Posts by Jake Pollock
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Speaking of Superbowl XLIII, we never got to hear Hayden's thoughts on the Steelers' tremendous victory.
Also, mounted police charge:
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Sadly, the denizens don't seem to share your enthusiasm for the new PM's choice of dance partners.
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And, if you want to check out riot coverage, do so here.
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I've had a bit to much yuengling to comment at length, but if anyone saw that game and thought it was anything but the epitome of drama in sport, they need their head read. Ho. Ly.
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Keir, how so railroads? I was pointing specifically to underlying logics, such as the absence or presence of time discipline, rather than factors in the development and popularisation of a sport. Nevertheless, the most commonly told story is that baseball was developed in the camps of the American Civil War, away from the pressures of the clock (although the outfield had its dangers should fighting break out, apparently). And, fair cop, the Civil War happened in the industrial era, but nevertheless the logic of baseball reflects, I think, work regimes that were not bound to the clock and the production line. And, um, working from home.
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Anyway, here's the heart warming story behind the Terrible Towels.
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Very true. There's a reason all of Kevin Costner's neighbours thought he was mad for building a baseball park in his corn field.
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Should we let baseball fans rewrite the rules of cricket to conform to their expectations of what a sport should and shouldn't be?
Oh yeah. We did, and it's called Twenty20, and it sucks.
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would the game be any worse?
Would the game be any better? Should we let baseball fans rewrite the rules of cricket to conform to their expectations of what a sport should and shouldn't be?
Football is a sport of the industrial age. There is a strict division of time, space and labour. Although each player has individual athletic ability, the key to success is not individual performance but the ability for everyone to perform their individual task as well as they can so that the whole team acts like a machine, sort of. And they do this over and over again, in different permutations, as many times as it takes to score a touchdown.
The entire sport is founded on a rigid system of specialisation. I watched Generation Kill recently, and it struck me that that same degree of specialisation exists in the modern American military. Each person has a role in their particular context -- only one guy drives the humvee, one guy sits behind him with a particular weapon, another guy sits in the passenger seat with a different kind of weapon. This level of organisation exists throughout the chain of command. A similar mentality pervades American Football.
Rugby also works on this logic, but to a lesser extent. The machine isn't reset all that often, and the space and time in which it operates is less strictly controlled. What that means, of course, is that the whole game has to be orchestrated by a referee in real time, which leads to this sort of thing.
This contrasts with baseball, where the only really specialist players are the pitchers, and there isn't any time discipline. A game can go on for as long as it takes to get a winner. And, baseball is always played in parks, football on fields. Just like in test cricket -- and of course both of these sports have roots beyond the industrial age.
So, the degree of specialisation reflects the underlying logic of the sport, and it doesn't detract from it. What I still haven't quite come to terms with is the extraordinary amount of rules surrounding penalties that have arisen to deal with the fact that the sport attempts to replicate this logic in time and space with fallible human beings.
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Not mine. I got here a few months after they won in 06. And unfortunately I'll be watching the game in a leafy, middle class neighbourhood, rather than in raucous Oakland, centre of the Pittsburgh undergraduate population, so I won't be near any rioting this time around.
There was a letter in the campus newspaper last week admonishing students not to set couches on fire in the event of a victory. They didn't mention flipping cars though.
Plus, what Haydyn and Robert said. I'm still a novice, but I like the pacing so far. As with test cricket, it adds to the drama. And if every time the whistle blew I expected someone standing a yard away to smash into me regardless of who had the ball, I'd be wearing a helmet too.