Welcome to the first Saturday Screencaps of September where you can feel the energy running through the veins of red-blooded Americans who realize we are about to drop into the vortex of the football season. Life changes today. Your life schedule changes this morning.
There are eight noon eastern kickoffs to consume today. There are two more 12:30 kicks to keep you degenerates happy followed by the equally loaded 3:30 window for you to make up your losses from the noon bets.
Please enjoy those patios. Enjoy the food. And for those of us who don’t live in the deep south or in Texas, go enjoy summer. Watch those college football games at outdoor bars. Find a window to suck down margaritas with your wives when there’s a break in the action. Soak it all in, fellas.
• I’m out on Herbstreit’s dog content. You know I love dogs and I’m a Herbie fan because we share similar SW Ohio roots. That said, the dog content era from him has gone far enough. If you’re like me, the bad news is that you are about to be inundated with Peter content. The dog now has a sponsorship deal with Hertz.
• For those of you who read Friday Screencaps, I hope you got Toledo +10 for the PUSH. I didn’t even bet the game, but I was sweating that one because I’d recommended taking the points.
• Do you guys miss the score ticker on ESPN games? Now that we live in a quad box world on YouTubeTV, I see the other scores on the screen anyway. Between two TVs, I’m consuming plenty of scores to not need ESPN’s ticker.
• Would you blame Bama fans if they stayed home today? It’s supposed to be 95 degrees in Tuscaloosa with the heat index expected to approach 110. Bama is a 27.5-point favorite. I have no problem with a half-full stadium. There’s no need dying, folks.
• Guys, be like Jena Sims. We feature her on Screencaps and Nightcaps for a reason. She’s one of us. She gets us. She’s married to a guy who’s one of us. She lives like us. She has the same mindset as us.
JENA SIMS KEEPS THE WHOLESOME GOLF CONTENT COMING AS SHE LEAVES IT ALL ON THE COURSE DOING THE WORM
I about fainted Friday when I saw this video of Jena literally jumping on MY Respect Summer® bandwagon. It was complete validation to everything I’ve been fighting for over the last five years within this column as the Home Goods, At Home and Michaels shoppers continue to disrespect summer.
For Jena to come out as this strong of a supporter means that my energy hasn’t been a waste. It’s resonating. It means something. The fight was worth having. Thank you Jena, and thank you to all the Screencaps readers who have joined the fight.
Now go throw away your wife’s pumpkin spice candles.
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– Marc emailed Friday: Where the f–k is your Screencaps??? It says on your bio on X ‘Screencaps 7 days a week’, but this entire summer it seems to be whenever you feel like it. I know you aren’t sick, as you posted something today, so where the f–k is your column, you lazy p—k???
Kinsey: As I told Marc, bookmark the Screencaps landing page. I get it. He is used to going to the Twitter account and having the link there. Times change. I submit my column, it goes through an editor, who then pushes the column into the Fox News Digital system, which then has a “push” delay before the column makes it to the user experience stage.
Meanwhile, I’m answering emails, preparing for Zooms, working on stories, emailing potential subjects for future stories, answering Slack messages, texts are going off, the phone is ringing, etc.
I promise to do better for Marc, but that attitude needs to change. Turn that frown upside down. It’s still summer, buddy. Cheer up.
– Timm in Saint Pauls, NC shares an incredibly tough email about where his life stands right now and wonders if football could make it all a little more bearable: Probably sound odd, but reading Kinsey Wolanski’s take on the Friday Screencaps regarding impending football widowhood made me sad, reflecting on my own situation.
I don’t have a lot in common with my daughter. I’m an older introverted disabled veteran with a bad attitude; a former soldier, mechanic, and truck driver. My daughter is a social butterfly; a competitive team dancer her whole life and now a dance instructor, former martial artist, gymnast, high school volleyball player, orchestra cello player, and currently following in her mother’s footsteps and working on her Bachelors in Sports Medicine and then planning to get her Masters in Occupational Therapy.
Despite our differences, we shared two things; the gun range and our love for the NFL. We’re Vikings fans, but I would get the NFL+ package every year so that we could go back during the week and try to watch EVERY game we could whenever she had free time before the next weekend hit..
Three weeks into the season last year, an intoxicated woman blew a stop sign at 55+, plowing into my son’s vehicle. My wife of 32 years died in the wreck and my son barely survived. A year later, he walks again, but with a pronounced limp and is seemingly permanently visually impaired due to brain damage… but at least he’s alive. Add to that, the fact that the woman had no insurance, no license, a fake plate on the vehicle, and an extensive criminal record. Beside the emotional impact of it all, the financial impact was also devastating. My son’s uninsured motorist coverage, capped in NC at $100k, was immediately claimed by his medical creditors (about $2M in medical bills), he lost his career, his house, and had to be moved back home anyway to be cared for.
Needless to say, my daughter and I didn’t see a single game after week three last season.
With this NFL season fast approaching, I’m hoping for a somewhat return to a sense of normalcy in our lives. A return to a time where I will find my daughter and I parked in front of the big screen on a random Wednesday at 3am trying to squeeze in a random game when she actually should be sleeping or writing a paper. But hey, this is a girl who requested that her college graduation gift be a trip to see the HOF in Canton.
I’m not sure why I wrote this… a sense of catharsis maybe, since most of my closest friends have passed away in recent years so I don’t really have anyone to vent to. And I could keep going… like about the turtle-like speed of the judicial system… or the fact that last month, I bought a used pickup truck for my son after he got cleared for “daylight driving”. Only 112k miles on it… and the motor blew 2 hours after the purchase… didn’t even make it home from the dealership three hours from our house… and how the Ford dealership said “gee… bad luck, that’s a you problem, not an us problem”.
I’m going to stop here. With everything that has happened in the last twelve months, I could probably rant in perpetuity…but I’ve already gone on too long. I apologize for dumping this on you… but it made me feel a little bit better seeing it in print. Keep up the good work.
– Steve shares his interesting life pivot point: 1980. College graduate (UVA). Had moved from my very small town in northern Va to the big city of Richmond to begin my new career as a management trainee with a local bank at the princely sum of $11,000 per year at age 22. Yes, I could afford groceries, a car payment, and rent at that income level in 1980.
My tasks at work consisted of opening new accounts, taking loan applications, answering phones, providing customer service, etc. One morning about 6 months in to the new job, I was at my desk at the branch bank office, but needed to use the bathroom. In walks an attractive similar-aged young lady seeming to require assistance, and that was my pivot point.
Do I continue on to the bathroom, or do I first assist this young lady? Well, I called her over, and the rest is history. I managed to get her home telephone number, her place of employment, and her work phone number while opening her new account. The pursuit was on. We will celebrate our 41st anniversary this October.
More life pivots from Screencaps readers
– Anonymous shares: – My seventh grade teacher told me that I needed to channel my prodigious talking skill into reading scripture at Mass. 50+ years later, I’m still at it.
– I decided to go to a smaller state university rather than the big flagship campus that everyone else in my high school graduating class. Four years later, I had my family’s first college degree while some of my high school classmates flunked out of the big school. Eight years after that I had my second degree on which I based my career.
– My wife convinced me that I should take a second shot at passing the CPA exam after I failed all four parts the first time around. I passed all four parts six months later.
– My wife and I were looking for houses to raise a family when we decided to take a detour and check out a house in a town we’d never heard of that was in the middle of miles of farmland. We closed on the house two months later and still live there. One day we will have to move out of that house, and I will be in one of the boxes.
– As my wife was battling pre-term labor contractions at 22 weeks, and we were wondering if our baby would survive, I was at her bedside in the hospital when the Lord whispered “Trust Me” in my ear, and from that point on, I did. Twelve weeks later, my wife delivered a healthy baby girl. Two and a half years later she would deliver two healthy baby boys.
– After a lengthy career at one employer, I was informed that my job was being eliminated, and an outside accounting firm would perform my duties. I was asked to stay on (with a nice financial incentive) to train the folks at the firm on how to do my job. During the training, I asked if the firm could use someone with my skills. Four months later, I was hired by the firm and eventually worked on the account of my former employer.
– A colleague that I worked with at my former long-term employer also got laid off, and went to work for a family-owned construction company. After several years there, she let me know that there was an opening to lead the company’s accounting department. I was unhappy at the accounting firm, so I applied, interviewed, and got the job. I’m still there, and couldn’t be happier.
I’m glad you brought up this exercise. I’ve never been a big life planner, but I’ve always had my eye on what is next. I’ve been fortunate to have opportunities present themselves when I was ready for them, and to adapt when things got rough. I’m not famous, I’m not rich, but I am happy and grateful for everything I have been given. Hopefully I have 30+ years left to enjoy what’s next.
– Bill, who has MD on the end of his name, from Longmeadow, MA tells me: I often find myself reading your articles on the Fox News App. This morning I read that you are interested in hearing about positive pivots/defining moments. I have had my share of these and often think of how lucky I am to have had them. The story below happened after I dropped out of high school and began delivering fruit baskets around Boston, where my route included many of the colleges, universities, and teaching hospitals.
Having grown up in the “Irish Ghettos” of Dorchester/South Boston (which had the highest concentration of white poverty in the United States in the 1980’s-“School Desegregation in Boston, Southie without Tears,” Commonwealth Magazine,January 2000), my dream of becoming a doctor someday was about as realistic as becoming an NBA superstar, especially with my conviction for auto theft at age 12. Anyway, the piece below is an excerpt from a longer manuscript that shows how I did finally end up becoming a surgeon. Thank you for showing interest in defining moments! I truly believe we all have them.
Kinsey: Bill’s story that he shared is pretty inspirational stuff. He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and eventually got his GED. Years later, he was sitting on a park bench when his pivot happened. He saw a newspaper advertisement for same-day applications to UMass and took a chance on himself. Bill applied and was miraculously accepted.
“As I drove away from UMass, the water in Boston Harbor, adjacent to the campus, seemed bluer, and the world appeared more wonderful than ever. When I merged onto the highway to get to my first delivery, tears of joy, a phenomenon I had always thought was just a saying that old people used, came to my eyes for the first time in my life,” Bill writes.
Life indeed changed. Bill is now a urologist.
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I hope today helps inspire all of you to get busy living, even if you’re in the middle of an incredibly challenging time in life. Go have a positive weekend. I’m heading out to the bookstore to get Screencaps the III a book he’s been asking to read.
And then hopefully I’ll hit a golf course at some point this weekend. SeanJo will be here tomorrow.
