Monday Short Takes

The best part of the 2018 World Cup is that the US team didn't make it, so we haven't had a lot of coverage and, thus, we haven't had a lot of handwringing by Old Farts^tm who feel compelled to hate the world's most popular sport.

It also means that I accidentally watched a really good game the other day without realizing it had been played two days earlier. No coverage, no spoilers. Better than back in the Nagano Olympics when I assiduously avoided the Gold Medal Women's Hockey Game so I could watch it when I got home, only to have those bastards at AOL post the final score on their splash page.

Dav Andrew is South African and therefore knows that the world's foremost sports tournament is on, but is somewhat over 4,000 miles from the nearest qualifying nation, so, like Americans, had to just pick a country or two or three and pretend.

My niece, whose mother is from Spain, stayed engaged until yesterday, while I was able to hang in for another two or three hours on the basis of my 25% Danish stock, but she's only at 12.5% of that and her kids only pan out at 6.25%, so it would have mattered about that much to them if the Danish keeper had stoned the Croatian PKs.

At the end, I would add, of what may have been the least beautiful example of the Beautiful Game I've ever watched that involved anyone older than 11.

At least the Spain/Russia match was well-played.

Ah well, it's like going fishing and not catching anything.

That's not why you went, or, at least, it shouldn't have been.

Which is equally impossible to explain to people who don't already get it.

The Return of the Native

This May, after six years of exile in LA, David Horsey returned to Seattle where he had grown up.

I'm lying in this subhed for the sake of the allusion, because he's not a native: Wikipedia reports that he was three when his family moved there, but given the boom nature of the Pacific Northwest, I suspect his roots are a lot deeper than those of most of his neighbors.

And he's just produced this short, insightful animation about the changes since he left, which you should go watch.

Having had a few Rip Van Winkle moments in the times I've gone back to Colorado, I can identify with his sense of wonder.

I'm glad he has landed in a place he loves, because he's a good guy with a lot of talent, but that's only a portion of why I'm sharing this.

 

I've also recently stumbled across Chan Lowe's new home in Western Massachusetts, where he became editorial page editor a few months ago, and I happen to know that intersection, but I certainly wouldn't if I hadn't gone to summer camp for several years, about eight miles away.

The point being that this is a cartoon for people who know that intersection and that old landmark inn, because the Berkshire Eagle does not expect, or particularly try, to sell a lot of papers or get a lot of hits in Wisconsin or Nevada except perhaps to homesick natives.

Lowe still does nationally syndicated cartoons, but this local stuff is priceless, exactly what local papers should be doing but which very few have done since they were mostly bought out by dimwitted Wall Street turds, a descriptor I only use in the interest of accuracy.

Like David Horsey, the Berkshire Eagle was gone briefly, a family-owned paper sold to a chain in 1995 but re-purchased by local investors in 2016 and turned back into a local paper.

Which brings up the difference between newspaper style and magazine style that I discussed in yesterday's posting: Newspaper "style" is mechanical, a matter of capitalization and spelling, while magazine "style" is the sound and feel of the stories, a much more subjective and creative factor.

Here's the reason: Newspapers are a utility, while magazines are a commercial product.

A properly-run newspaper is like the water works or the electric company or the highway department. It's the Local Information Department that tells you what city hall is doing about the budget, when the fireworks display at the park will begin Wednesday, who died, and when the traffic light will be installed at that troublesome intersection.

And it has some funnies and an advice column and a few other fun things to amuse you while you're soaking in all that local information.

The newspaper might not matter to you if you're just renting while you go to school, but, when you settle in and buy a house, you'll get the water and electricity and gas put in your name and you'll subscribe to the local paper.

Or, at least, you would back when local papers were run by people who knew how local papers operate.

Back then, the publisher often owned the paper and was a long-standing pillar of the community. He might be an autocrat who sledgehammered his vision of the community or a kindly elder who reflected its tone, but what he was not was the interchangeable button-down drone of a far-distant corporate leech.

The publisher understood the community and the editor understood the publisher.

The publisher set the tone of the publication while the critical job of the editor was to avoid having the paper make a goddam fool of itself with pointless errors and inaccurate reporting.

However, these Wall Street nincompoops have installed automatons in the publishers' seats, shifting them around so that they never get to know a community but are simply there to impose cookie-cutter creative concepts from HQ so that every paper in the chain looks exactly alike.

Which means that their papers fail to serve as local utilities, but, unlike magazines, neither do they distinguish themselves as more desirable than other publications in their category.

They have made themselves neither necessary nor attractive.

That's a poor strategy.

 

Comments

[Brent]

There's a big flaw in that soccer/ballet analogy. One side is talking in general, and the other in specific. If you make them match then the message becomes quite different. "Our soccer team needs to score more" is a legitimate issue that teams work hard on. "Ballet needs to do something to encourage taller girls" is also the sort of concern that people need to address... for one, you first need to see if it's discrimination and taller girls are being "encouraged" to give up.

That said, soccer in general not scoring enough is the sort of issue that other sports have been dealing with and changing rules for. For example, hockey shootouts after regular games... that's to give the people there a "winner" in an exciting way, rather than just marking down the tie. They've also played around with various rules and talked about things like offside and the blue lines, when they think the game has gotten too defensive... or too offensive. You want a balance.

And it's the same with curling. Curling almost died in the 90s because the ice, equipment, and players got good enough that top teams would take a one point lead from the first end and blank the rest of the game by pealing every stone the other team put up. They introduced the free guard zone and 4 rock rule to make sure that a team that was down at least gets some rocks in play. And the sport is moving to 5 rock rules now... to help make sure rocks stay. Similarly, there was a big crisis in curling recently when new broom heads were allowing sweepers to control rocks to extreme levels... this made for a concern that the thrower's skill might be minimized and that it would become a sweeping skill game. They decided they didn't want that, and now there's new rules on equipment.

And speaking of equipment... fuzz on tennis balls, golf balls and clubs, those fancy high tech swim suits. All these have been ruled on by and changed for the good of keeping things fair and interesting.

So soccer should not be immune to such criticism. There are things that could be done to change the balance to be more offensive. Substitution rules, offside rules, dimensions of the field, number of players on it (hockey uses reduced lines in overtime to reduce defensive capability). Can you make soccer be high scoring... not without sever changes. But it would be foolish to do nothing... other sports are changing their rules to be more interesting to a new audience that wants more action. You want to keep your audience, you don't want them moving to other sports or to a new high intensity version of soccer that someone creates (well, "soccer" as it wouldn't be Association rules then).

[Mike Peterson]

I'm going to assume you don't honestly believe the girls stand on tiptoe because they aren't tall enough.

[Kip W]

I'll be back in Fort Collins in a couple of weeks for my niece's wedding. It took them decades, but they're finally making headway in turning the place into something alien. I think that damned stadium in the middle of town is probably the single biggest and stupidest thing they've done so far.

[Mike Peterson]

I'd suggest they move the wedding to Left Hand Canyon, but it's probably a shopping center.