A weather forecaster...really?

In America, we don’t have reactions, we have OVERreactions. Look at the rise of sports gambling. What was kind of an underground, kind of shady, thing with maybe mob connections has burst out into the open with gambling companies actively advertising and promoting their products during sporting events. It’s gotten so bad that in many instances, players are threatened if they don’t produce the right statistics for a bettor to win a parlay. 

A podcast I listen to (Hang Up and Listen) recently explored the intersection of legalized gambling and stalking. Professional athletes, and to a lesser extent, college athletes are being stalked and in some instances, their family is threatened. I thought sports were supposed to be a diversion, not an addiction. 

The hosts bounced around a bit and there were a lot of interesting facts about security costs, ideas about banning parlay bets on college athletes, having at least some kind of regulation to prevent people from becoming addicted to gambling and losing everything. There were some sad stories about that. But there was one weird one: the most common person stalked was, you guessed it, the local weather forecaster. The hypothesis is that they are a localized celebrity who has an “intimate” relationship with the viewer by coming into their home. 

There really isn’t some pithy point on this weblog, but just an example of overreacting and taking things too far. Stalking is just plain wrong. Taking gambling from a relatively harmless vice to an addiction is also wrong. And so is not taking the appropriate level of concern about how we react to things.