Pumping Pain

The Mayors are inflicting pain on the BDFL

DOLOMITE - When John Fogerty wrote "Proud Mary" for Creedence Clearwater Revival back in the late 60s, he'd never been east of Montana, much less seen the Mississippi River. Fogerty wrote the song after he had been discharged from the National Guard. He had been known to carry around a small notebook with a list of song-title ideas in case he might need one. At the time, he was living in an apartment in Albany, CA near San Francisco with his wife and newborn son. He was still in the reserves and was real concerned about being sent to Vietnam. One day in the early summer of 1968 he received his honorable discharge from the service and in the blink of an eye, he was a civilian again. He was so excited about the good news that he picked up his Rickenbacker guitar and began playing a song intro he'd been working on recently. The chord riff was based on the opening to Beethoven’s "Fifth Symphony" which he had first heard on television while growing up. Fogerty didn’t really like how Beethoven had composed it. John preferred hitting the first chord hard for emphasis, not the fourth cord like Ludwig. When he added in some rhythm to the chords, the song had the sound and motion feel of a big-wheeled riverboat. Fogerty always loved Mark Twain’s writings and the music of Stephen Foster (The Father of American Music), so he then began writing some story type lyrics about an optimistic passenger traveling in a riverboat down the mighty Mississippi. The line "rollin' on the river" was influenced by a Will Rogers film that he had seen as a kid about two riverboats racing. He had finished most of the song in about two hours, but when he opened his notebook for a song title, there was "Proud Mary" at the top of the list to help him complete the masterpiece. The single came out in January of 1969 and topped out at #2 for three weeks on Billboard’s pop chart in March. There are several classic lines in the song like, Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis, but my favorite is Pumped a lot of pane down in New Orleans. The latter has been open to interpretation. In Week 12 of the BDFL, the Mayors continued to inflict a lot of pain on their opponents. This week's victim was the Fairfield PowerSleds. The Cronies slaughtered the Sledheads 44-26 to remain "the team to beat" in the BDFL. The defending BDFL Champions currently lead the league with 409 total points and sport a solid 8-4 win-loss record. The Mayors may not repeat and win the 2022 BDFL title, that is yet to be seen, but you will most likely have to go through them to win it all.

Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)

Amnesty 2022

The BDFL provides hope for the hopeless

TITLETOWN - According to Mr. Webster, "amnesty" is the act of an authority (such as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals. In the BDFL, Iron Hand, The Commissioner of the BDFL, defines "amnesty" as a provision to allow a team with a losing record to be pardoned from the league's "Bullet Rule" that states a team must have a winning regular season record to make the elite Big Daddy Championship Series (BDCS) post-season playoffs. Desperate times, call for desperate measures. There is a real-life scenario brewing this season in the BDFL that could result in only five (5) to seven (7) teams being eligible for the league's BDCS due to the aforementioned Bullet Rule. Therefore, the league has set forth an "Amnesty 2022" provisional plan to make sure the BDCS will have eight teams competing for the BDFL championship title this season. As customary in the past, if only seven (7) teams are eligible for the BDCS based on the Bullet Rule, the BDFL will assemble a #8 seeded team made up of seven (7) starters from the best unclaimed players and a random team defense/week from a 2022 USFL game to compete against the #1 seed in the first round of the BDCS. This is nothing new and there is league precedent here as Iron Hand clearly outlined in the BDFL's official October 2022 newsletter. If you recall, this potential replacement team will go by the name of the North River Neanderthals. No new news here. However, if the 2022 BDFL regular season fails to produce seven (7) qualified BDCS teams (8 wins or more), the BDFL will go to their "Amnesty 2022" contingency plan to determine the final one, or final two teams, to make the league's "Elite Eight" post-season bracket flush. The fair and equitable formula for this selection process will be each team's total points through Week 15 plus 10 points for every vict'ry. Example: 300 total points + 6 wins/60 points = 360 Total Amnesty Points (TAPs). The top one, or two, teams using TAPs will qualify for the 2022 BDCS. In the event of a tie, or multiple ties, with any TAPs scores, the BDFL will use rock-paper-scissors to determine the Amnesty 2022 qualifier(s). In the BDFL, you're never really out of it, until you are out of it. The BDFL...Giving hope to the hopeless this holiday season.