Williams Grave Cleaning

I previously promised to talk about the wonders of Williams Grave Cleaning, so I shall do that now.

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During my first semester in the Heritage Resources program at NSU, our Methods class had something called a monument treatment assignment. Each student selected a gravestone -- headstone, flat marker, Woodmen of the World memorial, etc. -- and was responsible for cleaning it in the proper manner and documenting the entire process. Take pictures, note damage and staining, determine changes from start to finish, and keep a record of how long each step took.

I selected the grave of Mary Grace Williams, a child of my grandparents who was born and died on the same day. The stone was covered with gray and black dirt and biological growth. Upon cleaning I saw immediate results, as much of the staining came off during application of the cleaning solution and a water rinse. I thought the work was easy, straightforward, and satisfying. The fact that I was working on a family marker was an added bonus. This assignment eventually led to the development of my project thesis on cemetery preservation.

Fast forward to the summer of 2010, when I was looking around for work after graduation. I didn't find anything that I really wanted or that really wanted me, so by fall I started looking into starting my own grave cleaning company. I spoke to a historical society in Leesville, and one woman there told me that she was so glad to see this kind of business, because she didn't know anybody did that sort of thing.

In October I filed articles of organization with the Louisiana Secretary of State's office. Their letter back to me said that it was "a pleasure" to approve my articles. A friend joked that he could imagine them sitting at their desk, weeping as they read through my articles that had moved them so. There was more paperwork for the IRS, the state, the Natchitoches Zoning Board and the Natchitoches Tax Commission. The end result is that I've got a business license, a tax ID number, and a business banking account.

The best thing about the banking account is the business debit card that comes with it. It's pretty sweet. When we used to plan happy hours at Capitol Advantage, sometimes we made sure to invite someone with a company credit card on the off chance they might decide to use it on our behalf. I don't plan on too many company happy hours, but it's still a cool thing to have.

Back in November, the Jefferson Historical Society contacted Save Our Cemeteries about having preservation work done on the John McDonogh tomb in McDonoghville Cemetery in Gretna, LA. SOC referred them to me, and I had a meeting with a society member and the Mayor of Gretna at the site. I returned on January 6 and spent seven hours cleaning the tomb.

NOTE: The tomb is technically a cenotaph, since he is no longer buried there. Ten years after he was entombed, his body was moved back to his hometown of Baltimore.

It was a gorgeous 60-degree day without a cloud in the sky. If you've seen the movie Field of Dreams, you may remember the part where one of the ballplayers asks Kevin Costner, "Is this heaven?" and Costner replies, "No. This is Iowa." Around 3 in the afternoon I stepped back from the tomb and looked around, then looked at the sky. Was this heaven? No, this was Gretna. But it was still a great way to spend a day.

I wrote up a work report and invoice and sent it to the city, and this past week I got the check in the mail. I was quite happy. Now I'm a legitimate businessman, and I got to post the Facebook status I've been looking forward to for months:

"Scott Williams is his own boss. I hate my boss."

I've got a couple more irons in the fire, which could be taking place in February. I will try to post about these on the Williams Grave Cleaning website.

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As an aside:

I spoke with someone the other day who asked if I wanted to live in New Orleans. I told him that years ago I wanted to live there for a couple of years, just to go through the seasons a couple of times and get into the flow of the city. My internship there in 2009 scratched that itch for a while, but I could still go back.

He said, "Well, I tried to get you a job down there the other day." The Chalmette Battlefield is part of the National Park Service, and they have about 15,000 marked graves in the cemetery there. He told the park folks that he knew somebody who would be happy to come down and clean them all.

For the record, it would take me a long, long, LONG time to do all of those. I don't even have a clue how long. But at about $35 each, it would cost them about half a million dollars. I think I could manage to live in New Orleans for half a million bucks.

The "Socialist" NFL

I know I was planning on writing about the wonders of Williams Grave Cleaning, and I will get around to it. However, someone directed my attention to Bill Maher's recent segment in which he states that the reason the NFL is so successful is that "the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer ones", ensuring equal opportunity and competitiveness for all. This results in more interest from the fans because everybody has a chance to reach the Super Bowl. The implication here is that America would be better off if we were more socialist and redistributed wealth like the NFL does.

Maher gives his argument very well. He should. He's on TV quite a bit, and he was a standup comedian for about 30 years. If that's not good training for expressing yourself and using words to good effect, then nothing is. Having said that, I'm a little surprised that he left out what I think are relevant factors in the NFL's success as a professional sport, as well as a pretty obvious trait of human nature (at least human nature as it exists among wealthy NFL owners).

To make sure I'm not misquoting or taking him out of context, the whole thing can be seen here on youtube; here are some of points:

1. The NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer ones.
2. 100 million Americans watch Super Bowl, 40 million more than go to church on Christmas, 85 million more than watched the last game of the World Series.
3. this is "an economic lesson for America”
4. “football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity”
5. “baseball is built on a model where the rich always win, and the poor usually have no chance”
6. World Series: “You have to be a rich bitch just to play”
7. Super Bowl: “Anyone can get in”
8. “Football is more like the democratic philosophy”
9. “The NFL literally shares the wealth. TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put it all in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways. Because they don’t want anyone to fall too far behind. That’s why the team that wins the Super Bowl, in the next draft, picks last. Or what the Republicans would call ‘punishing success’”
10. Baseball is exactly like the Republicans. Their economic theory is ‘every man for himself’”. Steelers vs. Pirates comparison. Pirates $40m. Yankees $206m.
11. “If you’re not in the game, you become indifferent to the fate of the game.” That’s what’s happening to the middle class in America.
12. Football, a sport that succeeds because it redistributes the wealth.

Here's my reaction these points:

Sharing/Redistributing

Numbers 1 and 9 aren't exactly the same thing. It's one thing if nobody has the money to begin with, and the money is distributed evenly among the participants. It's another thing if somebody has the money, and someone else comes along to take it away and give it to someone else. The NFL's TV money goes to each of the 32 teams in equal amounts right from the start. It's not like the Cowboys and Redskins have all the money and Roger Goodell plays Robin Hood, taking it from them to give to the lowly Packers and Steelers.

TV Ratings

Any comparison of television ratings is extremely misguided. Not because I don't believe them, but because of the nature of the sports themselves. Baseball is the greatest sport to watch in person, and people did so about 73 million times this past season. There is no such thing as a bad seat in a baseball park. Football is the perfect sport for television. It's got the right amount of time between plays, stats, graphics, timeouts, and bathroom opportunities at halftime. You would also have to have your head in the sand if you didn't think that the violence of the game had something to do with why people tune in to watch. Baseball is a skills game. Football is an athletic, impact game. The latter appeals to more people right now.

They don't share everything

Maher doesn't mention that it's only the TV money that gets shared equally. The gate is a 60-40 home team/away team split. None of the merchandising revenue is shared. None of the local licensing revenue is shared. None of the parking is shared. None of the box seats revenue is shared. None of the bajillion (technical term) other methods NFL teams use to increase revenue gets shared. And in this case, the big markets have a big advantage. They can use the extra money--they can do this, it doesn't mean they will do it--on salaries for their front office people, their coaches, their facilities, their scouts, and a lot of other off-the-field factors that go into having a successful franchise.

Salary Cap

This leads me to the salary cap, which is another element he left out of his argument. Every team is limited in how much they can spend on player salaries. (Of course "limited" is a relative term, since the 2009 salary cap was about $123 million). If there was revenue sharing with no salary cap, the big market teams might still be able to outspend the rest of the league and assemble teams of star player after star player after star player.

(NOTE: Even if Major League Baseball tried to implement a salary cap, I wonder if the player's union would allow it. In 2010 baseball had an average salary of $3,340133, about one million dollars more than the highest-average salary NFL team. Baseball players like being paid millions and millions of dollars a year)

You gotta be rich

Concerning #'s 6 and 7: are they true? Kind of. One of the biggest gripes about baseball is that the Yankees and Red Sox outspend everybody else and sign all the mega-free agents. Indeed, you have to go back to 1998 to find a year when the Yankees didn't lead the league in payroll. However, the idea that you must be one of the wealthiest franchises in order to make it to the World Series is off the mark. From 2000-2010, fifteen NFL franchises made the Super Bowl. The World Series? Fifteen. The average payroll position of the participants was 11th, and that includes teams that were 29th, 27th, 25th and 25th. The number of Super Bowl winners in that span is eight. World Series winners? Nine.

In general you have to be at least kind of wealthy -- top third or so -- to make it to the World Series, but it's not any sort of predictive measure.

It's A LOT of money and Human nature

One of the main reasons I think big market teams were willing to split TV money in the first place is that -- hello -- it's A LOT of stinking money. The current value of TV contracts is $20.4 billion dollars. This year Fox paid $712.5 million, NBC $650 million, CBS $622.5 million, and ESPN $1.1 billion for their respective rights. That's just over $3 billion to split among 32 teams, which comes out to over $96 million just for showing up. That's a pretty nice deal.

This is where I think the human nature part of it comes into play. It's easy to say, "Yes, let's all share" when there's a lot to go around. What if there wasn't as much money? 75% as much. 50% as much. 40% as much. I don't know exactly what the number would be, but at a certain point the big market teams would look around and say, "That's about enough of this. My team is responsible for five teams as much TV viewership as this other guy, and he still gets the same amount? Nuh-uh."

The amateur economist--extremely amateur, mind you--in me says that if America were run in a socialist economy, there wouldn't be any $20.4 billion dollar deals for NFL games. The contracts are paid for my giant media corporations operating in an environment geared towards producing as much wealth as possible. If they were in an environment where the goal was managing the wealth instead of producing gobs and gobs of it, big market NFL owners might feel differently about sharing with the little guys.

Punishing Success? Rewarding Failure?

As Maher mentioned, the team with the worst record gets the first pick in the NFL draft. He says Republicans would call this "punishing success." He may not know it, but there have been people who suggest that the Super Bowl winner should indeed get the first pick. This is supposed to provide "incentive" to the losing teams to do better and taking winning more seriously. Sometimes losing teams are criticized for not trying hard enough to run a winning organization while still taking the money generated by those who do. I'm fine with the draft the way it is.

Having said that, you can probably count on one hand the number of teams that actually think having the first pick in the draft is worth the money you have to pay him. No draft pick is a sure thing, and if you miss, you have missed BIG. Screwing up the first pick can be more damaging to your franchise than the benefit you would get if he actually panned out. If that's the case, maybe the Super Bowl winner should be forced to pay a 22-year old $10 million a year...I kid.

Somebody has to lose, and sometimes you're just terrible

Speaking of picking first, did you know that somebody does it every year? Why? Because every year somebody finishes last. All the revenue sharing in the world can't change that. Somebody has to lose, and somebody has to finish last.

From 1991-2004 the Cincinnati Bengals never finished better than 8-8. They finished 3-13 three times and 2-14 once. How often did the Bengals have a chance that's supposed to come with revenue sharing? For the first 20 years of their existence my beloved Saints never had a winning record at all. Equal TV money wasn't much of a help in the standing. Sometimes you're just terrible.

Football is not life. Life is not football.

This is not an economic lesson for America, at least not in the way Maher implies. It's the enormous amount of money provided by the TV networks that makes it possible. Not everybody starts out with large amounts of cash in the bank. Not everybody is willing to share. Not everybody's business is the most popular gig in town. The NFL has all sorts of advantages that make its "socialist" model possible, almost none of which translate to real life America. In effect the NFL's model is made possible by the capitalist model that provides the money to fund it. I'm sure there are a lot of really good arguments for socialist government, but this isn't one of them.

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A couple of notes:

When speaking of the number of people who go to church on Christmas Day in comparison to the number of people who watch the Super Bowl, Maher said, "Suck on that, Jesus!" He finds it ironic that Republicans preach capitalism while loving a socialist-run sport. I find it interesting that he would spend six minutes supporting the rich giving to the poor, while at the same time taunting a man who advocated just that. I suspect that his ire is directed more at hypocritical Christians than at Christ Himself, but that's just a guess.

He speaks of the Republican economic model as being "every man for himself." I think this is generally true in an "eat what you kill" sort of way, though I'd bet that an extremely small percentage of Republicans would advocate a 100% unrestrained capitalist system. Just about every one of them would agree that a certain amount of regulation is needed to keep things under control. What bothers me more, however, is that Maher conflates economic policy with social policy. I know of no policy that preaches "every man for himself" as a social policy, where we should just walk by someone dying in the street. I know this happens, of course, but as a result of people not following the social policy--often based on religious beliefs--they have espoused to others.

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It's been a while since I've written anything like this, and I'm sure there's a good bit wrong with it. Please let me know.