Oh, I Think So

This week, with the football lockout still, uh, fully locked, I thought I would do some heavy research and find some of the manliest sports played on Planet Earth, kind of like stumbling off the Starship Enterprise armed with testosterone and without ever leaving orbit.  It took less than 3 seconds to find stuff aplenty; amazingly, NASCAR is nowhere on those lists. The Highland Games are sports for the manliest and strongest of men with massive upper body strength and incredible concentration and also some pretty strong women who could beat the crap out of me with no difficulty.  I detail:      1.  Caber toss:  The caber, a big old piece of wood closely resembling a tapered telephone pole, is balanced vertically on one end and the person doing the tossing runs forward and attempts to toss the pole end over end, having said wood and land facing away from the person doing the toss.  No, the cabers don't need to be a uniform size; scoring de...

I have discovered that my client has an administrative assistant who is a huge NASCAR fan.  I found this out when she was sending her boss to North Carolina and mentioned the track in Winston-Salem. I know this person to be extremely bright and well educated.  She has an advanced degree in science.   She said she loves NASCAR so much if she could have she'd have gotten a Bachelor of Science and a Masters in NASCAR but the latter wasn't offered anywhere.  She said she considered getting a Masters in Physics so she could work in NASCAR but was afraid she'd have to be an engineer and didn't want that at all, so she married an engineer who also loves NASCAR. I asked her my question:  how is NASCAR a sport? She explained how going around the track pulled 3Gs or three times gravity which, at such high speeds, was a constant assault of Gs on the body.  The aerodynamics required to stay on the heavily-banked track, the lightning fast reflexe...

As you may or may not have heard, the NFL lockout continues.  Were this a normal year, fans, owners, and players would be getting all itchy and excited about trades and the upcoming season.  Participants and observers of the game would be looking forward to training camps, exhibition games, pre-season games, and actual games.  Players would be giving interviews about how excited they are to be back and how this is the year and how they are in great shape and want to prove themselves.  There would be sound bytes and snippets of video where the face of the coach or player fills a TV screen (my TV is just 19 inches and it frightens me to think of 52+ inches of Jay Cutler in high def and plasma).  There would be plans for season-long pools, per-game pools, and Fantasy Football teams.  Instead, we are looking forward to a whole lot of nothing. I have admitted that I don't know why I now like NFL football but I do and there we have it.  Since I like it, I...

During the Winter Olympics a few years ago, I recall one of the women skiers on Team USA going to watch the qualifying performances of Ice Dancing --  when each and every pair performs the same choreography that's been used for decades with everyone using same piece of music -- and marching out, declaring in annoyance, "This is not sport!"  Yet this was the Olympics and the ice dancers were, like the skiers and the snowboarders, in supreme physical condition, performing at a world-class level, except they were doing it to music. The same could be said of the figure skating singles and pairs -- that what they did was simply not sport.  In the Summer Olympics, synchronized swimming might be called into question as it is for women only, the performance begins the moment they are introduced,  and even their approach to the pool is judged.  These women are athletes in supreme physical condition, performing at a world-class level to music. And then there is the Na...