The unofficial rules for jumping on another team's bandwagon

We're entering the greatest part of the annual sports schedule. The NFL and college football seasons are under way. The baseball playoffs are almost here. Next month, the NBA and NHL start their seasons.

It's a great time to be a fan, but it's also a great time to decide what to do if your team isn't good.

As noted Raiders fan Scar sang in "The Lion King:" "Be prepared!"

If you're a baseball team whose team won't make the playoffs, do it now. If you're a Las Vegas Raiders fan, know that it's coming soon. If you're a Golden State Warriors, Sacramento Kings or San Jose Sharks fan, it's never too early to think about what team should you pick in several months when the playoffs finally arrive.

It's confusing, right? Can you jump on the bandwagon of the San Antonio Spurs, who will be good for a while? Can you be a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers or the Colorado Avalanche or the Dallas Cowboys?

Well, I'm here to help with a series of rules. When you consider a team, answer these questions. If the team you picked passes a series of tests, you can choose them.

There are eight steps to the Stanhope Sports Fan Bandwagon Rules©. When it's time to pick a team to follow (hey Giants and A's fans: It's time now!), follow this path by asking the following questions.

1. Is the team from Los Angeles? If yes, stop now. You cannot be a fan of this team. Not the Rams, not the Lakers, not the Dodgers, not even the Kings, Stars or Clippers. No Los Angeles teams. If the team is not from Los Angeles, they're still alive, but otherwise, start over.

2. Is the team the Dallas Cowboys? No. You can't be a fan. Pick another team (not from Los Angeles) and start over.

3. Is this team a rival of my favorite team or a local team? If yes, you cannot be a fan. If you're a Raiders fan, you can't jump on the Chiefs or Broncos bandwagons. If you're a Giants fan, see question No. 1. If you're a 49ers fan, see questions No. 1, No. 2 and exclude the Seattle Seahawks. If you're a Warriors fan . . . uh, the NBA doesn't have many bitter rivals over the years, so you're probably OK if your bandwagon team fits the other qualifications.

4. Is this team the Raiders? If yes, God bless you. That's not a bandwagon; that's a dump truck. Please seek counseling.

5. Is this team a long-time powerhouse in the sport or does it already have a national following? If you want to jump on the bandwagon of the Yankees or Celtics or Cowboys or Steelers, the answer is no, you cannot be a fan of this team. Start again. Those teams already have plenty of front-running, glory-hogging fans (no offense). Pick another team.

6. Has this team broken your team's heart at some time in the past? You cannot become a fan of a team that ripped out your heart at any time. If you're a Giants fan, for instance, this rules out the Anaheim Angels, who beat them in the 2002 World Series. It also rules out the Colorado Rockies, who couldn't beat the Atlanta Braves in 13 tries in 1993, allowing the Braves to edge the Giants by one stinking game! If you're a Raiders fan, it rules out the New England Patriots (Tuck Rule Game) and Pittsburgh Steelers (Immaculate Reception Game). If your bandwagon team broke your real team's heart, start over.

7. Does this team have a shameful past that it hasn't addressed properly? Consider the Houston Astros with their cheating scandal; the New England Patriots having Tom Brady all that time; the Indianapolis Colts moving from Baltimore in the middle of the night. You cannot be a fan of those teams, so pick another one and start over.

8. Is this team from your geographic area? A surprise twist! This is the reverse of the others, because if the answer is yes, you can absolutely become their fan. I'd even waive the first and second rules for residents of Southern California and the greater Dallas metro area. In fact, the best bandwagon to join is the "local" team that is doing well.

So maybe the approach is to consider No. 8 first and pick a local team. If not, you're free to pick a team that isn't from Los Angeles, isn't the Cowboys, isn't a rival of your favorite team, isn't a longtime powerhouse, hasn't broken your team's heart and doesn't have a shameful past.

Good luck. There aren't many out there, but feel free to jump on a bandwagon. Last year, my Seattle Mariners almost made it to the World Series and my New York Knicks won the NBA championship.

It's fun to be on the bandwagon if you follow the rules.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Nostalgia for past includes missing record players and more

They just don't make nostalgia like they used to.

Remember when old people talked about listening to "The Lone Ranger" on the radio? Or recalling when they paid 10 cents to go to the movies on Saturdays? How about when they romanticized played kick the can or stickball?

Ah, the good old days.

They're still here. If you talk to enough older people, you'll hear about playing outside until the street lights came on (not possible where I lived, since there were no streetlights. As far as I can tell, my fellow neighborhood kids are still out there playing, now in their 60s). You'll hear about black-and-white TVs and three TV networks. You'll hear about cars with manual transmissions and people smoking in movie theaters.

Those were the days, my friend.

But listen to people who aren't quite old (a generation younger than me) and you'll likely hear laments about bygone technologies, some of which they're fighting to bring back. Nostalgia now is for how the world operated around 1980 or 1990.

Example No. 1: People miss record players or stereo systems that play vinyl records (spelling challenge for me: I know there's a "y" in vinyl, but often try to put it after the "v." It might be vynil? Vynyl?). According to a recent survey by the YouGov folks, 42% of Americans miss vinyl records and want to use them again and another 27% miss them, but don't necessarily want to do them again. That's 69% of respondents!

Vinyl records are missed. However, they're still available for sale – not just at garage sales and used record stores (arguably the greatest stores of the 1980s). Many artists release new records on vinyl, too – hoping to catch the part of the market that thinks they sound better that way (do they? I have no idea. What I do know is that you can't leave a vinyl record in your car on a hot day without it warping. That's a lesson I learned after ruining three or four albums that cost $7.99 or $9.99 each).

Technology moves very fast: We went from vinyl records to cassettes to CDs to streaming back to vinyl in about 30 years. Other technologies (smartphones, cars) advance even faster. Nostalgia now comes quicker than it did for the kick-the-can generation (who would also tell you about carhops and ration books and World War II).

Life in the 21st century, as Ferris Bueller said 40 years ago (!), moves pretty fast.

Want more insight? YouGov's survey asked what we miss and what we don't. For simplicity sake, I'll combine the figures of the "I miss it and want to use it again" and "I miss it but don't want to use it again" into a catchall category I cleverly call . . . "I miss it."

Using that metric, 59% of us miss CD players (still available at second-hand stores!), 58% of us miss digital cameras, 57% of us miss DVD players and 57% of us miss film cameras.

They all seem great if you don't remember CD and DVD players skipping or when half of your photos were out of focus (in film cameras) or the extra work (carrying around a digital camera).

Some other technologies are missed by more than half of us. At least 50% of the population misses iPods/portable mp3 players (53%), handheld video game consoles (51%) and cassette tape players (51%).

The point isn't that all technology used to be better. It wasn't. Technology almost always advances because we find something better. That's true even if years or decades later, we consider the original better than the replacement.

However, there are some technologies that people are happy to leave behind. It's unsurprising that dial-up internet service, floppy disks and pagers are technologies we're most happy to be rid of, with 81% of us glad to be done with dial-up, 68% of us happy to not have to insert floppy disks or and the same number happy to see a number on a pager, have to find a pay phone and call the person to whom we're selling drugs (I'm guessing here. The only time we used a pager was to know when our first son's birthmother went into labor.).

At least half the population is also happy to be done with fax machines, rotary-dial telephones, non-smartphone cellphones and payphones – a category I call "dumbphones." We love the advance of the smartphone, which is also arguably an improvement over vinyl albums and record players for music. Modern smartphones also address the lack of CD players, DVD players, handheld video game consoles, cassette players, digital cameras and nearly everything else on this list.

I get the nostalgia. Record albums (and used record stores!) felt more real than a streaming device. Digital cameras felt like they gave us more control over our photos.

But when it comes down to it, I'll take my smartphone. To the others? As John Waite sang on a vinyl record that I had and ultimately used a special device to transform into an mp3 for my iPod, "I ain't missing you at all."

Then I left the record in my car and it got warped.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

We're on the brink of the world's most popular holiday

Labor Day is called a lot of things. The unofficial end of summer. The least patriotic of our three major summer holidays. An overlooked holiday and perhaps the most expendable of the "most people get a day off" holidays.

Here's what most people don't say about Labor Day: It's the most popular holiday in the world.

That's based on the number of people living in countries where variations of Labor Day are a federal holiday. In other words, the first Monday in September isn't the most popular holiday, Labor Day is.

Labor Day topping the widest-celebrated holiday list may come as a surprise in a world where Christmas dominates an entire month and Thanksgiving ushers in what we call "the holiday season." But Thanksgiving and Christmas aren't the most popular holidays in the world. That becomes obvious when you recognize the purpose of each of them.

Thanksgiving is a strange attempt to celebrate thankfulness (a noble cause) by pretending to imitate a meal eaten over a long weekend 405 years ago that was nothing like what we do now. I'm not sure what exactly happened on that first Thanksgiving, but I'm certain the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys didn't have home games that day.

Christmas isn't the most popular holiday because so much of the world isn't culturally Christian. China isn't. Most Arab countries aren't. Just take China (population 1.4 billion) out and you eliminate 17% of the world's population. (Side note: Did you realize that India surpassed China as the world's most populous country? It has 1.5 billion people and moved into the top spot in 2023.)

Anyway, when considering the most popular holiday it's Labor Day. Which is Monday. Except . . .

Well, for most of the world, Labor Day isn't the first Monday in September. For most the world, Labor Day (or Labour Day in places where they spell things wrong) is May 1. May Day.

May Day is a holiday for 5.8 billion people across the globe, edging out Christmas, which is a holiday for 5.5 million people. Add our Labor Day to the May Day total and you're past 6 billion celebrants.

So Labor Day is the biggest holiday in the world. Here in the United States and in Canada, it's celebrated in September, while England doesn't celebrate it at all, apparently still in the clutches of the pre-conversion Ebeneezer Scrooge's business plan.

In case you're wondering, New Year's Day (4.3 billion people) is third and no other holiday is celebrated by more than 4 billion people. Not even Pi Day (March 14) and May the 4th (be with you!), which are celebrated by English-speaking nerds.

Another thing I learned in an article about holidays: Most countries have 12 to 14 public holidays and the United States has 11. We're in the middle.

Two nations – Somalia and Uruguay – have less than five and a few (including Japan) have 25 or more. The biggest holiday-granting government? Nepal, where I had several jokes available before the late-August floods. Trust me, they were funny, but not appropriate now. Suffice it to say, Nepal has 31 national days off.

So how will you mark the most popular holiday in the world? A barbecue? A picnic? 

Personally, I think the best way to celebrate the world's most popular holiday is to do what people in the rest of the world do.

Dance around a May pole. Crown a May queen. Hold a massive military parade to commemorate the power of the Soviet Army. We may celebrate Labor Day on the wrong day, but there's no reason we should ignore the traditions that make the holiday so popular.

I bet people in Nepal get a week off for Labor Day and workers in Uruguay and Somalia probably have to work double shifts.

We live in 11-holiday America, so be grateful for our final holiday of summer, even if we celebrate it four months late. And enjoy your May pole dance.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.