I’m a big sports fan. And that includes college sports. I think most American sports fans could list a number of things they love about college sports: the NCAA Tournament’s Cinderella stories, the marching bands at football games, the fierce rivalries, and countless others. But if we look at the big-time college sports, football and men’s basketball, there can be no doubt that these sports are big business. Millions of dollars are at stake based on the performance of young men, most of whom are 18-22 years old. And the rules say that these men cannot be paid (except for tuition, a dorm room, etc.). The problem is, the two preceding sentences are at odds with each other. The most talented of these men are undoubtedly worth millions of dollars–they often turn pro and then receive gigantic salaries. And yet they cannot officially be paid. Obviously that is going to lead to a situation where many of them receive money (or other compensation) through unofficial channels, some shadier than others. Maybe it’s an easy job, maybe it’s an occasional lunch, maybe it’s a few $20s or $100s. Maybe, if you play at Miami, it’s a prostitute. The point is that it’s absurd to think that these sorts of things aren’t going to happen just because the NCAA doesn’t want them to.
But this isn’t a diatribe against sleazy boosters or rule-bending coaches or corrupt governing bodies. This is about the absurdity of the very notion of amateurism and its roots in the snootiness of 19th century England. The lazy landed gentry with their public school educations (in England, “public school” means “school where the really rich people go”) were playing cricket or various forms of football and didn’t want to compete against the working-class rabble. The people who had actual jobs couldn’t afford to take the time off work needed to compete at the highest level, so sports were, at first, exclusively for “amateurs” (i.e. the elites). In some cases, not only was getting paid to play outlawed, but in the case of rowing, anyone who was a “mechanic, artisan, or labourer” was not allowed to compete. Heaven forbid the factory workers with their big muscles should compete against the upper class. However, in the late 19th century sports such as soccer and rugby started to attract spectators (i.e. money). This led to a desire for better players, and in 1885 soccer’s governing body in England, the Football Association, officially allowed professionalism. Rugby didn’t handle things so well, leading to the 1895 split that still exists today: rugby league (which allowed professionalism) and rugby union (which, shockingly, didn’t officially become professional until 1995). Continue reading ‘the concept of amateurism and its role in American college sports’
As I write this, Space Shuttle Atlantis sits on its launch pad awaiting its takeoff. Its mission will be the last of the 135 in the program’s history. The United States has spent billions and billions of dollars on the Space Shuttle, and what do we have to show for it? Not much. Along with its fellow boondoggle, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle program has been a colossal waste of money.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I want my spaceflight tax dollars going toward kick-ass stuff, the sort of stuff that would make a seven-year-old boy’s jaw drop. Going to the moon? That was cool. Going to Mars? That would be even better. A giant telescope that gives us amazing pictures of deep space? Pretty damn impressive. But most of the Space Shuttle’s and ISS’s science experiments did little to live up to the gigantic price tag of each mission. Head over to NASA’s website and take a look for yourself. There’s some great stuff there. One of the first ones I saw listed was about “Skeletal Development in Embryonic Quail.” Okay, I understand that people’s bones weaken in space and that animal studies about bones in microgravity could be useful, but do we really need to spend the money to send quail eggs into space? Continue reading ‘the space shuttle program and the ISS’
Now, let’s get one thing straight right of the bat. Jonathan Bornstein is an amazingly talented soccer player. In a nation of 310 million, he’s one of the best 30 or 40 players. And he’s probably a perfectly nice guy and decent human being.
But he still sucks. He’s a left back, but he can’t defend, which is a pretty important skill to have if you’re a left back. He was terrible in the World Cup last year, and he was terrible today against Mexico in the Gold Cup. I realize we’re thin at left back, but is that really the best we can do? When Steve Cherundolo went down with an injury, not only did we have to bring Bornstein on, we had to switch Lichaj over to the right. Lichaj has looked pretty good on the left, but he didn’t seem comfortable on the left. So we got worse at two positions. In a perfect world we’d have had Timmy Chandler come on at right back, but he wasn’t called up, presumably because we wanted to keep his German club team happy, as he would’ve had no offseason had he played in the Gold Cup. (Some thought that it might have to do with him wanting to play for Germany, but that’s not happening, according to interviews with him and his agent.)
Again, I realize our lack of depth and experience along the back, but couldn’t we have brought on Spector? Or Ream, even if it meant shuffling some players around, which we did anyway? As soon as Bornstein came on, it’s like the entire Internet said, “Oh, shit!” (Well, the American parts of it, anyway. The Mexican parts we’re saying, “Hell yes! Look at this crappy half-Mexican defender the gringos just brought on!”) Everybody knows he sucks, except for Bob Bradley. Sometimes Bradley gets attached to players and those guys pan out. (Exhibit A: coach’s son Michael Bradley, who is an absolute beast in the midfield.) Other times, it just doesn’t—for example, Ricardo Clark get inexplicable minutes in WC 2010. It’s the same thing with Bornstein. He just sucks, and needs to be booted from the national team.
This year’s Mississippi River flood is the worst in decades, with record flood stages set in many places throughout the system. There are two main ways to deal with the threat of river flooding:
1) Build huge levees to contain the water.
2) Create outlets where water can be released from the river.
There are a few other possible solutions, but those are the two major ones. Unfortunately, each has its drawbacks. Levees force a river through a narrower path; the only place for the water to go is up, causing the river to get higher, so that the levees must be built taller, and so on. Along the Mississippi, the building of levees has historically been combined with a practice of shutting off almost all of the natural distributaries of the river. It doesn’t take an expert hydrologist to figure out that closing off places where water flows out means more water downriver.
Using outlets of some sort—diversions into other rivers, spillways, or simply flooding large areas of low-lying land—can damage the property or livelihood of whoever owns the land that is deliberately flooded. In some cases—for example, the Bonnet Carré Spillway—only a small amount of land is used. The Bonnet Carré is roughly six miles long and two miles wide; it empties into Lake Pontchartrain. Though the spillway is used for recreation purposes when not in use for flood control, there are no land owners to appease. Thus, it is fairly low-risk (from a political standpoint) to open it up. Sending dirty river water into the lake does annoy the environmentalists and the fishermen, but all things considered it’s not going to piss anyone off too much. Continue reading ‘saying that the morganza shouldn’t have been opened’
As you may have heard, President Barack Obama just decided to release his birth certificate. It looks like this:
Hopefully that finally settles the years of idiocy coming from the “birther” movement, a group of buffoons who have steadfastly insisted that Obama is somehow not a citizen, with most of them suggesting he was born somewhere outside of the United States. Part of this skepticism came from the fact that the previously released version of Obama’s birth certificate was this one:
That, of course, is obviously a printout of an electronic version. It did not satisfy the birthers, even though this was the standard document released when people needed a copy of their birth certificates. Also, there were birth announcements published in the local Hawaii papers, so any conspiracy would have to be as old as Obama himself.
The birther movement had its ebbs and flows. It was an issue during the presidential campaign, even though the McCain camp didn’t choose to make an issue of it. But somehow it gained steam to the point where huge numbers of Republican and conservative voters either thought Obama wasn’t born in the US or were unsure. In 2010, a lieutenant colonel in the US military refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan out of his conviction that Obama was not eligible to be president and thus was not legally entitled to act as Commander-in-Chief. And most recently, possible presidential candidate Donald Trump has been stirring the birther pot. Continue reading ‘the birther movement’
It’s April. That means spring, baseball, and the deadline for federal taxes. Usually, it’s April 15th, but this year, thanks to some quirks of the calendar, the deadline is the 18th. The local news channels always seem to have a reporter on location at a post office staying open for the convenience of the procrastinators.
Many people, however, are eager to get their taxes done long before the deadline. Why? Because they’re getting a refund. People get so excited when they get a refund. It’s as if this just happened:
But a tax refund isn’t some magic money out of nowhere. It’s money that you earned, then paid to the government. As you’ve probably realized when you’ve looked at your paycheck, the government withholds money from every paycheck you make. Then you fill out a bunch of forms (1040, etc.) and you either get a certain amount back or have to send the government more money. Continue reading ‘people who celebrate tax refunds’
There’s a lot of stuff on the internet. Apparently Google CEO (soon-to-be ex-CEO) Eric Schmidt once said 5 million terabytes. I have no idea how old that estimate is. And really, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the number is, it’s too big for any of us to really comprehend. The bottom line is that the internet is a very, very, very big place. And much of the information on it is fascinating, entertaining, informative, or just plain time-suckingly captivating.
Now, how do we find the good stuff on the internet? By and large, we rely (in some form or another) upon other people to point us in the direction of stuff worth looking at. A friend posts a link on twitter or Facebook. A user posts a video response to a youtube video. Writers (everyone from big-name newspaper columnists to lowly bloggers) mention blogs or articles. Even Google is basically just an algorithm spitting out results based on what people are linking to.
The great thing about the internet is that just about any intelligent creative output a human being can create ends up there in some form or another. Music, movies, essays, stories, whatever—almost all of it is out there somewhere online, free or not, legal or not. The bad thing about the internet is that most people are stupid. So they point you to crap like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, which has blown up twitter and youtube and everything else for the past week or so. Continue reading ‘when crap goes viral’
If you follow sports you’ve probably heard that the NFL owners and players are arguing with each other. Each side wants a bigger share of the billions of dollars in revenue the league generates. The owners want more money; the players want more information about the teams’ finances; and to put it in clichéd terms, it’s billionaires fighting millionaires. Do they really think it’s a good idea to complain about their share of a gigantic financial pie when unemployment has been above 9% for the past two years? Apparently, they do. Now, people aren’t going to care too much if the season starts on schedule. If this debacle is out of the way by July, no big deal. But if this gets close to the start of the season, if it affects any games or comes very close to doing so, the NFL is playing with fire.
Right now the league dominates the American sports scene. I admit I’m a little bit biased, living in the football-mad South and Saints-crazed New Orleans, but the NFL is clearly the biggest of the Big Four North American sports leagues. The league is doing incredibly well on TV, and even in the recent economic downturn the vast majority of NFL teams routinely sell out their stadia for every game. It would be incredibly stupid for the teams and players to risk a nightmare along the lines of the 1994-95 MLB strike. That ruined baseball for years; it only made a decent comeback after the long-ball era and home run chases of the late 90s and early 2000s, an era that we now know was tainted by steroid use. I’m sure the teams and players of MLB must have cost themselves a ton of money due to the game’s decreased popularity. Why should the NFL take that risk? It’s in a great position right now. That doesn’t mean it’ll automatically always be the biggest league in the US, but a strike could certainly have damaging short and long term effects. What if a league such as the UFL makes a push for expansion and increased popularity during a lockout or strike, then tries to stick around? What if people decide they’d rather just watch college football, knowing that teams can’t threaten to relocate and there are no strikes or lockouts? Continue reading ‘the nfl labor dispute’
Most of y’all probably got a bunch of shots as little kids. And let’s face it, nobody likes shots. They hurt. But I’m awful glad that I never got polio or measles or smallpox. And if the chicken pox vaccine had been widespread when I was a kid, it would’ve been awful nice to miss out on that terrible week in fifth grade where I was itchy as hell and miserable.
So while vaccination has had hugely beneficial effects for society, in recent years a number of ill-informed, misguided fools have decided that vaccines are bad. For a while people were pissed off about thimerosal, a mercury-containing compound used in some vaccines. They suggested that thimerosal caused autism. So the CDC asked vaccine makers to get rid of it, and they did, even though no studies ever showed a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, one of the world’s leading experts on vaccines, Dr. Paul Offit, even suggested that this policy shook parents’ (and even doctors’) “faith in the vaccine infrastructure.” He says that “about 10 percent of hospitals suspended use of the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns,” leading to the death of a 3-month-old born to a woman infected with hepatitis B. Furthermore, the idea that thimerosal and mercury were linked led to many bogus claims of an autism cure through chelation. According to the article, about 10,000 autistic children a year receive this pointless treatment, and in one case, this led to the death of a 5-year-old. Continue reading ‘the anti-vaccine movement’
What’s the quickest way to piss off a million people? Claiming that Dallas is a better place to live than New Orleans. Sean Payton just found this out the hard way when he announced that he was moving his family to the Vaquero Club, an ultra-exclusive, ultra-expensive golf course community in Westlake, a suburb of Dallas. Reportedly, the house once belonged to Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, who used to play for the Texas Rangers. And as you might expect for a guy who supposedly makes about $8 million a year, it’s a really, really nice house.
As time has passed, more information has come out about how this situation is going to work. First, there were reports of a door-to-door 90-minute commute by private plane, which sounded a bit unlikely. Instead, according to an article in today’s Times-Picayune, Payton will live full-time in the New Orleans area during the season, with his family flying in for Saints home games; he also expects to move from Mandeville somewhere closer to Saints headquarters in Metairie.
Most rational Saints fans and New Orleanians acknowledge and understand Payton’s desire to do what he feels is best for his family. But just about everyone in the area, on at least some level, is emotionally appalled at Payton’s decision. You live in Dallas for a couple years, then you live here for five years, become more-or-less deified after winning a Super Bowl, then you decide Dallas is a nicer place to raise a family than here? New Orleans has had a long rivalry/inferiority complex with regards to Dallas and Houston and Atlanta. Everybody holds those cities up as crown jewels of the South, with their downtown corporate headquarter skyscrapers and their vast, sprawling suburbs filled with cookie-cutter houses and strictly regulated signage in commercial areas. But we in New Orleans steadfastly reject those supposed paragons of commerce and industry and wealth. We think it’s a good idea to take a mid-winter Tuesday off work, make enormous papier-mâché tractor-towed floats, throw silly trinkets from said floats, fight over said trinkets, and drink alcohol and eat king cake while doing these things. Clearly our way of life is different. Continue reading ‘that sean payton is moving his family to dallas’