my bleeding heart catharsis

i'm sure you've heard the term 'bleeding heart liberal.' it's the conservative way of mocking the left's dedication to social welfare programs. slang-slinging republicans contend that many liberals hear a single sob story and then forge their entire political doctrine with the aim of helping that poor unfortunate soul. that's fine, the conservative might say, but the problem is that these 'bleeding heart' agendas tend to offer free hand-outs to a vast contingent of welfare abusers.

politically, i fall somewhere between the bleeding hearts and their conservative counterparts. however, i'm starting to develop a bleeding heart complex of an altogether different kind: i'm becoming a 'bleeding heart sports fan.' after the seahawks unfathomable playoff loss and the uw huskies sweet sixteen loss, i just can't help complaining about the biased stated of officiating in sports. seriously, i'm sick of sports. that is, i'm sick of sports officiating, and unfortunately, in most sports it's impossible to separate the two. maybe i should join the rest of america and take up nascar.

i don't mean to scapegoat the boys in black and white, i just can't see why they have to make themselves the pivotal piece of sports. refs are like wallpaper -- you only notice them if the colors aren't right. friday's NCAA battle of the dawgs featured more foul calls than minutes, including several lopsided calls against uw that turned the tide of the game in favor of uconn (e.g., the double foul on roy). actually, i think that lorenzo deserves serious props for holding off the uconn advance while half of his starters sat on the pine. and, aggg! the missed goal-tending call? if the refs can swap fouls back and forth between players several minutes after the original play, why can't they review a simple goaltending call? in any case, as sean wrote in yesterday's comments, uw certainly made some stupid mistakes (although, i don't think applebee was necessarily wrong to dish it off. in that situation, i think you really do want to let some more time slip off the clock. besides, wasn't the lane filled with several big guys? applebee wasn't the one to make the awful pass...), uconn showed some more last-minute heroics, and ultimately, us seattle fans should (just forget about the bad calls and) simply be proud of our dawgs.

(but, holy sammamish, it sure is hard)

ps. have you ever wondered what it would be like to roll around in liquid wax? do you think you would burn yourself? it hurts a bit when you stick your finger in candle wax, but it certainly doesn't burn. well, obviously you couldn't dunk your head, but i think it might be fun.

super bowl xl autopsy

i'm disgusted. my philosopher of football (steve) once had me convinced that the those whistle-wearing zebras play a far greater role in the outcome of an nba game than an nfl game. however, i don't think i'd be using much hyperbole to say that sunday's super bowl xl was the most lopsided example of officiating that i've ever seen. honestly, i'm tempted to write a letter to the nfl and demand an apology.

but settle down, andrew, let's take a step back. stay calm...think happy thoughts...

okay, happy thoughts. well, before football there was ping pong. every day after school, my bestfriend and i would sprint into my basement lair and play game after game of ping pong. in fact, we developed an entire pro-ping-pong league. brandon and i were ping-pong gods. i don't mean to imply that we were unbeaten titans of the table; yes, brandon had a killer slam and a crazy-goose style which he recently described as 'a bit out there,' and, yes, the chatty play-by-play crew (that'd be brandon and me) aptly dubbed one of the 'players' on one of my better teams 'stonewall jackson' (i.e., the little white ball of ping-pong goodness just never made it by me), but really our table tennis divinity was less suggestive of our mad-hot skills than our at-will tinkering within the league. because we each managed (and played for) about half of the league, we could doll out wins and losses between our teams with unabashed favortism. in other words, if my bamboo chargers posted a losing record against brandon's teams, i could still pull enough victories from within my set of teams to assure the bc of a mid- to top-seed in the grand, end of the season tourney.

aside from an explosive atmosphere of fun competition, the nfl should bear little resemblance to my ping pong days. it's ridiculous to postulate that nfl commissioner paul tagliabue is pulling strings like some grade school gepetto...right? well, something isn't right. regardless of how i fiddled with the win/loss columns or attempted to stack our table tennis tourneys, it always came down to a gritty showdown, brandon and i in a last race to 21 points.

but the boys in black and white (or is that yellow and white?) seem to think they're nfl gods (more like nfl demons if you're a seahawks fan).

okay, okay, my analogy may be full of holes and a bit silly. after all, i see no easy way to incorporate dropped balls (jerramy stevens) and injuries (andre dyson; marquand isn't that an odd name? manuel, and rocky bernard) into the ping-pong parallel. and how does one explain holmgren's odd play clock management style? in any case, these issues, while important, all seem secondary. let's face it, the mvp award should have gone to referee bill leavy.

my stomach's getting queasy, so its about time to wrap up this rant. before i go, i want to share one last ping-pong memory. occasionally, our ping-pong battles would be disrupted by a parental cry from above or by the low hanging ceiling or, believe it or not, what one of us perceived as a questionable call. in these cases we developed the most indisputable method of settling arguments: 'the do-over.' that is, we would simply serve the ball again and replay that point. perhaps a super bowl with this many bad calls should steel a page from the andrew-brandon playbook, perhaps it simply deserves a do-over.

a four-night pictoral premonition of SEAHAWKS victory

looking into the future, i can just barely hear a chorus of popping champagne corks and the tearful cheers of the 12th man. yes, i see it clearly now: the space needle exploding into bright bursts of light, celebratory fireworks to honor the super bowl xl champions. oh, look i can even upload these visions onto my blog. how 'bout that...
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okay, so these pics are from new years eve night, not february 5th. still, i'm sure we'll have some kind of tribute when we win...(please win, please!!!)

SEAHAWKS are goin' to the SUPERBOWL!

the idea of a seattle team playing for the national football league superbowl is far, far outside the scope of my cerebralsphere. in other matters, i had an interesting conversation with conybeare about punctuation this morning. he was wondering how to punctuate something like this:

can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there?)?
can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there?)
can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there)?

any opinions?

[1.25.05:]

2 votes (beth, mari) for item one. 1 vote (joel) for: can you tell me how to get to sesame street? (is it scary there?) i agree with everyone; based upon my initial grammar god consult (CMS, the everyday writer, and a forum), i think that item one is technically correct. and i strongly agree with joel in that the best way to avoid awkward structure is to just recast the sentence. still, i wonder if can you tell me how to get to sesame street? (is it scary there?) may result in a subtle change in meaning. structurally, it puts a bit more space between the two sentences and thereby may increase the difference in meaning between the two. joel, do you ALWAYS make parenthetical sentences their own sentence or only at the end of sentences? (e.g., would you alter this: the dinosaur (scholars continue to insist that 'dino' means terrible and that 'saur' means lizard) groaned once and was silent. okay, that's a horrible example...

to make matters even more confusing, the cms might actually campaign for item two; here's a similar example from the CMS (well, almost):

Who shouted, 'Fire!'

that's right, no question mark. here's another interesting one:

here favorite songs are 'hello dolly!' 'chicago,' and 'come with me.'