Thankful for ... suits

 Today is America's day to commit turkeycide, and to fall asleep watching wretched NFL football, and to recognize, as we should on all days, that most of us have it pretty damn good in spite of all the madness in our midst. And so allow the Blob to join in.

I am thankful, today, for my health and my family and my parents, God bless their memory, and a life far too blessed than I deserve. This year in particular, I'm thankful I married the daughter of a great soul named Dr. Jean Arthur Creek, who passed last week at the full and fruitful age of 93, and whose obituary filled half a page in his hometown paper in Bloomington, In. -- as befits a man who was the personal physician for four presidents of Indiana University, and whose insatiably questing mind was matched by an insatiably compassionate heart, and who was a trumpet player and a lover of Mozart and Jefferson and traveling the world, and also of photography and fishing and the outdoors.

Rest well, Jean. I've known few others, nor will I ever, whose life was so full to the top.

Know what else I'm thankful for, on this day?

Lawyers. 

Wait, before you exit laughing ... let me expand on that.

Let me add that the suits I'm thankful for in particular are the suits who kicked some fairly notorious bullies in the teeth this week, and it was about damn time. They were the attorneys who brought suit against a pair of vandals, Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the National Football League, on behalf of the city of St. Louis.

It was Kroenke, remember -- and his accomplice, the NFL -- who decided St. Louis didn't deserve a franchise in their precious league, and stole it at gunpoint or something like it. They did this because the NFL desperately wanted to tap the lucrative Los Angeles market, and was too lazy to do it through expansion. So the league allowed Kroenke to move the Rams to L.A., adding insult to injury by trashing St. Louis on the way out the door.

Well. On Wednesday, St. Louis got a measure of justice for all of that.

Kroenke and the NFL settled the city's lawsuit for $790 million, which is couch cushion money for both but at least an acknowledgment that they did St. Louis dirty. A more equitable settlement would have contained 10 or 11 figures in it, not just nine, but something's better than nothing in these deals.

So thanks to the suits, at least in this case. But be wary of the check bouncing.

After all, remember who you're dealing with.