Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Is the World Cup over yet?
Monday, July 5th, 2010
I know; it still drags on for a few more days. What little interest I had evaporated when the U.S. team lost to Ghana. I watched about 15 minutes of that match, an experience that only confirmed my dislike of watching soccer in general and the World Cup in particular
What I hated about watching this World Cup
- Soccer.
- Vuvuzelas. Not only were they obnoxious, the noise was constant; if there were crowd reactions to the play on the field, they could rarely be heard over the cacophony.
- Diego Maradona. What a doofus.
- Officiating. What a joke.
- Overexposure. It’s not enough that the Disney/ABC/ESPN empire have shown so many games, they’ve had to have talking heads chatter endlessly about them as well.
Why I think soccer is a lousy spectator sport
I know that ESPN and millions of soccer moms have done all they can to make us want to watch soccer, but they have failed. Yes, I’ll watch my grandson play, but I’ll watch him play Go Fish too. The appeal is the kids, not the game; the experience does not translate into a desire to watch grown men who are not my grandson. Soccer is mostly just boring to watch – scoring is rare, teams are often content to play to a tie, and the game consists mostly of watching people running up and down a very large field chasing and kicking a ball. Leaving aside auto racing (which may not be a sport at all), I find at least four sports much more interesting to watch:
- Football (not futbol or soccer or whatever the rest of the world wants to call FIFA’s game), consists of discrete plays, each of which nearly always matters. Most plays don’t yield a score, but they move the team with the ball incrementally toward – or away from – a scoring opportunity. Within soccer’s vaunted flow, there is little measurable progress as the ball flies back and forth. It’s only when the ball finally turns up in the vicinity of a goal that the threat of a score raises its ugly head.
- Basketball, of course, lacks football’s incremental progress, but makes up for it with speed and the fact that a score from the opposite end is never more than a pass and a shot away.
- Baseball is nothing like soccer, of course, but every pitch holds the potential for an opponent’s score. And there’s always time to go to the bathroom or get a beer from the fridge without missing anything.
- Tennis offers both shot-making and an ebb and flow that is many-layered – sets, games, and points, always points.
Things I dislike about soccer in general
- Fans. American fans of other sports – especially youth baseball parents – can be pretty unruly. But the international soccer fans’ record for hooliganism, brawling, rioting, stampeding, and killing people is unmatched by anything in American sport.
- Pratfalls. It’s not hard to find an NBA player who can be knocked flat on his back, arms flailing, by the slightest brush of an opponent’s forearm. But nothing can match the flops of professional soccer players. The sight of an obviously strong, well-conditioned, and downright manly soccer player dissolving into paroxysms of agony at the touch (or near miss) of finger goes beyond laughable to pathetic and, well, downright sissified.
- Overtime. Sorry, “extra time”; is just silly. Why would I believe that the referee is any better at keeping track of time than he is at spotting goals?
- Nil. American sports announcers seem to believe that soccer is immune to the slang they apply to other sports. In every sport but soccer, a team that has not recorded any points (or runs) has scored zip, zero, nothing, nada, squat, a bagel, or a goose egg; they have been blanked, shut out, silenced, or held scoreless. Anything but “nil”. [While I’m at it, why do Grand Slam tennis tournaments in Australia, France, and the U.S. take two weeks while Wimbledon takes a “fortnight”? Sports announcers are so fond of phony erudition.]
At least this foolishness only happens every four years. ESPN will continue to promote soccer, with off-year tournaments, English soccer leagues, and America’s own irrelevant MLS, but it should be less intrusive. Until 2014 of course.
Tags: FIFA, officiating, scores, scoring, slang, soccer, spectator sports, Sports, vuvuzelas, world cup
Posted in Culture, Sports | 1 Comment »
Unlike Solomon, Supreme Court divides the living baby
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
The First Amendment, the first of the ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution known collectively as the Bill of Rights, is short:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
On Monday, the Supreme Court cut the living – if nearly comatose – First Amendment in half. In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez the court announced its decision that you can have freedom of assembly or free exercise of religion, but not both. Briefly stated, the Supreme Court ruled that the Christian Legal Society at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco cannot bar from leadership any student – Muslim, atheist, Wiccan – on the campus. If the Christian students at Hastings want to peaceably assemble, they must give up the free exercise of their religion.
The fascism of the left has grown suddenly more powerful.
You can read the legal society’s summary of the case here. Some useful commentaries can be found at Human Events, Beliefnet, and First Things/On the Square.
Tags: fascism, First Amendment, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, Supreme Court
Posted in Christianity, Culture | No Comments »
Off to college – is your kid prepared?
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
Most parents of recent high school grads who are now preparing for freshman year at some distant college or university are around 40-60 years old. That is, they are a generation or more removed from what their college experience was (or what they would have expected it to be had they gone). And I suspect that a fair number of these parents don’t really understand how radically the experience has changed on residential campuses.
While I may have more to say in the future about the moral and intellectual quagmire of the post-modern academy, this post captures the spirit of contemporary college life:
The bacchanalia of the contemporary American college experience can be resisted, by young people who are strong enough and determined enough to oppose a personal code to the riot all around them. But lots of the young are not that tough. They’re weak and silly and susceptible—they’re young and uneducated, in other words—and they just want to do what everyone else is doing. In its way, that makes them just like the administrators of those colleges: weak and silly and susceptible.
What’s surprising – and terribly disappointing – about college in the 21st Century is the stifling sameness of schools that have become ashamed of who they were and where they came from:
The identity of American universities reaches deep into their psyches—where all of them want to be Berkeley and Madison, and all of them are ashamed of being elsewhere.
Valparaiso University has a new diversity program, of which the school is proud—oh, so proud—for it makes the Lutheran Valparaiso just like every other school. A friend recently took her high-school-aged daughter to a college presentation in which the representative from Georgetown never mentioned that the school is Catholic. The University of North Dakota is ashamed of its gender-segregated dorms. Everybody at the University of Texas in Austin will tell you, shamefacedly, that even though Austin is in Texas, it’s different. And everybody at the University of Texas in El Paso will tell you that they’re really just like the folks in Austin—different from other Texans. Their school is really like the universities in California or New York, you know. No difference. No difference at all.
Is your quasi-adult child equipped to survive intact in this chaotic world? I hope so, because if he or she is leaving this fall, it’s probably too late to begin preparations.
Posted in Academia, Culture | No Comments »
ESPN: Entertainment and Soccer Programming Network
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
The Lords of ESPN have apparently decided they don’t need many viewers this month. After regular showings of games from some British soccer league, they have decided that World Cup soccer is just what American sports fans are pining for this summer. Or maybe they’re not so sure – they’ve been inundating their viewers with World Cup hype for several months now, complete with tie-ins to the movie Invictus. Disney/ABC/ESPN is a very politically correct empire, and, as far as sports are concerned, you can’t get much more PC than soccer – or Invictus, for that matter. I suppose there is something strangely admirable about putting cultural engineering ahead of mere dollars.
The heavy-handed effort to get someone in America to care about soccer in general and the World Cup in particular does seem to be paying off: According to the Onion, America’s soccer fan is getting worked up enough to annoy his family and co-workers. Who would have thought that there would come a day when ESPN’s prime time fare would consist of soccer and the National Spelling Bee? Oh, for the days of Australian rules football and international table tennis.
Posted in Culture, Sports | No Comments »
Vocabulary lesson: Clinch vs. win
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Bob Knight once famously said that if he ever needed a brain transplant, he would choose a sports writer’s brain because it wouldn’t be used much. Sports writers continue to give evidence of the wisdom of Knight’s choice. An article on the USA Today web site reminded me of the inability of many sports writers to distinguish between the words “clinch” and “win”. Writer Kevin Allen gave the following muddled assessment of Philadelphia Flyers center Mike Richards’ performance in their series-ending win over Montreal:
Richards had a goal, two assists and was literally a force from Philadelphia’s first goal to its last in the Flyers’ 4-2 series-clinching win against the Montreal Canadiens.
I don’t mean to pick on Allen; he is just another in a long line of writers who don’t understand that “clinch” and “win” are not synonymous. So herewith a little vocabulary lesson:
“Win” means it’s over. Done. The game/series/season is finished. Before divisional play, for example, baseball teams played 154 games and the team in each league that had recorded the most victories at the end of the season had won the league pennant. Done. No more regular season games. On to the World Series. The Flyers won their playoff series against Montreal, 4 games to 2. Over. No more games in the series. When the Orlando Magic defeated the Atlanta Hawks for the fourth straight time in their best-of-7 series, they won the series 4-0. Finished. No need to play 3 more games.
“Clinch” means it’s not over yet, but the outcome is certain. For example, in 1985, the Chicago Bears won the NFC Central Division championship and shuffled off to win Super Bowl XX. But long before they won the division at the conclusion of the 16-game season, they clinched it. In week 11, they defeated the Cowboys 44-0 to run their record to 11-0. That same week, the Lions beat the Vikings to go 6-5. If Chicago went 0-5 in its last 5 games and Detroit won out, both teams would end the regular season with identical records of 11-5. But even in that worst-case scenario, Chicago would own the tie-breaker by finishing 7-1 against division opponents against Detroit’s 5-3 record. So at the end of week 11, the season was not over; the Bears still had to play 5 more games. But they could not possibly lose the division – they had clinched it with 5 weeks to go.
So here’s a little rule to help sports writers remember: A fixed-length series can be clinched before it is won, but the remaining games will still be played. A best-of series can never be clinched because the series ends when it is won.
Why does this matter?
When words that aren’t synonymous are made to be synonymous, a shade of meaning is lost. In this case, the words properly used clearly convey whether or not there are games remaining to be played. Here’s a simple (and more important) test for selecting a dictionary (print or online): If “infer” is given as a synonym for “imply” (or vice versa), the editors encourage such degradation of the language; go elsewhere.
Posted in Culture, Sports | 3 Comments »
"A blizzard of lies" from Al Gore
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Al Gore has a huge financial interest in the myth that human activity causes global warming. Perpetrating the fraud of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has made him even wealthier than did his family’s tobacco business. And he’s prepared to defend this lie with the same zeal with which he and the tobacco companies defended the lie that cigarette-smoking was not a serious health hazard.
Gore has came out of hiding with an op-ed piece in the New York Times. If the spin makes you dizzy and the fantasy world he inhabits reminds you of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, you might regain your footing with a dose of reality from Investor’s Business Daily:
If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore’s op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
Perhaps he’s trying to protect his investments as he knows them, for he is heavily involved in enterprises that deal with carbon offsets and green technology. If the case for climate change is shown to be demonstrably false, a lot of his green evaporates like moisture from the ocean.
Read the entire IBD piece here.
Posted in Culture, Politics | No Comments »
Must Watch TV: "Hide the Decline"
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Some interesting videos discussing the fabrication of “global warming” data and efforts to stifle opponents. The videos describe what happens when scientists becomes prostitutes to political objectives.
Al Gore’s “inconvenient falsehoods”
Learn more at Climate Depot.
Emails reveal efforts to promote “global warming”
fiction and punish dissidents
The corrupt peer review process
behind “global warming”
Posted in Culture, science | No Comments »