Games people play

On the first Sunday of the NFL season, we'll kick off (get it?) with Tank McNamara and a tribute to naked greed.

Football is the only sport I follow anymore, and I hate having to get my fix from the NFL.

Let me be clear: Sports-hating is just one more form of whining, and a lot of it is unfair.

Given the age range of the players, for instance, they're statistically no more prone to bad behavior than their cohorts, and, while they make a lot of money, they have a very short earning span and they generate tremendous profits for their employers, so why shouldn't they get a cut?

Meanwhile, if you can't get your spouse/boyfriend/partner/lover/significant other (see below) to focus on one or two teams and skip some of the other games to go antiquing or picking apples or whatever, he probably wouldn't be good company anyway and I'll bet this isn't the only indicator of that.

And yet, for football fans, there is the ethical conundrum of getting your fix from the NFL, which did all that it could to avoid acknowledging the concussion issue.

And Roger Goodell has stood tall in resisting calls to change the racist name of Washington's franchise, and he tried to stand up for the integrity of the game over rumors of inconsequential cheating by totally violating all possible standards of fair play as well as the collective bargaining agreement, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that darned judge.

Hang on a sec. I'm starting to talk myself out of watching. ... Okay, I'm back.

Anyway, I love the chess match tactics of football and the complexity of assignments and options on each play, and I'm sorry that the same corporate strategy that avoids the sprawling expansion that has so diluted baseball and hockey also includes monopolistic profiteering.

I don't mind the outrageous ticket prices. If they can sell tickets at those prices, more power to them, and not only can they sell the tickets, but there are waiting lists that go decades into the future.

But the jerseys don't have to be $99.95, and the fact that they can get people to pay that much explains why today's Tank is funny in the sense that your other choice is to bang your head on the wall.

Which you shouldn't do, because, y'know, concussions.

 

The only way to win is not to play the game

I'm convinced that the entire purpose of the Game of Life is to provide cartoonists with metaphors, and Edison Lee has been here before, but, as you see today, it works.

Thing is, we all had this game and, while it wasn't very much fun, we played it often enough to get the jokes made about it.

And the game was educational: It taught you that being an adult was mostly about driving around in your car wishing you had more money and seeing that other people were doing so much better, and that it's all pretty much based on getting a couple of favorable roles of the dice at the start.

 

I don't get it

No, no, I get the joke in today's Rhymes with Orange. Sure.

I just don't get the thing she's joking about. I think it's because I didn't go to a lot of middle-school slumber parties where they played these things.

I was home watching sports on television.

But at least these "What's your (whatever) name?" things can be expressed in a single Facebook posting.

The ones that have lept the shark entirely are the "What character from (whatever) are you?" things where you have to go to a site to answer a bunch of questions.

Back when we were in sixth grade, these silly games were played with cootie-catchers.

Now they're played with spam-traps.

 

Name it and claim it

Speaking of things you probably should have left behind in middle school, Reply All ponders the issue of what to call That Person.

I never agonized over it a whole lot, but I think that was because I was married a few weeks after I turned 21, so the problem disappeared while I was young enough that "girlfriend" was fine and then I was able to use "wife" long enough that, by the time the issue re-emerged for me, I was old enough that it was just something to joke about.

I did use "girlfriend" for four years about the time I turned 40, because I was dating  seeing  keeping company with  involved with dating a woman who had gone back to college, and I got a kick out of watching people's faces when I said, "I'm gonna go down to Northampton to see my girlfriend this weekend. She's a sophomore at Smith."

Hey, I'm a hound dog wannabe. Sue me.

But what I eventually discovered was that names work pretty well. No, really, they do!

Instead of "My partner and I went to the farmers market" or "My lover and I are thinking of getting a pasta machine," you can say, "Susan and I think this whole nomenclature dilemma is a load of inconsequential bullshit."

Though I was thinking of it the other day, because I have a nice set of 20-something neighbors whose names I don't know, and it occurred to me that, if I were pressed into an actual conversation, they'd have to both be present because I have no idea if they're married and, without names, I can't refer to the absent person without a term, and marriage seems to be the Big Divider.

Which made me realize how much I miss "Old Lady" and "Old Man," an archaic pair of playfully affectionate terms that connoted an unspecified but stable connection.

They fell out of favor 30 years or so ago, in part because "my old lady" was too often followed by "said she'll kill me if I spend all of Sunday watching football."

But mostly because we all became very, very serious indeed and so playful affection was no longer an option.

Which is a shame, because playful affection is the best kind of all.

 

 

 

Comments

[Bob]

"Game of Life" - a couple good rolls of the dice at the beginning or one lucky roll at the end of the game. For a lot of people, that's not too different from "Real Life."

I remember the "cootie catchers" from grade school, but never heard them called that (at least that I remember). It brought a smile to my face remembering the girls "determining" who they were going to marry.

Thanks for a fun read this morning. Enjoy the football games today.

[Craig L]

Living in Los Angeles made it real easy to give up NFL football, because the NFL officially gave up on us. And I grew up a couple miles away from where two future L.A. Rams Hall of Famers lent their names to California's first Audi dealership. (Huh?)

The Game of Life is just one of the things that make me glad we've progressed from having 7 boxed board games at Toys R Us to choose from to 3000 downloadable games at Steam... I only wish 2993 of them weren't worse than The Game of Life.

And if you think the terms for 'whomever I am currently in a relationship with' are a failure of the English language, just consider "My Ex".

- Lolly Gaynor
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-name-game

[Mike Peterson]

Wait -- what's wrong with "ex"? It's not an invented term, just short (and gender-non-specific) for ex-wife or ex-husband.

I'll grant you, "my outlaws" for "the people who were my in-laws before I divorced their daughter" is only offered as a joke, and I used the acronym S2BX the other day, which is flippant (and also means "Straight to Bank Exchange" which some may find amusingly appropriate).

But I'm not going to write "the woman to whom I was previously married" each time. What's your solution?

[Mary in Ohio]

The difference between in-laws and outlaws ? Outlaws are wanted.

[Mark Jackson]

"Playful affection is the best kind of all" - absolutely, although the pursuit is not without risk:

http://alumni.caltech.edu/~mjackson/PnC_knowthatnow.gif