This is What Happens on Wednesdays

I’d like an explanation, thank you very much.

We can kill a person, but only slowly. We are more humane to a dog with a worm its gut than we are to a person with a mushed-up brain. If they’re going to kill her, at least have the decency to do it quickly.

I’d rather read my daily blog list than the newspaper. Anything important I can get from newsflashes on fark.com, and anything in depth isnt going to be covered by traditional news sources anyway. Journalism schools need serious revamping if we’re going to continue to expect decency, standards and quality from the industry.

Steroids in baseball, I can handle. The hockey strike has broken me, but I can go on. If the NBA goes up in flames, I’ll finally become a fan. But if Tagliabue cant get a collective bargaining agreement done with his players, I’m going to have a hard time not moving to the UK and rooting for cricket and soccer.

What professional sports in America needs, and you read it here first, is a massive anti-trust movement. Each league needs to be split up like Ma Bell. This will reinvigorate old rivalries and create new ones. It has endless possiblities. Real local sports. Competitive trades instead of money-saving ones. It will cut down the status of sports stars from international celebrities to athletic gems who have to work for a living, just like their fans. All they’d need is a guaranteed pension, strict drug testing and decent health insurance, and they’d still have it better than the more mopes in the stands, and it would make for a real sports environment around here for the first time in generations.

I might be out of the sports gambling business for good this time. My 2005 bracket died quicker than any year prior, in sloppy fashion. By the third day of play, Syracuse and Wake Forest stabbed me in the heart. On the fourth day, Connecticut spat on my grave. I’m going to have to seriously reconsider my options next year. It’s possible that I might not even participate in football betting come fall. I don’t usually do much, but this year it might be nothing at all.

This means that I’ll have to step up my poker game. I might have to move from the $.25-.50 tables to the real money tournaments. Those are the tables where a cinderella sometimes makes it to the big game in Vegas but the hundreds he lucked out against are left squealing and squashed. You can lose your lovers, your children, your house, your entire life savings, on an off-suit kicker. But at least you’re betting on yourself and not on a bunch of kids with guaranteed contracts.

I have to like Louisville and Texas Tech the best. Louisville gets to play Washington, and Tech gets to play West Virginia. Tech-Louisville on Easter weekend will be the best matchup of the tournament. But, chances are, Illinois is going to win, because Oklahoma State is going to tire itself out, and Duke/UNC/Kentucky just arent built to stand up against real opponents. Duke will be lucky to get past Michigan State, and Kentucky might lose to Utah, after all. And forget about North Carolina. The Roy Williams effect killed Kansas and he doesn’t even coach there anymore.

I don’t know yet what to make of all the literary cliques that are out there these days. The ULA is similar to the fathers’ rights groups that swarm the internet. They’re spinning their wheels preaching to the choir but are notoriously ineffective at planning, executing or, in the case of the ULA it seems, simply just writing. Also, I’ve read a few of their writers, and some of them really arent very good.

Maud Newton is popular, but she’s predictably feminist-oriented with a typically liberal emphasis. She’s also safe, which is boring. I like Bookslut, she’s good. She likes comics, which mixes it up a bit. She’s sort of snarky, which isnt bad in small doses.

Mobylives is the best place to get real literary news, I think. I fear that its readership is rather small, but they seem to cull a good deal of information from “out there” and present it in an honest, fairly objective but pointed manner.

Arts and Letters Daily is a good repository of articles – I do need to mention them.

But I don’t know where they’re all going. I think Mobylives has the best chance at contributing to change, because the guy who writes the summaries there, and the columns he chooses, are practical and accessible. If you read the ULA’s blog, they seem ready to literally string people up. Revolutions are fine, but without guns, they don’t work, and we live in a police state. So slow easy change is probably most likely, although painful.

Unlike most of my essays, this one doesn’t wrap up very well. I guess you’ll have to just take it and go.

- posted by seanmh @ 9:19 AM