Hurricanes a whole bunch, Cornhuskers not very many
I've previously mentioned my disdain for all college football teams from Florida. Thank God I'm no longer there to endure a year of Hurricane fans spewing about their "national championship" and Gators fans spewing about how they knocked the crap out of Maryland and Florida State fans talking about how ... well, whatever Florida State fans talk about these days. I have no particular allegiance to any college football team; I just hate all teams from Florida. Not that I had any illusions that Nebraska deserved to be in the Rose Bowl -- they had it handed to them by Colorado, and they should have lost to Oklahoma -- but in whatever form the college football national championship is awarded, it needs to be awarded to a team from somewhere other than Florida.

Enough about grown men playing kids' games, for the moment. Consider this:
--Guess the war is over. The New York Times is no longer doing its "A Nation Challenged" section. My Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper is all but treating the war like any other running national story. I find myself caring less and less whether we catch the evildoers or not. The death toll from the attacks goes down, of all things, every day. I suspect I'm like most Americans; I suspect we all have pretty short attention spans. The question is this: Has the war been a rousing success, or are we just losing interest, much the way we collectively lost interest in March 1991 and decided it was basically OK to leave Saddam Hussein in power? Do we really think al-Evildoer has been taken down, or are we saying, "Hey, they've left us alone for almost four months, we must have beaten them?" I'm pretty much as against war as the next guy -- I learned the word "pacifist" when I was 10, and have never strayed far from that basic philosophy -- but I have to think that if a war is going to be fought, there should be some tangible goal and it should not end until the goal is reached or is proven unreachable. If the goal is to catch Mr. Head Evildoer, he needs to be caught. Otherwise, let's take our bombs and go home and let the Afghans figure it out for themselves.
--It was 14 degrees outside last night. Coldest night in my part of Texas since 1996. Didn't matter to me; it was 72 where I was, sleeping under goose down. Just needed to sound a note of appreciation for that fact. Wish I was smart enough to figure out a way that everybody could sleep where it's 72 degrees.
--Just received an e-mail from an ambitious relative who is planning a family reunion for next summer in Anytown. I'm getting the sense that people aren't falling all over themselves with glee over the idea. She's plugging away anyway, and I have to kind of admire her a little bit for that. I come from a very large extended family, and many of these folks are, shall we say, different. Which doesn't make us any different from most large extended families. I tend to view most of my extended family with a sort of benign bemusement. I find them somewhat entertaining, but I wouldn't go out of my way to be entertained by many of them. Probably we'll stuff the kids in the minivan and head to Anytown, go meet a bunch of people we'll never see again, get ready to hear "I remember you when you were THIS big" in thick West Texas accents about 80 million times, try to be nice when my wife asks for the 248th time, "Are we done here yet?" and go home wondering how the hell I came out of that gene pool. Then I'll think about it some more and be damn proud of my gene pool, even with its foibles.