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Tuesday, August 13, 2002
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When Did the Hooliganism Move Onto the Field?
In 1997, Alf-Inge Haaland collided with Manchester United's Roy Keane. Keane suffered a season-ending knee injury, but Haaland didn't know that at the time. As Keane was lying on the field, Haaland berated him for feigning an injury. Now Keane has admitted that he deliberately injured Haaland when they faced each other again in 2001.
We'll hold off on any speculation about the errant thought process that led Keane to admit that now for no good reason. Instead, what I'd like to hold forth on is the generally poor quality of officiating in football. The first thing an American raised on the endless replays and analysis of baseball and American football is likely to notice is how often football officials get calls wrong. With only one official on the field and two assistants on the sidelines to watch twenty-two players in a continuously flowing game covering thousands of square yards, this shouldn't be surprising. As I have developed a rooting interest in games, I've tried to think of officiating as weather--it's out of human control, so one just hopes for the best.
But the officiating in this year's World Cup made even that attitude untenable. And beyond the occasional bad call that can change the outcome of a game, I've noticed the more subtle problem of frustration and aggression that grows out of poor officiating, leading to vigilante acts like Keane's. With genuine fouls not being called while "simulations" do result in fouls being called, the incentive for players to behave properly on the field is greatly reduced. Once a game becomes rough, there's no going back, so one is left to simply bear it and hope for a cleaner game next time.
7:24:30 PM 
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Why Can't I Take the Train?
This is a disgrace. Anyone who has ever traveled in Europe much is likely to have noticed how much easier it is to get pretty much everywhere without a car. There is train service to nearly every town, no matter how small. Two years ago, I took a two-week bike trip through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and Denmark. No matter how far out into the countryside we got, there was always a train line a couple of miles away.
Here in New York, the part of the country best served by public transportation, it is still convenient for us to own a car, despite the $500 a month in parking and insurance and this week's $1,200 repair bill. Without the car, we would have been essentially unable to get to last week's Real Madrid - A. S. Roma game. And without the car, visits to my family in Connecticut are a real pain. We can get there by bus, but then we have no way to get from my aunt's house to my mother's house to our favorite inn, all within 10 or 15 miles of each other. Not only can we as a country not manage rail lines that serve any but the largest urban centers, we can't even manage high speed rail serving the major cities in a single megalopolis.
6:41:50 PM
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Whose Provincetown Is It?
When I e-mailed my uncle about Michael Cunningham's Land's End, he responded that he had read it, and that he had also read Peter Manso's Ptown, which he found objectionable. Manso apparently has an axe to grind (which may or may not have to do with homophobia), and he seems to have gotten a number of factual matters wrong, which is a bad combination. Out of curiosity, I checked the customer reviews at Amazon. While hardly scientific, I found them interesting. They were sharply divided, with the people not liking the book being visitors or part-time residents and the people liking the book being full-time residents.
I haven't read the book, and I haven't seen anything that would suggest doing so would be worthwhile. But I think that there might be something in the reaction to it. There was a period when my father, my brother, and I stayed often in Provincetown with my father's then girlfriend and her two daughters. They lived there full time, but had only done so for a year or so at that point. They hated tourists, despite having recently been tourists, or at least visitors, themselves. It seemed to me that they wanted the entrance closed tight right after they got in. That's not so unusual I suppose, if a bit silly. In fact, it reminded me of our effort to buy a cooperative apartment. When you're buying a cooperative, you want the approval process to be as easy as possible for you. But once you're in, you want it to be difficult for others to get in (at least until you want to sell). Maybe Provincetown should go cooperative.
8:16:17 AM
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Am I Memelogging Masturblogging?
I ran across the term memelogging on Advogato, which is defined as:
The process of inventing and promoting a meme while simultaneously identifying yourself as the creator of that meme. It's an ongoing media event, and it's yours.
Although there have been three whole links to masturblogging, I don't know that it really qualifies as a meme or a media event. In any case, Advogato rightly suggests that we might have too many words in the language anyway.
8:09:39 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist.
Last update: 11/2/03; 10:25:41 AM.
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