The paper says U.S. Olympian Rachel Flatt was surprised and shocked by the score the judges gave her Thursday in the women's figure-skating competition at Vancouver. She had skated a "clean" program, a personal best, and felt good about it.
Too bad. It wasn't to be. The judges said there was something wrong with two of her triple-flip jumps. So Rachel finished seventh in the event, well out of the running.
The paper says another U.S. skater, Johnny Weir, sixth-place finisher in the men's competition, also had troubles in Vancouver. It was partly about his skating -- he was "robbed," some fans say -- but it was also about Weir and the media.
Their coverage of him tended to be derisive. This wasn't about his skating. It had to do with his persona, with things he was saying, his off-rink, eccentric behavior, his "flamboyant" costumes, things like that.
A pink-ribboned corset figured somewhere in this. One critic suggested he submit to a gender test.
Well, that's history now, and it's obviously too late for Vancouver, but I have a suggestion to deal with this sort of thing in the future.
Starting with the next winter Olympics, the people who run the games should simply strike figure-skating from the program. For good. And while they're at it, they should also drop gymnastics from the summer games. For good.
Neither is a sport that can be judged objectively by a time-clock or point score. Judges are human. And they may, individually, be patriotic, temperamental, even whimsical.
Figure-skating is simply high-speed dancing. It can only be judged subjectively as an art form.
Of course Olympic skaters are strong, highly skilled and disciplined. I bet Fred Astaire was in great shape and finely disciplined in his day, too, but he starred in "Roberta," not the Olympics.
As for gymnastics, those performers are acrobats. They also are strong, highly skilled, and disciplined. Plus daring. They just can't be judged objectively, one against another, on a precise point scale as Olympic judges try to do.
If I want to see acrobats I'll go to the circus.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
birch
Dwight David Eisenhower, born in Texas and reared in Kansas, grew up to become supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II, He won two landslide elections as president of the United States. He served as president of Columbia University, and he has been enshrined as an enduring icon of Republican politics.
But to Robert Welch, founder and president of the ultra-right John Birch Society, the moderate and genial Ike was very likely something else: . . . "a conscious dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy" . . . for whom "there is only one possible word to describe his purpose and his actions. The word is treason."
Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, reared in Asia and elected to the U.S. Senate, decisively won a historic election to the presidency. In that office, Americans have to agree, he is laboring manfully if imperfectly to get the nation out of the worst financial mess since the great depression.
But if you had happened to attend a recent political forum of the right-wing Tea Party in the Colorado Springs area, you could have bought bumper stickers with messages like this:
"Roses are red, violets are blue, Obama's a Commie and Pelosi is too."
Or: "Honk if you voted for Barack Obama, you Socialist bastard"
From what I've been hearing and reading lately about the ideas rumbling around inside the growing Tea Party movement, they remind me more and more of some of the notions of Robert Welch's old Birchers in their heyday 40 or so years ago. Notions like: guarding against the formation of a New World Order being pushed by secret U.S. "elites"; abolishing the Federal Reserve, heart of the national banking system; resigning from the United Nations; "nullifying" inconvenient federal laws, and standing up for the "sovereignty" of the individual states in any dispute with Washington.
And, by the way, what's wrong with giving at least some thought to the idea of secession?
Now of course the core ideas of Tea Partiers aren't identical to those of the Birchers, but they have a disturbingly similar tone. Both have goofy ideas about the tax system they so abominate. Both, for instance, would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the graduated income tax.
Come on, they say, let's be reasonable. Let's have a really "fair" tax.
And what would that be? Well, it would be an excise tax, like a national sales tax, which everyone would pay at the same rate.
See? The millionaire would be charged the same tax as the welfare mother for a bottle of milk. Or a bottle of champagne. What could be fairer than that?
There are, of course, some big differences between these two political movements. Unlike the Birchers. the Tea-ers have no national leader, organization or discipline. And, unlike the Tea Party, the Birch Society -- even when it was being widely publicized and discussed -- was always considered to be politically out of bounds to the mainstream.
Kooky.
While there were lots of highly conservative Republicans in politics in the '60s and '70s, they wouldn't have been caught dead at a Birch event, and they would have spurned a Birch endorsement.
Nowadays Sarah Palin, reigning queen of the party, is happily playing footsie with the Tea-ers, and top GOP leaders have offered them everything but the keys to the safe if they'll only come aboard.
Pointy-headed liberals like me hope they do. What fun! What mischief!
But to Robert Welch, founder and president of the ultra-right John Birch Society, the moderate and genial Ike was very likely something else: . . . "a conscious dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy" . . . for whom "there is only one possible word to describe his purpose and his actions. The word is treason."
Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, reared in Asia and elected to the U.S. Senate, decisively won a historic election to the presidency. In that office, Americans have to agree, he is laboring manfully if imperfectly to get the nation out of the worst financial mess since the great depression.
But if you had happened to attend a recent political forum of the right-wing Tea Party in the Colorado Springs area, you could have bought bumper stickers with messages like this:
"Roses are red, violets are blue, Obama's a Commie and Pelosi is too."
Or: "Honk if you voted for Barack Obama, you Socialist bastard"
From what I've been hearing and reading lately about the ideas rumbling around inside the growing Tea Party movement, they remind me more and more of some of the notions of Robert Welch's old Birchers in their heyday 40 or so years ago. Notions like: guarding against the formation of a New World Order being pushed by secret U.S. "elites"; abolishing the Federal Reserve, heart of the national banking system; resigning from the United Nations; "nullifying" inconvenient federal laws, and standing up for the "sovereignty" of the individual states in any dispute with Washington.
And, by the way, what's wrong with giving at least some thought to the idea of secession?
Now of course the core ideas of Tea Partiers aren't identical to those of the Birchers, but they have a disturbingly similar tone. Both have goofy ideas about the tax system they so abominate. Both, for instance, would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the graduated income tax.
Come on, they say, let's be reasonable. Let's have a really "fair" tax.
And what would that be? Well, it would be an excise tax, like a national sales tax, which everyone would pay at the same rate.
See? The millionaire would be charged the same tax as the welfare mother for a bottle of milk. Or a bottle of champagne. What could be fairer than that?
There are, of course, some big differences between these two political movements. Unlike the Birchers. the Tea-ers have no national leader, organization or discipline. And, unlike the Tea Party, the Birch Society -- even when it was being widely publicized and discussed -- was always considered to be politically out of bounds to the mainstream.
Kooky.
While there were lots of highly conservative Republicans in politics in the '60s and '70s, they wouldn't have been caught dead at a Birch event, and they would have spurned a Birch endorsement.
Nowadays Sarah Palin, reigning queen of the party, is happily playing footsie with the Tea-ers, and top GOP leaders have offered them everything but the keys to the safe if they'll only come aboard.
Pointy-headed liberals like me hope they do. What fun! What mischief!
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
ballparks
Though baseball's opening day is still more than a month off, it isn't too early for a nut like me to dig out one of the classic books of the game: Josh Leventhal's "Take Me Out to the Ballpark," an illustrated tour of playing fields past and present.
Note: To be precise, in this case "present" means only up to 2000, which was the year of publication.
But what's a decade or so when you can learn that Sunny Jim Bottomley knocked in 12 runs on Sept. 16, 1924, as the Cardinals beat the Dodgers 17 to 3. And when you can read what Babe Ruth thought of the now-fabled, almost sacred "friendly confines" of Chicago's Wrigley Field.
Ruth was quoted in the fall of 1932 when the New York Yankees were in the process of sweeping the Cubs 4-zip in the World Series. Ruth went five for 15 in those four games, hitting two homers and batting in a total of six runs.
The Babe, who in his day was the highest-paid player in baseball, had this to say of Wrigley, "I'd pay half my salary," he said, "if I could bat in this dump all the time."
There are a lot of such tidbits from the greatest sport of them all.
Item: In a game at Ebbets Field in 1926, three Brooklyn Dodgers were caught standing on third base at the same time. Two were tagged out to end the inning.
Item: At least until 2000, no one had ever hit a ball over the right-field grandstand of Boston's Fenway Park. However the Red Sox installed a special red seat in the right-field bleachers where a ball hit by Ted Williams, estimated to have carried 502 feet, hit a fan on the head, crushing his straw hat.
Item: On April 17, 1945, at Sportsman's Park, a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray made his debut with the American League St. Louis Browns, going one for four against Detroit. He went on to play 77 games that season, when war service had decimated major-league rosters.
Item: At Yale Field in New Haven, Connecticut, home to the university's baseball team and, for a time, the New Haven Ravens Class AA franchise, authorities in the 1920s installed a double-wide seat for William Howard Taft.
See, the former president, Supreme Court justice, Yale alum and law professor was a truly big man, his usual weight being around 320 pounds.
Item: On Sept. 15, 1963, the San Francisco Giants fielded an outfield of three brothers, Felipe, Jesus and Matty Alou.
Those are just a few samples. You gotta love this game.
Note: To be precise, in this case "present" means only up to 2000, which was the year of publication.
But what's a decade or so when you can learn that Sunny Jim Bottomley knocked in 12 runs on Sept. 16, 1924, as the Cardinals beat the Dodgers 17 to 3. And when you can read what Babe Ruth thought of the now-fabled, almost sacred "friendly confines" of Chicago's Wrigley Field.
Ruth was quoted in the fall of 1932 when the New York Yankees were in the process of sweeping the Cubs 4-zip in the World Series. Ruth went five for 15 in those four games, hitting two homers and batting in a total of six runs.
The Babe, who in his day was the highest-paid player in baseball, had this to say of Wrigley, "I'd pay half my salary," he said, "if I could bat in this dump all the time."
There are a lot of such tidbits from the greatest sport of them all.
Item: In a game at Ebbets Field in 1926, three Brooklyn Dodgers were caught standing on third base at the same time. Two were tagged out to end the inning.
Item: At least until 2000, no one had ever hit a ball over the right-field grandstand of Boston's Fenway Park. However the Red Sox installed a special red seat in the right-field bleachers where a ball hit by Ted Williams, estimated to have carried 502 feet, hit a fan on the head, crushing his straw hat.
Item: On April 17, 1945, at Sportsman's Park, a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray made his debut with the American League St. Louis Browns, going one for four against Detroit. He went on to play 77 games that season, when war service had decimated major-league rosters.
Item: At Yale Field in New Haven, Connecticut, home to the university's baseball team and, for a time, the New Haven Ravens Class AA franchise, authorities in the 1920s installed a double-wide seat for William Howard Taft.
See, the former president, Supreme Court justice, Yale alum and law professor was a truly big man, his usual weight being around 320 pounds.
Item: On Sept. 15, 1963, the San Francisco Giants fielded an outfield of three brothers, Felipe, Jesus and Matty Alou.
Those are just a few samples. You gotta love this game.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)