The Life Slant - page 2

If you never saw the Purple People Eaters browbeat quarterbacks or Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain blank opponent after opponent; if you never saw Walter Payton deliver crushing blows to prospective tacklers or Gayle Sayers dance his way to the goal line; if you never saw Paul Hornung covered in mud or an exhausted Kellen Winslow dragged off the field; if you’re not sure who the Super Bowl trophy is named after or who George Halas is or why the AFC trophy is named after Lamar Hunt, then to you NFL football may seem great, just fine, normal.  But to those of us who have been fans long enough to remember when the game was still football, today’s NFL is a sad and pale reminder of better days gone by.

From 1948 to 1960 a linebacker named Hardy Brown terrorized NFL offenses using a devastating right shoulder, which he used the way a boxer delivers a six-inch knockout punch, sending player after player from field to hospital.  During an interview for NFL Films in the 70s, after rule changes began to calm the game down, Hardy called the current state of football “a sissy game”.  As much as we hated to see him go in 1991, it’s probably better that Hardy never got a chance to see today’s much sissy-er version of the game he loved to play.

A horrible whale massacre took place last month near the infamous town of Taiji, south central Japan, renowned for its cruelty. It sickened (and rightfully so) millions of empathetic people as they helplessly witnessed cold-blooded executioners in-action.

On Christmas Eve 2020, a minke whale unsuspectingly swam into a pen of stationary nets near Taiji.  Ren Yabuki, an animal activist with the Life Investigation Agency, fortuitously saw it. Using a drone, he documented the whale’s plight and enlisted the global support of animal lovers to free our brethren and sistren of the sea.

The oceans store more than 90 percent of all combustion heat. In 2020, record fossil fuel and wood pellet heat in the ocean was the energetic equivalent of detonating 315,536,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The energy within the oceans drives the climate, which is becoming less predictable and more violent.

Planetary ice is important for reflecting incoming solar radiation back to outer space. As the world’s temperature rises, planetary ice is in peril. In fact, Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s. The world has lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice since 1994. That is enough meltwater to fill 10.2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or, cover the entire state of California in ~200 feet of water.