I'm not really a sports fan in general, just a baseball fan and occasionally watcher of tennis. Football, basketball and hockey I'll watch once in a blue moon, gymnastics every four years is quite enough, the same for ice skating (my apologies to my very good friends who adore the sport), and golf doesn't even appear on my radar screen. (I did really get into curling in the last Winter Olympics. I always thought it was a pretty silly activity, but I changed my mind after some real exposure to it. Oh, and I got caught up in watching snooker when I was in the U.K. a while ago.) But baseball's a passion, and I watch a lot of tennis during the U.S. Open, and, sometimes, Wimbeldon.
I was glad that Andy Roddick won the open, especially considering the fabulous comeback he had to make to survive his semi-final match with David Nalbandian. He looked overwhelmed to have won, and seems like a nice kid, running crying into the stands after the match to hug his friends and family, but the match itself was pretty boring. If Roddick wasn't bombing Ferraro with a ~140 m.p.h. serve (it's really unbelievable that anyone could even get to a serve hit that fast, let alone return it), the two were slamming away at each other from the baseline. Neither of them came into the net more than a couple of time, as far as I can recall, and great gets weren't all that common. For someone whose introduction to U.S. Open tennis was John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, it just wasn't that interesting to watch. Once you'd awed by Roddick's serve...
Still, considering that they played almost no tennis for 3 or 4 days, it was pretty amazing that they managed to get everything in on time and didn't have to extend the tournament another day. (CBS would have had a cow, I assume.)
Incidentally, why did CBS not use the "Hawkeye" computerized technology that USA used in their coverage, to examine close calls on the lines? CBS had their lame "MacCams" (excuse me, "Dupont MacCams") which were fuzzier and (at least apparently) less definitive. If CBS passed up the opportunity to use "Hawkeye", they made a big mistake, especially considering that Ferraro complained about a number of calls.
Earlier in the day, on the baseball front, I was happy that the Yankees managed to beat the Red Sox this afternoon, avoding the sweep and taking the edge in the season series, 10-9. The Bombers got bombed by the BoSox on Friday (9-3) and Saturday (11-0) and it seemed as if they were falling apart, since they got clobbered in a similar fashion by the White Sox just about 10 days ago. Unfortunately for me, that series came almost immediately after I had picked the Yankees to win it all, confident that the Red Sox would do their annual dive and get out of the way. Now, that doesn't look like it's going to happen (the Yankee announcers are right in saying that this is the best Red Sox team in a long time, with more power than the Yankees have, and with pitching that's almost as good).
I guess I'll stick with my prediction for the time being: Yankees vs. Atlanta in the World Series, New York wins it.
Incidentally, I'm not one of those New Yorkers who believes you can only root for one of our resident baseball teams at the expense of the other. I follow and enjoy both the Yankees and the Mets, and have been doing so since I was a kid. (Actually, I've more of a serial team follower over the years: first the Yankees, then the Amazin' Mets, then the Yankees, then a long period without baseball, then the Mets, then the Yankees, now, both, with an edge to the Yankees.) When I have to choose which team to watch, I pick the one playing the most interesting brand of baseball at that moment.
This year's Mets are in no danger of winning anything at all, and in mid-season they were very bad indeed, but since they've started their rebuilding effort, fielding a team full of rookies, they've been sort of fun to watch. I think they have already the nucleas of a team which can compete decently next year, assuming, of course, they find some pitching and plug up a few holes.
No matter, with great confidence, I pick the Mets for the NL East cellar.
(Incidentally, the Yankee/Mets divide is, I believe, primarily geographical, with Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island going with the Mets, and New Jersey, the Bronx and most of Manhattan favoring the Yankees. The fact that I grew up in Westchester may have been a factor which allowed me to go either way. I was somewhat closer to Yankke Stadium, but I saw my first Mets game at the old Polo Grounds, right across the Harlem River from the Stadium. With the move to Shea, they were farther away, but not too far.)
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
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destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
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not candid
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oblivious
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out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
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rapacious
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venal
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warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
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Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
