Category: sports

Snowmobiles Rule – Only in Canada. Pity.

Snowmobilers are often presented as enjoying the natural beauty of the North.  Oh please.  Not at the speeds they drive.  Not while their exhaust pipes spew fumes into our air.  And their engines roar at a volume that must be endured by everyone within five miles.  And their tossed beer cans litter the forest until …

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Men’s Precision Teams

Have you ever wondered why, in the sport of figure skating, there are no men’s precision teams? Sure, precision skating requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense.  But both are surely male capabilities; in fact, aren’t they male superiorities?  Isn’t that why (so we’re told) men dominate science and engineering? And of …

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Being Josh (Monday Night Basketball)

It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat.  But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that.  Eventually it happens: this time …

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Basketball, Gymnastics, Hopscotch, and Double Dutch

The neat thing about television coverage of the Olympics is that women’s events are shown a lot. Often within close temporal proximity to men’s events. Comparison is inevitable. And interesting. Consider basketball. Men’s basketball isn’t even a sport anymore. The guys are simply too big. Give me a ball small enough to hold upside-down with …

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A Fun Run

I happened to experience once upon a time to a provocative juxtaposition: I watched the IAAF World Cross Country Championships, with Kenyans in the lead of course, just after I saw the news about a famine in east Africa, in particular, in Kenya. So it occurred to me that

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The Soaps vs. The Game

While both ‘the soaps’ and ‘the game’ have been criticized as poor viewing choices, only the soaps have been dismissed as fluff. However, a close examination reveals that, in fact, the soaps have more heft than the game. In both cases,

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The Superbowl: knock yourself out

So does anyone think someone’s going to get knocked out during this year’s Superbowl? It’s happened before. And frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Just like that latest disgrace with our prisoners of war. I mean, consider the similarities:

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King of the Castle

Octavia Butler got it right in Xenogenesis when the aliens identified one of our fatal flaws as that of being hierarchy-driven (they fixed us with a bit of genetic engineering) – but she failed to associate the flaw predominantly with males. And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that …

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“Daddy, daddy, the house is on fire!” “Not now, sweetie, the game’s on.”

So about this guy in Taiwan who drops his child in order to catch a foul ball at a baseball game… I don’t know whether to be more appalled at the man’s action or at the media’s framing of it. Am I appalled that we condition our males to value sports over parenting? That they’d …

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Some sports are just too dangerous

‘Some sports are just too dangerous for women. They might get hurt.’ Oh please. This from the sex that makes beating someone senseless part of the game. And has its reproductive vitals hanging by a thread at bull’s-eye of the body with nary a half-inch layer of fat for protection. (What’s next in the evolution …

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