{"id":150,"date":"2008-11-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.keloland.com\/lund\/2008\/11\/03\/monday-morning-quarterback\/"},"modified":"2023-07-20T21:00:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-20T21:00:17","slug":"monday-morning-quarterback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/monday-morning-quarterback\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Quarterback"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Forget the headline..today&rsquo;s entry really has nothing to do with comments on Sunday&rsquo;s football games..well, nothing other than the Vikings managed to make me yell at the TV again&nbsp; as they tried their very best to &nbsp;give away a 14 point lead. But they didn&rsquo;t and the Colts beat New England last night so all is well in my little NFL world.<br \/>\nI check the news entries on Keloland.com every day. There were a few&nbsp;this morning that caught my eye&nbsp;which I thought warranted a few additional observations.<br \/>\n&ldquo;South Dakota Senator John Thune says he&rsquo;s hopeful VeraSun energy will emerge a stronger company after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I think the future of ethanol is very bright, I think we&rsquo;re experiencing a speed bump in the road that will correct itself over time.&rdquo;<br \/>\nNow, I like John Thune but to say that the bankruptcy of Sioux Falls-based VeraSun, the nation&rsquo;s second largest ethanol producer which is 2 Billion dollars in debt, might be a good thing in the long run..seems like a bit of a stretch. This &ldquo;speed bump&rdquo; sounds more like a brick wall. But what do I know? I&rsquo;m stuck having to buy into my financial planner&rsquo;s advice to hang-on..stay the course..in hopes that our meager investments will one-day rebound and thrive again. Like Thune&rsquo;s &ldquo;speed bump&rdquo; he&rsquo;s also fond of using euphemisms like a &ldquo;hiccup&rdquo; in the stock market instead of a crash; &ldquo;course correction&rdquo; instead of recession.<br \/>\n&ldquo;Holy severed bat heads&rdquo; Batman, the prince of &amp;^%$#@&rsquo;n darkness was in Yankton last week!&nbsp; Heavy metal rock legend, Ozzy Osbourne..who once bit off a bat&rsquo;s head on stage was right there in river city with his wife and kids shooting footage for their new variety show, which has a working title of &quot;The Osbournes: Loud and Dangerous.&quot; &nbsp;I must admit that I was a fan of the MTV reality show called &ldquo;The Osbournes&rdquo; which featured the controversial lead singer for Black Sabbath as the&nbsp;bumbling, mumbling husband and father he really is. It was hilarious.<br \/>\nAfter reading Shawn Neisteadt&rsquo;s story on calculating our carbon footprint, I decided to find out how bad of polluters Linda and I are. I knew I was in trouble when one of the first questions asked was what kind of car we drive.&nbsp; Even though our big old Lincoln gets pretty good mileage it, along with the amount of driving we do, was apparently bad enough to give us a final reading of 7.5&#8230;or&nbsp;about the national average.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br \/>\nNow that gasoline prices are down around two bucks a gallon again (which many predicted would never..ever..happen) I wonder how it might affect people&rsquo;s enthusiasm for going green or firing up their SUV&#8217;s that have been parked all summer. &nbsp;<br \/>\nI see that a federal prosecutor will be on duty Tuesday in South Dakota to take any reports of election fraud or voting rights abuses. Gee, I don&rsquo;t think anything like that has been an issue in my precinct. About the only violation I&rsquo;ve ever noticed are people accidentally driving into the parking lot of our polling place&nbsp;on the road marked Exit instead of Entrance.<br \/>\nOnce inside, I always look forward to the friendly hellos from the nice old folks..all volunteers..sitting there checking off names, passing out ballots&hellip;and asking if we&rsquo;d like a piece of candy from a dish on the table.<br \/>\nAs I emerge from those few moments in the voting booth, there&rsquo;s always a feeling that rushes over me about how lucky I am..how lucky we ALL are..to take part in this process and what a privilege it is to be an American.<br \/>\nDon&rsquo;t miss out on the opportunity to experience that feeling for yourself Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forget the headline..today&rsquo;s entry really has nothing to do with comments on Sunday&rsquo;s football games..well, nothing other than the Vikings managed to make me yell at the TV again&nbsp; as they tried their very best to &nbsp;give away a 14 point lead. But they didn&rsquo;t and the Colts beat New England last night so all&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12045,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/12045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}