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.