SpeedyHat Makes An Entrance
17 June 10
The Beard has invited me to participate in this blog. I’m not really a writer. And I don’t really read. But hell, why not. I figure the only requirements for blogging are that you (1) have an inflated sense of your own self-worth and (2) don’t mind looking stupid on a fairly regular basis.
So here I am. Hopefully, I’ll prove a good foil for Mr. Authorbeard. If nothing else, my blog posts will be much shorter and more frequent, though they might lack a certain flare characteristic of the Beard. (yes that was a dig)
Welcome me.
[I just noticed that there are way too many categories in this blog. I'm using porn ... well because I like porn. My apologies to future browsers. ]
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Speedyhat you magnificent bastard. Wait a second . . . I mean welcome. And I say that not because you ordered me to but because I’m a nice guy.
And enough with the apologizing already. I’ll ridicule you into better form, never you mind. After all, you willingly moved . . . well, where you moved. I’m not revealing your whereabouts here. But too many categories? Nonsense. There aren’t enough. This blog, it touches on all sorts of things like a blind man with OCD, and the internet can only hope to sort of keep up.
But on to cases. I’ve been thinking of a coupla things I’d like to talk to you about here within these confines, and I’m going to list a coupla categories here. That said, I think we should post each new discussion thread under “Everybody’s Wrong” and make announcements on the main page, even though they’ll probably post there. I don’t want you to have to be tarred with the suspiciously sticky brush of my goings-on here.
Anyway, two things, one older and one I just thought of today. Tell me what you think:
1) I’ve been watching and enjoying the bejebus out of this world cup thingy you mighta heard something about. Made me think, as int’l sports competitions often do, about both the arbitrariness of which sports teams one supports (everyone changes eventually, so do we support the uniforms? That said, our body always replaces cells, so what is it that’s us? Probably nothing, but then I’m also probably wrong about that) and the easy reversion to national stereotyping that these things occasion. I can see it two ways: either it’s stupid to let the nonsense of international politics and insidiousness of patriotism and nationalism intrude on what should, theoretically at least, be something fairly pure. That’s the lure of sports for me, is that it’s this endlessly unpredictable set of actions taking place in a preestablished (albeit arbitrary, but so what?) set of guidelines. But that’s probably unrealistic. So, on the other hand, maybe it’s a good way to vent these things, give them a little breathing room, instead of doing it with tanks and such. Of course, since governments can’t resist getting involved and international sports competitions have always been politicized that way, there’s no reason to expect it to hold true that this just gives vent to it. There’s something as brilliant as it is, it seems, silly in the endless array of European soccer championships. You get to measure all these players and teams according to all sorts of arrangements: by nationality, by professional club status (I need to start watching that; the clubs, after all, are assembled by choice and have to prove themselves in a marketplace against others assembled thusly), by region, etc. I guess I still haven’t yet justified getting back into sports–and, recently, becoming nearly consumed by them on occasion–even though the more relevant question is the value judgment (is it a good or bad thing to be into sports? On what terms?) and I’ve answered that one (it’s fine within some limits; it’s just one utterly subjective choice for entertainment that others may or may not share, with no objective justification one way or another, though it’s fun to piss off Europeans by pointing out that any NFL player could destroy entire rugby teams and elite basketball players are at least as athletic and creative as the soccer pansies).
–sub-question. Er, subject. Anyway, another thing: what’s with all the flopping? On the one hand, I hate it. On the other, I this Slate article from 2006 that I’m too lazy to look up and link to made a good point: it creates a disincentive for thuggishness and helps counterbalance it, which is particularly needful since soccer has the largest playing field of all the sports but only one referee, so he’s bound to miss a lot of stuff.
2) I was thinking America’s competitive advantage might ultimately have nothing to do with any specific industry or skill, but that it’s endlessly adaptable: that the only thing that could be said, plausibly, to define “American culture” is that there’s no such thing. That is, that it’s even less fixed than “culture” is anyway, and adapting, evolving and basically being constantly fragmented works very much to our advantage. And that that’s under attack from all ends of the political spectrum, so it threatens to go extinct, making America less interesting and also, of course, less wealthy and free. But then, you support this idea of a national culture, don’t you, you Dobbsian you.
Anyway, holla back.