Jessica Gavora, native Alaskan (and aka better half of Jonah Goldberg) has some thoughts on basketball and Sarah Palin:
We didn’t play basketball to pad our college applications or fulfill some bureaucrat’s notion of “gender equity.” We played because the winters were long and cold and dark. There was nothing else to do. Maybe as a result, basketball was deadly serious business. Away games were played at the end of eight-hour bus rides or
harrowing plane landings in frozen, remote villages. Our opponents were tough, and the fans were unforgiving. And even though the law that feminists like to credit with all female athletic success, Title IX, was then unenforced in high school sports, we girls wouldn’t have dreamed of taking second place to the boys–nor did we.
Palin earned her now-famous nickname on the hardcourt–“Sarah Barracuda.” Her enemies have tried to belittle her by pointing to her stint as a beauty queen, but it is clear that Palin’s background in sports, more than any other experience, is what has made her the existential threat to liberal feminism (and possibly the Democratic ticket) that she is today.
I wonder how she’d do one on one with Senator Obama? Did he ever win a state championship for his team? Perhaps it’s another comparison that his campaign should avoid.
I’d won a free 6″ sub. This was timely, since I was planning to buy one for my wife. We finished our meal; I went back to the place where the Sandwich Artists labor in various degrees of surly disinterest, and presented the coupon. The Artist began to craft the meal out the chopped and processed carbclay arrayed before him – and that’s when the manager walked over.
“For future reference,” she said, “those are for the next visit.”
I pointed to the small print on the back of the ticket. “Actually, it says for your next order.”
“Well, it means visit. It’s how we keep track of them in the back.” She jerked a thumb towards the back of the store, where the Something wet and spiny sat in a crate, swallowing souls and dreams and crapping out rules and procedure.
If there are two things I don’t like, it’s someone who tells me that fine print doesn’t mean what it says, and alludes to some company process that makes things simpler not for me, or for the employees, but some theoretical person on whose behalf the system was set in place years ago by a team of consultants who have already moved on to rejiggering something else that worked perfectly fine. On the other hand, after years of dealing with restaurant employees who couldn’t give a fig about the job, it’s difficult to carp when you find someone who does – unless, of course, that person has decided to make a point about a free sandwich for future reference.
I am not. I’ve never been in a serious , or even mock fight, and never had a desire to be. I probably wouldn’t have made it far in an earlier time. One of the many reasons I’m glad to live here and now.
Lileks examines the train wreck that is Garrison Keillor’s latest:
I’m sorry, but I’m just fascinated by his column. Each is nearly identical in formlessness, subject and general pointlessness. To be fair: we all write at haste and repent at leisure, unless we can somehow get it out of the Google cache. We all make inelegant remarks that seemed wonderfully writerly at the moment but curdle when exposed to another pair of eyes. It’s the perils of blogging. But he has an entire week to write these things. Never does he attempt to make an argument or explore a line of thought – it’s just flat assertions ladled out with nuance or shading. The sun rises, Bush is bad, life is long but also short and so you should sit outside and drink lemonade and think of the people who came before you and sat outside and drank lemonade and there is a comfort in that continuity and we need all the comfort we can get in these days when nihilists in golf pants are everywhere and the Republic lies in ruins. Also, he is given to run-on sentences. This week has perhaps the finest example yet.
If that’s not enough, there is some cereal blogging, too.