the ball is gone...in a flash

A little late...but my previous entry may clue you in to the fact that my plan to post this earlier got a bit derailed...(Oranj is recovering quite well, by the way).

Anyway, I'm probably now the last music blogger to post SF Seals' "Dock Ellis" in memory of the pitcher who died a couple days ago...and who is best known for his claim to have thrown a no-hitter on acid. Barbara Manning is a major baseball fan (SF Seals was her band...named after a minor-league baseball team) who wrote an entire album around baseball, but here she imagines, with brilliant sonic acuity, what it must have been like to have been Dock Ellis that evening.

Manning isn't the only musician to have written a song called "Dock Ellis": here's Lotion (best known for having been blurbed by none other than Thomas Pynchon) with their "Dock Ellis" song.

SF Seals "Dock Ellis" (The Baseball Trilogy, 1993)
Lotion "Dock Ellis" (Full Isaac, 1993)

what ever happened to baby Nadia?

More on the ugliness of Olympic female gymnastics - this from Dave Zirin's online column on the issue, a quote from Joan Ryan's book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes:

In 1956 the top two Olympic female gymnasts were 35 and 29 years old. In 1968 gold medalist Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia was 26 years old, stood 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 121 pounds. Back then, gymnastics was truly a woman's sport....[In 1976] 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci clutched a baby doll after scoring the first perfect 10.0 in Olympic history. She was 5 feet tall and weighed 85 pounds. The decline in age among American gymnasts since Comaneci's victory is startling. In 1976 the six US Olympic gymnasts were, on average, 17 and a half years old, stood 5 feet three and a half inches and weighed 106 pounds. By the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the average US Olympic gymnast was 16 years old, stood 4 feet 9 inches and weighed 83 pounds, a year younger, 6 inches shorter and 23 pounds lighter than her counterparts of 16 years before.

So what's driven this trend toward ever-younger athletes? (They would be ever-younger had not a ruling finally been delivered limiting competition to girls and women 16 and over.) Not the sport itself, evidently.

from tragedy to farce

Following up on my post earlier today, early in the article referred to therein, Buzz Bissinger refers to watching women's beach volleyball in the Olympics. In what appears to be the journalistic equivalent of opening a presentation with a joke, Bissinger confesses that he watches "not because it's a sport" but because he enjoys watching "skimpily-clad, leggy women rolling in sand." As a lead-in to an article primarily about the abuse of female gymnasts, this is a bit odd and opens him to various criticisms, and sure enough, one reader comments huffily that volleyball players are too athletes (which Bissinger doesn't deny, of course).

But this article, with our president apparently thinking his predecessor's way with women helped his ratings, illustrates (literally) the hypocrisy of anyone who doesn't see the hypocrisy in the way women's volleyball is marketed and presented:



Show me a sport for men whose uniforms reveal this much asscheek, and I'll stop believing women's volleyball isn't a featured Olympic event primarily to drive ratings. There's no doubt these women are fine athletes...but that's not how they're being presented.

"women"'s gymnastics: child abuse

Read this New York Times article by Buzz Bissinger. Plain and simple: in order for the girls (not women: the average age of this year's US team, for instance, is only 17 and a half) to develop skills necessary to compete at the Olympic level, they can have no childhood, only grueling and rigorous years of training. And of course, the decision to undertake this training is, by definition, not a decision made by the athlete as an independent adult, it is a decision made for them by her parents. The effects of such nightmarish training on these girls' bodies, their development both emotional and physical, would be bad enough by itself, but the odor of worse abuse attaches itself to the intense relationships coaches develop with these girls. Bissinger points out several examples of sexual abuse pre-teen gymnasts have suffered at the hands of their coaches, and while such cases are surely a small minority, the demanding/dependant relationship between coaches and the young girls is psychologically damaging in any event.

The Romans enjoyed gladiatorial combat to the death, and while the abuse suffered by female gymnasts isn't quite so extreme, at least the Romans didn't kid themselves as to the source of their enjoyment or the suffering of its victims.

my duty as a Wisconsin resident

...is to weigh in with an opinion on the whole Brett Favre thing:

Go home, Brett. You're making an ass of yourself.

Yeesh.

torch it

As I've mentioned in this space several times, I hate the Olympics. It's nothing but an orgy of nationalism, spiced with hypocrisy about "international brotherhood" and the glory of athleticism, all geared primarily toward raking in huge shovelsful of money. And even if you want to merely admire the athleticism on display, ask yourself (particularly concerning the sports whose excellence requires constant and expensive training from a very young age), as Kurt Vonnegut did about an Olympic swimmer character's father, "what kind of man turns his own daughter into an outboard motor?"

And pity the city that's privileged to host the Olympics - or rather, pity its residents, who'll find their poorer component shoved into the nearest dumpster in order to erect pointless stadia, rent jacked up to the sky, and police only too eager to put the hurt on in the name of public relations. And of course this year we have the spectacle of China - who should probably just deal with its human rights problems by compelling its political prisoners to breathe its air: I mean, when they all keel over, that's not abuse, is it?

Anyway, further ammunition, courtesy of David Byrne's blog: turns out the whole concept of the torch relay is yet another contribution of those pioneers of large-scale performance art: the Nazis.

diamond whitewash

Milwaukee has its racial and ethnic tensions, to be sure...but it's also, as this article points out, one of the few cities whose major-league baseball teams sports more than a couple African-American players (not to mention not one but two players sometimes nicknamed "The Hebrew Hammer": Gabe Kapler and Ryan Braun). The article addresses some of the factors behind the declining numbers of African-Americans choosing to play baseball, but I'd argue the expense and space are among the keys. Schools that can barely afford to provide books for their students are unlikely to be able to keep up a baseball field, much less the equipment required for the game.

beetles, specters, owls, giants

1. Apparently, NASA plans on beaming the Beatles' "Across the Universe" into space. No word on which version they're going to use - I kinda hope they use the horrible Spectorized one, because that way, space aliens can also realize, wow - he killed someone, and he ruined a perfectly good John Lennon song! (Okay, unfair: Phil Spector did the opposite of ruin many more songs than he ruined...)

Less discussed is the follow-up headline: RIAA to Preemptively Sue All Lifeforms for Copyright Infringement.

2. Regular readers of this space know that I'm occasionally rather out of touch with the average goings-on of the typical American - so it may surprise such readers (all four of them) that I am actually aware that a major sporting event took place yesterday. It involved the game of "Foot-Ball," and is known under the sobriquet "The Superb Owl," for mysterious reasons. One team, known as the Providers of Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Tapes (New England), had gone the entire season without losing a match (which wouldn't have been a problem, since the team was well-equipped with lighters), while its opponent, The Football-Playing New York Football Giants of New York That Play Football Gigantically, had not. Despite this, the larger team won! Yay Largeness! Volume Volume Yoo-Rah-Rah!

a state takes refuge in superstition

I don't particularly care about the Packers...but Wisconsinites searching for supernatural explanations for the team's loss yesterday have a good candidate in the infamous Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx... Brett Favre, of course, having appeared on the cover of the magazine's January 21, 2008 issue...and then throwing an interception in overtime that led to the team's loss.

harbinger

Leaving the house and heading north on the freeway earlier this evening, I noticed that, for some reason, lights were on at Miller Park - and I realized that even though it's the deepest depth of winter, baseball season is less than three months away. I'm not at all a major sports fan...but I do like baseball, and it occurred to me, seeing the lights illuminating the arching roof of Miller Park on the horizon, that I really ought to get to a few more Brewers games this season.

To hell with winter - bring on the springtime!

puckishly

Since I follow sports primarily via The Onion's sports page (mostly by way of asking more sports-literate friends to explain the jokes to me), I was informed that apparently, there's still at least one professional hockey league (it's called the "NHL," which stands for "National Hockey League." That's kind of a funny name for an organization whose teams are almost evenly distributed between two nations, but I digress...). I was under the impression that there had been a strike, and I'd just assumed all the players had realized that actually, they weren't all that interested in chasing a little rubber thing around the ice with a stick and had gone home to drink beer and watch TV like the rest of us.

In fact, that's a rather parochially American view. Canadians, it seems, so depend on their hockey fix that its absence can affect the caliber of the nation's thought: the void left by the missing season of hockey so messed up the Canadian mindset that they went and elected a Bible-thumping conservative as their prime minister (Stephen Harper) in the first election after the missing hockey season.

I wish I could say there's a lesson here...but I can't. Maybe we should invade the next Republican convention with a phalanx of skating Canadians. (I'm sure many Republicans are offended at a sport which actually allows a guy out there on the ice with a jersey that says SATAN on the back, in front of the Canadian God - who's called "Brian" - and everyone.)

please rise for the Croatian anthem

Frank Zappa once wrote (with great wisdom), "a mountain is something you don't want to fuck with."

Well, apparently that depends: a British singer mangled a key consonant in the Croatian anthem, with results that pricked up the ears of the audience.

do their rap sheets come with a little stick of bubblegum?

Here's a thought: if Barry Bonds is found guilty of lying about his steroid use, it would seem likely that Commissioner Bud Selig would bar Bonds' admission to the Hall of Fame (or rather, bar him from being elected to the Hall).

And that would mean that the holders of baseball's two most prominent offensive records - most career hits (Pete Rose) and most career home runs (Bonds) - would both be barred from the Hall of Fame.

That's rather sad.

Certainly, Bonds' offense (assuming he's found guilty...which, of course, I would never do, of course not) is far worse than Rose's: it materially affected his and his teams' performance, whereas Rose's gambling did not. I've always felt that barring Rose from the Hall is pointlessly moralistic: the man hit 4,000-plus hits, and that he was a lying, unethical jerk has little to do with it. I mean, if we're going to include "character" as a consideration for the Hall of Fame, what's Ty Cobb doing in there? Unlike Rose, though, Bonds' offense directly facilitated his achieving the record - and therefore makes it rather less legitimate. I mean, if Roger Maris had to have an asterisk next to his name merely because there were a few more games to a season, surely Bonds deserves an even more prominent qualifying mark. As Steve pointed out, The Onion got it right...