From the improbable Kansas Cricket Association, here is a remarkable 4 minute explanation of the British Empire’s world’s greatest sport. (My Contemporary Moral Issues students might want to note that there will not be a question about this video on the midterm).
From the category archives:
Sport
Your chance to make predictions and explain who you’ll be rooting for and why. I’m hoping for an England win, but predict SA to win 32-12, with Wilkinson scoring all England’s points. Since I’m English, it isn’t hard to explain my sympathies, and the fact that Bristol hooker Mark Regan should playing for England and is an old boy of St Brendan’s 6th Form College (where my youngest went) more than completes the picture. I’m more intrigued about who the various Celts, Gaels, Aussies and Kiwis who write for or read CT will be backing. Normally, I’d expect an “anyone but England” policy, but, given the dubious politics of SA rugby and England’s underdog status, there may be some surprises.
Richard Williams in the Guardian
Had things turned out differently, one of the seats in the press box in the Stade de France last Sunday night might have been occupied by a 79-year-old Argentinian newspaperman whose own rugby career was blighted by asthma. He would have been recording the success of his fellow countrymen in reaching the last four of the 2007 Rugby World Cup for the first time.
In rugby’s Darwinian stroke,
Whole countries evolve into jokes:
You’ll see Wallabies cry,
Springboks that fly,
Gaels that suck—and Kiwis that choke.
After the first weekend’s matches, I’d say that the Southern Hemisphere big-guns haven’t been tested yet (though South Africa had a hard 40 minutes of fighting against the Samoans), and of the IONA countries, only Scotland have any reason to be happy. England were boring and stuck. Ireland looked uncoordinated. Namibia scored two tries against them in four minutes, which is ridiculous. Having beaten France and seen Ireland’s performance today, Argentina must be feeling pretty good right now—and the French are probably feeling better as well.
Compare and contrast this:
With this:
Looks like everything in rugby has gotten more professional over the past 25 years. Bonus haka (vs Ireland) below the fold.
The Rugby World Cup starts this weekend, with France vs Argentina tonight. I haven’t been able to keep up with the form this time. I think Ireland are looking slightly shaky in the run-up. They’re in the same pool as France and Argentina, so that’s going to be tough, with France having home-field advantage and Argentina being the dirtiest team in Europe. England are hoping for a revival. I would, ideally, like to see them semi-revived and then re-crushed, but I’ll settle for straightforward humiliating defeats. Thanks to their crap form they may have a helpful underdog status, however. As for the Southern Hemisphere, all the Kiwis I know are in their usual frame of mind, viz titanic self-confidence combined with a desperate fear that the All Blacks will choke yet again.
The BBC tells us
Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun a footballer, according to computer models used to estimate running speeds of dinosaurs.
But which one? Outrunning some footballers would be no great achievement. More to the point, would T. rex have been able to control the ball and get a decent cross into the box? Those who have followed the career of the Danish winger Dennis Rommedahl know that speed isn’t everything.
By all accounts not any sort of couch potato, Ogged is understandably distressed to look at the age-group records for his chosen event, the 50 meters freestyle, and find that he has to go all the way up to the 75-79 age group to find a time he would stand a chance of beating.
I have the related experience of having family members who are irritatingly athletic. For instance, my brother was on the Irish cross-country team and won a bunch of stuff in college. My sister-in-law ran the Chicago marathon in 2004—her first—and finished seventeenth. Worst of all, two years before I was even born my uncle won a marathon in Kaduna in a time of 2:15:03, then the fastest time ever run in Africa, and now more than thirty five years later still one of the the 20 fastest marathons ever run by any Irishman. (And also, to my knowledge, still the fastest marathon ever run in Nigeria.)
Elite athletes are different from you and me, and this is true even when, as in my case, you share a significant percentage of their genes. My sister-in-law once told me of the experience—common amongst top women athletes—of being out for a run and getting held up at a stop light. Some regular semi-fit guy out for his evening jog runs up alongside, and glances over. The light changes, and the guy takes off at an unsustainable speed because, obviously, it would be a violation of natural law for a woman to be able to run faster than a guy. Having gone through this one too many times, my sister-in-law adopted the strategy of just tucking in behind the guy and waiting to see what would happen. After a short while he realizes she’s behind him. He tries to go faster. He glances behind. She’s still there. A very short while later the guy, now beginning to boil in a self-made vat of lactic acid, starts making random turns down streets in a desperate effort to shake his pursuer. It doesn’t work. Eventually the guy grinds to a halt, she breezes by, he’s left gasping for air and maybe reflecting on his views on gender.
Well, here we go . An open thread for pre-match speculation and post-match analysis. Me, I’m feeling confident. Milan are a great side, but they’ve been doing all the talking and I think their desire to avenge 2005 will work against them. They were terrific against Man U, but profited from suicidal defending, and great performances are often followed by average ones. Hold on tight.
Good 1 Evil 0 (Agg. 1-1) Good wins 4-1 on penalties.
Among the many reasons to love the late Pierre Bourdieu, quite apart from the range and quality of his scholarly work, is the fact that he was willing to appear in the 1977 film Slap Shot as the character of Moe Wanchuk. He wrote about the experience many years later in Contre-feux, but most English-speaking readers remain completely unaware of Bourdieu’s brief career as a Charlestown Chief. I mean, talk about putting your cultural capital at risk:
