in a post in the future.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[jday]

Very interesting post my friend...................and for those that want the Reader's Digest version.......this quote perfectly sums up this post.

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it"....................Charles R Swindoll

Yet another quote I may have to use in an upcoming post. Thanks for sharing and reading!