Perfect, I was considering a post for this link too: calculating the athletes at the Olympics performing highest above the mean for their events. Lots of Dutch endurance athletes on that list...
The Bazelon piece is very good. F(anybody's)I, she's done a bunch of reporting (and maybe wrote a book?) on bullying. I didn't realize the underlying report was so well done.
[Note: Title is a quote from the Kathy Bates character in The Waterboy. ... not that anyone needs to be told that.]
Actually, the note was meant just for your information, heebie. I do wonder if any female ever watched The Waterboy of her own volition.
Here's the counterpoint on Rolle: http://espn.go.com/blog/tennessee-titans/post/_/id/4950/a-simpler-reason-why-myron-rolle-missed
2: Yes. The Rolle piece is not as strong, but I vaguely recalled him from when he was a prospect (or maybe when he was briefly a Steeler) and had no idea of the backstory and outcome--I would have guess he was playing somewhere.
That counterpoint doesn't exactly make its case very strongly.
Actually, the note was meant just for your information, heebie. I do wonder if any female ever watched The Waterboy of her own volition.
I wondered, and edited out the part which was unmistakenly to me, but then figured that many of us would need help with the quote. Which I saw of my own volition, IIRC, but what, 15 years ago?
8: Really, you said to yourself I want to go see this Adam Sandler picture?
I don't understand why anybody sees Adam Sandler pictures. Even Operaman bits were just way too much of him.
7:Because meritocracy, neb.
Actually, that seems to be the rare article that is worth reading the (very few) comments. One of Rolle's brothers shows up to take issue.
9: Apparently it came out in 1998, but my memory is that living in the dorm (1995-6) there was a steady drone of every Adam Sandler memory airing constantly. I suppose there were also those grunts of the pixelated WoW ogres that the boys played. There was also a SES(?) hockey game that was on nonstop. So I guess those three sounds, braided together, emanating from the boys hall, which I was not a stranger to.
I doubt I saw it in the theater but I definitely saw it, even if not in the dorm.
10: I actively dislike most of them, but The Waterboy really hit just the right note of stupid for me (you've got to ignore a lot of actual stupid stupid just like with a Caitlin Flanagan article). The good old boy who no one can understand squeezing his nipples at the climax of the comeback was pretty inspired, for instance.
I didn't dislike Adam Sandler movies, but they took me a couple showings before I started to see why anyone would find them funny.
ACTUALLY! I remember seeing Waterboy while home from college, in Florida, at a theater. So there you have it. And now that I remember which one it is, I found it funnier than the other ones.
I wonder if someone with Rolle's skill level and career path could have made it in another money sport. Red Sox setup man Craig Breslow (the guy who beat Rolle for the top spot in that "smartest athlete" listicle in 2010) deferred admission to medical school at NYU to play baseball and seems to have done pretty well, but that may just be a function of league-average left-handed relievers being a more valuable commodity than third-on-the-depth-chart safeties.
1: That Polish ski jumper (shows up twice) did seem to have something clearly beyond everyone else*.
*I await the revelation of subtle cheating. Something along the lines of the Soapbox Derby racers** who put electromagnets in the noses of their cars and so got briefly pulled forward by the mechanism which released the cars.
**My favorite cheat ever and, like academic politics, done for very low stakes.
I think Billy Madison is close to a genius level comedy, and Happy Gilmore is excellent. The rest of them just kind of grind on with the same formula until it's a moldering corpse, and obviously there are a string of really unwatchable movies. I do remember finding The Waterboy OK when I saw it in the theater.
12: after half a minute of wondering what exactly socioeconomic-status hockey would be, and that you must have gone to either a much more liberal or much more regressive college than I did, it occurred to me you probably mean SNES (or Genesis).
18: Mr. Halford, what you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this thread is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
there was a steady drone of every Adam Sandler memory airing constantly
Implantation at work.
I used to dislike Adam Sandler, but then he rescued me from having to sit through endless incredibly boring Elmo videos with this little gem . It's got Elmo but it's actually entertaining and it's short....THANK YOU MR. ADAM SANDLER.
True story: The first I ever heard of Feist was her appearance on Sesame Street.
12: I suppose there were also those grunts of the pixelated WoW ogres that the boys played.
World of Warcraft only came out in 2004, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was '94, and Warcraft 2 was '95, and I suppose one can argue that the the Warcraft 1/2 ogres are, in some sense, the same ogres as in WoW, so I suppose I shouldn't be quite such a little bitch about this.
The Adam Sandler comedy I liked best was Little Nicky, so of course it's the one flop.
I've been unlucky with the movies on transocean flights, so I've managed to see both Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2. I thought Grown Ups was possibly the worst movie I'd ever seen, until I saw Grown Ups 2, which a comedy that's so unfunny that it's very ineptness makes it funny. The plot is the same plot as the first season Community episode where Jeff gets in a fist-fight with Anthony Michael Hall, except any 10 seconds of the episode are funnier than the entire movie.
World of Warcraft only came out in 2004, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was '94, and Warcraft 2 was '95, and I suppose one can argue that the the Warcraft 1/2 ogres are, in some sense, the same ogres as in WoW,
Oh how fascinating!
You can never enter the same ogre twice. Except if you're Shrek, I guess.
27: You obviously haven't seen Shrek Does Dallas
I was trying to guess which "boyman" comedy has had the most gender-skewed viewing ratios. Sandler's a pro, but the competition is intense.
Maybe Tommy Boy? That one was hard for me to see the humor in. Eventually I chuckled.
Bad Santa? I loathe Bad Santa. Maybe it's not gender-lines, but that is one divisive movie. No one seems neutral on it.
Oh whatshisface. The Ballad of Ricky Bobby?
Which I do think is a really funny movie, but I never would have watched it of my own volition, if that's the criteria we're using.
31: Is it possible it's still growing on you? In five years, maybe you'll laugh.
I disliked Adam Sandler and his movies until I saw Punch Drunk Love and realized I just hadn't really understood him. PDL is a pretty fucked up film, but it's fascinating, and having seen it I realize how much smarter and sadder Sandler movies are than I had given them credit for.
Now I'm just naming movies that Jammies' younger brothers always seem to watch on TV. Hot Tub Time Machine? Anchorman? Impossibly dull action movies? Isn't it ironic that action movies are so fucking dull?
Alex is a single, 36-year-old video game tester who lives with his friend Josh. When Josh spends their rent money on Filipino hookers, his landlord kicks them both out, and Alex has to find a new place to live. Alex tries to stay with his marijuana dealer, Dante, but cannot do so because Dante is adopting a wild lion to live in the house. Alex spends one night with his co-worker Jeff, but Jeff still lives with his parents. After an embarrassing "encounter" with Jeff's mom, in which he is caught masturbating in the bathroom and subsequently ejaculates on her, Alex is forced to move in with his grandmother and her two eccentric friends, Bea and Grace.
Hey ladies!
I really don't think 37 is right. Looking at how his crap has gotten even worse and more formulaic in the ensuing years, I think Punch-Drunk Love was more like Starship Troopers where the director intentionally cast bad actors for reasons of social commentary.
I love Starship Troopers. There are a half-dozen sci-fi movies where anytime someone mentions it, I have a half-second where I hope they're talking about Starship Troopers.
NOOO! I mean Galaxy Quest! I always hope people are talking about Galaxy Quest. I've never seen Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers is pretty much the same as Galaxy Quest except that it has Doogie Howser instead of Snape.
20: I used a bit of that speech reviewing a very bad paper for my boss (including "dumber for having read it"), and he was so delighted he included it in a private note to the editor.
I had not realized until looking up Adam Sandler movies on imdb just now that Richie Brockleman is responsible for so much of this stuff. Jim Rockford must be very disappointed.
41 is an awesome way to get confused.
I knew Dennis Dugan was the director of 450 horrible comedies and one good comedy (Brain Donors), but didn't know he was an actor!
It's evident here that HG has mastered time travel. That's probably why she was so confused about the pace at which fashions change.
HG -- Wells. Hidden in plain sight, probably to avoid the pressure of being expected to go kill Hitler.
How can you not like Bad Santa?
I would probably happily watch Grandma's Boy, were I hungover and without anything better to do.
The part of The Time Machine where Professor Challenger travels forward in time to kill Hitler always gives me chills.
How can you not like Bad Santa?
Easy?
I've seen Grandma's Boy more than once. It was better than I expected. Also, I was higher than I've been in a long time. The antagonist character is a pretty hilariously on-point caricature of various people I've known.
To the OP, that Rolle article is weird. Some остранение:
The second possibility is Rolle lacked the desire to succeed; that his other goals superseded his desire to be a professional stamp collector, which translated to poor performance. This was the American Philatelic Association's fear, so Rolle did all he could to quell those reservations, working overtime to maintain peak philatelic knowledge even as he completed a rigorous academic program. Had his heart not been in the APA, he could have gone directly from Oxford to medical school. And after he returned from Oxford, Rolle often refused to talk about anything other than stamp collecting, despite his stamp collecting friends pushing him to do otherwise. "I wanted to be completely and totally entrenched, immersed in this philatelic life, this culture all the way, so you don't even have a thought, an inkling, that my mind is somewhere else."
HG Wells--
http://io9.com/5801409/a-warehouse-13-spin+off-starring-hg-wells-yes-please
41.2: Ducts. Why Is It Always Ducts?
Adam Sandler is a fine actor, I just hate his typical character.
I liked The Wedding Singer, because it's not like a typical Adam Sandler movie at all, in that he plays a more or less plausible human being. It's a romcom, but more funny and less sappy than most, I thought, and the sappiness was handled well.
I liked The Waterboy, because it's a typical Adam Sandler movie, but unlike Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore I didn't get the impression I was supposed to empathize with his character. I felt pity for him, but he's clearly brain-damaged and comes from a completely alien environment. Unlike most Sandler movies there was no point at which I got the impression I was supposed to put myself in his shoes, so I could just ignore what passed for pathos and laugh at the pratfalls.
I didn't enjoy Punch Drunk Love, but from what I saw of it I had the impression it was a good movie, I just wasn't enjoying myself. I can imagine it would have been a sobering corrective to the hypothetical person who likes the usual Adam Sandler movie, if they were smart enough to get it.
I liked the one where he plays the sadsack post-911 PTSD love interest.
Brain Donors also bombed. There's probably a life lesson here.
31: Maybe Tommy Boy?
That's one I thought of. Maybe Dumb and Dumberer, I could see a few women being fooled into seeing the first, but surely not after it. Similarly for Ferrell/John C. Reilly I could see Talladega Nights getting some play, but surely not Step Brothers.
Brain Donors also bombed. There's probably a life lesson here.
Never go full retard?
Dumb and Dumber was pretty great. I can't recall Dumb and Dumberer, but I know I saw it.
30: Hard to say. To be the biggest ratio, the numerator can't be tiny too. But Encino Man did come to mind.
I saw Biodome and it was completely unwatchable even after adjusting my standards down because of Baldwin.
High-profile volition? Or moderate-plus?
I have not seen any Sandler movies, or any of the other movies in this thread. OTOH, I did watch Diary of a Country Priest, Bresson 1951 last night, and
***spoilers***
"What does it matter? All is Grace."
(in French, of course)
***spoiler end***
I presume the Sandler movies have that exact message, with less malice and judgement for those who surround him.
Whatever.
----
Brain surgeon, social activist, humanitarian...or NFL safety? What a quandary! Show me the money!! was a favorite catchphrase in America not long ago. Kid's a complete fail commie, ship him back to Barbados, we don't want his kind around here.
I wonder what the names of various penile implants are? I'd suggest:
Plenipotentiary
Panjandrum
Pundit
Pontiff
Now I feel less deep for missing that point of Adam Sandler movies.
Strongest recollection if the Diary of a C Priest is how damp the dude was. I may have added retrospective humidity but dude struck me as taking wet to a whole new level.
70: Was he standing in the rain? Sweating?
No! I know! Participating in a wet t-shirt contest! Right?
This from Billy Madison is just wonderful. Also the moment at the end where he looks to the sky and sees three smiling faces shining down is just perfect.
Bad Santa is one of my favorite all-time movies.
72.1: Happy Gilmore was one of Billy Madison's best roles.
73: I was going to remark on the unexpected direction the thread had taken, but in a way that was supportive and nurturing.
Ogged wants to talk about the Longest Yard remake, everybody. Get to it.
If anyone has not read it yet, I will reprise Sifu's link to the fantastic black quarterback compilation.
Joe Gilliam (Steeler's 1970s) always fascinated me. At the NFL combine, he ran a slow 40-yard dash on purpose, so coaches wouldn't consider him at wide receiver or cornerback. Briefly started ahead of Bradshaw.
Tweety, what's that doing under your name!
I presume the Sandler movies have that exact message, with less malice and judgement for those who surround him.
I think I missed the part in DofaCP where the CP gets squealingly, vermilion-facedly furious over some petty challenge to his infantile hungers and attacks an elderly man.
Great sports thread, nerds.
Heels! 4-0 against the AP and coaches' poll preseason Top 4.
71: just google images and its plain as day wet wet wet if you shook his hand it would be ugh damp. Shudder.
re strong sense impressions, the malodorous fug arising from the O'Hagan piece in the LRB is remarkable. Pity the Ecuadoreans, or at least whoever has to enter his hidey hole to empty the trash.
77.2: Despite a fan base of Neanderthal racist goobers locals, Pittsburgh had an interesting stretch in the late '60s and '70s with black athletes.
Clemente: Forcing his way into the fans' reluctant admiration by relentlessly being better than everyone else at his position.
September, 1 , 1971: First all-black starting lineup in MLB history. (Dock Ellis starting pitcher, but not the LSD game recently linked). 11,000 in attendance (Mets led league with 2.0M, would have been 23rd in 2013.) World Series champs that year.
Willie Stargell: Black star with congenial personality loved by fans.
Dave Parker: Black star with uncongenial personality despised by fans.
1979: We Are Family World Champs: Also cocaine. Later Pittsburgh Parrot (white guy) implicated in Pittsburgh Drug Trials.
Joe Gilliam: First black QB to start season as starting QB in NFL.
Frenchy Fuqua: Of goldfish in the heels fame. He was the intended receiver of the Immaculate Reception and who the ball may have bounced off before being scooped up by Italian/Black Franco Harris. (And of course Stallworth, Swann, Mean Joe Harris and other Steeler stalwarts.)
And last (and probably least in Pittsburgh memories), Connie Hawkins leading the Pittsburgh Pipers to the first ABA championship in 1968.
If you get silver by being trounced in the final are you Scottish or British?
86: Have to ask ajay and ttam.
(because asking the English cohort is important, but they're marginally less likely to stab you).
And now having mentioned or eluded to the sports of:
Foosball
Football
Boxing
Ski Jumping
Soap Box Derby
Golf
Basketball
Baseball
and Curling,
I think we should talk about food.
Or even "alluded." The "getting old" thread is over there.
I could have easily made that typo as a 30-year old!
I finally watched some speed skating today for the first time this Olympics (the men's 1000m short track final). Exciting!
I saw grown ups 2, and it was better than I thought it would be. I thought it would be pretty bad though.
I've watching all speed skating, long and short, every heat, and nothing else at all.
The speed skating where they are racing against each other is pretty exciting. The "pursuit" was not. Canada seemed to be 1.5 seconds ahead of the US after 15 seconds, and they continued to be 1.5 seconds ahead for the ensuing 20 laps.
All those speed skating events are the transposition of indoor bicycle racing onto ice. All the rules and strategy are directly transferred. There are still six-day professional track races in Europe, as died out here in this country after the war even though it had held its own until then.
The other sport, enjoying a huge resurgence in popularity and also employing the same rules and strategies? Roller Derby.
Is there a reason not to suspect the Dutch skaters of doping?
Maybe, but it would be a stretch. Like with Lance Armstrong.
I've followed bike racing very closely for years, and am a fan regardless of doping, which I don't condone. I thought it likely Armstrong was doping when that was not a popular opinion, and he was the only American cyclist the average person had heard of.
Speed skating is closely related to cycling, and many athletes have competed in both: the Heidens, frer et soeur were the last prominent Americans, I think.
Are the Dutch doping? I have no idea, but it isn't the first thing I think of, nor would it have to be true for a better program to produce these results. As for the Americans, Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair have both suggested diplomatically that the assumptions of the program, particularly training at Salt Lake City may have been a mistake.
Maybe the skaters and their coaches didn't want to spend time in West Allis. I know the overwhelming majority of American cyclists live in Colorado, and rationalize doing so with altitude training theories, when they might just like it better.
97: Ah, so that is what you were getting at in 1.
No question they had an extremely strong Olympics taking 21 of 30 medals (compare 13 of 36 at the 2013 Worlds also at Sochi), but I don't see anything exceptionally pronlematic. They've always been dominant, so did not come out of nowhere like Floyd Landis or Chinese women swimmers a few years back, but they have also not absolutely transformed the standards of competition like East German women's swimming in the '70s. The times were good but not staggering, 4 Olympic records (one by the South Korean woman on that list) and no world records. It seems that they did do relatively better at Sochi than the rest of this season, and sure, the Olympics would be where to do that--but they did so across distances from 500 to 10,000 meters which generally respond to very different kinds of doping. (I think the longer distances could get one-time boost from blood-doping a la Landis's magic day in the mountains, but I don't know of anything that does that for sprints, for indtance.)
I think standard-level suspicion of athletic doping is in order, and if so it is probably sport-wide although the Dutch would probably be best at it like they seem to be in every other aspect of the sport.
98: Not to mention Stretch Armstrong.
Couple of years ago, my youngest: "Neil Armstrong? Isn't he a cyclist?" Didn't know whether to be impressed that she knew the name Armstrong, or think she was woefully ignorant.
And er, 86, I may have referred to them as Scots after they lost.
I liked the crazy skating relay races.
NOOO! I mean Galaxy Quest! I always hope people are talking about Galaxy Quest.
I'm watching Galaxy Quest for the first time right now. Keith Mars makes a fantastic alien.
Saw Galaxy Quest after hearing Patrick Stewart praise it on a talk show. Tim Allen's performance was a revelation, but good work from all the stars.
The short track relay race is taken directly from track cycling on the small, steeply-banked indoor venues--very different from long track Olympic races, which are exactly analogous to long-track speed skating. In cycling, the outside rider gives a hand sling to his teammate coming up from the inside, transferring momentum with a kind of handshake. In short track speed skating this is done with two hands on the reliever's back.
The brilliance of short-track speed skating is that it doesn't require specialized and expensive facilities. Banking is not required because the skates can bite the ice at an extreme angle. So short-trackers can come from a much larger and more distributed pool than long trackers. Even a huge, rich country like the US has only two places you can do long-track, but hundreds where you can do short-track.
that his other goals superseded his desire to be a professional stamp collector
Any coach will tell you that nothing has killed more philatelic careers than developing an interest in rereading Lady Chatterly.
Even a huge, rich country like the US has only two places you can do long-track,
Well, four if you count outdoor ovals, and even more if you count the more casual seasonal ones, like Saratoga used to have and might still for all I know. But basically, yeah.
I love that Unfogged has two Americans who follow speed-skating, neither of whom lives in Wisconsin, conclusively disproving Slate's assumptions about the extent of non-Dutch interest in the sport.
According to Wikipedia there only 30 indoor tracks in the world. Six of them in the Netherlands. Which is more lack of support for the doping theory. And I wonder if there are some specific accidents of geography involving topography, water, and climate that might contribute to the roots of the sport there.
Apparently the Tonya-Nancy thing is going to air sometime in the 7-8:30 time slot on NBC this evening. (In EST, not sure how they've been handling time zones.)
Photos from the abandoned parts of the site of the Sarajevo Olympics.
Apparently the Tonya-Nancy thing is going to air sometime in the 7-8:30 time slot on NBC
Saw it was going to be on, remembered our discussion here, decided I didn't have the stomach.
My wife and I have always enjoyed the Gala, the unjudged free skates after the competition is over, and that's what we were watching.
And I wonder if there are some specific accidents of geography involving topography, water, and climate that might contribute to the roots of the sport there
And history, of course. Think renaissance paintings of skaters on the canals. Does anybody read Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates any more?
114.1: Yes, despite my post on the incident and having watched the recent ESPN one, not finding this one appealing. Putting right there on closing night seems a bit much--but I couldn't say why. Trust me that Harding will not come off well.
Just watched it and it was better than I feared. If you ignored the utter indictment of everyone's character (including mine) that our continuing interest represents it was quite well done.
Also this NY Time piece: "I Was a Tonya Harding Look-Alike".
Does anybody read Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates any more?
Probably not, but they fucking should!
It's like Die Hard on a frozen canal.
I liked reading Hans Brinker when I was a kid. The surgery fascinated me, as even then I knew it was happening a long time ago.
One final note on Harding, there was a documentary on her as a teenager made in 1986 by a fimmaker from Yale, . Some of the footage in last night's show was taken from it, including the few bits with her mother talking about her. I've only watched about a quarter of it, but it certainly gives a fuller sense of her family and skating life at the time. Her mother is quite the odd bird--and literally has an odd bird on her shoulder during the interview.
I've seen Striking Distance and that was on a river that was not frozen.
The only thing frozen about that movie was the facial expressions of the cast.
Why couldn't the movie with Bruce Willis as a Pittsburgh river cop (?) be the same movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme saving the day at a Penguins game? Then you'd really have something.
"Striking Death" or "Sudden Distance"?
The persistence of the class war/troubled life narrative about Harding is more than a little obnoxious. Sure, there's all that, but underneath it all, she's an asshole.
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