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Legends of Learning

As a super nerd, I have read not only every one of Malcolm Gladwell's books and both of the Freakonomics compendiums, but also Christopher Booker's wonderful 742 page opus The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (I read that one during jury duty (and I don't care what anyone says, jury selection is the highest form of comedy and I wish I did get called in every year)).

I like reading these books because they give me insight into aspects of our modern world that I would otherwise never have thought of, like why Heinz really has the best ketchup, or how many people really heard Kitty Genovese being murdered and whether or not they cared. But whether you're writing about teachers cheating on behalf of their students or why Blue's Clues is actually more educational than Sesame Street, understanding our world in an any aspect in any era boils down to one fundamental fact: human beings learn through stories.

For example, if I asked you what was the name of Ross and Carol's baby on Friends, most of you would be like, “Who's Carol? Was she even a Friends character? I remember Ross dated that Chinese woman for a while, but they didn't have a baby, did they?”

But those of you who watched the show would remember the episode where the baby was born, and you'd remember that Ross keeps fighting with Carol's girlfriend Susan about who is more helpful, and Phoebe has to drag them into a supply closet and they get locked in and almost miss the birth completely, but luckily a janitor wants some supplies and he lets them out of the closet just in time, so they name the baby Ben, after the janitor. So there we see how much easier it is to remember a fact when it is part of a story.

To that end, I have found a few current NFL players who have interesting stories going on in their lives. Hopefully by taking an interest in these individuals, it will help us all to take a greater interest in the league as a whole. It's like watching Friday Night Lights except you have to watch the news and you never actually see them having sex.


BRETT FAVRE – Brett Favre was the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers for ever and ever and ever, but he turned 40 last year, which is prime if you're an opera singer, but it's downright geriatric for Olympic athletes and ballerinas, and long in the tooth for football players. Knowing this, Brett Favre retired from the Packers in 2007. They had a party and gave him a cake and everything. But then he sat around for a whole summer and got bored, and there wasn't anybody to play with, and he didn't feel that bad, so he decided to unretire. Only problem was, the Packers didn't want him back. So there was duh-rama. Brett Favre played for the Jets in 2008 and the Vikings in 2009. He might play for the Vikings again in 2010, but he hasn't decided yet. I personally think he should do a farewell tour every year, like Barbra Streisand, and then when some space opens up at the Venetian he can run a permanent show four nights a week in Vegas, like all the other legends.

DONOVAN MCNABB – Donovan McNabb is interesting (to me, at least), in the same way that Evan is interesting on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge: he's pretending to play for everybody's team right now. And by everybody's, I mean his own(the Philadelphia Eagles) and Brett Favre's. You see, an “unidentified source,” which we will refer to as “Deepnovan McThroat,” apparently told the Philly newspapers that McNabb wants to be traded to the Vikings and take over Favre's spot if Favre retires. Then McNabb (as McNabb this time), went to the coach of the Eagles and told him that wasn't true and he's totally happy staying with the Eagles and not getting a huge raise or playing with a better team. So that's going on.

BEN ROETHLISBERGER – So, the Trials of Young Roethlisberger currently qualifies as the NFL's version of Gossip Girl. After sorting through all of the very repetitive articles reporting this story over the last two or three weeks, here's the story as I understand it: Bugs Rutabaga and some buddies fell down a flight of stairs and landed in a thrilling metropolis called Milledgeville, Georgia. They went to a nightclub and Bean Wafflestomper had sex with a girl in the bathroom, and then later she said it was assault. Rufflesteamer's lawyers feel like they have a good case, because she didn't go to the police immediately. Her lawyers feel like they have a good case, because Rumplestiltskin was previously charged with sexual assault in Nevada. I'm not going to take sides or anything because I'm sure he's a complete douche bag, but I would like to point out that according to basically everyone, sexual assault is not recognized as a crime in Nevada.

CHAD OCHOCINCO – This guy's parents named him Chad Johnson, but he wanted everyone to remember who he was, so he changed his name to Ocho Cinco because he wears number 85. He used the Spanish translation for “eight five” because he made the trade during Hispanic Heritage Month (October, 2006). He constantly proves his stamina to his fans by making hours-long entries on a video blog (see previous link), and he is currently a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. In other words, this guy is possibly the awesomest human being alive.

This entry has run a little long and I apologize, but I feel like it was worth it. Hopefully, these man can do for us what Achilles did for Greece, Arthur did for England, and Gandhi did for India, by making complicated and possibly fictional events into just a story about a guy, so that we can remember it.

I guess this is sort of news. Mini-Post 2

Ho (and I do mean ho). Lee. Crap.

We all have one month to perfect our spray-on tans and even out our boob jobs. April 24th will be tryout day for new Dolphins cheerleaders!!

So if you're skinny, double-jointed, and like to yell, and you're going to be in Southern Florida for the next year, you could do what I would do and kill yourself, or you could audition to be on the cheer squad for the Miami Dolphins, and be appreciated as the artist you truly are.

After wracking my brain to write an essay about this, I realized that I can't come up with anything funnier than the “How to Prepare” page they have provided themselves for potential applicants, so here's the link. Enjoy.

(PS - The girl in the picture says her name is Andrea and I used this photo without her permission, so if she or anyone who claims to know her contacts me and angrily asks me to remove it, I will.)

Football News Mini-Post 1

So, all the dicking around I've been doing here for the last six weeks has been fun. But even though Sandra Bullock totally won an Oscar and seems to be a strong contender for her husband's love (although not a front-runner; she doesn't have enough tattoos), if I want to be knowledgeable for the upcoming football season TMZ just isn't going to prepare me. So I spent a couple of hours going through the news on nfl.com and I learned a few things, but I have ultimately decided that this blog can only really handle one news item at a time. On the other hand, maybe I'll post a little more often for the next few days. Top news story:

It's free agent season!

Okay, so every week, somebody gets voted off of Project Runway, right? And then at the beginning of the next episode, whoever won the challenge gets to pick if they want to kick the loser's model off the show, or if they want to exacerbate their own model's eating disorder by picking someone else to wear their clothes. This is so heart-wrenching that it has actually inspired a spin-off reality series about the models, which I don't watch because I can't take anyone seriously if they consider walking to be a skill. Anyway, free agent season is like the NFL's model roulette, except that the models—I mean, football players—actually have some say in their own fate. During free agent season, any football player who has completed a stipulated number of seasons with their current team is eligible to receive offers from other teams to see if they can make more money. There's a whole equation for how much they're supposed to make compared to what they made last year and what other guys who play their position are also making, but I'm not about to pile math onto everything else here. The important thing is, this is the time when football players change teams, usually.

To someone who really follows football I'm sure this is fascinating. I myself enjoy a good round of crazy politics and intrigue every now and again—that's why I'm such a huge fan of the Real World: Road Rules Challenge. But as of yet I'm not familiar enough with enough of the participants to know more about free agent season than that it's happening. I'm hoping to be more caught up in time for the new player draft, but it will be hard to find time if I'm going to see all of Dancing With the Stars featuring Chad Ochocinco.

Quick Question

So, I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to do some field research by going to Hooters and I'm wondering if people would be interested in tagging along and making a big trip out of it. It would probably be about a month from now. Any takers? The more the merrier!

Blind Sided

Once upon a time in Memphis, Tennessee, there lived a couple named Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. They were very nice people and very wealthy people, and they liked to use their good fortune to help those around them.

One day, they met a poor giant black boy named Michael Oher who didn't have any place to sleep, so they let him come to their house, and after a while, they all decided he should stay forever and be part of their family. If Sean and Leigh Anne had not done this, Michael Oher probably would never have had the confidence--let alone the opportunity, let alone the education—to discover that he was a natural -born football phenom. He never would have made it to college without their help, and he never would have made it to the NFL, which he did.

If Michael Oher had not had the opportunity to learn that he was built and wired to play football better than anyone else possibly ever, Michael Lewis (contributing editor for Vanity Fair and childhood friend of Sean Tuohy) would not have written a book about him, entitled The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. If Michael Lewis had not written this book, John Lee Hancock would not have adapted it into a screenplay and made a movie, out of it, and Sandra Bullock would not have been cast in it, or nominated for an Academy Award.

If Sandra Bullock had not been nominated for an Academy Award (which she won, by the way), I would never have been interested in the movie, which was based on the book, which I read, because I like to read books that have been made into movies, and I would not have discovered that the book The Blind Side, in addition to telling the story of Michael Oher, is a very well-written, easy to understand, enjoyable explanation of the game of football and why it works the way it does and how it has developed over the last thirty years. So by reading The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, I now understand football a million times better than I did with the so-called help of Howie Long and his Dumb Book for Dummy Dum-Dums, and I can recommend it to you with the promise that even if you still aren't really interested in football, it is a very, very good book.

And the moral of the story is that you should always do kind things for other people, because you never know when someday, down the chain of events, your good deed might end up helping me.

So guess what?

There's no Wikipedia page for "third down conversion."

How to watch a football game, assuming that you really, really don't know how.

When I was in about the tenth or eleventh grade, I wanted very much to go to that year's graduation ceremony at my high school. In most places, this would not have posed enough of a problem that I'd be thinking about it ten years later, but I went to high school in Southern California and my school was an active participant in the overcrowding epidemic (which continues to this very day!), so due to the very high number of students graduating and the intractably finite number of seats in our school's football stadium, all graduating students were allowed only two free guests. I think that they sold tickets beyond that, but never in my life would I have willingly paid any real world currency for the privilege of watching teenagers walk in a line, unless I was planning to purchase one. I can think of no legal context in which that situation might occur.

Anyway, I would eventually skip my own high school graduation but I wanted to go to this one, and I've never been one of those people who always gets what they want, but I have a certain knack for convincing people to let me into places I shouldn't be allowed to go, so I arranged with the music teacher to allow me to sit on the football field with the orchestra for the ceremony. Now might be a good time to point out that I do not play a musical instrument.

They hid me in amongst the violin section, next to my friend Ray, and I made myself useful by turning pages, which is most likely to say that I may have turned a page for him one time. Mostly I just hid behind his music stand and made catty remarks about how nobody looked good in their graduation robes. Seriously. Our town was nothing but Latinos and Armenians--olive complexions. Who picked purple as a school color?

I will tie this back in to football, I promise. See, what with me sitting around, not playing an instrument and generally being a jackass, Ray got pretty distracted. “Pomp and Circumstance” is actually not long, as musical pieces go, and it isn't difficult either, but there were about seven hundred students graduating—no exaggeration, look it up—and that required approximately thirty or so repeats, and between me distracting him and the sheer boredom of playing the same twenty-four bars over and over, he completely lost his place in the music.

But what I always liked about Ray was that he was not one to panic. “Hang on,” he said to me, violin-benecked. “I'm just going to play E for a while.” And for the next half hour or so, he played one note on the violin and tossed out some admirably bitchy comments himself. I still don't know why I even wanted to be there that day. I must have had a crush on one of the graduating seniors or something.

My point is this: when you are utterly lost, the best thing to do is go back to a trustworthy reference point. For Ray and his violin, it was the E string. For us watching football, it needs to be the quarterback. As a football novice, you can still usually find the quarterback pretty easily—he'll be the guy standing in the middle, behind the line of other guys (I'm talking about the team of guys that are standing close together; if they're more spread out, that's defense).

What happens is, the quarterback stands behind the rest of his team, and he yells at them all what they're going to do, and then he says “Hut!” and they do it. The other team tries to stop them, but they lose points if anyone gets murdered. If the quarterback's team can go ten yards forward within four tries, they get to keep going, and they go until they run out of turns or they make it to the end of the field and score. Basically.

Have I mentioned that football is ridiculously complicated?

Anyway. If you're still having trouble figuring out which guy is the quarterback, just stay quiet for a while and wait until they start showing closeups of the players. The quarterback will have the most closeups, unless somebody else gets an injury. But if they keep showing a guy who doesn't seem to be hurt, pay attention to what number he's wearing, and as soon as they show them playing again, look for that number and then cheer. And then all the boys will be super impressed by what a cool girl you are because you're totally into football.

An Interlude

Just a brief note for anyone actually paying attention to let you know I'm still on the job. I've been a bit busy lately and then last night our computer crashed so it will be another day or two until I have a good word processing program again, and I'm nervous about trying to write a real blog entry without one. But I've got a thing or two planned and I might even address some current football news or something.

If you do read my blog I am grateful and I am always open to ideas if there's something you'd like to see in here. Back soon! Ciao!

Nihau means hello!

I've hit a roadblock: information.

You see, all things relating to football are basically marketed to men (and, in the words of Howie Long, “very occasionally, women”) who have been fans of football for their entire lives, and so the most, most basic information is not covered. It's like trying to learn to read Chinese by reading a book for Chinese children. They already know that a football is called 足球 , so they just have to learn the phonemes. I, on the other hand, am stuck accidentally saying “I love you,” when I mean to say “welcome,” which is one of only four Chinese words I actually know (none of them are “football”). Sometimes I wonder how people who do like football learned how it works, and then I wonder if maybe they don't and they're all just playing a massive joke on the rest of us, like Mornington Crescent with tackling.

But I'm still working on the assumption that there is some order somewhere, so today I was trying to play Madden Football and nothing made sense, but that was okay, I didn't really expect it to. I had one very simple goal, which was to figure out which of the approximately seventeen hundred little men on the television was controlled by my Xbox controller, which is very difficult when they all move around at the same time and try to kill each other. The problem was, I had a native speaker in the room.

“Why don't you run forward?” my husband asked me. “You're supposed to get to the End Zone.”

“I would run forward if I knew which one I was!” I snapped.

Him: “You're that one. The one with the circle.”

Me: “Which one?”

Him: “Well it just changed because you threw the ball.”

Me: “How? Never mind, just leave me alone, I'll figure it out.”

Him: “Wait, why did you rewind that? You just scored!”

Me: “But I don't know how! Go away, I'm figuring this out!”

Him: “I'm just trying to help you! Why don't you ever let me help you with anything?”

Me: “Because if you do it I don't know how it works! Go away!”

Him: “I can't go away! We live in a studio!”

Me: “I can't play with you here. You make me too self-conscious.”

Him: “Well, I'm not leaving. I have to write my own blog right now before I leave for work.”

Me: “Fine then. I'm just going to turn off the game and write about how we got in a fight today.”

Him: “Make sure I look like the good guy.”

Me: "I'm going to tell everybody you said that."

And that's why I haven't learned anything yet. Next entry will be about quarterbacks, probably.

Sure she's dumb, but can she play?

When last we left our heroine (and by heroine, I mean me), I was being confronted by a John Madden hologram demanding to assess my football skills, and I had chosen to make a tactical retreat.

I've been fairly busy the last few days, but I want it to be shown in the record that two nights ago I fired up the old Xbox and took the entire Madden football test, and let me tell you, it was not gentle. Unfortunately because this is my life, none of my results got saved, and it took me until this morning to get my courage back up.

“You know, honey,” (this is my husband talking now), “the game lets you skip the quiz. You don't have to take it.” Thus my husband reveals himself as a Philistine who knows nothing about the importance of acquiring knowledge.

So now what I'm going to do is take the quiz again, and this time I will write about it as I go, so if things still don't take at least my results won't have been skewed any more than they already have by seeing this test before. The test is a simulator of game situations that you may encounter in Madden Football, and the truth is that it doesn't really test your knowledge of the game of football as much as your ability to press specific buttons on an Xbox controller in a timely fashion when prompted. Still, it is better than nothing.

There are four parts to the test: Rush Offense, Pass Offense, Rush Defense, and Pass Defense. My skill in each of these areas will be rated either Rookie (poor), Pro (fair to middlin'), All-Pro (pretty good), or All-Madden, and come on, don't we all want to be All-Madden, all the time? My combined scores will add up to my Madden IQ, which, you ought to know, defaults to a median of FIVE HUNDRED, because that's a reasonable IQ score for someone who plays a lot of sports video games. Anyway, you're bored already, so let's get this train rolling.

RUSH OFFENSE

A rush offense is when a team runs the football forward instead of passing it (which means throwing). For anyone reading who really really doesn't know about football, the goal of the team with the ball is of course to cross the goal line and score points, but that is generally so unlikely (because you only get four chances), that the officials of the game let you start over if you make it ten yards. So your goal is to go forward ten yards. I am good at rush offenses because you don't have to be good at anything to be good at them; all you have to do is dodge the guys that are trying to knock you over, and who among us hasn't been doing that for years?
On Rush Offense I score All-Pro and my Madden IQ has risen to 534, which should easily win me a scholarship to the university of my choice.

PASS OFFENSE

Pass offense is when you throw a ball to another dude and make it his problem to score points. The simulator wants me to push a button which will throw a video game ball, and if the guy I throw it to catches it, I win. This seems unfair to me, because I have no control over the skill of the pass catcher, but we cannot live in a perfect world or even a simulation of one, so all I can do is grin and bear it. I probably shouldn't complain at all though, because there is no question that these imaginary football gentlemen are much better at catching things that have been thrown at them as I am.
My Pass Offense score is Pro and my Madden IQ drops slightly to 528, which should still be good enough for me to get a job on a brain trust somewhere.

RUSH DEFENSE

The defending team doesn't have the ball. They want to stop the other team from going forward ten yards so that they can get the ball back. Rush defense just means knocking down the guy with the ball, and I can't figure out how to do it. I'm never sure which little simulated guy I'm controlling, or whether I'm supposed to just hold the button down or press it one time or mash it, and the upshot is I do not score even a single point in this area.
I score nothing at all in Rush Defense and my IQ has dropped to an alarming 453, so Stephen Hawking has stopped returning my calls.

PASS DEFENSE

For pass defense, one guy is throwing a ball to another guy, and I am supposed to stop this from happening, which I manage to do once by accident.
My score in Pass Defense is Rookie, and my Madden IQ drops again, to 387.

So, to recap, I am not very good at anything athletic except running away from things, which translates on paper to an IQ Score of THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SEVEN. And I'm not even holding the results upside-down! I knew you had to be a genius to understand football.