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Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
At about 00:47, it’s The Nature Conservancy meets Fight Club meets Facebook in 2018.
(Hat tip: reflectionof.me)
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Nine months after the week Barca won at Real Madrid and Chelsea to help secure the most dramatic and successful season in European club soccer history…birth rates across Catalonia are up 50 percent, reports The New York Times Goal blog.
Watch Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge above in five different languages, and then tell me you don’t feel just a little warmer.
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For a guy who’s given up on Brett Favre, I sure am trawling for schadenfreude about him now. Maybe I will start blogging GBP after all, Mike Cade.
Anyway, MacGregor references the Fates, seven-layer salad (no capitalization, Jeff – it’s not patented), Sisyphus, Tithonus and Quixote — and neatly skeweres Urban Meyer, hiding behind the curtain of his own vanity — in the course of framing the Favre phenomenon as something like Nietzsche’s eternal return. A piece built on a simple idea, but still brilliant. Money quotes:
In Hell, Brett Favre is doomed for all eternity to short that throw.
And I am consigned, century upon century upon century, to watch him do it. And then condemned — forever — to read and write about it.
We all get what we deserve, apparently.
and
Anyway, by comparison [to Meyer's hypocrisy], Brett Favre is as reliable as a German bicycle and his blindered devotion to his own ambition is appalling but refreshingly honest.
Thus does our NFL industrial complex have its narratives inscribed for the Super Bowl fortnight. The Saints will play for the 9th Ward and Bourbon Street and redemption, for le bon temps and love and loss, and the Colts and Peyton Manning will play for vindication or validation or in spiritual service of the Midwestern recession or rectitude or something.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
The cliché could just as easily have been the Jets’ four-decade resurrection, or Favre’s un-aging grace. The stories don’t even register in the face of all that spectacle.
Come the great moment two weeks from now, some of you will be happy and some of you will be sad.
This, thanks in some unknowable measure to Brett Favre, and to his myopic selfishness and his awful ambitions, his single-mindedness and his stubborn arrogance, his passion and his fortitude. Think of him then, we owe him that, in the moment of your joy or sorrow, his armor clanking and on the run, as old and foolish and beautiful as Quixote.
I didn’t say it made any sense. But it is nice for somebody else to call bullshit on the Whole Thing — not just Favre, but Favre as the metaphor and simulacrum for the perpetual motion machine of hysteria and amnesia and false drama that is sports today. Even if the next click just takes you right back to Rick Reilly.
(Image: Google search volume for the term “Brett Favre” by state, 2008-09. Graphic credit: DavidErickson/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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My colleague and Packer-fan-in-arms Michael Cade is through with Brett Favre, disgusted, after a long love affair. It’s a nice piece. If you haven’t been a Packer fan your entire life, it’s hard to imagine how some of us feel about what’s happened this year. Hatred, bitterness, disbelief, shame, despair — all of these; more. There are almost no parallels in sports — Luis Figo going from Barcelona to Real Madrid, maybe. We need a huge composite German adjective of Fassbinderian desire and soul-sickness to even start talking about this.
Brett Favre might have been the reason I stopped watching football. He was certainly one of the reasons I continued watching football for as long as I did. And now we’re the ex-boyfriend, and our girlfriend is fucking our estranged brother, and we can’t stop imagining his hands all over her, and what she does to him, what she stopped doing with us. That wasn’t supposed to happen — Brett Favre grew, and we didn’t? Are you kidding me? We can’t imagine ourselves without him. There are no Green Bay Packers anymore. He became us and then took our selves away.
It’s pretty to think, as Mike suggests, that there was once Good Brett, Our Brett, and then Daddy died and Brett lost his superego. Lots of people feel this way. It’s critical to think that we weren’t wrong about him, that he was once who we thought he was: Our son, our brother, too ingenuous to hide even the dollar he’d borrowed from our wallet, no more complicated than the mowing rows of the Mississippi tractor…almost see-through. It reminds me of Tiger, in a way.
Now he’s just an amazing ageless wonder — isn’t that the narrative? Sports narratives are so impoverished these days. The single salty tear so easy to conjure. I’m done with him, too, but I’m done with football completely. I watched the last quarter of the Packers/Steelers, and Roethlisberger threw that perfect pass at the end to beat us, and everybody could see it coming, and I thought: This game is too easy. Way too easy to score; way too easy to have my heart broken. No more.
(Image credit: Emery O/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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“What draws a powerful man to pay for a women outside of marriage? It’s not the sex. In fact, sex is the beard, if you know what I mean. By paying money for the excuse of sex, they don’t have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I am growing older. I am not loved. My wife is bored with me. I can’t talk to my children. I’m worried about my job, which means nothing to me. Above all, they are saying: Pretend you like me.”
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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“In retrospect, [Managing Director of FT.com Rob] Grimshaw said it was a ‘huge mistake’ for publishers to give away their product. So why did they?
“Grimshaw said newspaper publishers realized they did not understand the Internet, so they hired Internet experts and ‘let them do whatever they wanted and whatever they said was the right thing,’ he said.”
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If you’re not a baseball fan, or a former baseball fan, such as myself, you will be lost in this close analysis of the steroid era by Joe Posnanski, a writer for Sports Illustrated and one of the best sports bloggers around.
But not lost enough to relearn an essential truth: Nothing is ever one thing. Each thing is dozens, thousands, millions of things. Everything discrete is really a cascade of interactions, and it is exceedingly difficult to assign clear casualty to any one of them. (Can you explain where Obama lost the American people? I mean, you can offer an explanation, but can you really explain it?)
Steroid use contributed to baseball players hitting record numbers of home runs in the 1990s and early 2000s. Except they didn’t, at least not in the way we think of, the A to B way that makes it surpassingly easy to condemn those who took steroids, except that we don’t really know who took steroids, how many, how pervasive it was, and whether the use of steroids was any more important than a thousand other factors, like the changing size of baseball parks or the continued dilution of pitching talent (siphoned off by other sports) or the changing sizes of strike zones. There’s just no way of knowing, because…it’s complicated. Posnanski dissects this wonderfully. If you know anything about baseball, this piece is like a really good merlot, one with an incredible finish. If you don’t know anything about baseball, it will still leave you with the question: How will we ever know anything? Outside of the next question, that is.
But, does all this mean that taking steroids wasn’t wrong? Or wasn’t that wrong? I think that depends on what you watch sports for, and what you assume when you watch sports, things I increasingly question for myself. The reason the Tiger Woods scandal hit many of us hard was that we assumed that Tiger’s excellence confirmed all the things we’d been told about him — about his dedication, his work ethic, his fierce focus, etc. — and confirmed them for him, not just his golf. We bought into the idea that superior performance is on some level about morality and moral fiber, not about practice and a narrow kind of genius and possibly beta blockers, too. Or we ignored the idea that morality is actually contextual — that you can actually be moral in sport, and immoral elsewhere.
We all know that many sports players are shits. Still, if you watch sports to have the myth of unified personal morality ratified — and even when I know it is a myth, even when I rehearse that insight to myself, it is still so hard to grasp — then steroids were wrong. If you watch sports to see the limits of “unaided” human performance, then they were wrong, too. But if you watch sports to see amazing things, to just be amazed by a physical act outside of any moral context, maybe not so wrong. Except when the amazing things that someone produces on steroids are amazing in comparison to things that happened when people were just on uppers. Except that Posnanski reminds us that…it wasn’t just the steroids. Or rather, that steroids were just another factor, like moving the outfield fences in 15 feet. Did anyone think that was cheating? Or just increasing the fun?
I have to admit I don’t know what to think now, and that that’s not so bad.
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