greed

First, go read this article by Bill Simmons of espn

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/110304

Done? Good. I'm a football fan, have been since my brother bounced a nerfball off my head 20 years ago. I know very little about the economic of sports, and I don't really care. All that matter is the patriots on tv every week. What I do know is this: the NFL has never been richer. Revenues are in the tens of billions every year. Half the owners are independent billionaires. Now let's go through some other facts.
      Roger Goodell claims to be concerned about player safety. He's made a giant show out of concussion awareness programs, new helmet technology etc. Yet one of the issues in the mess of a cba negotiation is the owner's desire for an 18 game season. Two more games, with greater ticket sales and increased revenues. Which they want the players to accept, even as their slice of the revenue pie goes down by one billion dollars. Two extra games of 300 pound men running into each other flat out, every hit carving a few more days off their lives.
      I'm not trying to write a sob story for professional athletes. They know what they're getting into, and are paid well for the physical risks. Rational adults can do what they want. I simply don't understand how the owners sleep at night. People had to watch the Superbowl in crowded basements because Jerry Jones tried to install more seats than his shiny new stadium could hold. This man and thirty of his ultra-rich pals are about to lock players out for more money. What the hell is wrong with the world?

a case for creativity

Every year, hollywood spends more money than I'll ever earn trying to figure out what audiences want. They conduct surveys, analyze market data, hold focus groups, and generally try to figure out how to fit square pegs in round holes. Over the last.... well, I was going to say few years, but let's be realistic here.... over the last few decades, the movie big-wigs have decided that the American public wants more of the same. This year, 2011, will see the highest number ever of remakes and sequels invading our theaters. Basically, studios have concluded that the public is too stupid to tolerate any kind of innovation or newness, and so are repeating themselves over and over. In a related story, the studios are full of idiots.

       Hollywood, let me do you a favor. If a movie looks like it sucks, people won't see it. If a movie looks awesome, people will see it. Analysis complete. 

       Best example- Inception, last summer. For people who don't spend as much time reading film blogs and such as I do, here's a little background. Inception was a giant passion project for Christopher Nolan, who you've probably heard of. The studio let him make it, on their dime, as a reward for the absurdly lucrative Batman movies, and as an enticement to make more. The industry thought it would be a flop, by being too complex, hard to follow, and not based on something that spawned ten crappy sequels since the 80's. (see: Halloween remakes) Instead, Inception was a huge critical hit, made tons of money, and has given Nolan a do-whatever-he-wants license for the next 20 years.

         The point here is this: audiences like being treated as if they have an iq over 50. Inception is incredibly complex. Its' also visually stunning, beautifully acted, and completely original. Knight and Day, which was thought to be much more commercially appealing, was a complete flop because audiences figured out quickly that it was a paint-by-numbers piece of crap.

        Obviously, not everything I'm saying here is always true. Some bad movies do make tons of money. But even in those cases, there's usually something artistically redeeming about the hits. Take the transformers movies, which feature the worst writing since.... since whatever Michael Bay did before that, I suppose. I'm not saying those are good films. But Bay is one hell of a visual director, and watching fifty foot robots toss each other around a forest still put goosebumps on my spine. Please, Hollywood, wake up. There are so many talented, creative people who can put your money to good use. And I think you'll find that true creativity is more profitable than endless regurgitation. 

ultra endurance

Most people haven't heard of Dean Karnazes. Ultra-running, the crazy uncle of marathoning and running clubs, is such a niche sport nobody can find it without looking. If you have time, google his name and take a look at what he's done. I won't recap it here, but suffice it to say the man's resume involves a lot of 100 mile runs. Personally, I'm not a runner. My sport, wrestling, involves maximum effort for six minutes. I've never run longer than an hour, and even that hurt like hell. The whole idea of staying on my feet. moving, for 24 hours is utterly incomprehensible. That's why I find ultra-running so fascinating. The human body is so much more capable than anyone realizes. Karnazes, one of the kings of his tiny sport, is preparing to run across the country in 75 days. That's 40-50 miles each day. Maybe seven hours, with nothing but music pulsing from earbuds and the road creeping up in front. The physical challenge is insane. The mental fatigue must be worse. It makes me wonder what else we're capable of. Everything's impossible until someone does it.

people stuck in the nineteenth century

I've been wrestling a long time. My brother, who is older than me by five years, was a seriously good high-school wrestler until he had to stop with a broken elbow. When I was nine, I let him convince me to try out for the middle-school team. I sucked. The first year my only success was in redefining the amount of noise takedown dummies could make while being tossed around by older kids. But I loved the sport, and knew I wanted to get good at it. That was thirteen years ago. In high-school I won four league titles, four new england titles, and was national prep champion twice. So far in college I'm a two time all american, and going for my first national title in a couple of weeks. I'm not trying to brag by listing this out, simply establish that I have the credentials to say certain things about the sport.
        Over the past few days one of the larger stories in sports media has concerned a young wrestler in Iowa, who defaulted from his first match in the state tournament rather than face a girl. See this column, by Rick Reilly of espn, for the background. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=6136707
A few things strike me about this situation. First, the girl in question achieved a 20-13 record in Iowa, and qualified for the tournament under her own power. Iowa high-school wrestling is legendary for its' brutality and technical excellence. Great wrestlers from Dan Gable down to the Leclere brothers can attest to this. Look at the roster of the Iowa Hawkeyes, the best college program in the nation, if you don't believe me. Some of their finest athletes have better records in college then they did in high-school. I've never met this girl or seen one of her matches, but I know that anyone who qualifies for that tournament needs protection from nothing. The other side of this has to do with the boy, who threw away a shot at his dream for what he claims was religious belief. Leaving aside the fact that Iowa state champions never have to buy a drink in their lives, his outdated attitude towards women is deeply disturbing.
          Every Christmas vacation I stop by to help with a couple weeks of practices at my old middle-school, under the same coach who taught me the sport a decade ago. It's a lot of fun, and an easy way to give back to a program I love. This past winter, for the first time, there were three girls on the team. Three friends, who'd all been interested in trying it for about a year and had decided to sign up together. I'd seen girls wrestle before, and had even competed against a few before I outgrew the smaller weight classes. But coaching them was different. After all, I'm a 22 year old man, and coaching does involve a good deal of physical contact. What I came to notice, over the fifteen or so practices I attended, was that the girls were only uncomfortable when I treated them differently from their teammates. So I sucked it up, got on the mat with them, and never had a single problem. My last day, all three approached me after practice to thank me for working with them. I should also say, the three girls outworked every guy on the team, were always first to practice, and never complained about anything. One day as I was leaving, I caught sight of the three of them, running sprints relay fashion on the school's indoor track.
         The point here is this: if a girl decides to participate in a sport, then she deserves to be treated with the same respect as every other competitor. That means, instead of bowing out from some twisted notion that women are delicate flowers, all the guys need to stop whining and strap on their headgear. Yes, its a little awkward. But not nearly as awkward as a girl must feel, her first day in the wrestling room surrounded by guys. That girl in Iowa didn't want to be the first female match winner in state history because of a default. She wanted to compete and find out if she was the best. Based on her record, it might just have happened.

Been a while since I wrote anything here. Its funny how quickly weeks pass while I'm at school. This is especially weird since I sleep way less here than I do on vacation. Time flies when you're writing philosophy papers.... What's sad is that I know the way I live now, with more caffeine then blood in my body, really isn't sustainable. I basically burn myself out every semester. Last Christmas, after an especially intense run through exam week, I went home and slept for fifteen straight hours. Probably shouldn't have driven that night..... In about fifteen months, I'll graduate from college and get a real grown up job. What I don't know is whether I'll be able to work the way I do now. Part of the problem is the number of obligations I give myself. Currently, I'm taking five classes, playing a DI sport, working at the school newspaper, and writing a book. It won't be this bad in the real world. But the balance is that I might go crazy if I actually do slow down. Boredom is worse then death. Ah well, ten thousand miles to go before I sleep....

twilight

This is embarrassing. I watched part of a twilight movie last night. Not the whole thing, only about half an hour. Yes, there was a girl involved. And we did turn it off to do something more interesting, which makes me vaguely less humiliated. The stuff I'll sink to.....
     Anyway, while I was wasting thirty minutes of my life on that film, a question kept coming up in my mind. Has anyone involved in that movie read Dracula? The reason I ask is because Bram Stoker wrote the book that got people interested in vampires to begin with. I read it for school a couple years ago, as part of a class on early British fiction. Dracula is not actually a novel, it's structured as a collection of letters and diary entries from the various characters. It's also insanely violent. I'm talking graphic, detailed depictions of extremely unpleasant thing happening to a lot of bodies.
      If you think about it, vampires can be a seriously powerful fictional device. There are obvious sexual aspects to it, with the ideas of nighttime visits, penetration, etc etc. Also the plague, which was a major concern in England at the time Stoker was writing. A distortion of nature caused by contact between bodily fluids. The same thing can be tweaked and used for foreign invasion. In any case, lots of options.
      I don't particularly care if filmmakers want to take someone else's creation and use it for a different purpose. I didn't even hate the twilight movie. It seemed like a fairly harmless teen romance kind of thing. Definitely not something i'd watch by choice, but it's existence doesn't harm the world. What really bothered me was seeing Stoker's dark, brutal, fairly brilliant creation sparkling in the sun. Adaptation is one thing, but at least preserve the essence of what you're ripping off.

The great sage, Ferris Bueller, tells us that life move's pretty fast. most of the time i appreciate this. my worst fear is sitting still for too long. but somewhere near the end of a third consecutive eighteen hour day, anybody would want a vacation. don't get me wrong, i love college. the fact is that the world i've chosen to live in demands results, regardless of what I have to do for them. between five classes, a job, a varsity sport,  and some other side projects i'll be writing about in more detail soon, i haven't seen the inside of my dorm room for more than twenty minutes in any of the last few days. i'm probably just ranting from fatigue and general pissedoffness, but sometimes you wonder if sitting still and a treadmill to nowhere aren't really the same thing.