Are We There Yet? vol. 183
The Scottish poet Robert Burns is recognized for saying, "There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing." This certainly held true on Monday night in Milwaukee. As background, after playing quarterback for the National Football League's Green Bay Packers for 18 years, Aaron Rodgers signed a contract this past year to play with the New York Jets. The Jets season opener was on Monday night.
A tremendous amount of excitement in New York surrounded the team, which has struggled for decades. Now, they have one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. In Wisconsin, however, some Packers fans were not as pleased about his move to the Jets. At Jack’s American Pub in Milwaukee, the owners promoted that they would pay the bar tabs for all patrons on any night when the Jets lost their game.
On Monday night, on the fourth play of the game, Rodgers was injured in what turned out to be a season-ending injury. The Jets were playing the Buffalo Bills, one of the better teams in the league. At Jack’s American Pub, patrons began running up their bar tabs as soon as Rodgers went down in anticipation that there was no way that the Jets could win the game without their best player. Unfortunately for them, the Jets went on to win the game, and all those patrons had to pay those large bar tabs.
We’ve all either heard or said something that starts with "everyone knows." Over the past few years, I’ve heard hundreds of people say that "everyone knows there will be a recession" and back in 1999 when "everyone knows tech stocks are not risky."
I’ve learned from experience that when everyone knows, no one knows. Perhaps a better phrase to live by is "never say never."
Take care and stay safe.
BOOK:
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating "historical over-reaching" by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.
But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.
Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.