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...

Let us agree right now:  something is seriously wrong with LeBron James.  I am going to get to this reasoning the hard way. I used to work in a place where a woman who was neither young nor "all there" also worked.  The rumor is that she came with the place when the company moved into that location but the truth was that her family was friends with the man who owned the company.  He asked them to find her something to do and she passed out the mail and ran errands among other minor jobs.  Of course, she was who she was and you could not change her.  If she didn't like someone, she would walk into their office, fart, and leave, or casually stop and cut the cheese and then continue on her way.  She would get very upset if things did not go her way; they weren't huge things but she liked things the way she liked them.  The best example of this is that she liked using the handicapped stall in the restroom.  She had no physical disability, she j...

I know a fellow who has three kids (two boys and a girl) and they are really great kids and he is a good dad.  The boys love basketball and last year, while he was still on the Cavaliers, one of them was a great fan of LeBron James.  When the Cavs came to town at the end of the 2009-2010 season, this fellow, at no small expense, got tickets for the three men to go to the game.  The fan of LeBron was so excited because he'd finally get his idol's autograph on his Official NBA LeBron James jersey.  So what happened?  LeBron James dusted the fans who waited for his autograph, totally dissing every single person in the crowd.  It was Chicago and it was probably a pretty chilly night.  He didn't care; he went home.  His fans went home too but they were disappointed.  Still, the kid who was a fan of LeBron James got over it and forgave his fave because he so admired his talent. It's been a busy year but this past Friday, I finally asked this fell...

Photo courtesy of www.troy43.com If you have read this blog offering with regularity, you will recall that it pisses me off to no end that NFL athletes have often come out of college with nothing to show for it but the chance to play in the NFL.  They might attend very good schools but when their NFL careers are over, if they weren't careful with their money they might struggle to get on with their lives with some sort of dignity and equal success.  Many are drafted before they graduate and don't ever bother going back to finish their degrees and prove to themselves that they have the brains to do it.  I am very pleased to say that Troy Polamalu, Safety of the Pittsburgh Steelers, isn't one of them.  During this lockout when the owners are probably thinking about making more money and the players are thinking about staying in great physical condition so they can get right back to it when the lockout ends, Troy Polamalu finished up his coursework for a Bachelor's ...