You asked! Okay, really, you didn’t ask. But you asked!
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The Tiger Woods thing is ridiculous. Nobody else seems willing to say why it’s ridiculous, though, so I will: because the man is a @#$%&@! golfer. There, I said it.
Jay Mariotti says “the public deserves to hear exactly what happened” on the grounds that “if Woods is going to market his image so aggressively and relentlessly, part of the deal is addressing a negative issue when it surfaces.”
Yeah, so… that’s not how it works, Jay. The public doesn’t “deserve” anything from a celebrity in a situation like this, except to be spared from having to hear about it everywhere they go, as though it’s something that matters to them. The public deserves to be told the truth: that this is all meaningless. If Tiger “coming clean” is going to make or break Bubba’s decision on whether to buy an Altima or a Regal, that’s between Bubba and the voices in his head. If anybody “deserves” anything in that exchange, it’s probably Buick, and… I don’t give a damn about Buick.
The man is an excellent golfer. Splendid. Some people may actually believe that his seven-iron is a source of white hot excitement. Terrific. Now leave the rest of us alone so we can read more about Charlie Weis, who is the third-most important person in my life right now.
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It’s a good thing I’m around, otherwise Canadian pop-punk bands from the ’90s would go largely unremembered.
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Here’s my suggestion for how to keep college football from being so stupid. Please note that I am well aware of many of the numerous logistical problems with this. I simply think they can all be overcome.
Institute something similar to the Bracket Busters that they use for men’s basketball. Instead of having two teams sign a home-and-home contract to play each other in back to back years, teams would sign home-and-home with ESPN or whatever, to play an unspecified opponent. The games would occur on one or two weekends at about the three-quarters point of the season, and the matchups would be announced three or so weeks earlier, based roughly on lining teams up with fairly equivalent BCS ratings profiles.
So, for example.o o This past weekend there was a mostly meaningless Cincinnati-Illinois game. What if that game had been scheduled three weeks earlier, and instead of Illinois, it was Iowa? What if Boise State and TCU could have played in the regular season? Just as a couple of examples?
Yes, there are obvious flaws. You’d wind up with something wretched like a Syracuse – Akron game in the middle of the season or something. But those games happen anyway.
Yes, it would give fans not a lot of time to figure out how to travel to a place which might be a long way away. But this would only happen once every two years. And it’s not like this is much different from what happens with half of the bowl games.
You could add some wrinkles to the whole thing if you wanted, to prevent, say, an Alabama-Texas game in the middle of the season when you’d want to save that for the BCS championship. But maybe you could have had an Alabama-Cincinnati game at some point. And maybe by creating more situations where teams in power conferences play each other, then there wouldn’t be as much guessing and confusion over whether the SEC is really down and the Pac-10 is really up and so forth.
I am happy to go pitch this to ESPN, the NCAA, the BCS, whomever. We don’t even need to call it the Huckelberry Challenge.
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The way I see it, every home needs a good battery tester around. Preferably it would be in a kitchen drawer with other oddities such as grandfather’s old lighters.
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I understand that there is a distinction between a person being talented and a person being an enjoyable performer. I understand that there are some technically wonderful singers out there with beautiful voices, and that they would all bore me to tears, while David Berman would make millions of people amble in a slow panic. Really. I get it.
I also realize that some huge stars are legitimately talented and some are not. The example that keeps getting brought up – not by me – is that Christina Aguilera is a much better singer than Britney Spears. Okay, fine. This doesn’t mean that Christina is more entertaining than Britney, or vice-versa. It doesn’t really mean a whole lot overall, I don’t think.
Having said all this… can anybody vouch for Taylor Swift being talented and/or entertaining? I don’t mean, would I find her entertaining, because I don’t. I’m just fishing for some sort of objective logic that would help me to understand why this scary little woman is some sort of sensation. No matter how hard you pay attention it seems like you only ever hear a maximum of 12 seconds of a song. I assume that she has performed complete songs, but I’m not about to go looking. It takes less effort to post a stupid blog comment about it than it does to hunt down a song and spend the time listening to it when I assume I will find the song morally reprehensible in some way anyway.
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When we were young and went back to school after Thanksgiving break, did the teachers actually try to teach us anything? If so, why?
