Avdat

More weekend sports blogging

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. I say that schadenfreude is a dish best served in small portions. So I watched the Redskins failed to score on fourth and goal from the one, and then watched Detroit march 99 yards for a touchdown, and now I've got a tummy ache because in that ten minutes of airtime I like, gobbled down a whole year's worth of schadenfreude in one sitting.

Friend, brother in Christ and colleague in ministry Bill from Clemmons NC was taunting me a while back because of a dearth of N.C. State posts on this blog. But why blog about N.C. State when it's so much more fun blogging about the Tarheels? So here's a very special link to Tarheel football highlights from over the weekend. How do you spell overrated? U-N-C.

OK, Bill, just for you, a little N.C. State football blogging. But be warned, you better "get your grown man on" before you watch this:

Most soccer fans aren't stoopid, but...

After pointing out that the Man U stoppage scandal could be easily solved if only soccer kept time like American football, dude shoots back:

Or how bout we have a constant running clock in basketball, hockey, and football and add injury time in an extra quarter, period, etc.

As if I'm making an arbitrary suggestion.

No. I'm not saying that soccer should be more like American sports just because. I'm saying that it's demonstrably better when everyone knows when an athletic event is going to end instead of only a few.

Let's try a thought experiment. What if we made track and field more like soccer? So at the next Olympics, we abolish the concept of set distances. Neither Usain Bolt nor Samuel Wanjiru know whether they're going to run for 100 meters or 26.2 miles. They just show up at the start line, start running when the gun goes off and keep on running until, gosh, I don't know, the official decides the race is over.

Stoopid.

Now Jason Davis at Match Fit USA, who was kind enough to link to my original post on stoppage time, says,

• I love when Americans do this, because while there's validity to the suggestion, they often fail to appreciate how resistant to change sports communities typically are. It's why goal line technology is still not in place, why there's no pitch clock in Major League Baseball, and why angst-ridden discussion follows all of those issues. Eventually changes do come, as we're seeing with the end-line official experiment in the Europa league, but I can't imagine significant changes with timekeeping are ever going to be seriously considered.

As a former minister I have head-banging-against-the-wall experience with the "But we've always done it that way" mentality. It's one reason why I am a former minister.

But that doesn't mean the change isn't right. It just means that people are obstinate.

In regards to timekeeping however, there is a difference. Soccer won't abolish stoppage time because it's a bad habit they just can't break. But the NBA isn't going to embrace stoppage time because to do so would be... stoopid.

Wilder card

We're electing a governor this fall in the Old Dominion. Today's big news is that former governor and former Richmond mayor Doug Wilder won't endorse fellow Democrat Creigh Deeds. The utterly weird Times-Dispatch editorial writers, conservatives with a long-standing man crush on Wilder, say that there's no way to spin this as a positive for Deeds.

I'm not so sure. These days, everybody thinks that Doug Wilder is psycho. White and black. Rich and poor. Democratic and Republican. Isn't a Wilder endorsement the kiss of death? I am conspiratorial enough to think that Obama and Kaine's pleading with Wilder to endorse Deeds was just kabuki theater.

You non-Virginians probably know about GOP candidate Bob McDonnell's master's thesis which exhibited cave man views on gender relations. I like Kevin Drum's 25/25 rule: You can't hold anything against a politician that he/she said more than 25 years ago or prior to his/her 25th birthday. Alas, McDonnell wrote his thesis in 1989 when he was in his mid-30s. It's fair game, and Deeds has been beating on that thesis like a drum, but that says to me that Deeds has yet to shore up his left flank (he was the most conservative of the three Dems in the primary). And he has yet to lock down the soccer mom/security mom/working mom vote.

Deeds is in trouble. You don't want to be going into October in that kind of shape. Plus, the economy stinks, and Democrats have held the governor's office for eight years. Time for a change, right?

There's no way that I'd vote for a troglodyte like McDonnell, but Deeds hasn't run an inspiring campaign. Deeds' ads notwithstanding, governors can't do jack about abortion. Their bread and butter is transportation and education, but all we get from Deeds is, "When I'm Governor, I'm gonna, you know, get people together and come up with a bipartisan transportation plan." Well that's no plan.

The gas tax in North Carolina is 31 cents per gallon. In Virginia it's 19. And Virginia's roads suck. Driving on I-64 in Richmond is like driving to the Baghdad airport. Northern Virginia is a parking lot, any time of day, and in any direction. We need fewer potholes and more mass transit. Just raise the gas tax and be done with it, OK?

Wilder won't endorse Deeds in part because Deeds won't rule out such a tax increase, which Wilder says is regressive. But look; it's not regressive in cities because poor people ride the bus, and even in rural areas, an extra 10 cents per gallon would be invisible--well within the customary price fluctuations of a commodity like gasoline.

Inclusive language back in the day

Halden notesthat the uber-repressed, hyper-patriarchal Augustine once called God Mother. I believe John Calvin did the same thing in his Commentary on Isaiah, although he may have employed a simile rather than a metaphor. I don't have the text before me.

Here's a hunch. Such language is not a protest against patriarchy, or even an attempt to oh-so-slightly smooth patriarchy's sharp edges, but is a direct result of patriarchy. Given the relatively static gender roles of both Calvin and Augustine's day, both theologians could probably experiment with such daring language and feel utterly safe in doing so. "God our Mother" is a kind of via negativafor a pre-egalitarian Christianity.

I'm thinking this because I'm remembering a pastoral visit to an elderly couple, in which the husband, a World War II Navy vet, broke out some old photos of his time in the service. Some of the pictures were of a day when the whole crew, to blow off steam, dressed in drag and threw a party. He laughed out loud at them, but they sort of creeped me out. I think that our different reactions owe a lot to the fact that I came of age in an era of much less gender role stability.

Long story short: people's aversion to inclusive language is at bottom about the vertigo they feel living in a world in which women do run meetings and preside at the Eucharist. But I'm no rhetorician, or a women's studies expert, so feel free to correct me.

Violent movies round three

No herd of wild horses has yet dragged Camassia to see Inglourious Basterds, but she has posted some thoughtful comments (as usual) on Christians and cinematographic violence.

Soccer stoopids can't figure this one out so I will 'splain it to 'em

Deadspin, as usual, breaks the latest shocking sports scandal: When UK soccer behemoth Manchester United is trailing at the end of the match, there's a lot more stoppage time tacked onto the end of the match than when they're in the lead. If you don't know much about soccer, this is sort of like the way that the strike zone shrinks for visiting pitchers in Fenway Park, or how NBA refs seem to swallow their whistles when the home team walks with the ball.

But Deadspin can't see the forest for the trees. I mean, what's the deal with stoppage time anyway? How can a continent that gave us Swiss watches and cuckoo clocks not figure out a way for its marquee athletic events to actually end when the clock strikes zero? Or 90:00? (That's actually problem in its own right; why do you count up to end a match?)

Let me be so bold as to suggest that European "football" could learn something from American football. What if, when there was an injury, or when players are running all over the place in delirium because somebody actually put the ball in the net, the official, I don't know, say, waved his hands over his head?

And what if there was a little guy up there with his hand on the switch that controls the scoreboard, and when he saw the official doing that hand waving thingy, he, I don't know, stopped the clock?

Once everybody gets over their delirium, or once it no longer serves the player's purpose to fake an injury and he bounces back up, then the official could do this little hands-on-a-clock-face motion to signal the guy running the scoreboard to, you know, start the clock again:

Now I know what my hoards of European readers are going to say. They're going to say, "Marvin, cut the ugly American act. Your McDonalds has already ruined French cuisine and your Hollywood has already demolished the venerable Polish art house cinema. Now you want to destroy Der Fußball aussi?"

Mai non, Monsieur! Keeping accurate time will in no way prevent flopping, nor will it curtail the offensive explosions that make soccer simply mesmerizing to watch. It just takes the guesswork out of when to end the game. Think of it as a DNR order. Most helpful.

A Tarantino free post about violence and hateful, spiteful onlookers

I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:

 A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.

Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:

I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”,  “Dismembered Fetus”, and “BodyBagz”?  That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to ‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!

"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.

And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.

I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.

I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.

But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.

Still not convinced that violence is beautiful and nihilism is cool

Regarding Brad East's hand wringing over whether or not to watch Inglourious Basterds and Adam Kotsko's snarky reply, I think everyone ought to read this little tale of a quadruple murder in a sleepy southern town not far from yours truly's. The obvious rejoinder is that music (or film, or media) don't kill people; people kill people. Just like guns, right? Or in this case, an unidentified blunt instrument.

It's awfully tempting for highly educated, culturally literate persons to think they are different than a twerp like Richard Samuel Alden McCroskey. Different enough that they can live beyond good and evil. But if I may double down on my prudishness with a little proof-texting, I seem to remember that someone somewhere said to somebody, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"

Which is why "intelligent Christians" are right to worry about the the effect that the toxic mix of gratuitous violence (or explicit sex, for that matter) coupled with a nihilistic worldview might have on one's body and soul.

Can kissing this bone clear my blocked duct, or should I try the sage again?

We kicked off our Medieval Christianity class with Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints. A classmate who moonlights as a humanities teacher at a parochial high school said he appreciated the book because Brown rather forcefully pushes back against the CWthat the transition from Patristic to Medieval Christianity basically amounts to a re-paganization of the Church. That's the point of view he sees articulated in a lot of western civ textbooks.

Brown's argument, in short, is that both Jews and pagans regarded cemeteries as places of cultic pollution, and viewed with askance the Christian move to build churches over the graves of the martyrs. When Christianity moved into the Roman and post-Roman countryside, they erected shrines as monuments to the saints out there too. It wasn't so much the Church shrewdly co-opting the pagan pantheon--the goddess Brigit morphing into the nun who founded the Church at Kildaire, for example. It was instead the triumph of a Christianized urban patronage system over a rural healthcare system based on herbal remedies and magic. The sick in the countryside were convinced/compelled to seek healing from the martyred saint's relics at the shrine in the way that pagan urban Romans once sought relief from their patrons at the Forum. (The bishop here acts as the saint's authorized representative).

So, yea! No pagan-Christian syncretism! And Boo on all those Protestant historiographies that say as much about everything that happened between 325 and 1519.

But the problem with what did happen-assuming Brown's argument is correct--is that Christians engaged in an act of gross cultural imperialism as they evangelized the rural West. In terms of healing, it was probably a wash. The placebo effect from seeking a cure from an especially efficacious relic was probably as good as the trial by error herbal remedies rural Celts and Gallo-Romans had arrived at. But why not investigate whether or not the roots and herbs had any healing power apart from the incantations said over them, and run with it? Alas, it was an age of scientific and technological stasis.

Long story short: Christianity obviously changed a whole lot between, say, Irenaeus (3rd century) and Gregory the Great (7th century), and there's a bit fight in the scholarly community as to whether the Church conceded too much (see Russell's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or too little (see any neo-pagan revisionist European history or any of the laments that Celtic Christianity got squashed by the Roman bureacracy) as it ensconced itself among the barbarians invaders and the rural populace.

It's a fun period to study because Christianity always has to sail between Scylla of syncretism and the Charybdis of imperialism in its missionary journey, and you get these issues in spades in the late antique-early medieval period.

Plot by numbers

A Facebook friend directed me to Slate's interactive Dan Brown plot generator! Plug in a city and a sect and voila! Page-turning, conspiratorial fun. And you don't have to wait through those interminable pauses between publication. As I told my friend, long have I suspected that the US Postal Service's presence in Buenos Aires wasn't altogether benign. But I had no idea of the evil they were prepared to unleash...