"What's on besides the Super Bowl?"

"'Sex and the City' marathon... 'Toddlers and Tiaras' marathon... 'Bewitched' marathon... 'Worst Cooks in America' marathon... 'Jerseylicious' marathon..."

"Is it harder for women to be sports fans?"



(Bonus question: Is it harder for women to speak without sounding like everything is a question?)

"Edmonton's Gold Medal Hockey Pee-O-Meter."

Things found in the sidebar of a Canadian website while looking for other things.

What I was looking for was that quote about poutine.

Eh. The whole quote isn't even there. It's here:

It was them criticizing me as a person, and that was something that frankly pissed me off. I’ve heard worse in bathrooms about me.... If I had the chance to sit down with them over a poutine, I think we'd all be, like, lovely people together.

The warm spell wrecked the snow for skiing...

... but it's cold again and...



... we got skates for Christmas!

How to get people to watch women's sports: "1. More singing.... 2. No more uniforms.... 3. More dating intrigue."

Joel Achenbach is using the hoary old tactic of trying to get a rise out of the feminists.

1. More singing. When U-Conn tips off against FSU with the all-time record on the line, we know that U-Conn is going to clobber the overmatched Seminoles. But what if the teams were also required to conduct a singing competition at halftime and, say, in the closing seconds? And they don't know if they'll have to do a hip-hop number or some country-and-western? Nothing but suspense.

2. No more uniforms. I am not suggesting nudity! I am suggesting that, rather than the players wearing identical outfits, they get to wear whatever they want, ideally clothes that they have personally made. And not even with real fabric, but with items purchased at, say, a hardware store! And this would be rated by judges. A player could have a rough night at the free throw line, making only three of ten shots, but she could still come out with extra points for having fashioned her outfit out of a heavy industrial tarp.

3. More dating intrigue. Break-ups, hook-ups, emotional anguish, betrayal, reconciliation. Friendships damaged and repaired. Gossip. Melodrama! Less emphasis on teamwork, more emphasis on the mating competition. If you can't steal the ball, maybe you can steal a boyfriend. Nothin' but viewers, my friends.

"All I knew was that I had to cross the line."

A 16-year-old runner collapses, then crawls to the finish line. "It took over 20 seconds for her to crawl two yards."

I was touched by this story. (There's also an angle about the coach having Lou Gehrig's disease, and her team won the state championship only because she finished.) But I wonder if officials should allow a kid who's collapsed to keep going.

[A]n assistant coach... said that if [Holland] Reynolds had appeared to be in immediate danger, he would not have let her continue. “I would have picked her up and carried her straight to the ambulance,” he said. “But she was able to make eye contact with me. Her body was tired, but she was mentally all there.”

Is that medically right? If a kid collapses playing sports but makes eye contact, she's not in immediate danger?

Check the video. The breakdown begins at 19:30. Should this be celebrated in the national press, or should we worry that encouraging kids to this point risks death or serious injury?

Go ahead!

Jump!



Via Metafilter, where I also found out (via email from Jaltcoh) about this amazing website where you can search for phrases in movie and TV scripts. So, for example, it found "Go ahead! Jump!" — or things quite close to that — in 27 phrases from 25 movies, including "Diva" ("Go ahead, jump."), "Back to the Future Part II" ("Go ahead, kid. Jump."), and "Mean Streets" ("Go ahead. Jump out the fuckin' window.")

Oh, I know what I'm going to search for. That line I've heard is in every movie. "2987 phrases from 2252 movies and series..." LOL. Hundreds of movies have it more than once.

Do you play Disc Golf?

We did. At this place. I'm a bit ashamed to say the tall grass swallowed my disc. Gone! But it was fun while it lasted. We enjoyed the characters out there — one duo toting a 6-pack of beer and smoking cigarettes but throwing great shots. Meade said, "I think this is kind of a 'Big Lebowski' sport."

"Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX."

Wrote Judge Stefan R. Underhill of the United States District Court in Bridgeport:

“Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”...

Underhill’s decision was a victory for the five women’s volleyball players who, along with their coach, sued Quinnipiac in 2009 after the university announced it was cutting their team and adding competitive cheerleading....

This is a complicated issue. Penn & Teller took it up in the first episode of the new season of "Bullshit!" I thought they woefully underplayed the Title IX legal issues, which they mainly cheaply disparaged by showing a feminist in an unattractive light and accusing her of wanting to force young women into her stereotype of what a woman should be, as this preview shows:



ADDED: The question shouldn't be what does "sport" mean in a general sense, but how it should be defined with respect to the pursuit of gender equality in education. As for the Quinnipiac case, the judge has to deal with the existing statute, regulations, and case law.

"... concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming..."

"... flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea in a word I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously...."

We got [l]ucky and went to the theater last night. Waiting for the show to begin, we ate popsicles on the patio, overlooking the woods...



... and Meade saved me from a tick.

Later, the next morning, we reminisced and danced The Net. You know the new dance craze, The Net? You dance as if you are entangled in a net.

Paul was right!

"If Paul gets it wrong tomorrow, nothing is going to happen to him, to Paul. Paul has proven his mettle so far and there is nothing bad waiting for him round the corner if he gets it wrong. It could happen to anyone. Even an octopus can get it wrong."

Trekking poles.

Ever use trekking poles? We got some like this.

United States versus Slovenia.

The controversy.

IN THE COMMENTS: Joan said:

It's kind of pathetic that the refs manufactured a before-the-goal foul that no one else saw or can even describe, in spite the multiple cameras pointed at the field and the varied POVs the videos can show.

And you wonder why Americans don't like soccer? The refs wanted us to lose but had to settle for the tie.

Yeah, f•ck soccer.

The sunset, a few minutes ago.

Seen from Picnic Point. It was really pretty, complete with Corgi. See the Corgi?



See?



Just a stranger's dogs. Not ours. We're dogless and get our dog-love where we can find it. A Corgi tonight. Perhaps poodles tomorrow.

It was quite beautiful. It was the first evening I saw fireflies. Fireflies, a runner in the dark, and...



... from over the lake, lights and crowd-squeals from a semi-final game of the 35th Annual Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association Softball State Championships.

Yes, a mosquito bit me. But only one. There's nothing closer to perfection.

"The NYT is totally on this important urban trend story."

The Catio. That's from The Corner, but it made me wonder what's going on at Stuff White People Like these days. SWPL used to be all over stories like this. Now, it doesn't even manage a post a month. And yet the NYT still comes up with those style articles that were once mocked so skillfully there under the heading "White People in the News."

Here's one from April 2009 about people doing yoga with their dogs. Like the new "catio" article, it had a cutesy, pet-related coined word: Doga. The best part of these old "News" posts, was the list at the end of "Stuff Mentioned in the Article"

#53 Dogs
#15 Yoga
#26 Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!)
Portland, Oregon (Book)
#11 Asian Girls
#92 Book Deals
#101 Being Offended

Each item links to an old post that added an item to the master list of stuff white people like (or refers to the SWPL book). I guess we could do that ourselves for the catio article, but I can't help but feel that SWPL has been the victim of its own success. It can't be bothered, even when powerfully baited. I can't be bothered with it either. Plus, I can't put up with actually reading an article about city folk who encase their tiny balconies in wire fencing so the cat won't jump over the railing. If it were sickening hipsteresque, it might be fun, but that's just pathetic to put yourself in a cat cage.

The newest SWPL piece, from a couple weeks ago, is on the timely topic of the World Cup, which I've noticed the NYT is featuring right at the top of its front webpage these days. I thought Americans didn't care, but SWPL was never about white people or white Americans generally. It's about the subcategory of folk who read the NYT. Anyway:

[B]efore you start planning out long watching sessions with white people you should be aware of exactly why white people get so excited about the World Cup. Though you may be waiting on baited breath for your favorite sport on a global scale, white people like the World Cup because it allows them to pretend they are European for a few weeks....

By the way, the expression is "waiting with" — not "on" — "bated" — not "baited" — "breath," and if this guy knows so much about what white people like, he ought to know we like proper spelling, proper use of prepositions, and knowledge of idiomatic expressions. I do anyway.

Geoffrey Taylor, in his little poem Cruel, Clever Cat, 1933, used the confusion over the word to good comic effect:

Sally, having swallowed cheese
Directs down holes the scented breeze
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

Cats! They're heartless killers. Of mice and, now, an unobscured view from the balcony.

"Peter Kinloch, 28... appeared 'elated, cheery and bubbly' as he posed for photographs on the summit" of Mount Everest....

"... but lost his sight and stumbled and slipped on the descent. Progress became painfully slow. Three sherpas administered drugs and oxygen over a 12 hour period attempted to coax him down the mountain but finally had to abandon him at an altitude of 8,600 metres as the weather closed in."

3 Instapundit posts...

... repeated here for your commenting pleasure:

8 PARADOXES OF CREATIVITY.

Posted at 10:29 am by Ann Althouse

WHY DO FEMINISTS HATE FEMALE FLAG FOOTBALL?

Posted at 10:03 am by Ann Althouse

IS ORGANIC FOOD BETTER? Wild birds say “no.”

Posted at 9:25 am by Ann Althouse

Extra credit for comments that combine all 3 topics.

What schools belong in the Big 10?

Wisconsin lawprof Walter Dickey says: "There is a strong feeling of Midwestern values and culture that is a part of the conference." Would that apply to Notre Dame, Nebraska, Missouri, Pittsburgh, Texas, Rutgers and Syracuse — schools rumored to be in the running?

I love the Midwestern chauvinism. Reminds me of Bob Dylan:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that the land that I live in
Has God on its side

Was the Wall Street Journal trying to make Elena Kagan look gay?

"A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said today its cover art was not intended as innuendo about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's sexual orientation after the paper's front-page use of an image of Kagan playing softball provoked a mixture of irritation and amusement from gay and lesbian advocates."

Ha ha. This takes me back to 2005, when John Roberts was nominated and I wrote that the New York Times used photographs (and other material) to try to create the impression that John Roberts is gay:

Just look at the series of photographs they chose: young John in plaid pants, young John with his boys' school pals, young John in a wrestling suit with his fellow wrestlers, John with footballers, and -- the final pic -- John smiling in an all-male wedding photograph. The article also says Roberts married his wife when both were in their forties and that that their children were adopted.

There was a huge discussion on the internet at the time, much of it focused on the question whether plaid pants suggest gayness.

Whatever it means for a man, here's Gawker laying out "The Case that Kagan Is a Lesbian":

The haircut...
She's never been married...
She's opposed to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"...
She played softball...
She wears plaid: Okay, since we're digging out the circumstantial evidence, there is a picture of Kagan from 1977 where she is wearing a plaid, flannel shirt. Sorry, but, like softball, flannel=lesbian.
The mayor of Gaytown has endorsed her...
She's never denied the rumor...
Obama digs lesbian judges...
The gay establishment is suspiciously quiet...
CBS News reported it...

So, do newspapers use photographs and other signals to create the impression that a public figure is gay? I certainly think so. I think it matters mainly because of the way it creates the impression that the newspaper is not journalistically...  straight.

"Allergy friendly"...

... hockey game.

Buzz Bissinger tries to write about Tiger Woods.

The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.

But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence — one sentence:

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.

Diagram that. The subject and verb are: story and has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.

Then there's this insight into emptiness:

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.

Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.

... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! — pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.

At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....

I'll spare you the spoiler.

But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.

What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive. A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.

It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....

The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.

Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.

Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.

Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade upward?

... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.

Swirling, eh?  Is it swirling upward or downward?

... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.

Well, I don't know who you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.