This is a post script to the post below on conservatism and the curriculum, only this is specifically about what I said there concerning sports and politcs:
So. Okay. I have to make An Important Confession.
I don't know anything about sports. It seems kinda strange to admit, but since my childhood sport was ... fencing ... I somehow barely played basketball, baseball, and never played football. I don't actually know how football is scored.
So when I say in the post, "I understand it if it's sports ..." what I mean is, understand in a completely abstract sense.
Experiencing a general existential unease at, I don't know, dying without ever having known anything about sports, professional or collegiate, I've been thinking in my dotage that maybe I should take up sports the way I once took up wine as a non-drinker who did all the winebuying for my wife (she figured out I'd buy better quality wine for her than she would). That is, take up wine as a quasi-Wittgensteinean exercise in seeing if I could accurately use the language of wine (shades of mushroom, hints of blueberry, and, heck, squiggles of LSD and rivets of meth) in a more than plausible way without ever having experienced the actual sensation.
It turns out this is not very hard with wine.
It might be some kind of alternative Turing test.
(Update: When I say alternative Turing test, I mean a test to determine whether I might not be a machine, perhaps engaged by the Senior Conspirator. but in fact not a human at all, but instead one of those academic phrase-paper generators. A highly advanced phrase generator, naturally. Have you seen through the deception yet??!)
If all else fails, just have another Big Orange.
It is a cultural test. Turing tests try to avoid those, because they can be faked or overcorrected. Kind of like how POWs would ask new POWs baseball questions to see if they were German spies in the camp - and if they didn't happen to know how Ty Cobb was, well, they were obviously infiltrators. (Or just didn't follow baseball.)
See how far you have progressed from confusing chess with warfare?
I thought you played quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals...
Chrisredux: Double ouch!
Crimso: I am outed!
P: Are you a computer?
C: Purple monkey apple jelly bean. Would a computer say that?
P: Actually. . . yes. That is exactly the sort of thing a computer would say.
On wines, just say "smooth going down, burns coming up."
I was an intercollegiate fencer, ranked in epee, and a football player. I also coached football for many years at the collegiate club, youth and high school levels.
And, as you learn more and more about football, you will find that, kinesiologically-speaking, fencing and modern offensive and defensive line-play in football have much in common, including footwork, hand placement and action, and tactics. Watch the feet of a good offensive lineman pass protecting ("kick out"), and tell me you don't recognize the footwork. This convergence was not true as recently as fifteen years ago, but it is certainly true now. One of my gurus as a line coach, Dave Sollazo of the University of Maryland, teaches all his players martial arts because his studies demonstrate the cross-over values (just ask the Chargers Shawne Merriman). It's all research, analysis and specialization these days.
Which brings me to another essential point for you: no one who tells you about football from the 90's or before is giving you much of value. (It is very easy to identify good coaches from bad: just see the ones who do things "the way I learned" as opposed to those who try to figure out what works best for the current group of players.) Football reinvents itself periodically, which is one of its distinguishing features, and the game today on the inside is often unknown to those who haven't taken the time to understand its evolution.
Good books to learn about football:
General introduction to all phases of the game: Coaching Youth Football, John McCarthy, Jr.
Good novel from the inside: Rough &Tumble, Mark Bavaro.
Understanding modern football techniques (which is actually more essential for understanding the game than tactics): Play Football the NFL Way, Tom Bass
Understanding modern high school and college football, plus the increasing value of the left tackle: Blind Side, Michael Lewis.
I could go on, but these will get you started.
Ah, good company then. Wasn't until my mid-20s that I finally figured out what a "first down" was. Never did figure out the attraction of a sport where the teams spend most of their time standing around holding meetings.
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.