Today's list for 205 is one of those classic Dumb Guy hypotheticals: who would you want to have relations with throughout history? I went partly from personal lust, partly from societal responsibility (you, yes you, could save the Beatles), and partly from the dream we all dream of -- being the very worst soul in Heaven. Enjoy the blasphemy!
If secrets constitute us as individuals, and secrets are crucial to storytelling, then it must be storytelling itself that expels us from Eden. Storytelling is corrupt and corrupting. - James Wood, writing about the works of Ian McEwan, in the 4-30-09 London Review of BooksSo let me tell you a story.
In my years of following the team, there were two very memorable games. The first came when we played Frankford, who had Blair Thomas (a star RB at Penn State, a first round draft bust with Jets). It was a tight game for a long time, but every time Thomas touched the ball, the difference between his future and everyone else's became more clear, and he eventually dragged his team to the win.On the off chance that you read the blog, aren't on my e-mail list and want to come celebrate me finally becoming, after 40 years and 2 days, A Man... well, email me at dmt shooter at gmail dot com. (Aka, my 40th birthday.)
Inspiration, as always, comes from self-righteous college football coaches who are taking life far too seriously.
I especially like the fact that he got applause when he left. That's what you do when you are in the presence of a man -- you show some respect!
Anyway, your date is Friday, June 5, your place is an Atlantic City casino that has a poker room TBD later, and we will eat manly things, drink manly drinks, and make manly wagers. I'll hit you back late next week with the details.
(Oh, and the final word on this was given by the Shooter Wife, who told me not to spend too much on the hooker. When I shot down the idea of paying for it by asking her what I'd do after the first 14 minutes, her reply was "Tell her about your blog?" I married well.)
When I was in that scorched earth middle ground before becoming a college graduate, it really wasn't a good time. College for me was like a prison work-release program, because I was paying my own way with multiple jobs and escalating debt at a school (Syracuse) that kept raising the tuition rates to the point of scandal (up over 30% in my three years there).
A good chunk of the school are composed of very wealthy kids, as it's kind of the upstate party school for NYC and Long Island swells. I lived alone, didn't date (no time, no money, no car, no hope), and basically gritted my teeth through 33 months and 2 degrees. I'm not in touch with anyone from those days, and I wound up getting a newspaper journalism degree just in time for the Bush The Elder Recession. Probably for the best, given what's happened to newspapers since then.
Don't worry, this is all going somewhere sports-related.
The Shooter Mom goes all out for holidays. Halloweens get elaborate themed decorations. Christmas was always a big deal, even if the year was thin. And when her kids got old enough, she'd ask them what they wanted a couple of months before the event, just long enough so that you more or less forgot about what you asked for, and were thrilled when you got it. She's great at this.
One year during this time frame, she asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Seized with a dull work ethic and no better ideas, I asked for interviewing clothes. Ties, Suits. A briefcase. An iron and ironing board. While hoping, in the back of my heart and not nearly out loud enough, for a guitar, because I was deep enough into music to want to try my hand at it.
Come Christmas morning, I dutifully unwrapped my presents and realized what a colossal mistake I had made, to have drained the fun out of Christmas along with every other day of the year. Everything was exactly what I had asked for, and I still own the briefcase, 20+ years later. And peaking out at the back of the presents, there to possibly save me from the unrelenting decades of Not Fun that were to come, was a big present. A suspiciously large, rectangular but also mildly triangle-shaped box... the guitar! YES!
It was, of course, the ironing board. (The Shooter Brother, for the record, got me a Les Paul the next year.)
Which is more or less how I felt last night as I watched my all-new re-tooled now with actual offensive players Oakland A's look like the same old weak swingers as the past few years, in an Opening Day loss to the Angels and the ever-dominant Joe Saunders. If your fantasy baseball team is hurting for pitching, just start streaming against the A's now, and thank me later.
You got the sensible shoes of Jason Giambi not being able to catch up to anything fast. The briefcase of Matt Holiday looking more or less out of place with the other pieces. The ironing board of Nomar Garciaparra not catching the ball at first base, which is to say, not being able to man a defensive position that his bat couldn't carry five years ago, when he had a pulse. And the nice enough ties of starting pitching of Dallas Braden giving up a laser bomb to Howie Kendrick, who might escape the label of Failed Prospect if he only got to play Oakland enough.
So, um, woo, baseball's back. Yay. Maybe my fantasy teams won't stink, because land a'goshen, it really looks like my real one will. Again. And even if it doesn't, the ownership will pull the chutes in June and send out anyone of worth.
Now, if you don't mind, I've got some laundry to do. And maybe these ties can hold my body weight...
Last night on my commute home, my iPod began to malfunction. It would cut out after a few minutes, and while music would begin again with a mere click, it was annoying, and after a dozen reboots in 25 minutes, I gave up and suffered with the jabbering crosstalk that too many commutes now have. Maybe I could have played with it longer, but since I'm still wearing multiple layers (spring, my ass) since moving back to the East Coast from Northern California 2.5 years ago, that means that I can never be warm again. Seriously, I'm like a little old man here. I'll be moving to a condo in Boca and eating dinner at 3pm within weeks. But anyway, that's not where I'm going with this, so...
The point is that, having gotten used to a level of performance and consistency from my gear, I became spoiled. When the iPod went down, I still had the same magazines, laptop and Blackberry that I carry every day. My commute hadn't become terrible; it just reverted to what it was in December, before the Shooter Wife gifted me with the iPod. And suddenly, what I had been used to all that time was damn near intolerable, and all I could think of was how screwed I was if the iPod had real issues.
We all do this; once you have new and better gear, going back to the old level of performance can just seem soul-crushing. In my 20s, after the first marriage circled the bowl, I wound up moving away from my nice downtown Philly apartment, back to the same crappy part of Fishtown that I had escaped to before. It was what I had to do for economics and work, but man alive, was it soul-crushing. Bad gear is a reversion, and it strikes at every insecurity you might have ever had; progress was an illusion. Failure was your true level of performance. The bad gear is simply a manifestation of that.
Now that I've given you a sunny start to your day, let's lasso this and bring it back to sports.
As a (mostly) Philly sports fan, I live in fear of the return of bad gear. So instead of obsessing over how, say, the Sixers may have years and years to go on a crippling contract to Elton Brand that will cap their ceiling at 45 to 50 wins, I think about how nice it is that Samuel Dalembert could never ever be compared to Shawn Bradley, and how Tony DiLeo has the team playing in a way that could never be confused with The Doug Moe Era.
When other Eagles fans long and pule for the return of a messianic #1 wide receiver (this month, the eternal wanderlust that is Anquan Boldin has given way to the he might be available Braylon Edwards), I'm just hoping that the new offensive line doesn't make me remember Ron Solt.
Now, this might explain a few things (too much, really?): the acceptance of mediocrity, holding on to the memories of players that were entertaining but flawed, the hedging of allegiances and/or passion for the knowledge that, like death, taxes and people jabbering for the entire length of my commute at a volume that even the rejuvenated iPod can't mask, a reversion to a bad level is just a matter of time.
And it is, of course, a matter for willful deception of one's own intellect. The same way that every day is, really.
Just because Tra Thomas is gone does not mean that we're going to go back to turnstile tackles. The fact that the Sixers haven't had a top-level low-post scorer since Malone and Barkley does not mean that they will never have one again, or that Brand is doomed. Eric Chavez might be useful for the A's this year. They might not regret the Rich Harden salary dump in the same way that they regretted the Tim Hudson salary dump. And so on.
We may think we know what will happen, but we really don't. We might even be right more often than we are wrong (yes, I've got a little ego from the fantasy sports performance, thanks for noticing)... but teh wrongness is going to return.
The details are not written, and the details mean everything.
So twice now in the past week, I've been in drafts where there's been a notable high ranked player that has slipped far behind his average draft position. And in both cases, an owner has piped up in the chat window to note this, as if this wasn't, you know, roughly akin to staring at a poker hand that he wasn't in and announcing what he folded. (Especially if you were, you know, bluffing.)
Twenty years ago, when I was playing in my first leagues with guys that were older than me, in a time that was mostly before computers, we had people who did this. It irritated the hell out of the commish, and eventually we passed a league law (the "gag" rule) prohibiting that kind of behavior. It's not like we took a guy's picks away or other punitive measures; we didn't have to, because there was, you know, a degreee of personal shame involved in violating the group dynamic.
Not to get all curmudgeonly on the world, but if you are violating the gag rule routinely or (even worse) on purpose, please learn youreself some manners. I wound up having to ream a guy in the chat window (no names, it's fine now) over this. Winning a fantasy league is difficult enough, even when the league is composed of homers and people that reach on name recognition only, without having that sort of fart in an elevator thing to deal with.
Because winning a league is not about just taking the best players; it's about taking them at the right time. In a typical draft with good competitors (and sadly, like poker, the number of fish seem to be declining over time, and replaced by nothing but fellow sharks), I'm going to have 2-3 options before a pick, and my decision isn't just about who fits my roster bet, but who I think I can get if I pass on them right there.
How you feel about your team is, basically, directly related to whether or not you got the guys you wanted at the time that you wanted them. Get poached enough, and you're going on the fantasy league equivalent of tilt. And if I lose out on a guy due to some loose talk while I'm waiting for my pick, when I don't really have a secondary option set up, I'm going to be on tilt for that pick and bone it. (Nine times out of ten.)
Life is too short to put up with that, really. Moving on...
For the past ten years, the Eagles have employed Tra Thomas to protect Donovan McNabb's blind side. He's done it well, with two All-Pro selections and three Pro Bowls on his resume.
And in perhaps the best testament to his performance, he started 165 out of 166 games. Or that the only time he's really been noticed is (a) when he tried to get his name changed (it didn't work, so he gave up), and (b) when he left.
On the list of things that Eagle Fan will worry about in this off-season, Thomas signing with the Jaguars will be low on the list. After all, he's 34 and not likely to be getting better, the team has an extremely good track record in knowing when to say goodbye, and one has to think that after a decade of making mostly good moves, they know what they are doing in replacing a fixture like him.
But, well, ten years of not worrying about a position is nice, especially given the laundry's history of revolving doors on the offensive line (imagine, if you will, what Randall Cunningham might have done with Tra Thomas and an actual coach, or whether Lawrence Taylor achieves the constant crushing on Ron Jaworski, had they simply had a tackle of Thomas's abilities)...
Well, you can worry, if you like, about the changeover at safety, or whether or not Brian Westbrook is too old for this sort of thing. Me, I'm going to be looking at the line. Hopefully, not for long.
For most of the last three decades, Eagle Fan has had a love affair with safeties. The Dick Vermeil Era had Randy Logan, who played in 159 consecutive games, went to a couple of Pro Bowls, and more or less managed the unique Philadelphia feat of never really getting blamed for much, since that could always be put on the corner. He also had tolerable hands for a d-back (23 career picks), was a sure tackler, and could still hurt a guy or two. And with Herm Edwards, who managed to rarely get beat because he was willing to let a guy catch 15 balls for 150 yards on short outs in front of him every game on the roster, we always had a better place to point fingers.
The Ryan Era cemented the idea that safety was going to be our favorite defensive position, as Wes Hopkins and Andre Waters were basically a heel tag-team come to life.
A brief word on the original Executioner, Wes Hopkins. If you didn't see him as a young player, before his serious injury issues, you missed a lot. Pre-Dawk, he was simply the best I ever saw in the laundry at that position. Imagine the guy you knew who killed people; now, imagine him as the fastest player on the field. Wes's wheels were so good, they used him to return punts, thought about him at corner, and tried to figure out ways to get the ball in his hands. The only problem was that he just seemed more interested in punishing the coverage team then making big yards. For those transition years before Buddy, he was the only reason to watch the team. If you only knew him for the Ryan years, you only knew about 70% of what he was: think pre-death Sean Taylor with a functioning brain. (Oh, and especially large kudos to Wes for managing to seat his wife next to his mistress so that they, too, could throw down during the game, which made the beat writers at the Daily News sick with happiness, back in the day. Moving on.)
Andre Waters (and no, no one in the area ever called him Dirty, such is the magic of the laundry) was death to knees and ankles and eventually himself, as he managed to be a feared hitter despite being more or less of a smurf. In games like the fabled "House of Pain" MNF match against the run and shoot and get concussed Oilers, they were a video game come to life.
And then, just when I was becoming convinced that we'd never see the likes of those two again, the team came up with Brian Dawkins... a man who combined exceptional coverage ability with mind-boggling hits. He was also, really, the first defensive leader that I've ever seen that was the true leader of the unit, which, given the way that the league has changed, is probably something to expect in the future.
Now, there are significantly bigger Brian Dawkins fans out there, even among the people who write on this blog. I'm too old to just adore a guy anymore, no matter how cartoonishly focused and freakishly effective he might be. To me, Dawk is simply the mirror opposite of Donovan McNabb, in that he's the best to ever play the game at his position and in this laundry, but still human, and prone to criticism/mistakes.
And unlike QB, safety is a position where age comes up fast. In recent years, Dawk seemed to pick his spots more, to lead with the helmet as he tried to will his team to victory by any means possible, and to engage in bizarre Wolverine moments on plays where it didn't seem to matter. This was on the field; off of it, he spoke in tongues, performed spasmodic dance routines, screamed at teammates and generally behaved as if his life depended on winning the game. Is there any wonder we all loved him? He was, mentally, what every fan wants every player to be.
The famous flying leap he threw at Plexico Burress, shown above, was at the end of third-down completion for a first, didn't actually make much contact with Plax, and at the time, just seemed silly. Now, of course, it might be the defining image of his tenure.
The rest of the Eagle writing blogosphere is deeply bent over the idea that Dawk isn't going to retire in harness, but to me, it's almost better. I don't want my memories of the man to be clouded with his last days, where he's getting smoked in coverage, receiving media mouth jobs on plays where he gets to the pile late, and getting lauded for his pre-game hype session like that's an in-game contribution. Leave that, please, to Ray Lewis. Our guy has more class than that.
Rather, instead, see him for what he is today: an aging player in a position where age is exposed with cruelty. The Eagles are better off giving time to the Quentins (Demps and Mikell) at this point, and the big money to someone else, given the large number of holes that are on the roster. If you believe in the young linebackers, you're better off locking those guys, rather then paying off the final days of the Dawk Appreciation Tour.
And I write all that with the full knowledge that lightning is going to strike me dead any minute now, because Dawk might be the most beloved defensive player since Jerome Brown. (We like our heroes to be infallible in this town, and you don't get any more mistake-free then dead.)
Meanwhile, Dawk's new team is in severe upheaval, given that Jay Cutler is throwing a snitfit over being shopped in Cassel-Gate, and Brandon Marshall is getting arrested (again). Dawk's going to wind up playing his final days for a mediocre team in a terrible division, for a coach that's younger than he is, and probably watching Eagles games on satellite with a bored Correll Buckhalter. I suspect he's already regretting the decision. Being the new John Lynch is just kinda sad.
Finally, I'd like to say something about the original point of the piece: Eagle Fan has come to expect some things from their safeties. First, that they will last longer than the usual in-and-out member of the secondary. Second, that they will hit like a man fighting for his life. Third, that they will play with emotion. And fourth, that if they fail in coverage, it's probably the corner, linebacker, or line's fault for not knowing the assignment and/or not getting to the QB in time.
It will be highly interesting to see if the same rules apply to the next wave.
I hate what the NFL has done with night football games.
Part of this, I am sure, is the fact that I've never really adapted back to the East Coast time zone in terms of watching games. There is nothing quite as enjoyable as rolling out of bed at 9:30am, giving the roto wires a last check to see if you are boned or not on injuries to your fantasy league players, and getting the games going over a good breakfast. By the time the late game rolls around, you can slug your way through those and still have daylight left to prevent feeling like an utter pig. It's vastly superior to having to race through stuff in the morning, knowing that if you watch both the 1 and 4 games, you won't see the sun again, casino-style, especially after the daylight savings adjustment.
Now, the Sunday night game? That, historically, was the property of The World Wide Lemur, who treated it as some bizarre experiment in Hipster Fanboy Football. Either you get the wildly overenthusiastic crew of Tirico-Maguire-Theismann (I'm pretty sure that I can still give you hives with an impersonation), or the Let's Hear A Hack Writer Work Out His Column stylings of the Kornheiser Three. (Please, Lord, for Thanksgiving... kill Cornhole. It doesn't even have to be painful. I'll be ever so good.)
The MNF game was rare, quarantined, special, tolerable only in its exception. Especially on the West Coast (and, alas, when I was young and not prone to falling asleep in front of the television), it was more than OK to miss. But now that the lords of night have access to flex schedules and fantasy sports makes nearly every damn game meaningful, it's hostage-esque. I want my evenings back.
Or, if not back, at least not so freaking painful.
There's no worse feeling for an NFL fan than a SNF/MNF loss. You get to go to bed with it (good luck with that: my nightmares had readjusted red lines periodically appearing in them), complete with the knowledge that the loss basically hurts extra, since there's less recovery time for your team afterwards. Also, um, that your team is the Philadelphia Eagles, who can't win under the lights now to save their lives, and routinely have their most dispiriting losses in prime time.
Don't believe me? Here's the track record.
2008 - 0-3 and counting
Week 10, SNF: Lose at home to the Giants, 36-31
Week 4, SNF: Lose on the road to the Bears, 24-20
Week 2, MNF: Lose on the road to the Cowboys, 41-37
2007 - No wins, four losses, much cursing
Week 12, SNF: Lose on the road to the Patriots, 31-28
Week 9, SNF: Lose at home to the Cowboys, 38-17
Week 4, SNF: Lose on the road to the Giants, 16-3
Week 2, MNF: Lose at home to the Redskins, 20-12
You have to go back to Week 16, 2006 (a 23-7 win over Dallas in Dallas) for the Birds last win in prime time. Since then, you've had your choice of knee to the groin, gouge to the eyes, or body cavity violation. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, has signified the change from the promising start of the Andy Reid Era to its sad and growing obsolescence as the team's performance under the lights.
Oh, and if you want to start dreading the next one? It's Week 13, when the Eagles are the third Thanksgiving game, at home against the Cardinals. And Week 15, a MNF game against Cleveland at home. They should be favored in both games, given that the Cardinals rarely show up on the road and the Browns are kind of horrible.
But it wouldn't surprise me if they blew both games. After all, the run defense clearly can't show up at night, and Andy clearly can't think at night anymore...
When I was but a wee teenager and searching for a purpose / occupation in life, I gravitated to sports writing. Eventually, I discovered that I wanted to dress better than a homeless man outside of a sports merchandise clearance store (seriously, the profession as a whole is so much about The Free, it's terrifying), and eat something more than Bottom Ramen. There was also that pesky matter of college loans to take care of.
But anyway, before I thought better of it, I wanted to be a sports writer. One of the reasons why was Frank Deford. On a whim, I bought his recent novel, "The Entitled."
The book concerns itself with the inner workings of a fictional Cleveland Indians team where the manager, a longtime minor-league coach who sacrificed family for career, is about to be fired, presumably for not getting the most out of his star outfielder... when the outfielder is a suspect in a rape case. A case in which the manager may have seen the victim.
Deford is able to move the point of view among his various protagonists and make them all believable. He's also able to make his baseball scenes seem real without making them overly complex; it's the kind of book that you can read, then share with a non-fan. It's also fairly intriguing in that none of the characters are without sin, and Deford trusts his audience enough to make the ending less than airtight.
The book's blurbs make it sound like it's "Eight Men Out" or better; it's not. But Deford has a lifetime of good work behind him, which means a little hyperbole is to be expected, and he really can write. It's worth a read.
(Feel free to play the video while you read this. And fire up.)
Something I used to do a lot on this here blog (you can, as Yogi says, look it up) is go off on esoteric rants inspired by things that no self-respecting sports fan would read, or at least admit to.
Eventually, I'll tie it all back to sports in some faltering way that would make a pot-smoking undergrad wince, and causes my religious friends to chuckle sadly in the knowledge that they won't have to put up with me in the better next place.
And now that 90% of you have had your eyes glaze over and look for the scroll bar, let's get into it, shall we?
In a recent piece in the London Review of Books, a writer worked over some philosophical constructs in an effort to explain something small and inconsequential; ergo, why the world exists. (He eventually came to the same conclusion that I do in this post, but since you don't read the London Review of Books, you'll just have to suffer with my mangling of it. Ha ha!)
Accepting the belief in a higher power, and hence, the disqualification of the emotionally unsatisfying Random Chance Accident, you get two motivations.
1) Because it had to (determinism, fate, destiny), and
2) Because someone wanted it (free will)
Now, determinism is a relatively simple argument to make, or at least it was when I took intro philosophy in college some 20 (aii!) years ago.
Ergo, that if you simply know enough about the creator and its thought processes, you can predict everything said creator will do.
Let's reduce this from The World and Its Creator to This Blog and Little Ol' Me for a moment, to make things easier to understand. Now, if you punch in all of my vitals into a computer, you would get that I read learned nonsense, run out of things to say about the NFL on Tuesday morning, feel compelled to fill the bloghole, am too far away from the start of the NBA season to go there, and am waiting for the White Sox and Twins to work out the last playoff spot before writing up MLB playoff picks.
You could predict (did?) that I'd write something like this today, and if you knew my reading materials yesterday, might even have guessed the subject matter. I'm a fairly simple piece of meat, and predicting my performance shouldn't be too difficult, provided, of course, that I don't get wind of what you are doing. That would give me the heebie-jeebies, and I'd probably react with a tangent that made no sense to throw the prediction off the path. 
Tony Kornheiser eats puppies.
Which, of course, you could also predict, in that Tony Kornheiser really does eat puppies.
But let's escape that rabbit hole of Pot Logic for now, and put determinism on the back burner as, once again, Emotionally Unsatisfying.
Back to option 2, free will. The preferred option for all of us, really, in that it makes us all much more interesting pieces of meat, and for deities alike, since a determinist Creator doesn't seem like any kind of fun at parties. (There are, of course, philosophical arguments against the existence of free will, but they are made by people with scraggly beards who make no money and are no fun in the sack, especially the women. So we're sticking with Free Will.)
So the world -- and this blog, and the eventual crux of this post, which is Your Team Fandom -- exists not from something pre-ordained, or even the long-ago child abuse of a parent who indoctrinated you in the ways of That Laundry.
It exists because you chose it, and continue to choose it, even if you are not aware of the choice. (Just *try* to Geddy Lee out of your head now. I dare you.)
And now, to the thrilling climax... why choose, of all things, to make a world, or root for That Laundry?
It's a mess, complicated, never seems like it will pay off with the goods. Even when it does seem to work out, you know it's just going to break your heart later. The fear of losing is much greater than the joy of winning, after all. And the nonstop praying! It's enough to make you stop watching and go read a philosophy book instead. (OK, maybe not.)
And well, that's it. It's art.
Art is something that lives for its own sake, maddening or not. It can't be explained fully, or even usually very well, but simply experienced. Its motivations are inherently private, and yet shared across consciousness, in a way that makes us all a little more aware that We Are Not Alone. Do it long enough, and it becomes a vice, in that it's mostly a diversion in a life filled with things to divert you.
So, final question time... if sports fandom is, just like life, an art... are you taking joy in your creation? Or are you torturing yourself and others with it?
If the answer is yes, signify your joy or misery by making no sign or comment.
(...)
Thy will be done.
Tonight in Philadelphia, the Phillies beat the Pirates in a surprisingly close and low scoring contest, 4-2. Brett Myers went into the eighth inning, Jimmy Rollins had two triples, Shane Victorino drove in 2 runs, and Chad Durbin cleaned up the ninth for his first save of the year. Ian Snell of the Pirates was in trouble all night, but he kept his team, such as it is, in the game, and the Phils' 13th straight shutout went home happy.
Why go into such detail? Because one of the guys that I went with brought his son, who had never been to an MLB game before.
And it got me thinking about my first game, which I thought I had cold. The Phillies beat the Dodgers on my fifth birthday, with Davey Johnson hitting a pinch-hit grand slam in the bottom of the ninth... until I went on Project Scoresheet to try to look up the details of the game, and discovered that the game actually happened on my ninth birthday.
I suppose this is all to be expected, given that it's hard to remember anything too precise about your childhood, but still... four years off. Yikes. You'd think that I'd have written it down or something.
Uh oh... It's sentimental time about the Crapholes We Have Known. Take the click and send me a hanky.
Oh, and here's a link with loads 'o nostalgia for the similarly affected.
Item: The growth in Spanish ad- vertising was five times that of English buys in the first half of 2008.This is where I should make any number of Colbert-esque pander-jokes, wrap the post up in a big pinata or sombrero, and call it a day. But I've got more to do here.
Today's list is here, and I'll throw a fresh one on the fire for the site loyalists... you sit down to fill your bloghole and can't stay awake. That's not good.
And for the record, not that anyone should care, but from the other people I've met in the sports blogosphere, there's basically three groups. The first are ambitious college kids who are trying to rule the world with their blogging. The second are guys in their late 20s trying to make a buck or get a full-paying gig. And the last are people with good jobs who just do this on the side for shits and giggles. All of us, eventually, realize the same thing... that if you want long-term, sustainable traffic, you either need hundreds of commenters who effectively give the site a chance to make its own sauce, or you need a lot of good poon, so that people with site blocking software consider you a go-to site.
Anyway... that's a longer tangent from the point of the post than usual. I must be getting old.
I used to take the Shooter Eldest to fifteen to twenty baseball games a year, when she was aged 2 to 4. People always used to congratulate me on how lucky it was that my kid was a baseball fan, or ask how I managed to cultivate a taste for such a slow game in a little girl... and then I'd have to tell them that, no, it wasn't luck or cultivation, because the Shooter Eldest isn't really that much of a fan. She just likes to go places with me.
"But how do you keep her from being bored?"
Well, we'd go to the children's play area, bring coloring books, buy junk food... hey, um, actually? Sometimes, she gets bored. Life is like that. It's not even child abuse.
The other night, I was keeping a spare eye on the Tigers-Indians game while dealing with laundry, where Cleveland jumped all over the minor-league board Dontrelle Willis (he's Barry Zito without, um, control or stuff). With the score 8-0 in the third and the mother of all rain storms bearing down on Motown, Indians' pitcher Cliff Lee just started throwing belt-high strikes to try to get the game to official status quickly. He gave up a couple of runs, but moved the game along fast.
The Tribe hitters then came up, and while they were also hurrying things along, they were still swinging the bat to hit the ball, and when reaching base, not getting picked off first intentionally. From outside the game, it seemed like the wrong play, but from the point of view of a player whose outs could be used against you in a court of arbitration? Maybe not. (Footnote: the game was stopped in the fifth, but eventually resumed, with a Tribe win.)
Having the ability to be OK with an unpleasant situation (say, heat, boredom, rain, or making outs intentionally), or more importantly, the ability to see beyond your immediate physical or emotional needs is, I think, damned useful. It allows you to develop the concentration to complete a goal. I was bored plenty when I was a kid; it allowed me to develop, moment by agonizing moment, the tiny amount of patience that I have today. More importantly, it let me develop an imagination and intellectual curiosity to see connections where others don't, to find things to think about when there is nothing else to do, and to blog every day and ride trains for 17 hours a week without going into a killing spree. (So far. I'm not making any promises for if and when train delays start pushing this to 20 hours a week and beyond. New Jersey Transit and PATH, you are officially On Notice.)
Entertainment, especially when it's passive and suits you, is brain candy; fun, a rush, easy to sell and, at the end of the day, essentially composed of air and nothingness, with no lasting import or impact. (You can toss in, of course, the video clips you find here, or even this little piece of timewaste if it's not sparking any thoughts on your part.) But you shouldn't just live on candy, just as you should be able to watch something that takes some time without being overwhelmed by feelings of boredom.
Because, well, the people in my life who feel compelled to tell me how bored they are? They are, by and large, extraordinarily boring people. It takes two.
Your list is here, and every year, the NBA seems to drag this out a little more... and that goes for the games, too.
This is a whole 'nother post in itself, but has anyone else noticed how the Lords of Sport seem to just have bloat in all live games? Baseball takes 3.5+ hours now. The Celtics' games, what with the incessant fouling and flopping, are coming up on three hours. For basketball, which used to take two. Football is borderline intolerable in the stadium. It all adds up to...
A deep expectation that no one -- no one -- is paying full attention to the games.
I'm on a laptop when it's on; I write my blog posts and catch up on my day job. I bet you're watching more SportsCenter than live games, because the live games just take forever. I can't imagine how this is working for younger folks, and I can't blame them. It's killing the golden goose slowly, from overfeeding it until it's obese and dying of heart failure.
And there is nothing -- certainly not the people at the stadiums, who pay more and more and might as well get quantity if not quality, and the folks at home who are just multi-tasking their way through the bloat -- that's going to stop it. Seriously, are you going to stop watching games because they take too long, or because there is too long of a gap between games?
Two really regrettable crowd moments from my week, shared with the Flatus Yahu blog that goes more for the Workin' Blue part of the world. Go take a good long pull. You'll feel better, even if you make other people feel queasy...
I tried to brighten the day over at the Fortress of Pillows Philly blog by telling my True Life Sportswriter Poon Story. The connection to the area was that the poon in question were those fine and fit fillies from Villanova. Those guys over there are taking the Flyers being down 0-2 pretty badly.
Full details, a bigger image, and an additional booty shot, all at the click. (Like you weren't going to go look?)
