Category: Sport

Daily Potpourri 7/17/12

  1. Paradigmatic case for discrimination?
  2. Toyota Solution.
  3. Guilty pleasure.
  4. Fastball shreds the Constitution
  5. Seduced and abandoned.

1

Hypothetical: Guy Philanderer from your Church walks into your restaurant with Bimbette The Pole Dancer, his girlfriend, hanging on his arm. Guy’s divorce isn’t final yet, but Guy says Bimbette’s his soulmate, that his wife was a youthful indiscretion, and that he’s checked with God, who’s cool with all this. The kids will be just fine. They’re better off without all the tension in the house.

That’s what he tells everyone about the situation. Guy’s pretty wealthy, by the way, and for some reason Pastor Billy Bob hasn’t yet gotten around to telling Guy he’s persona non grata until he repents.

May you “discriminate” against Guy and Bimbette? Mustn’t you discriminate?

Does that conclusion change if Guy comes in with “Fabio” on his arm, making the same “soulmate” and “God’s cool with this” argument?

Just askin’.

2

From Toyota, the greenest car ever. (HT Mercatornet.com)

(For my credulous friends who breathlessly pass along nonsense, be it noted that the car is not real. The Onion is satire/humor.)

3

My standing advice, linked below, disses television, but if I happen to notice that one’s coming up on ESPN or something, I’m a sucker for strongman competitions. Here’s your chance to grab a little guilty pleasure without touching that remote. (HT The Browser)

4

[O]f late come rumblings from the most august newspaper in the land that certain questions concerning LIBOR-fixing among American bank officials might soon be entertained in a federal courtroom. But isn’t it a fact that the US Department of Justice has its hands full – not to mention its dockets – with cases of alleged performance-doping by star athletes? Just think: all that effort (and expense!) at repeated prosecutions and Roger Clemens remains at large! His fastball might yet shred the constitution and dishonor all the combined sacrifices of our men in uniform in countless heroic wars.

IMHO, that’s all about Kunstler that’s worth reading this week, but here’s the link if you want to judge for yourself.

5

It’s an interesting thought that the health insurance industry – which went into the tank for Obamacare upon the promise of “a requirement to buy coverage backed with a penalty for violators” – now finds itself with no mandate and a nominal tax for those caught going bare, and thus may turn en masse for repeal.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that they’d destroy their seducer now that they’re abandoned.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Tofu Tidbits* 12/9/11

  1. A single point of light.
  2. Science and Faith.
  3. Football and Faith.
  4. Decorating Politics with Slogans.
  5. Hormones and Life Savers.
  6. Civil and mature debate my way, you &#!!%^^!.
  7. Danu
  8. Othello

* Temporarily renamed in honor of the Nativity Fast, about which Mystagogy has some more information.

Continue reading “Tofu Tidbits* 12/9/11” →

Sport is Not Great: How Sports Poison Everything

An op-ed at the New York Times argues that West Point and Annapolis have sacrificed military excellence for success at big-time sports, and have become anachronisms that need to be fixed or abolished:

Yes, we still produce some Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholars. But mediocrity is the norm.

Meanwhile, the academy’s former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself.

George C. Scott, in the opening scene of Patton, tells his troops that when their grandchildren sit on their knee in 50 years and ask “what did you do in the War, Grandpa,” “you won’t have to say I shoveled shit in Louisiana.” Well, in my generation’s war, I emptied bedpans in Peoria, so I try not to pontificate on what makes for a strong military.

But passing over applicants with indicia of future military success in favor of guys with Heisman trophy potential is a serious mistake.

Yeah: fix ’em or close ’em.

Tiger Amadeus Woods: A Lenten Meditation

It started with Jason Peters rewriting William Blake. Then John Willson performed a dental colostomy* on Tiger, with FPR contributor Jeffrey Polet, I and at least a few others taking exception to what we thought was an extremely harsh tone. Now at last Polet has published his own promised thoughts on L’Affaire Tiger.

It was timely for me. I have avoided the details of Tiger’s transgressions, but moments before clicking on a link to Polet’s piece, I stumbled across a reproduction of some of Tiger’s text messages to a porn star mistress, and they were pretty shocking. I won’t link to them. I don’t think there’s a shortage of ways to track down the salacious detail.

I don’t recall who said “to understand all is to forgive all.” A quick Googling suggests that it’s probably a French proverb – proof again that the French are more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (as Jonah Goldberg called them. I can’t help but laugh at many French jokes, as the French in my experience deserve a reputation for haughtiness. There’s a reason why one Wall Street Journal columnist always refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, served in Vietnam.”). But Polet’s analogy between Tiger and a tempestuous genius of an earlier century puts things in an edifying perspective. It helps to understand, and to me “feels right,” as I try to empathize with the temptations of superstardom.

I could meander off into some personal reflections about how easy it is to condemn X immediately after condemning Y’s condemnation of Z, but I won’t.

* “Dental colostomy” is a euphemism for the slang phrase “chewing him a new [body part omitted].” I think I coined it.