Department Of More Ways To Make Olympic Connections:
Best Name Ever (For Star Trek Fans) For A Ski Jumper
I can’t tell y’all how much I love love love this.
Japanese ski jumper Ryōyū Kobayashi
Let me guess: is his signature style called the Maru?
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Department Of Nominations For Worst Name
For A Game Or A Sport,
Entry 22 In A Continuing Series
In this moment of Olympic fervor, [1] let us pause for a moment to ponder perhaps one of the most unfortunate names that has ever bestowed upon a non-Olympic sport [2] in the English-speaking countries.
Among the many sports beloved in Ireland which have ancient Gaelic origins [3] is a game where the objective is for players to use a wooden stick (called a hurley) to hit a cork-cored, leather-covered ball (called a sliotar) either between the opponent’s goalposts or under the goal’s crossbar into a net guarded by a goalkeeper.
This sport is called Hurling.
I find it to be a joyously unfortunate name for the sport, in its inappropriate/stereotypical appropriateness, given the reputation of the Irish for…how you say…prodigious consumption of alcoholic beverages. Moiself supposes that, when it came time to name the game my Irish forbears enjoyed, one of the players suggested, Why don’t we name it after the stick? And no one thought to consult their Gaelic crystal ball to realize what the term hurling would come to mean to the euphemism-disposed English language speakers of the future.
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Department Of Nothing To Do With Sports:
When Did It Come To Be That Instead Of Simply Reporting The News,
We Expect Officials To Editorialize About It?
” ‘My heart is with the victims, their families, and all who were impacted by the deadly crash,’ Bass said in a statement thanking first responders and asking the public to avoid the area.”
Tha’s from an LA Times article from last week, quoting LA mayor Karen Bass. who waswas commenting on an accident wherein an elderly driver, who reportedly suffered a medical incident, plowed into a popular area in Westwood, killing and injuring several pedestrians.
Now then: yours truly has been reading the news since I was eight years old, and it seems to moiself that at a Certain Point In Time® I cannot definitively mark, a line was crossed. Where public officials used to merely be the conveyors of This Something Has Happened, now these officials are also/seemingly obligated to be the public face of mourning and/or personalizing the incident (if it is tragic), for lack of a better term.
“My thoughts are with all of the blah blah blah
who have been impacted by the blah blah blah…”
Which leads me to think…
Just tell us what happened; don’t think you can make us to feel better about it because of what you say you feel about it. You’re an elected official with serious responsibilities; I hope you are mostly thinking about those responsibilities, and get on with solving what you could be solving. Fix the damn potholes; let your heart hurt, if it truly does, in private.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
“Yes, you are. Drop and gimme fifty, you heartless bastard.”
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Department Of A Blast From The Past
Dateline: January, last year. A new year; a new project: taking an excerpt from a past blog, from the same time frame (the second Friday of whatever month). My thought at the time: Perhaps moiself will like this enough that it will turn out to be a regular blog feature. So far it has, but time, and my capacity for reruns, will tell.
This journey down memory lane is related to the most convincing reason a YOU-of-all-people-should-write-a-blog-why-aren’t-you-writing-a-blog?!?!?! [4] friend gave me, all those years ago, [5] as to why I should be writing a blog: a blog would serve as a journal of sorts for my life. Thus, journal/diary-resistant moiself would have some sort of a record, or at least a random sampling, of what was on my mind – and possibly what was on the nation’s mind – during a certain period of time.
Now I can, for example, look back to the second Friday of a years-ago February to see what I was thinking. (or as MH put it, WHAT was I thinking!?!? )
Here is an excerpt from my blog of 2-8-13 ( The Awards I’m Not Winning ):
Women in combat. No, I’m not referring to the battles women face in trying to get standard, life-saving treatment at Catholic hospitals. It’s the military thing, courtesy of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s lifting the military ban on women in combat.
I still can’t wrap my mind around the phrasing: “lifting the ban on women in combat.” Women have been participating – and dying – in wars, in combat, ever since the sorry concept was constructed by some pissed off Neanderthal. Only now, they can get credit? Lifting the obliviousness about the reality is more like it.
The old saw about protecting the women and children flies and spits and shakes its impertinent ass in the face of the fact that, during wartime, civilian deaths always outnumber military casualties. And who are the civilians? The much-vaunted “women and children,” whose protection from the evil, encroaching ___ (insert enemy of choice) is cited as justification for combat.
Objective consideration of a person’s ability to do a job, any job, should be gender-blind. Most of us civilians – and even a few former and active soldiers, it seems – forget that the majority of those in the armed services never set foot on what used to be called the front or battle lines; [6] the majority comprise the support staff, on which the “warriors” depend. Every soldier has to be prepared to fight, but most contribute to the fight through transport, medic, food, equipment procurement, distribution and maintenance positions. Or, as Napoleon Bonaparte, famous military leader and infamous sufferer of Short Man’s Syndrome put it, “An army marches on its stomach.”
Not every male soldier makes the cut (or desires to) for combat positions, and the wash-out rate for the so-called elite combat units is high (the all-volunteer paratroopers units, in which my father served during WWII, had a wash-out rate of over 80%). Review the standards for the job. Keep the physical and mental standards truly appropriate to the job, and have only those who meet the standards, men and women, young and old, gay and straight, qualify for those positions.
One bubagoo the silly voices raise: okay then, all of you miss smarty-panties, if all military positions are open to women, what about women registering for the draft? Well, what about it?
The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) authorizes Congress “To raise and support Armies…” and goes on to permit the regulation and training of such armies. [7] Nowhere is the gender (or age or ethnicity) of these Armies mentioned. Of course, we can assume that the framers assumed an all-male (and Caucasian) army; nevertheless, but all it says is Congress has the power to raise Armies.
If it served Congress to do so, I have no doubt that women would be drafted in a heartbeat. Or so was my argument in the late 1970s-early 1980s, when some of us were still trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Register for the draft? Pass the frigging ERA and I’ll register for your friggin’ draft.
About the appropriate standards. Police academies used to have minimum height standards which effectively screened out most female – and Asian and Hispanic male – applicants. Thirty-plus years ago I remember reading an article in The Orange County Register about a Vietnamese-American man who desperately wanted to be a cop. This was at the time when police and fire agencies in California were desperate to increase the number Asian and Hispanic officers. The man was intelligent and independent [8] and eager to serve, kept himself in awesome physical shape – he did everything he could to qualify, and he would have, except that he was ~ an inch shorter than the minimum height requirement. And, okay, so maybe this part of the story tempers the previous remark about his intelligence, but he decided to re-apply to the academy, and before taking the next physical exam he had his wife repeatedly bonk him on the head with a wooden plank, to try and raise a bump that would get him to the minimum height level.
I don’t know what happened to the bonkers-for-cops dude, but it wasn’t long before anti-height discrimination lawsuits provided the nudge for the police to evaluate their policies, and most agencies subsequently, eventually, eliminated the minimum height requirements. Unlike the cinematic shoot-’em-up image, the majority of police work involves negotiation skills, keeping cool under pressure, the ability to quickly evaluate and de-escalate dangerous situations…and, yes, kick ass if and when necessary. As police departments around the nation have discovered, if you can pass the police academy training, assessment and examinations (including lifting and dragging a 160 lb dummy, weapons and marksmanship training, tolerate getting pepper-sprayed and tasered), the fact that you’re lacking an inch doesn’t matter.
Which, of course, women have been telling men for years.
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [9]
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May the sports you play have no direct or euphemistic references to puking;
May your work never involve public statements about bad news;
May you enjoy finding obscure connections between the names of Olympic athletes
and your favorite TV shows;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] At least – or only – in my household.
[2] Although, “distance plunging” and “live pigeon shooting” were once Olympic sports, so who knows what the future holds?
[3] Others include Gaelic football, Rounders, and Gaelic handball.
[4] I was adamant about not writing a blog…thus, the title of the blog I eventually decided to write.
[5] Was it really over thirteen years ago?
[6] with today’s increasing use of kill-from-afar technologies, and wars of terrorism and insurgencies, “front line”-style warfare may soon be an exhibit in the Smithsonian.
[7] Interestingly, it also states that “no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;” which seems to make our maintaining of our standing armed forces unconstitutional.
[8] He defied his relative’s wishes by wanting to become a cop, a profession seen as dishonorable by many Asian immigrants, who came from countries where the police forces were corrupt.
[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
