The "On This Day" feature of the Facebook mobile app is a great one. It allows you to stir up some memories, most of them nice ones, and today it pointed me to a Grandstander post that I made on January 1, 2012. I re-post it here verbatim. Substitute "2016" for "2012" and substitute "Rio de Janeiro" for "London" and what I wrote four years ago still applies today.
Happy 2016, everybody!
Two huge events await us in 2012.
It's an Olympic Year. No doubt the Games of London will be marvelous spectacle and great fun to watch. Someone who we currently do not even know exists will no doubt become a breakout star during these games. Whom will it be? Man? Woman? American? Asian? European? Someone from some small third world country? The fun will be in watching it unfold.
It's a Presidential Election Year. As has been my policy from the beginning, The Grandstander shall eschew politics in this space, as I prefer to concentrate on fun stuff and not the bitterness and anger that is so prevalent these days. All I will say now is that I hope that this can proceed as an exercise in an almost sacred right of democratic process as envisioned by the Constitution of the United States. Sadly, I fear that it will be a months long exhibition of ugliness among the various participants, and, in one of the lesser developments of the 21st Century, and avalanche of chain emails that purport to be funny, but are really their own exercise of hatefulness. I don't think this is what Washington, Jefferson, Adams and the rest of the founding Fathers had in mind.
