Quote:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”--Martin Luther King

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Day Dreaming

(Ronaldo Field, Beaverton, OR)

This promises to be a solid weekend of relaxation, my first in weeks.

Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm a big fan of these sorts of days.  I'll even take the thunder showers that are expected tomorrow as long as they pass through quickly and we return to sunny skies.

Yesterday I procured a backup hard drive to store my video clips safely away from the perils of computing obsolescence. The largess of a friend made this happen, and I am grateful.

It is not a question of if your computer crashes, but when.  My sales clerk advised that I buy an extra backup  drive to complement the first one, but I nixed that idea for now.

The blues festival at the waterfront is blessed by the weather gods this year.  This is the 25th anniversary of the festival.  If memory serves me, most of them have had good weather.  I can recall being scorched more than once by the July heat as I stood in front of the bandstand and boogied down to one band or another.

My boogie-down days are over.

Out in Beaverton at the Nike campus this year's crop of supposedly elite American football seniors have gathered for a high-profile competition in speed, agility and strength drills, with a little one-on-one competition thrown into the mix.  This is an exclusive by-invite Nike-promotional being held on Ronaldo Field, named for a Portuguese soccer star.

Cristiano Ronaldo is all of 25.  He  is one of the world's highest-paid athletes, and he is admired by futbol fans worldwide, particularly the kids who want to emulate him.

Nike is in the dream business.  And the biggest dream in the world for kids is soccer.

Of the 150 elite American high school football stars on hand at Nike, a handful of them will ever make money playing the violent game at the highest level.  And not a one of them will make the kind of money Ronaldo makes.  Probably won't have a field named after them either.

The dream business is big, and Nike leads the fantasy.

I'll be outdoors today, dreaming that one day I'll sell a few RBP editions.


TS

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