Hoops Season

If you REALLY like college hoops, check out my Bracketboard blog. That's where I'll be doing a lot of writing during hoops season.

The Sports Prof shares my sentiment about the NBA hurting the game and focusing too much on "sizzle" and not enough "steak."

Life Without Football

Wow, another good one from Kyle Whelliston on football and American culture.

Football is a game that has become 15 percent sport and 85 percent extraneous matter. The reports from training camp, the player profiles drawn in heroic bas-relief, the ex-players debating concepts like "knowing how to win." Indeed, the football broadcast in 2007 has become the final evolution of the spambox, padded with balding cures, penis pills, dangerous financial offers, and tits. And like spam, it's all very difficult to filter out.

If you do not like football, you will love this essay. If you like football, it will challenge you to ask yourself why. If you are apathetic about football, it will speak to larger cultural concerns.

Fun with Death

Deceased rock star and catalyst for my rock-n-roll awakening Kurt Cobain is the subject of a new documentary. Friends Brandon, John, and I went to Nashville's Belcourt Theater to see About A Son last night. The film consists of video/images of Washington towns Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle, and audio from Cobain himself. Cobain's voiceover is taken from Michael Azerrad's interview tapes for his book Come As You Are. The film gives insight into the mind of Cobain and the childhood, physical ailments, contradictory personality, and general grouchiness that so heavily inspired his music.

There are no Nirvana songs. No live footage of the band. No entertaining of conspiracy theories about his death. No chest-beating about how they changed music. It is a very real portrait of Cobain and the towns, landscape and culture that molded him. Check it out if you can.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, check out this highly entertaining and informative cartoon on the death industry and the impact of our decaying bodies on the earth. If Cobain made cartoons, they might have looked something like this. Fascinating stuff.

College Basketball Returns

A wonderful essay from my friend, Kyle Whelliston of ESPN fame. Kyle once stayed at my house during a trip to cover the Hilltoppers. I've known him since his days as "that 100 games guy."

Anyway, this is a great essay, even if you do not like basketball--and I expect you might like college basketball a bit more if you read it.

Conferences in basketball make things special. They give teams from counties and regions home-and-home shots at each other each winter: Kent and Akron in the MAC, the Metro Atlantic's Manhattan-Iona and Canisius-Niagara pairings, Lafayette and Lehigh in the Patriot, the Big West's Irvine and Long Beach. There are state skirmishes too: Montana-Montana State in the Big Sky, Arkansas and Arkansas-Little Rock. Sometimes they clash over the rights to a name: Saint Francis must be somewhere up there, checking in twice a year to see which NEC team (PA or NY) is wearing his name more proudly.

I will be writing more on my hoops blog from now on. I'll link here whenever I write something that crosses hoops into this space. Of course, I'd argue that hoops ALWAYS does that...