19 November 2009

loyalty, flawed.

Last night's Wizards game was as fun a game as I've seen at the Verizon Center. The house was packed, the Cleveland frontrunners were duly marginalized, and the Wizards got a semi-meaningful (but badly needed) win.

Because my vitriol for Cleveland frontrunners is severe, I couldn't shut up about it all night. Except that I never considered the company. I was there with a friend, JH, whose loyalties are decidedly fluid. While I deplore the kind of sports fan LeBron James is - he is a Chicago Bulls, New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys fan - JH would say that successful teams should be rewarded with additional fans.

In this framework, loyal fans who keep supporting losing teams are enablers - complicit in their own misery by not abandoning the teams they love. I have a hard time seeing that, seeing as how I view sports fandom as a grim and desperate battle against the possibility of happiness, but I'm willing to believe that I'm just wrong.

JH, to wit, has an overarchingly difficult set of sports loyalties. I do think that the freedarko attitude is legit - the idea that for some watchers of the game - basketball in this case, but you could say the same for most American sports and for European soccer - the compelling drama has nothing to do with the team name on the jersey, and everything to do with the battle gifted athletic individuals are waging against themselves in an effort to express their personalities through sport. Everything about that freedark perspective is interesting to me, and in the age of free agency, it's hard to think in manichean team-or-nothing terms. There are some guys I just like. Donovan McNabb - I just like the guy. The three guys who formed the core of the 1990 Dutch world cup side - Van Basten, Rijkaard, and Gullit. Chris Paul. Reggie Wayne. The list goes on and on.

So, maybe JH is right. Your team doesn't torture you - they just get boring, and you go with someone else. Nick Hornby alluded to this during the 2002 World Cup - his son not getting that he was supposed to support England, and instead taking an interest i the fates of all the players who played for his favorite club side (Arsenal, right?) There's something cosmpolitan about that. But it also seems like trading your family in, or something.

The other interesting issue JH raised is whether a sport is better when the best team wins or not. He was happy about the Yankees winning the World Series - they were the best team all season, and the playoffs actually, for once, benefitted the best team in the league. This is of course the opposite of the "any given Sunday" ethic of the NFL, or the thrilling fact that soccer is cruel and unfair. I'm totally agnostic about the right answer here, but part of me thinks that if the point of a sport is to be predictable, then...well, I'm not sure there is a point then. That, as the sports bloviators love to say, is why you actually have to play the game: because the better team doesn't always win. Right?

09 November 2009

Scattered things

1. My dad just got the international kindle.This doesn't sound very impressive, until he pointed out to me that this was the first gadget he has pre-ordered and received, in Rio, on the day of its release. He half expected it not to work as advertised. But it does. And people in Italy, Portugal, Australia and so on all report the same. Think of what this takes, logistically. Amazon had to negotiate contracts with cellular carriers in all of those countries. They negotiated subscriptions with newspapers in those countries. They worked with customs officials to get the devices delivered on the right day. And these are not countries with low entry barriers for new technology. These are places with entrenched bureacracies, and yet - Amazon pulled it off. Impressive.

2. With TARP and with health insurance reform, I don't understand the objection to oversight. I hear conservatives saying the money shouldn't have been spent, but then there's all this indignation about the oversight.

3. I've said it before and I will say it again: conservatives equate government intervention with lack of freedom. But a society where people are reluctant to take new jobs or follow their dreams for fear of loss of health insurance is a less free society too.

4. Wizards are off to a bad start, but I can live with it. It would be easier to swallow had opening night not been so great. In any case, in the world of things that I hate, a friend not too long ago asked me with whom I would rather get stuck on a deserted island for the rest of my days: Maradona or LeBron James. Sigh. LeBron didn't go to college; he probably hasn't read a book. Maradona may be a greasy turd, but he would at least have interesting (though shallow and predictably old-guard Latin American leftist) opinions.

5. Unibroue / La Fin du Monde.

02 November 2009

Halloween on the 42

We roll through Dupont Circle, past a tall patrician-looking white guy dressed as a sheik in an outfit that could have come out of a Tintin book.

Me: Isn't that kind of racist?
Ms. AC: Why?

Just then, the bus rides past a group of well-dressed middle-eastern men standing outside of a restaurant.

Ms. AC: See, that guy's wearing a turban too.