Anyone disagree?

Clearly, the locked-out NFL officials - union members - are better at their jobs than the scab referees who are trying to call the games. And failing.

Update (9/19): Everyone knows they suck:

Two weeks into the regular season, with the N.F.L.’s lockout of its officials going strong, replacement officials have awarded a team an extra timeout in a close game, ruled multiple incomplete passes as fumbles, missed an array of pass-interference and unnecessary-roughness calls, and in one game took six minutes to review a play that they subsequently determined was not reviewable. One referee was removed from the crew of a New Orleans Saints game after publicly proclaiming himself a Saints fan.

I'd like to see stupid personal fouls be reviewable so officials could catch the instigators instead of just the retaliators.

What they show us

Lazing on the sofa, idly watching a third rate college football bowl game that I don't care a whit about and never heard of before - the BBVA Compass Bowl. After a Pitt kick-off return, as ESPN went to commercial, I noticed the long shot of the Birmingham skyline had an area of soft focus, obscuring lettering on the parapets of two office buildings.

Here's what ESPN was hiding on behalf of their sponsor:

Competitors. As expected.

Moral of the story: Don't outsource your bullshit detection. Know when the content you see and hear is advertising.

College bowl games are and have always been about brand-building. This one? Same reason Toronto Dominion Bank bought naming rights to the Boston Garden - to fit in with the locals. Both have also disguised their nation of origin by using their initials. Toronto might not have been so bad, but Dominion, well, na ga happen. Can you imagine Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Birmingham!? Every deputy sheriff would be asking for their papers.

In fact, nearly all TV is captured by its sponsorship. Media is a product, and it carefully shows us just what its sponsors want us to see.

Stopped by godless New Englanders

Ayn Rand wouldn't have helped

This 2008 ESPN video has been coming 'round on the git-tar again:



I saw this on Facebook.  Actually, I saw a similar vidlet on something called Godvine, edited to hide its origin.  Google helped me find this version, which at least is clear about its origin.  I'd embed something from ESPN itself, but all it has is this print story.

I can see why Godvine would want to claim the story, even though none of the fine sportswomen mention God, at least on air.  It is a heartwarming story of virtue and altruism, just the sort of values that Jesus honored.  Those who aspire to godliness should want to set a social norm of generosity and helpfulness toward their fellow humans.

The radical capitalists don't live this way.  They don't put their character before their profits.  Wall Street defends its profits as deserved, even as it denies that deserving matters.  The very accrual of wealth is self-justifying to the moral midgets of the plutocratic right wing.

They'd look at the young women who helped their opponent to their own detriment as willing losers.  They'd scoff at their sacrifice, at altruism in any sense.  They'd deny even the possibility of altruism and assert that Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace must have derived value from their act, even though they lost the chance to reach the playoffs because of it.  Of course, the selfish, Rand-inspired capitalists would also sneer at anyone so naive as to put sportsmanship above profit.  Those softball players need a good capitalist re-education camp to learn the value of having no values other than mercenary ones.

This contrast between wealth and Christianity is a tension among conservatives.  They've tried to spackle the fault line with the prosperity gospel, a totally ahistorical and patently laughable attempt to claim the divine right of wealth.  If those people are going to heaven, it's hard to see the meaning of Jesus' ministry to the poor and powerless.

In Congress and state legislatures around America, wealth is attacking anyone who is weaker.  The social consensus that this bleak greed is ugly and wrong seems to have died in our age of selfishness and bullshit.  But there may come a reckoning for the wealthy class warriors, when at last people understand that Republicans will take food from the disabled so that their kleptocrat corporate cronies can sneak a hundred more Havana cigars across the Gulf of Mexico for their smoking parties.

Dump button

Watched two TV shows today of types that I often avoid - the Celtics vs. the Heat and the Grammys.  Both have made extensive use of the dump button.  Yep, those audio gaps are censorship.

The NBA broadcast nixed the word bullshit (my favorite!) but only with mixed success.  That Boston crowd, what a bunch of scamps!  Personally, I think people need to chant "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" much more often than then do.  NBA officiating should be a constant source of outrage, though far from the most important.

Mainly, we should chant "bullshit" whenever a Republican opens his mouth.  This is what I mean when I say that truth is more important than civility.

Rappers on TV have a hard time getting out their lines.  How prominent does n----- have to be to get Eminem dumped?  It came through once that my busted old ears could parse.  "Kiss my ass crack" elicited no dead air at all.  Whoo-hoo!  Edgy!

Random regress

For the most part, TV technology has gotten better and better.  Resolution is better.  Watching sports on DVR is better than live if you're o.k. with deferred gratification.  You can fast forward past all the frippery.

But basketball broadcasts never replay the previous play - the one you want to see.  They replay a previous play.  Since football broadcasts don't do this, it must be a consensus directorial decision.

Let me tell you, it's bullshit.  Show me the damn play, even if it exposes the complete caprice of foul and walk calls in high-level hoops.  (Yeah, finally there's an exception - proving the rule, and the refs totally missed the UConn player kicking the ball out of bounds.)

Reality, that's what I want, not bullshit swept under the rug.  Just like politics, only if you know what's real and true can you possibly make the world better.

Or watch wrestling and roller derby.

Slap on the ...

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.

Redemption means more than a quarter back

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

A better answer to the NFL

Why do Democrats cave so easily?

When the NFL objected to Russ Feingold's use of a few seconds of NFL video in his campaign ad, he should have politely responded, "That's fair use, never mind the adhesion contract you're attempting to enforce without ever gaining consent to it."

If nothing else, standing up for himself would bring free publicity, and that ain't bad. But it also sustains a principle of law and the public sphere that's under siege from private interests who want us all to pay more for things we already have a right to.

Product and propaganda

The single unifying principle of the Fox media empire is that they're selling product. Watching the NFL...

• Michael Vick was in Atlanta and then (memory hole) he came to Vickadelphia. Yay! Redemption from "whatever problems off the field." And respect. You have to respect his talent (which is true).
• The announcers constantly hype one thing or another. The action can never speak for itself. Like Sean Hannity or Megyn Kelly, they must give it meaning - the meaning that Fox needs for the action to have. Viewers are expected not to notice how often the announcers miss what's plainly in front of all of us, and most viewers are all too happy to accommodate.
  
• Injured Denver Broncos receiver Kenny McKinley "passed away." We can't have suicide intruding upon the circus of our modern imperium.
• Even when obviously selling, media recognizes this about itself. Audi's ad tells us that we've been propagandized - "I've been told." Then it in turn and by definition tells us its own propaganda.

In fact, selling is not at all restricted to Fox. I stopped watching CNN because of the constant product placements. But Fox is relentless in the expression of its singular point of view.

I am thankful that my father taught me on many weekend afternoons that TV constantly purveys bullshit. He did this by mocking both ads and sports announcers. I only hope I've passed this on to my daughter.

American families everywhere need this lesson.

Fox asks - innocently

Is the President avoiding CHURCH for political reasons?

Fox just teased that bullshit during the NFL game between Philadelphia and Green Bay. They know how to get their message through to the credulous idiots who are the centroid of American politics.

Fox is a propaganda outlet and deserves exactly zero credibility.

Get a grip

The IOC is investigating Canada's gold-medal-winning women's hockey team for daring to have beer and cigars on the ice after they beat the U.S.

Grow up, get a grip, stop being such priggish puritans. Try to enjoy life.

The Canadian women earned their celebration. I didn't want them to win, but they did. Let them enjoy their party.

Update (3/1): Here's a send-up.

Underdogs

I grew up rooting for the underdog. This was part of my dad's teachings many a Sunday afternoon: If you don't have a strong prior loyalty, hope for egalitarianism. This, I thought, was a basic American value. Anyone can get ahead here. Pedigree is not destiny, not in America.

I didn't have a strong loyalty in Super Bowl XLIV (last holdout of Roman numerals!). Unlike much of the rest of the country, I don't despise Peyton Manning, and the Colts' departure in the dead of night from Baltimore hadn't left any of my nerves inflamed after all these years. But the Saints had been the Ain'ts for so long that, when the whistle blew, I took their side.

For this, I am derided as insufficiently capitalistic:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

All I can say to that: Goddamned Tory courtier to power. Root for the Yankees all the time? I don't think so.

(h/t Alicublog)

Queen and Carrie

Maybe there's hope yet for our great and challenging experiment in democracy. Or maybe my third glass of cabernet is exposing my usually suppressed naive optimism...

Queen Latifah, by the way, can sing "God Bless America" for me any time she wants to. She is a woman of immense talent, and she has made it big without being an anorexic, silicone hottie.

Free mock-it

Click image for full Mark Streeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

God is great

Tonight, I heard again the commonplace expression, "God is great." In Arabic, it would be "Allahu akbar."

I didn't think it was a marker of terrorism. I didn't mistake it for anything but a culture-specific assertion of faith, an attempt to bring religion into the public sphere.

I heard it - in English - from Tim Tebow after Florida smacked down Florida State. It was a Christian statement of faith - one of many he makes in the opportunity of his celebrity, including a Bible verse on his eye black.

Of course, of course, Islamic terrorists use this expression. The cause of this effect is that they're Islamic, not that they're terrorists.

Maj. Nidal Hasan may well have been a terrorist. Or possibly he just went postal because he was a frustrated failure who couldn't stand his deployment orders. Nonetheless, the fact that he reportedly shouted "Allahu akbar" is not proof of anything other than his religion.

How you know the recession is still going strong

Low-production-value local ads are running on Monday Night Football. Roni Deutch. Standard def!? Bob's Furniture. Even major college NCAA football runs cheap and cheesy ads.

Newspapers aren't the only medium with business model problems.

Swish

Strictly for enjoyment, go and see the complete photo. It's a brilliant realization of form, composition, and tone.

Click image for full photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images, published in the New York Times. Used here under Fair Use.

Someone somewhere might be having fun

Michael Phelps inhaled. So what! Why do we think it's our place to censure victimless fun? Why didn't Prohibition wring that particular kind of tut-tutting out of our political system?

Marijuana is a goofiness-enhancing drug, not a performance-enhancing drug. Ask anyone who's ever been stoned, and you may get a grin from the memory, but no one will tell you how razor-sharp their concentration and coordination became. Well, no one who's sane...

It has long puzzled me why the Abrahamic religions are so devoted to stamping out most sexual pleasure. Sure, they'll tell you it's god's will, but I'm looking for a historical and sociological explanation, not one that requires me to accept the faith of the "explainer". If there was ever a time when people were screwing so hard that they starved, I haven't heard about it, and you'd think they at least would have left enough offspring to tell their story in oral culture (heh).

It's not as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam etched in stone their scriptural opposition to sexual expression at the same time, in the style of "Life of Brian". Maybe it's the ascetic tradition - those guys each went eremetic out into the Sinai, the Dead Sea, or Arabia, going commando under their itchy robes, and they could have mistaken the suppression of libido from grime, dehydration, and isolation as necessary for the inspiration they believed they had achieved.

More likely, it's all just an overreaction against the cult of sexuality in ancient Egyptian polytheism. Those guys built monuments to their own phalluses and celebrated masturbation among other practices. Then the current abstemiousness would be the price of Exodus. Call it Pharaoh's revenge! But even Wikipedia is missing this, so maybe it's just science channel titillation, not real history.

Esthetic of football

Tuned in late to Pittsburgh vs. San Diego. From birth, I've been trained to root for the underdog, and I like LT despite his irate slanders against my Patriots. (OK, Bill Belichick is probably an asshole, but he's about 40 IQ points ahead of the average NFL idiot coach, and after this brilliant, difficult season, I'd put him in charge of any underperforming organization. He knows how to build doable assignments.)

But the Steelers don't have Bill Cowher in charge any more, with the whiny gestures only someone with his shovel jaw could get away with, and I like Mike Tomlin's impassive focus. That last drive for the third touchdown was so grittily beautiful that I may have root for Pittsburgh.

On the other hand, I really enjoy watching Darren Sproles run.

---

Can you believe the Chevy ads on this game? All Chevy has is macho bullshit. Ford appears to have all the innovative features. Howie Long would really prefer a heated steering wheel if he still lived here in Massachusetts, where he grew up. Boy's gittin' above his raisin'.