Overreaction?

I'm not a parent. At this stage of my life it's not going to happen. So, I don't ever have to answer the question of whether I'd allow or encourage a son of mine to play football, at any age. (Frankly, if we'd ever had kids we'd be far more likely to nudge them towards music, which has its own character-building virtues.)

That doesn't stop me from wondering at the thought processes of those who either do have to make such decisions, or those who are in the professional medical position to do so. The former number has occasionally included some famous individuals, even football players, who have chosen to encourage their male children towards other pursuits.

I can only imagine that's a hard position to be in. One might think of, say, coal miners or factory workers who imagined themselves to be working in those fields so that their sons didn't have to do so (although I imagine there were also plenty who expected their sons to follow in their footsteps), but that's not quite the same thing. Playing Pop Warner football or even high school ball doesn't necessarily lead to an NFL career. I suppose there's a greater chance that playing Pop Warner or high school might be more likely to produce a desire to play in the NFL, but the Rolling Stones have the answer to that.

I have to imagine that it's a particularly challenging time to be a medical professional where this subject is concerned, though. By this time it's hard to imagine doctors being completely blind to CTE and its effects on individuals long-term. Even most NFL players don't stay in the game for twenty years, a la Mike Webster, but not all former NFL players who manifested the disease were that old -- think of Paul Oliver, who was only 29 at death, with advanced CTE. Chris Henry was only 26 when he died, also with CTE manifest in his brain; Adrian Robinson was only 25 when he committed suicide this past April, also showing the telltale markers of CTE. Advanced age isn't mandatory.

Of course, even younger players can manifest signs of potentially debilitating brain trauma, without having concussions, as this study among others reminds us. That study focuses on players in college, and not exactly football factories at that.

Fine. Just walk away after high school, right? Hmm...that might not even work out for the best. Even as that study insists that science can save us all, it also reminds that these things do start to show up in young players, and that concussions aren't required to do the damage. The particularly chilling part is that even an offseason doesn't always provide enough time for the traumatized brains to recover. And yes, even a few who didn't play beyond high school have ended up severely traumatized, apparently.

Even at the youngest levels these kinds of brain injury really can occur, in many different sports. One neurosurgeon/Pop Warner parent puts his opinion in writing here.

In "walking down the stairs" through these various age brackets and their potential for harm, I have to admit that I'd have a hard time with the idea of a child of mine playing football. If anything I'd be concerned that (despite the obvious genetic handicaps he'd bring to the game) he might be good at it. Do I then have the nerve to be vigilant about monitoring his brain health? Do I have the nerve to say "that's it, no more" if a young boy of mine suffers a concussion, as Dr. Powers says he will do above?

But as noted, I'm not a parent, so I'll never have that decision to make.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the doctors depicted in the movie Concussion (not a major character in terms of screen time, but an important one to the plot), discussed in the previous post on this blog, is now at work at the large state university in the town where I now live, and the local paper took note of that in today's edition. It's an interesting interview, in which he recalls the initial results and the pressure applied by the NFL (he was a co-author on the study the NFL demanded to have retracted).

And yet, at the end of that article, this physician pronounces those parents who decide to steer their children from football to be guilty of overreaction.

"Understandable overreaction," to be sure, but overreaction. Geez, how charitable of you.

It's pretty unlikely I'll ever meet the man (I am nobody, after all), but if it ever were to happen I'm not really sure I'd be interested in any long conversation with him. My contribution to the conversation would likely be kept to a question:

What would it take for you to decide that such a choice wasn't an "overreaction"? Dead children?

Brief film commentary: Concussion

At a little over two hours long, the new film Concussion is primarily a story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist/medical examiner whose findings blew up the NFL's careful efforts to conceal what it new about the effects of concussions and brain trauma on its players.

The two-hour length, intentionally or not, almost results in two different movies. The first hour, once it establishes Dr. Omalu's credentials and personality, walks the viewer through the initial cases that landed in Dr. Omalu's lap, leading him (at his own expense in most cases) into the revealing of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of deceased former NFL players. The second hour becomes the story of the NFL's efforts to squash Dr. Omalu's research and Dr. Omalu personally. By necessity, the second hour is the more melodramatic of the two, but in many ways the first hour is the harder to watch.

(What follows is spoiler-ish, so if you need to be preserved from all information about the film, stop reading now. As the basic facts of the story are pretty much public record now, I don't feel I'm giving away too much below, but you've been warned at any rate.)

(Seriously, stop if you want no spoilers.)

(Stop now.)







OK, moving on then.

Second hour first. If the film's implications are to be believed, the degree to which the NFL did everything in its power to destroy Dr. Omalu is beyond the pale in every possible way. That they attacked his professional credibility is established -- attempting to bully him into retracting his research, for example? That really did happen. Trying to thwart Dr. Omalu by attacking his boss Cyril Wecht, the coroner? That I did not know, and the film is opaque in its suggestion (apparently, once Dr. Omalu departed from his job, all charges against Wecht were dropped, in a suspiciously convenient coincidence). Still, there were other things the NFL did in their ongoing smear campaign against Dr. Omalu that are not included in the film (essentially commandeering a medical journal for the purpose of attacking his research, for example) that are especially damning, but probably don't translate into film drama terribly well.

A certain amount of dramatic license is not surprisingly employed, in which actions by multiple characters are condensed to one or two characters in the film. For example, as mentioned in the previous post, former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson is portrayed in a confrontation with Dr. Omalu that by all evidence did not happen in real life. As well, it's not clear to me that the specific confrontation between Duerson and former Philadelphia Eagle Andre Watters portrayed in the film actually happened, but Duerson did have contentious encounters with a number of players who sought help from the NFL's pension fund for dealing with their brain trauma-related maladies.

A good bit of this half of the movie portrays the effect of this siege on Dr. Omalu's personal life, which for some will be a distraction from the "main point" of the movie and for some will be the "main point" of the movie. From a dramatic point of view, Dr. Omalu's wife is used as little more than plot device in the film, which is a tremendous waste of Gugu Mbatha-Raw. This film will by no means pass the "Bechdel test" in its portrayal of its female characters. On the other hand, the NFL itself doesn't really pass the "Bechdel test" either.

Back to the first half. This portion of the film is more engaging as film than the second, which starts to look like any number of other movies pretty quickly. Dr. Omalu's credentials are established in winning fashion, as well as his quirky personality and driven nature. You end up with the impression that he's perhaps an odd duck, but he's all right.

The film is not afraid to portray Dr. Omalu's Catholicism as an essential part of his character without necessarily bashing you over the head with it. I doubt that anyone who makes such lists will ever count Concussion as a "faith-based" film, but to leave out that aspect of the film's portrayal of its main character would be to assess the film incorrectly.

Some of the most striking work in the first half of the film is done by actors playing two of the first former players to be (posthumously) diagnosed by Dr. Omalu with CTE. If David Morse's screen time as Mike Webster was any longer he'd be getting awards talk tossed in his direction; he is unrecognizable, and unflinching in portraying the agonizing decline of the longtime Pittsburgh Steelers center, and the horrifying lengths to which he went trying to ease his symptoms (it's shocking enough, but the description of Webster's decline in the book League of Denial is frankly more explicit and more horrifying, although this film does portray one instance of perhaps Webster's most horrifying self-treatment). Another former Steeler, Justin Strzelczyk, is portrayed by Matthew Willig; his time on screen is even less, but effective, and his death in a fiery automotive crash is one of the more gasp-inducing moments in the film. (Interestingly, Willig is a former NFL player; his thoughts on the role are noted in this video clip.) Some dramatic telescoping is evident in this half of the film as well, but perhaps not as much as in the second half.

Short conclusions:

Filmmaking observations and opinions: I have no problem if Will Smith rides this film to an Oscar nomination. He probably hasn't disappeared into a role this effectively since, I don't know, Six Degrees of Separation? Let the man be rewarded. Albert Brooks as Wecht is of course Albert Brooks.  Alec Baldwin, aside from occasional bad attempts at what I gather is supposed to be a Louisiana accent or dialect or something, is reasonably effective in one of his more understated turns, playing Dr. Julian Bailes. Casting Luke Wilson as Roger Goodell is way too generous to Goodell, but Wilson does bring an appropriately smarmy touch to the role. Some of the villains seem a bit overplayed (Mike O'Malley as another medical examiner in the Pittsburgh office, Arliss Howard as Joseph Maroon), while some of the most serious villains in the NFL's response seem underplayed or ignored. Dr. Elliot Pellman (played by Paul Reiser), a rheumatologist and sometime team doctor for the New York Jets, doesn't get much air time at all, yet he was the most belligerent (and bald-faced lying) mouthpiece for the NFL in its Big Tobacco-style full denial phase, in his role as chair of the league's laughably named Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI) Committee.

As to the film's subject: it is about Dr. Bennet Omalu first and foremost. See the film? Yes. Should it be the last word in informing yourself on the subject? No. The aforementioned book is still probably the most informative starting point, and the PBS Frontline episode derived from it (which you can watch here) is also worth the time. Other possible sources for getting more informed will be explored in a future blog entry.

David Morse as Mike Webster in Concussion

Hollywood jumps in!

With the absolute and unyielding avalanche of publicity and unbridled geekery heralding the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this past weekend, you might not be aware that other movies are being released this holiday season. (I think in this case "holiday season" is the best term. I mean, really, do we really want Sisters or The Big Short somehow tied to the child in the manger? I didn't think so.) But there are, and one of them is of great interest to this blog, and not because it represents Will Smith's first serious bid for an Oscar nomination in years.

Indeed, this Friday marks the release of Concussion, a movie based on the experience of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born medical examiner whose examination of the brain of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster set off the ill-labeled "concussion crisis" that now haunts not only the NFL, but every level at which football is played, and other sports as well.

I have no advance knowledge of the film itself that anybody else can't obtain. (No, this blog has not earned me admittance to a Hollywood premiere or any advance screening. Shame, I know.) It's not hard to guess the basic outlines of the movie, however, if you've either read the book League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, which features Omalu's work prominently as part of its narrative. If books aren't your thing, you could also watch the PBS Frontline episode based on the book and featuring interviews with many of its principals, including Omalu. If you are dubious about ordering DVDs, the doc airs again this month, with part 2 of an expanded version airing tonight on many PBS stations. (It does air on the local station tonight ... at 3:00 a.m. I wonder if this is a pattern in other football-besotted towns.) Or after tonight you could probably stream it from PBS.org.

The Fainaru brothers are good at what they do, and the book and/or documentary are worth your time independent of the coming Hollywood treatment. But it's the Hollywood story that confronts us this weekend. Hopefully I'll see it some time this weekend, when family and/or church obligations allow, and have some hopefully useful comments on it. But trying to guess or anticipate what happens allows for a comment or two

1) It is Hollywood, folks. There is a documentary on concussions in the NFL, and it's noted above. This will not be a documentary. Some amount of representational storytelling will happen. Based on some commentary I've heard, some of that "representational storytelling" will involve Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears linebacker whose suicide, shooting himself in the chest apparently in order to preserve his brain for examination, marked perhaps the most publicly striking moment in the ongoing crisis before the suicide of Junior Seau. The movie appears to include a scene in which Duerson attempts to prevent Omalu from reporting his findings at a medical conference. This didn't happen. However, Duerson was an early key figure in debunking any connection between football and CTE, even testifying to a senate subcommittee in defense of an NFL committee's denial of disability benefits to former players, a stance which still angers a number of former players affected by that denial. (For now I'm leaving aside the columnist's apparent eagerness to be judge and jury of how affected former players really were or weren't by CTE when committing suicide.) Players like Brent Boyd take no particular pleasure in Duerson's being claimed by the malady whose existence he denied (not unlike a climate change denier being drowned when his home washes away due to rising seas, I suppose). At any rate, while the particular incident between Duerson and Omalu didn't happen, Duerson's bitter denial of these effects is not inaccurate, and any attempt to defend him against being "smeared" by the movie rings hollow.

2). It is Hollywood, folks. While the movie can't get away with too much Hollywooding, it has several aims besides toppling the NFL or sounding the alarm over concussions. It wants to make money. It wants to win awards. Will Smith definitely wants that Oscar. These are basic cautions any moviegoer should exercise when watching a "fact-based" movie. That said, expect pushback from the NFL and organizations allied with it.

Also in the run-up to the film's release, some of its principal charaters are emerging in the media. Omalu himself showed up with an opinion peace in the New York Times with the radical suggestion that kids shouldn't play tackle football, period. Reaction, ranging from panicked to outraged, followed. Dr. Julian Bailes, a doctor who was an early guide to Omalu (and is played by Alec Baldwin in the film), showed up on the ESPN Radio program Mike & Mike in the Morning. Bailes's principal motivation seemed to be to defend football as a sport, particularly football for children and adults. The very same platitudes the NFL always repeats ("football has never been safer" for example) come right out of Bailes's mouth, as well as the extremely deceptive claim that "they knew the risks" in reference to children and youth in football, including his own sons. (To be fair, the Mikes -- Greenberg and Golic -- don't really let up on their questions in the face of his mindless platitudes, doing a reasonably good job of playing the role of concerned parents.) Perhaps the most horrifying thing to comes out of his mouth is the suggestion that high-school players who die as a result of on-field brain injury would probably have died of something else or other anyway. At any rate, his own compromised nature is at least admitted up front when he acknowledges serving as a volunteer adviser to the national Pop Warner football program for kids.

That looks really bad now, in light of a court ruling allowing a lawsuit against Pop Warner football by the family of a youth who was paralyzed as a result of a head-on hit they allege was instructed by his coaches. Paralysis isn't concussion, but the charge that a coach was directing players to hit head-first demonstrates the degree to which no football organization has the ability (or, frankly, willingness) to monitor its coaches and their teaching of proper techniques. That kind of thing is left up to you, the parent of a would-be youth football player, who is expected to know these things (even though they're not always being very forthcoming about those things).

What is striking is the difference between Bailes, who played himself and has two sons who played, and Omalu, who had about as little knowledge of football as it is possible to have when Mike Webster showed up on his examination table. Omalu, who I'm assuming will be portrayed as more saintly than he is in the movie, said what he saw. Bailes, suddenly seeing his sport threatened, begins to distance himself from what he has already seen.

This kind of thing doesn't augur a lot of hope for non-medical professionals who grew up with fierce attachment to football, whether they played or not, and are now faced with the moral quandry of justifying the game that probably holds primary allegiance in their lives (and no, I am not exaggerating; even if I've only been a pastor less than a year I have no illusions about how the church does in comparison. If you've seen one of the movie trailers you've heard the line about how the NFL owns the day of the week the church used to own; the only thing remarkable about the line is its utterly non-controversial nature) in the face of its obvious life-debilitatig damage to a major portion of its players.

How do you react to a condition that you can't see happening, that is (even the NFL expects) likely to tear down the lives of about a third of its players?

At any rate I'll go see the film as soon as I can, and I hope you will too, and be motivated to dig deeper.

Will Smith bids for a statue and hopefully pushes the discussion along in the process.

Standards

While much of the virtual ink spilled in this blog is directed against American football, there are plenty of other physically violent sports out there in the world. Hockey has been implicated in a number of posthumously diagnosed cases of CTE, particularly among some well-known "enforcers" such as Bob Probert, and the overdose death of Derek Boogaard (an active player at the time). International soccer, though not necessarily considered a violent sport, was shocked by the diagnosis of CTE after the death of Bellini, a star of the Brazilian team of the late 1950s and early 60s.  The thoroughly insane sport of Australian football (called "Australian rules football" back when ESPN used to air it in its early days), was drawn into the discussion when preliminary experiments in diagnosing CTE before death pointed to a possible diagnosis for one of its more notorious players.

And then there's rugby. Talk about insane sports.

It shows up on college campuses as a club sport in some cases. I have memories of one of my suitemates, during my freshman year at college, coming back from those club contests looking as if he had been assaulted; bruises everywhere, walking with a pronounced limp, and at least once missing a tooth. Only his maniacal grin suggested he had taken the beating voluntarily.

While it hasn't hit the big time in the US, it is one of the most popular sports in other parts of the world, particularly some of the nations once part of the British Empire. New Zealand recently won its second consecutive Rugby World Cup, and parts of it were broadcast on one of those lower-tier sports networks that show up on some US cable systems, to pretty decent ratings in some quarters. I actually tried to watch a semifinal match, between New Zealand and South Africa, to try and get a grasp on just how much violence to the head was aparent (the game wasn't terribly revealing, as New Zealand was clearly dominant).

But in the British Isles, a death in rugby has rocked youth sports and led to a push for unified standards for concussion diagnosis, nationwide and across sports.

Benjamin Robinson, 14, died in January 2011 after a match in his native Northern Ireland, in which he suffered multiple severe blows to the head due to collisions and ground impact. The failure of officials and coaches (and teammates) to recognize and respond to the young man's increasingly dire condition would likely have gone unnoticed except that his parents refused to let it go. A second inquest revealed that at least three blows, as opposed to one as suggested in the initial report. They began to seek answers, despite lack of police interest and school resistance. Finally, with lawyers involved, a video surfaced showing Benjamin Robinson suffering at least three severe blows, not just the final blow to which the death had been initially attributed.

Because Benjamin's parents, Peter Robinson and Karen Walton, pursued answers about their son's death, and with the support of Scotland's foremost medical expert on sports and brain trauma, Scotland adopted nationwide standards to be used across all sports for determining removal from a game or time required to recover. This is a significant step in any part of the United Kingdom, which has in some ways been much slower than American sports to react to the ongoing brain-trauma issue, partly due to sadly misguided attitudes that rugby, a less "armored" sport than American football, was less prone to head trauma. Unlike in the US, though, Scotland has adopted the aforementioned across-the-board standards, while American sports are regulated, if at all, by individual leagues or conferences or associations. As a result, concussion or head-trauma protocols vary widely.

The application of such standards hasn't prevented problems; earlier this month a rugby player in England died after a head injury suffered in a match, the second female rugby player to die in England in a little over a year. Lily Partridge had suffered two concussions previously, but had stayed out of action the required period of time before returning to action after the second, according to coaches and teammates. This came after a tournament in February, in which a Welsh player was not removed from a match despite two major head blows, and was not even assessed after the second blow.

I am left with two observations:

1. Try as we might, we really aren't capable of doing anything to prevent these head injuries in these violent sports. Even with standards in place, on-field officials and coaches are not capable of seeing every play clearly enough to identify head blows that call for assessment, apparently.

2. Robinson and Walton didn't quietly acquiesce in the initial official report on their son's death. I truly, sadly doubt that American parents have the nerve or perseverance to be so tenacious when their sons are claimed by the games they play. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've seen very little evidence of this so far.

Benjamin Robinson

The occasional voice

It's kind of sweet. People are now sending me links to feed the blog. Just my wife for a while, but now others too.

One link that arrived in such fashion is from the online site of the journal Sojourners, in which the author, pointing towards the release of the movie Concussion this week, lays out why his family does not participate in the NFL. (Now don't be obtuse, folks..."participate" is the term of choice in this blog for any kind of involvement in the NFL, including as a fan who watches games, buys tickets or merchandise, plays fantasy games, etc.) Unfortunately I could only get a free preview, and haven't wanted to spend the bucks to subscribe (I too often find their environmental writing naive at best), I can't quite read it all. It did, however lead me to other articles in that site, older ones not requiring subscription to read, by one Ernesto Tinajero. The first, in 2009, relates his choice to stop watching football; the second, approximately a year later, reasserting the choice and noting some of the events that had occurred over the year since.

I actually noticed some of my own experience in what Tinajero wrote; on those occasions when a football game would be, say, on a TV in a restaurant where I was eating, I would be more jolted than ever before when some particularly violent collision flashed across the screen, even if I wasn't trying to watch (or trying not to watch). I can't say as I'm quite as surprised by this as he is; nonetheless, it's more of a shock to witness than it ever used to be.

In the meantime, another voice appeared recently, with a much quirkier take on the question than I've even attempted; is it at all possible to avoid football altogether? Not just refrain from watching, but have no contact with it at all?

You can catch Matt Crossman's interview with the NPR program Only A Game, in which he describes his futile efforts to avoid the NFL for six weeks, or read his longform story on SB Nation about not only the effort, but the motivation as well. ("Longform" is a key word, but it's worth the read.)

It's kind of sad that Crossman, who doesn't explicitly name any faith motivations for his experiment, nonetheless gets thwarted at least once because his minister uses a football story in his sermon. Or because somebody in his Bible study group hands him a commemorative McDonald's cup for the forthcoming Super Bowl. When he has to wonder "if Christianity is the official religion of football," yeah, it's relevant here.

Living in Charlotte, he's beseiged by the Carolina Panthers' success. Finally, the experiment collapses, well short of its original goal; getting through the Super Bowl without even knowing who makes it.

There is something disturbing about how difficult it was to avoid what I'm calling participation in football. Admittedly Crossman's definition is even stricter than mine; he at least made an effort to pull back from corporations that sponsor the NFL, and I don't have anything like enough time even to research that subject. But still, how does twenty-two people running around on the grass (or a concrete floor, for all practical purposes) hitting each other become so pervasive and unavoidable, even as it becomes more and more apparent that it destroys a large number of those who play it?

It's impossible for it to get to that point without a great deal of desensitization among us, the folks who inhabit the NFL- or NCAA-saturated world without protest. To see harm or trauma or even death happen, not just once but multiple times, without reacting or raising up in some kind of protest, leads each harm to register less and less with us. We get numb. And when we get numb to actual death as a result of the games we watch, we have entered the realm of moral harm.

We experience moral harm when we become numb to injustice, to politicians and wannabe politicians demonizing Muslims for political gain, stirring up the beginnings of Brownshirts, and we don't raise up a protest.

We experience moral harm when young black boys get gunned down for playing with toy guns while rabidly armed white men actually shoot police officers and end up unharmed, and we don't raise up a protest.

And hell yes, we experience moral harm, harm to our own moral capability, when another current or former player finds himself on the middle of the freeway with no idea where he's going, or ends up on an autopsy table with his brain showing the telltale tau markers of CTE, or a high school player dies on the field or in the ambulance or in the hospital after a game, and we don't raise up a protest.

The harm runs pretty deep these days.

If you look at it right, it almost looks like an altar...

Quickie: Culture change doesn't come easily

My schedule keeps conspiring against my ability to blog lately, but I certainly didn't want this one to get overlooked: an NFL player actually self-reported concussion symptoms in the course of a game. And the player was a fairly big name to boot.

The culture of football has demanded, pretty much as long as football has existed, that players play hurt, and more specifically they play hurt without saying anything about it. Back in Teddy Roosevelt's day it was literally better to die than to fess up to being hurt. While I doubt that most modern players truly feel that way, In the course of a game a football player really doesn't care about his future. I'm not trying to be cruel; ask one. The only thing that matters is staying on the field for the next play, and the next, and so on. If something is broken or your bell is rung, hide it. That's the code.

So, when a pretty big-name quarterback came to the sideline and reported feeling concussion-like symptoms on Nov. 29, it was a bit of a jolt. Ben Roethlisberger did exactly that, though, in the Pittsburgh Steelers' game against the Seattle Seahawks. Accordingly, he was put into the NFL's concussion protocol, and ended up missing the rest of the game. The Steelers lost.

Roethlisberger continued in the concussion protocol for part of that following week. (This article has a quick-and-dirty summary of the requirements a player in that protocol must meet in order to return to the field.) He was found not to have a concussion, and returned to action the following game.

There will be troglodytes who will see nothing but Roethlisberger missing the end of that game and blame him for being soft. He's been accused of exaggerating injuries before, so that is a fairly easy leap for such a trog to make. So far, most of the public reaction has been restrained and even somewhat supportive, as in the initial link above. But the troglodytes tend to lurk in comment sections.

Seeing a big-name athlete watch out for his own health is not a thing to be dismissed or taken lightly. Even so, though, it's hard to assume that some high-school kid who gets his head slammed into the ground and suddenly can't remember his name is going to think, "I need to get to the sideline, that's what Ben Roethlisberger did." The culture change has to be built in from the bottom as well, which is presumably the purpose of this site.

Tied into the forthcoming movie Concussion (and quite unafraid to pitch the Will Smith film, as you can see at the bottom), this site, also tied to this educationally oriented site, appears to be aimed at making the avoidance of head trauma part of the early levels of football. How much effect it can have I don't know (young boys aren't always noted for having a lick of good sense, and are often allergic to looking or seeming uncool), but at least somebody's trying, I guess. When paired with news like this out of Florida some weeks back, one might be excused for feeling vaguely hopeful.

For a better view go visit that website.