March 2026 Grab Bag o’ Humour

Every ten years or so, there is a blockbuster cartoon movie about basketball. Goat is the current edition of such a societal trend.

The other sports are jealous. I used to assume that basketball was the third most lucrative sport in North America. I was surprised to see the real numbers. Yes football is the number one sport in North America. But I expected baseball with its 162 game season would be number 2. I was wrong. Basketball is number 2.

Perhaps it is because of the boost all those cartoon movies give basketball. Perhaps the very young are drawn in by the cartoons and end up liking basketball better because they have a positive first impression of the sport.

Maybe the number 4 North American sport, hockey, has learned from this. Maybe they don’t have the numbers to make a cartoon movie worth Hollywood’s attention.

But they can ally with the LGBTQ+ community. There is no doubt that hockey has a series hit with the show Heated Rivalry and its gay love story. Now if hockey had a series every 10 years perhaps with other LGBTQ+ communities being featured, perhaps they could also surpass baseball and be the number 3 professional league in North America.

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I couldn’t help but notice McDonald’s advertising their coffee with the word smooth. This word is supposed to be a convincing positive to the brand. I can’t help but point out that cigarettes and alcohol have also advertised with the word smooth for their products.

Is smooth just a mostly nonsense adjective that today has come to mean, you will feel briefly happy because of the addictive quality of these products? The only product that I have seen the word smooth being used for that isn’t addictive is peanut butter. Smooth is used in it’s original meaning for this. That is not the case with the others.

I think there is a secondary meaning for the word smooth that has developed over the latter decades and it means, yes, this product is addictive. And you will like it precisely for that reason.

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Back in the day, a fully bald head was rare. You were likely to only see it on Lex Luthor, Kojak, or Mr. Clean. But this has changed in recent years. Today, fully bald is considered preferable to partially balding. So men shave their heads completely.

I think bald was meant to represent rarities in days previous. Lex Luthor was a genius who could challenge Superman by his brain alone and no super powers. Kojak was an uncommon detective who regularly licked lollipops. And Mr. Clean was that odd man that is both strong and really clean.

But today, now that full baldness is common in men, it is obvious that those attributes don’t apply to all bald men. Bald men aren’t usually evil geniuses, uncommon detectives or really clean people.

So Mr. Clean decided to retire their mascot because of all this.

Then two weeks later he was brought back when the powers that be realized he is the name of the company!

So I guess all those bald men can be really clean people after all.

Dig we must - for growing New York.

#Kojak