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Nerd Powers Activate
Jan. 9th, 2013 01:01 amI never particularly intended to become a baseball fan, but now that I am, I find that I am also more tolerant of other sports. It's nice. I feel more well-rounded and can make conversation with new groups of people. Nerdiness, after all, is nerdiness, and was already something not foreign to me.
However. Now I am annoyed at bad sports analogies, which are somehow everywhere in political discourse. Before, I could be annoyed that someone was using a sports analogy in a tone-deaf context. Now that I understand those analogies, I am also able to be infuriated by the lazy thinking behind the comparisons. Because I, Romie, needed yet more things to be annoyed by.
Sunday, it was a Dave Barry punchline that depended on the Yankees being the baseball team with the highest payroll. But they're not anymore; the Dodgers are. Anybody who has followed baseball even passively in the offseason knows the Yankees are trying to shed payroll to get under a luxury tax cap by 2014; they didn't make any big signs in the offseason, even though their team has some serious holes.
Who cares, right? Except that if you're not a baseball fan, you don't get the joke, and if you are a baseball fan, you know the joke is wrong. It's lazy. It's like making a joke that relies on an outdated theory of atomic structure.
Or there's another joke I saw today, a perennial favorite of conservatives, that goes:
[Prominent Democrat involved in tax battle] saw [big recent sports game] and decided to redistribute the points from [winner] to [loser] because s/he thought it was unfair that one team got to score all the points!
The details vary depending on the year.
Before, I had plenty to be annoyed about, such as the idea that the rich are on a team against the poor. I might have gone off on a tangent about the way a prominent athlete on whatever team benefited from public schooling or food stamps. Now, what I think is: you stupid -- pro sports have salary caps and let losing teams have more turns in the draft and pick new players first. Pro sports are all about redistribution of odds; pro sports want close games between evenly-matched teams. Those games make everyone involved a lot of money.
Pro sports are also dominated by strong unions and collective bargaining. Dumbass.
I have a dream that as I come to better understand other people, I will like them more, but instead I usually find the dumb people are even dumber than I thought and the mean people are meaner and the selfish people are even more selfish. It is the opposite of what I was taught in children's books. We really need to look into that. (Eternal gratitude to Thurber and Dahl, the truth-tellers.)
Today was mainly work, and a last few hands of Canasta before REL headed back to Atlanta. I received in the mail and then wore a pair of super low rise black-and-white-checkerboard skinny jeans, which are more comfortable than you would think.
However. Now I am annoyed at bad sports analogies, which are somehow everywhere in political discourse. Before, I could be annoyed that someone was using a sports analogy in a tone-deaf context. Now that I understand those analogies, I am also able to be infuriated by the lazy thinking behind the comparisons. Because I, Romie, needed yet more things to be annoyed by.
Sunday, it was a Dave Barry punchline that depended on the Yankees being the baseball team with the highest payroll. But they're not anymore; the Dodgers are. Anybody who has followed baseball even passively in the offseason knows the Yankees are trying to shed payroll to get under a luxury tax cap by 2014; they didn't make any big signs in the offseason, even though their team has some serious holes.
Who cares, right? Except that if you're not a baseball fan, you don't get the joke, and if you are a baseball fan, you know the joke is wrong. It's lazy. It's like making a joke that relies on an outdated theory of atomic structure.
Or there's another joke I saw today, a perennial favorite of conservatives, that goes:
[Prominent Democrat involved in tax battle] saw [big recent sports game] and decided to redistribute the points from [winner] to [loser] because s/he thought it was unfair that one team got to score all the points!
The details vary depending on the year.
Before, I had plenty to be annoyed about, such as the idea that the rich are on a team against the poor. I might have gone off on a tangent about the way a prominent athlete on whatever team benefited from public schooling or food stamps. Now, what I think is: you stupid -- pro sports have salary caps and let losing teams have more turns in the draft and pick new players first. Pro sports are all about redistribution of odds; pro sports want close games between evenly-matched teams. Those games make everyone involved a lot of money.
Pro sports are also dominated by strong unions and collective bargaining. Dumbass.
I have a dream that as I come to better understand other people, I will like them more, but instead I usually find the dumb people are even dumber than I thought and the mean people are meaner and the selfish people are even more selfish. It is the opposite of what I was taught in children's books. We really need to look into that. (Eternal gratitude to Thurber and Dahl, the truth-tellers.)
Today was mainly work, and a last few hands of Canasta before REL headed back to Atlanta. I received in the mail and then wore a pair of super low rise black-and-white-checkerboard skinny jeans, which are more comfortable than you would think.
