Category Archives: Americana

Sunday night NFL

Americana

Michele and I watched Sunday night football last night – the first non-title NFL game I have seen in years, probably twenty years – and it was a shock. By way of background, I used to love football. I was a huge Raider fan with season tickets on about the twenty yard line and watched them – starting when John Rauch was their coach and continuing through the John Madden years – become a dominant team. The Raiders personified – for me – the American dream of a group of outcasts coming together and being more than just the sum of their parts.

But that was a long time ago. Even before Superbowls were marked by Roman numeral. The first shock was how jingoistic football has become: it is now America’s game. The second shock is the irony of America’s game being the Hyundai Sunday night game with the Toyoda halftime show. Huh? America? Hyundai? Toyoda? I am not very comfortable with the hyper-nationalism that requires everybody to wear a flag pin, but, What the hell! I like Hyundai, I like Toyoda, and I love irony.

The game hasn’t changed much, sure there is more passing -as an aside, I once watched Kansas City beat the Raiders in a title game, when both their wide receivers were hurt, by passing only three times during the entire game, end aside – but the game still seems to be controlled at the line of scrimmage; everybody is bigger and faster and more skilled, but the cornerbacks are still covering the wide receivers and the linebackers are still getting burned if they commit to the run too early.

The coverage – TV coverage, not linebacker coverage – however is really different. The ability to isolated individual players and make everybody else disappear is great, seeing both the line of scrimmage and the first down line as lines on the field is very handy, and the video-photography is outstanding. And, the constant flow of huge amounts of information is much more helpful to somebody like me who doesn’t know any of the players.

However, the whole time I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a like a roman circus. A distraction to keep our minds off of Afghanistan, off of house foreclosures, off of the country slowly changing from the American Dream to a new jingoistic America keeping us in line by keeping us scared. I hope I am wrong but I don’t think so.

 

The gray lady is becoming a hot chick

Americana, Web/Tech

I don’t think it is a good idea to trust the New York Times as your only news source. (When I saw New York Times, I don’t mean the dead tree edition, but the living WWW edition.) In some areas it is wonderfully neutral, in some areas it is Liberal and other areas it is Conservative: Conservative in that it is for the status quo and against change. So, if you want accurate reporting on Occupy Wall Street, don’t go to the New York Times, but if you want to read about stuff that is not controversial, that is not threatening to the status quo,  the NYT is your go to place.

It does a great job – and I mean this in the best possible way – on reporting on the latest trends in cat shows, or on new women comedians breaking taboos. It is the place to go to see photos of cricket in Johannesburg, or read a blog on almost anything. And it is doing an even better job almost every day. When I go to an article on smart phone cameras, for example, a little goodie pops up in the lower right corner of my computer that says More in Personal Tech (2 of 14 articles) App Smart: For Thanksgiving….In the article on women comedians, the article references Phoebe Robinson, a petite comedian from Cleveland, and the link takes us to a bit by her on You Tube site.

Going to the site, I get the feeling that I could spend a week there and not see it all: start but not have time to finish eight page article on sex education at the private Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia, read book reviews not covered almost anywhere else, see a video on Libya ’s oil industry. The site is alive and getting better almost every day – with lots of color pictures of course. Just don’t expect an balanced look at Occupy Wall Street.

 

Lost in Reamde

Americana, Around home, Books

On a rainy fall day, there is almost nothing better than curling up with a good book in front of the fireplace. For me, this fall, the book has been Reamde by Neil Stephenson. But, now it is a bright sunny day and the book still has me in its clutches. To quote from the New York times book review:

Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting.

This is the kind of book that it is easy to get lost in, easy to be transported to a new place in . The world on the printed page becomes more real than the real world which fades to being only a distraction from the book. Lord of the Rings was like that. I think that I read Lord of the Rings about three times over a six year period. I knew I was hooked when I would try to catch a few paragraphs while stopped at traffic lights. Another, for me, was Shogun by James Clavell.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer – for some strange reason – was one of those books and it started me on a World War II binge.

Not that Stephenson always makes it easy: his characters usually have goofy names that are hard to pronounce like Richard Forthrast, they are sort of improbable, and the first hundred pages are setup. But then it takes off, much like Shogun, in an episodic blast. Each event leads to another with consequences that seems both improbable and,  somehow,  inevitable.  Along the way, while we are running at full speed, Stephenson – running alongside and whispering in our ear – explains the world. For example, a British handler explains to a spy how the American counter-terrorist system works:

The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex…. It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.

How can a nice, sunny, fall, day compete with that?