Friday, October 26, 2007

Manchester City Again

England is just like America.

Or at least, it is in the small way I've chosen to elucidate today.

When not being invaded by terrifying robotic ambassadors of this country's far inferior version of football, England's national sport is visually plagued by the single-minded adherence to far-too-few team color motifs. Tomorrow, my chosen team, Manchester City, "The Blues", will play London's Chelsea, also "The Blues". Out of twenty teams, there are five teams that are officially called "The Blues" (Birmingham, Everton, and Portsmouth are the others), and four "Reds" - Liverpool, Arsenal, Middlesbrough, and "The Red Devils", Manchester United. The last World Cup Final featured another permutation of this peculiar prismatic disaster: Italy's Azzurri vs. France's Les bleus.


My normal sport of choice is of course also plagued by the same, let's call it, colorless uniform color uniformity. Baseball's fascination with red is, well, uniform, and encompasses, quickly, the following teams: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, Houston, St. Louis, Boston, Arizona, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. And as for the NBA.

Have we gained anything, together, by looking through all of those links? I'm not quite sure. But these things can be quite bothersome to watch. (Can you tell that these two are playing for different teams?) And since I'll be watching the Blues-Blues game tape-delayed on Sunday morning at 2 am, I'm worried that I'll just be unable to actually understand what is going on.

I thought I was doing some obscure, barely readable unexpected rooting for Manchester City, until I found this blog by an Italian fan. He has pictures of himself with three of the team's players(!), and much superior production value to "Faster Than a Shark", which boasts a mere two readers who must be notified every time it is updated. And it is nearly certain that one of them is at this very moment high on any number of hallucinogens and is licking a towel somewhere in the forests of Massachusetts.

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Sunday, October 14, 2007

Guest Post by Track Fellarn

I have long been confused by the way that people follow sports. It is certainly possible that a person would care about who won what game (I guess), but why would it then be important for this person to follow the specific play-by-plays of this game? Why watch a game when the next day the paper prints the name of the winner (and often the loser! and the score!)? It's often been suggested to me, though, that the reason I cannot understand the relevance of a specific pas de deux by Peyton Manning is that I also don't care about the outcome. That sounds fair.
Except for one thing. I do care about politics. I like following this current general election campaign, and am very interested to see who will be the next president. Actually, I'm more than interested. I'm emotionally invested. I'm fairly confident that sports blogs aren't supposed to be explicitly political, but this blog is unpopular enough for me to comfortably say that if any of the Republican presidential candidates win this election, I will not emerge from my bedroom until mid-August 2010.
Back on point, though, CNN has a thing it calls the "Political Ticker," where it posts short articles about what's happening in politics. For a while, it was interesting ("Oh, look, Elizabeth Edwards says that John Edwards is at a disadvantage as a white man running for president."). But lately, its minute-by-minute minute coverage is exhaustively stupid. Here are some examples of "newsworthy" headlines from CNN's Ticker:
Eventually, there will be an actual election, and Clinton can tell us then why Giuliani would not be a good president, and those of us from New York can be embarrassed to have ever voted in local elections. But until that point, I don't care at all about which candidates are attacking which within their own party. Much in the same way that I don't care if the Red Sox beat the Yankees. Just tell me which is playing in the World Series. Actually, scratch that. Just tell me who won the World Series.
Actually, you really don't have to.

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