So you have a problem with the Mad Mix?
I confess I don't know what the Mad Mix is.
Why do guitarists want their guitar to growl?
3: Why do fish swim? Why does the wind blow?
As a guitarist, this is always the guitar player's fault. Assuming they can hear themselves, and it's not a monitoring problem, then basically they are using too big an amp for the venue, or failing to properly set the amp they have.
Valve amps sound good when they are driven into power-amp distortion, and to do this with valve amps of anything above moderate power levels usually requires cranking them. There are two standard routes around this.
I) use an amp with master volume controls.
II) use a smaller amp.
Some people claim that using the master volume to control the levels alters the tone -- you are basically relying on preamp rather than poweramp distortion -- but most modern amps designed to produce a reasonable amount of gain are also designed to function pretty well with using the master volume to control levels.
On the other hand, it's become quite fashionable in recent years for guitar players to go back to using fairly low wattage valve amps so they don't have this issue. You can totally wind up a small valve amp into full-on power-tube saturation, in theory, without it overpowering everyone else and preventing the engineer mixing properly.
If there's a problem it's because either the guitar player is being a dick about using the master volume, or they are using too much amp for the venue.
There are a couple of fixes. Turn the master volume down, or use a smaller amp, or, plug an attenuator into the big amp.* Attenuators act as a power soak -- you can crank the crap out of the valve amp, driving the power tubes into saturation, but the attenuator soaks up some of the power and the power being delivered to the speakers is lower. People, in theory, can use them to run vintage Marshall heads at coffee-shop volume levels.
I have an old (mid 60s) 50 watt 'Marshall'-type valve head. Turning it up loud enough to get a decent level of gain/saturation would involve sound levels that would cause physical pain to people. So, if I was gigging with it in clubs I'd need an attenuator, or band mates who liked playing at eye-bleeding levels.
* oh yeah, or run the amp clean and get the saturation from a pedal.
ttaM: Can explain what a valve amp is, you know, for a dumb drummer? I'm familiar with tube and solid-state amps. Never heard of valve amps.
Also: can this attenuator you speak of be had commercially? I might like to recommend one. Or ten.
Oh, and my own particular interest here is that, fucking hell, I'm sitting right next to your amp, man. And these earplugs do only so much.
re: 6
Tubes and valves are the same thing. I suspect it's a British english versus US english thing. Valves == tubes.
Yeah, attenuators can be bought commercially. Probably the most commonly used is the THD Hotplate. In the US, probably the best value for money is going to be the Weber products (they are very competitively priced).
http://www.thdelectronics.com/product_page_hotplate.html
http://www.tedweber.com/atten.htm
The big difference is the Hot Plates are impedence specific. You get an 8 ohm attenuator if you normally run your amp in an 8 ohm cab, etc. The Webers can be used with multiple impedances.
Other people make them, too. Marshall do one, etc But the THD and Weber products are probably the widest used.
Also, with a lot of attenuators, there's a line level out, too. So you can run the amp in full power-tube saturation, use the attenuator to take the onstage volume down, and use the line-out to take a feed to the PA/desk.
8, 9: I confess I'm confused why anyone would name an amp-related company THD (Total Harmonic Distortion?), but I will pass along that info the relevant offending parties. I'm pretty sure they're running at normal impedance, and so Ohm will be pleased. Thanks.
9: You guys call the PA the "desk"? Clearly I need to tour the UK. Someone give me money.
re: 10
The impedance is speaker/amp dependent -- e.g. there isn't a 'standard' number.* So the person will definitely need to make sure they choose the right THD if that's the route they go down. Or they could just buy a Weber MASS.
* it's all simple electronics. A 2 x 12 cab with two 8 ohm speakers in it, wired in parallel, is going to have a difference impedance from a cab with a single 12" speaker in it or from a 2 x 12 cab with the speakers wired in series, and might be different again from someone using a full stack with two 4x12 cabs, and so on.
re: 12
Well, the PA is the thing producing the power (i.e. power-amp and speakers) and the desk is the mixing desk that everything is being plugged into. I thought that was standard terminology?
13: Yeah, I was a bit a bit hand-wavy there. I'm familiar enough with speaker impedance that we'll get that part right. I know parallel wiring, series wiring, and ohm's law and all that.
Now it's convincing some folks to turn down, like the nice soundperson says.
14: Oh. We call the mixing desk the mixing "board". That's all.
re: 15
Yeah, at least with an attenuator the guitar players doesn't have the excuse that they can't turn down. FWIW, a lot of guitar players I know who like power-tube saturated types of sounds have moved to very small amps for gigging (which they then mic for the PA). There's a huge market these days for amps in the 5W - 15W sort of range.
I don't gig regularly, so it's less of an issue for me. The last time I played a couple of years back [in the pit band for a Brecht/Weill thing] I used a solid-sate amp, so it was no problem to control volume levels.
Because I perversely enjoy producing this kind of thing:
"how do you get a * off your front porch" - first 100 results
43 - X college grad / student
12 - Drummer
6 - Philosopher / philosophy major
6 - Guitarist
4 - X team member / draft pick
3 - Bass player
3 - X team fan
3 - Musician
2 - Harpist
2 - Keyboard player
2 - High-tech / dot-com CEO
2 - Pro gambler
2 - Saxophonist
2 - Banjo player
2 - Democrat
1 - Dumbek player
1 - Web designer
1 - Guitar maker
1 - Level 60 gnome warlock
1 - Liberal arts major
1 - Nashville songwriter
I hear that the answer here, as so often in life, is Centaur.
17: The problem is playing two kinds of gigs: (1) party, with PA for just vocals and (2) club show, with full amplification of everything.
I think I'm going to suggest a smaller amp for #2. Barring that, attenuator.
Moreover, my philosophy is, let the soundperson do the work of making your mix sound good in a particular room; you make your mix sound good for him or for her.
re: 20
Sounds a good plan, assuming the amp already in use doesn't have a master volume control (or sounds a bit crap when it's turned down too far).
4a: Because it gets boring to stay in one place all the time.
4b: Well, when a cold front and a warm front love each other very very much...
So, why do guitarists want to make their guitar growl?
re: 23
Well, that's the sound isn't it? Overdriven guitar has been at the core of rock/punk/indie etc for 40 years.
Not everyone wants to sound like Johnny Smith.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xf3rAXoYjA [Johnny Smith]
I want everyone to sound like Willie Nelson.
That includes in casual conversation.
Asking everyone to dress like Willie Nelson comes next week.
I share some hobbies with Willie Nelson.
Sooner or later, everyone sounds like Johnny Cash: but why rush it?
Is there some good reason why distortion circuitry isn't simply built in to guitar amps? My initial take is that it's silliness of the fake authenticity type, but I don't want to prejudge*.
* This is a lie.
||
Just when you think the Mark Sanford story couldn't get any weirder...
|>
re: 29
This is one of those 'you don't know what you are talking about' things. Which is understandable -- most people aren't guitar players. The basic answer is yeah -- most amps have a way of making distortion built in, but they aren't all the same, and some of them work best when the amp is turned up.
There are three basic ways to get distortion. One, through vacuum tubes. This is an ancient tech but people still use it because there is a near universal consensus that vacuum tube distortion just sounds really good. Two, through transistors clipping. This is the technique used in your basic distortion/fuzz pedals, and also in solid-state/transistor amps. This can sometimes sound really good, but the consensus is that it doesn't have quite the same sort of sound as vacuum tube distortion, and sometimes it sounds really nasty. A more recent option is through digital modelling -- where a CPU basically takes the input signal and manipulates it to sound as if it had gone through an amp.
With vacuum tube distortion you get that by basically driving the tubes really hard so they clip. Tubes clip in a different way from transistors so you get a nice rich harmonic distortion. In valve/tube amps that have a master volume, when the master volume is turned down it's just the little preamp tubes that are distorting. The problem is if you force the power-amp tubes into distortion -- the big tubes that make the amp really loud -- this sounds even better than just making the pre-amp tubes distort.
So, there are lots of 'distortion circuits' -- but a lot of people think the ones that need you to crank the hell out of the amp sound best. It has nothing much to do with authenticity. A lot of people have invested a lot of time and money in finding ways to get that kind of sound without ear-bleedingly loud sound-pressure levels.
31 makes me once again wish that I could have seen the Who at their (decade-long) peak.
30: BA is a nice choice, I'll give him that.
18: Starting with just "How do you get", #1 result is "pregnant." Uhh....
Naw, I've been coveting my neighbor's wife for a year now, and I'm still not pregnant.
You might not be coveting correctly.
37: Google isn't helping me at all on this....
The wiki answer page for "how do you get pregnant" very helpfully suggests that you google "sex" for informative pictures.
31: My experience with anything related to audio is that there is an enormous amount of bullshit surrounding the devices involved, which is why I ask. Signal recovery and reproduction is a core element of my job, and I work with signals far trickier than anything an audiophile or musician will ever see, so I do actually have a pretty solid basis for understanding the issues involved. Really the thing I'm unclear on (and for which I have an uncharitable default explanation) is why, given that "A lot of people have invested a lot of time and money in finding ways to get that kind of sound without ear-bleedingly loud sound-pressure levels" people aren't actually using that technology. Of course that assumes that the people involved have been successful, but given that the odd harmonic distortion characteristic of vacuum tubes is fairly easy to generate, even without going to digital, it seems to me the most likely explanation is social or psychological, not technical. From your explanation it seems to me the driver is not authenticity so much as something along the lines of conservatism.
I wouldn't make the uncharitable assumption but for the fact that in the audiophile community (dealing with similar technologies) there is a staggering amount of pseudo-scientific bullshit about signal reproduction. Not coincidentally the bullshit tends to encourage people to buy really expensive stuff, and given the subjective nature of the whole thing it's entirely possible that despite the fact that the signals reaching ones' ears are identical, the experience of listening to music carried over (f'rex) $20/foot speaker wire really is superior to the 20 cent/foot speaker wire experience.
39: I've been looking at informative pictures for years, and I'm not pregnant. Yet another wikifailure...
36, 37: Have you tried coveting his ass as well?
The tonal difference between real tube overdrive and even the best digital emulations is still pretty significant, to those familiar with it anyway. Which is why every recording studio will have racks of digital devices, but also a Marshall half-stack in a soundproof box somewhere that you can just crank the fuck up. But the difference between real cranked power tubes and overdriven preamp tubes, or even a good distortion pedal, is not going to be remotely detectable to 99% of a live audience. So guitarists who insist on being cranked up for that sweet tone are either a) purists or b) dicks, which two groups are clearly not unrelated.
I'm thinking it's usually the guitarists who could come down a bit.
43 comments in and no-one has suggested making it one softer?
40: Many (most?) guitarists do in fact use loads of non-ear-destroying ways of getting distortion and overdrive, so it's not that people aren't using that technology. But the effect of simply being too loud (which many musicians and audiences seem to enjoy) is hard to achieve without turning it up a bit.
I agree that there is a bit of audiophile preciousness in the valveophile community, but I find it more forgiveable given that they at least are upfront that they want to make a distorted sound, rather than hiding behind waffle about 'warmth'.
30: I maintained last night in conversation with Rah that we were not yet done finding nuggets of crazy in that story and I still maintain this. That crazy mine is rich and promising yet.
46: You are correct, sir. Stay tuned.
43: The tonal difference between real tube overdrive and even the best digital emulations is still pretty significant, to those familiar with it anyway.
I'd want to see double blind tests before I buy this. The dynamics of tube saturation are pretty simple. My first real lab work (stuff that made it into peer reviewed publication) was on a very closely related phenomenon, so I read all the original papers on the subject. Fascinating stuff, if you care about clouds of electrons. And who doesn't? Crazy people, that's who.
re: 40
Really, most attempts to sound like valve amps fail to quite get there -- hubristic statements like "the odd harmonic distortion characteristic of vacuum tubes is fairly easy to generate" to the contrary. Some stuff gets pretty damn close (because of the people who've spent all the time and money, etc), but it's not remotely as straightforward as you think.
It also gets complicated by the fact that the sort of amp that makes good sounds at bedroom/small-rehearsal volume and the sort of amp that makes a good sound at large gig level are often not the same amp and not everyone can afford to have loads of gear lying about. Most people end up buying a mid-powered valve combo, say, because it'll work for rehearsals with the master volume down a bit, and for small to medium sized club gigs. But it's not a one-size fits all situation.
They -- valve and non-valve technologies* -- really do sound different by the way, and I'd be a damn sight less confident with your pronouncements if I were you.
Of course, it's true that most of the time the audience isn't really going to notice the difference, and people/guitarists could be less dickish about it.
* although digital modelling is getting really really close for home-recording/small-rehearsal type applications.
#5.
Eddie Van Halen's early setup was basically a big ol 100W Marshall, cranked, and run into a dummy load (attenuator). the output of the dummy load went into a power amp, for volume. so the Marshall was acting almost like a really big and heavy distortion pedal / pre-amp. he got the benefits of power-tube distortion but the volume was completely controlled by the power amp - so it was possible to crank that Marhsall all the way up without blowing the walls off. and, even better, he could put his effects between the Marshall and the power amp, which is a totally different sound than putting them before the amp.
Also, fwiw, there are guitar players who really prefer the sound of transistor amps. It's not a totally one sided thing. It's quite genre specific, and not always the genres you'd think.
And, to add another layer of complication, lots of amp technology is hybrid and uses both.
re: 50
Heh, There have probably been more words written on the amp setup used for VH1 than for any other album in rock history.
I don't know anything about recording equipment, but for playing music I've always thought that buying things like expensive cables and whatnot is the audio equivalent of purchasing extended warranties or getting the undercoating on a new car.
52
for good reason, too! it really is an awesome sound.
re: 54
Yeah, it's pretty close to perfect in that genre.
And if you can just replicate it, maybe Valarie Bertinelli will doink you!
That would be the "brown sound," right?
re: 57
Yeah. Ironically, that's one of the sounds that both of the digital modellers I have do a pretty decent approximation of.
The brown note? What does this word "doink" mean exactly?
59: Brown Note: South Park, Makes everyone crap. Doink: Lie back and think of hot for teacher.
What does this word "doink" mean exactly?
I believe that's the word to say when you hit someone on the forehead with a teaspoon. Teaspooning, if you will.
I don't know anything about recording equipment, but for playing music I've always thought that buying things like expensive cables and whatnot is the audio equivalent of purchasing extended warranties or getting the undercoating on a new car
As a bit of an audiophile I think it's shamefull how badly the commercial side of high-end audio treats its customers. No wonder "home theater" has been winning the battle for consumer dollars -- it can actually deliver somethink like consistant value.
It annoys me at times, but I think the audio industry deserves lots of blame.
Spending lots of money on guitar cables in order to improve sound quality is indeed incredibly stupid [ditto hi-fi, of course]. Guitar applications are very low-fi. On the other hand, guitar cables take a lot of hammering. They get plugged and unplugged a lot, kicked, dragged around, etc. So a certain minimal level of mechanical strength is needed. Really really cheap cables tend to be a false economy because they just aren't sturdy enough.
62: Our stereo is so old that it has two cassette decks, but will only hold a single CD. The only audio equipment we've purchased in years are various iPods. I don't know how they get the vacuum tubes so small.
47: Rah's theory last night was that there's a little Senator Ensign-esque business that had to be taken care of in some fashion.
OK, so now I want to hear VH1 straight through, which is a lot more achievable than 32. Still not going to happen, tho.
53:My understanding is that it is, in fact, true that the stock cables that come with a lower-end sound system are inadequate, esp. over long distances (like, across a big room), but that diminishing returns set in almost immediately - once you've improved over the stock 20ga. (or whatever) cables, there's no more gain to be had.
65: Matt Yglesias is suggesting the same thing. Not claiming inside knowledge or gossip, but speculating.
I kind of hope it was just "Man, don't you ever just want to get on a plane and just go?" I'd like that in a governor. But it's probably something depressing.
49: They -- valve and non-valve technologies* -- really do sound different by the way, and I'd be a damn sight less confident with your pronouncements if I were you.
My area of specialization includes the very dynamics that lead to distortion in valves (I've actually built one from scratch, and characterized its distortion), and I work daily with signal processing, and given that there is a huge amount of subjective bullshit associated with audio equipment, I feel completely justified in expressing skepticism. So far what people are offering is subjective evaluations. Expectations affect perception to an enormous degree, so that's a pretty thin thread to hang an argument on. Do you have double blind tests or something like that you can point to?
This is of genuine interest to me, and I'd love to learn something new about the topic, but I'm frustrated by the blizzard of bullshit and proof by repeated vigorous assertion that seems to surround tube amps. Not that I'm accusing you, mind, just explaining why this particular issue gets under my skin.
* A while back, admittedly.
65: He snuck out of the country to get a secret abortion. You heard it here first.
67: No one else thinks he was meeting zombie Hitler?
re: 68
I suspect the real problem is that prior to widespread cheap digital modelling technology, it might well have been true that the mathematics of valve distortion were fully understood, but circuits that could be built at an affordable price out of standard transistor circuits were not. I've owned a number of not especially cheap transistor amps, and while they could definitely sound good I'd bet than even a non-player could tell the difference (blind) once it had been pointed out to them a couple of times.
The consensus these days seems to be increasingly coming round to the view that the very best digital modellers are pretty much there. 99.99 times out of 100, or whatever, you'd not be able to tell which was which. The very best digital gear sounds amazing.
On the other hand, if you are Joe Blow, gigging with your garage band at any point up until the last couple of years, nothing 'transistor' you could afford was going to sound anything like as good as the valve amp you could buy with the money you had.
re: 68
Also, fwiw, I'm pretty sceptical about most/all extreme audiophile claims, except with guitar equipment until very recently the differences weren't tiny nuances that some 'golden ear' claimed to be able to detect only when Pluto was in Capricon, or whatever. They were screamingly obvious.
That probably no longer holds true with digital modelling.
"the differences weren't tiny nuances that some 'golden ear' claimed to be able to detect"
In high school, our music teacher gave us a test. We'd have a staff with three notes written on it. He'd play the three notes and then a fourth. We had to say whether the fourth note was higher or lower than the third. I got exactly 50% correct. Nobody else had any problems at all.
re: 73
Heh, yeah. A while back there was a discussion here of some more sophisticated online version of that sort of thing. Lots of people posted the scores they got. Sadly, mine wasn't especially good and I've been playing instruments for over 20 years.
71.last: This is almost certainly the root cause of the issue. I can easily see tube amps being manifestly superior in a bang for the buck sense. Which is bloody obvious, now that I think of it.
I recently visited a guitar store in DC that has a "tube tester" machine like those I saw in early childhood when TVs used tubes, not ICs/transistors. As a non-musician, non-audiophile, I never would have thought that amps are still made with tubes.
30: Just when you think the Mark Sanford story couldn't get any weirder...
"I didn't know the Argentine, but I knew American sailors"
Togolosh, when you go to negotiate with my Dad about my sister's brideprice, you should tell him what you do. From your description, I'd say you are in very similar fields (if not the same field). You sound like half the dinner table conversations of my childhood. He might knock a couple cows off.
This is of genuine interest to me, and I'd love to learn something new about the topic, but I'm frustrated by the blizzard of bullshit and proof by repeated vigorous assertion that seems to surround tube amps. Not that I'm accusing you, mind, just explaining why this particular issue gets under my skin.
I suspect that a lot of this has a lot less to do with the wonder of valves and (at least to begin with) a lot more to do with with the general crappiness of the 8-bitish (cheap!) I/O of the 80's. For example...! I had a Sony digital amp manufactured circa 1985 with a decent set of speakers. It sounded pretty good. On the other hand, in the 90's, I inherited a Yamaha stereo amp manufactured around 1973. So having heard all these audiophile versus anti-audiophile arguments, I pitted the two against each other (including arranging blind testing of sorts) and the Yamaha did sound better. When pitted against each other using the same CD player and CD (through the same Sony speakers). Lo and behold, the Sony clipped - it became much more unresponsive at low volume levels and whatnot.
So I gave the Sony away. It did at 20 years old. The Yamaha is still going and still sounds good. The trick is, is that the Sony was piece of average equipment from the 80's and the Yamaha was a genuine no shit very expensive high-end amp from the 70's, complete with real wood case. Basically, I'm pretty sure the Yamaha was much better made (and Sony, if it hasn't earned a fairly shitty rep by this point, deserves one for their audio equipment); it is certainly more powerful.
Also, having tried a small, new, Peavy digital guitar amp of the 80's and an old, used tube amp of the 70's, I can say that it is entirely possible/likely for a digital amp to sound better.
In the audiophile bullshit category, I also know of a guy who rebuilt a CD player as a tube-driven CD player (if that isn't gilding the lily, I don't know what is), and he claimed it sounded better. If it did (I didn't get a chance to find out), it was because he replaced cheap digital components in the post-conversion circuit with good quality analog components.
So my suspicion is, is that it might well be possible that a preferable sound comes out of a tube driven amp, but it's going to be because of the particular and inherent difference in the circuits, and not due to to an inherent superiority of analog to the digital.
max
['I feel so bipartisan.']
I suspect Mark Sanford was actually running guns to the secret Bush ranch in Paraguay, in preparation for the upcoming coup against NObamian Socialism. But they will probably use some mistress as a cover story or something.
76: Audiophiles have been vital in preserving tube manufacturing infrastructure. Also soviet bloc nations still used (through at least the early oughts, dunno about today) tubes for a lot of their military hardware, due to their robustness against electromagnetic pulses. For a while in the mid (maybe early?) 1990s the sole source for vacuum tubes of sufficient power for some of the older (now retired) US early warning radar systems was Russia.
78: Cool. If he'll take tubes instead of cows this might work out quite well indeed.
Dude. He has rooms full of that stuff. I don't think he wants tubes.
Also, having tried a small, new, Peavy digital guitar amp of the 80's and an old, used tube amp of the 70's, I can say that it is entirely possible/likely for a digital amp to sound better.
Heh. I used to own a late 80s Peavey transistor. It wasn't even in the same ball-park as the tube amp I had shortly after. On the other hand, the Fender transistor amp I had more or less at the same time, I could definitely see some people really preferring it over the Marshall I had.
The Fender transistor amp totally nailed a particular high-gain scooped-middle big-hair 80s rock tone, at quiet volumes in a way that the Marshall didn't. The Marshall did a better job at some other things, but the transistor Fender did the two things it did well, really well.
I have a benchmark for overly-expensive cabling (for everything but speaker cable): If it costs more per foot than the cable for my 200MHz oscilloscope probe, you're doing it wrong.
|| Yay! Paper accepted for big annual meeting! (There's only ever one Euripides panel and 5,000,000 papers submitted for it.) In our house this meeting is known as "Chick APA," as opposed to "Dick APA." |>
||
A bit more of this might not be entirely bad. Bad, but not *entirely* bad.
|>
It wouldn't take much for philology to be more chick-ridden than philosophy.
86. Καλως. I suppose we'll never be able to read it to protect your secret identity. Wah.
90: Well, while that is certainly true, the names exist because in our house because mine is chick APA and CA's is dick APA. But yes, your APA is way more dickish. (But only because your search for truth is laser-like and searing in its intensity! And the rest of us can't handle it! Kidding!)
It's true, though. The rest of you can't handle it. My quest for truth. Laydeez.
85: She misses the mark, by about a foot.
Well, at least Sanford claimed to be in a country that US citizens can visit without a visa.
I desperately want to know if a reporter is going to ask him to show his passport to prove he was there. I bet Argentina still does stamps.
Mark Sanford has less of a Southern accent than I'm used to hearing from South Carolina politicians.
Already apologizing to his wife and kids "for letting them down".
Jesus.
Can we get every elected official in the country to simultaneously admit "Yes, I screw around", and so not have to to deal with this sort of thing anymore? I am so, so terribly bored and annoyed by these stories.
83: Heh. I used to own a late 80s Peavey transistor. It wasn't even in the same ball-park as the tube amp I had shortly after. On the other hand, the Fender transistor amp I had more or less at the same time, I could definitely see some people really preferring it over the Marshall I had.
My Peavy was very early 80's, and new (and small). After that got stolen, I wound up with a pawn shop something (Peavy or Marshall? Can't remember. Peavy, I think), that was large and loud. Sounded like shit. Probably seriously blown or had a decaying tube or three. I only had it long enough to figure out it sucked and unloaded it and the guitar shortly thereafter.
max
['Add to the list, things I had that I woulda and shoulda kept.']
Argentinian mistressdear dear friend.
Dude. He has rooms full of that stuff. I don't think he wants tubes.
So what togolosh needs to do is trade the tubes to Ttam for some sheep, trade the sheep to Apo for some pot, and trade the pot to someone in the Texas contingent (M/tch, maybe?) for some cows. Easy-peasy.
You know, "dear, dear friend" is refreshing -- at least it's not, "that dirty trollop who never meant anything to me."
100: Can we get every elected official in the country to simultaneously admit "Yes, I screw around", and so not have to to deal with this sort of thing anymore? I am so, so terribly bored and annoyed by these stories.
But... but... family values! Small government! Lower taxes! If you stick your peepee in the wrong hoohoo, you're crowding out vital private investment! And then the lack of family values will give the green light to black people who will riot in the streets and elect a black musli.... OHMYGAWD! RUNRUNRUN
max
['Government penises must stay out of the private market or HITLER!']
And having an Argentinian mistress is way the hell better than being head of the Republican Governors Association anyway.
I wanted "hiking the Appalachian Trail" to be a euphemism for something more bizarre and exotic. Sigh. You disappoint me, Governor Sanford.
106: God, you fuck just one sheep...
some of those smaller 80's peavey's sounded pretty good. Some didn't. I gigged once with one emergency patched through a marshall 15" cabinet, after an amp meltdown.
106: Thousands of household uses. In a pinch, you can probably even trade them to folks back in the hills for surplus daughters more pot.
Sanford said he has taken adventure trips for years to unwind. He has visited the coast of Turkey, the Greek Isles and South America, sometimes with friends and sometimes by himself. "I would get out of the bubble I am in," he told the newspaper.
Terrific. Nothing like making your family have to deal with public disclosure that you've been doing "adventure trips" for years.
80: Spike nailed it! The mistress is a cover story.
I still think zombie Hitler was there too.
"Sorry I'm late. I took an adventure trip to your sister's house."
Not just adventure trips, but "Greek style" adventure trips.
115: That's it! "Hiking the Appalachian trail" == "intercrural sex".
Not watching the press conference or anything, but Marshall's liveblogging is making me want to cut the guy some slack.
I think politicians should try to find American mistresses. It's green (instead of food miles, I'm worried about sex miles) and we should try to keep jobs at home.
"Adventure trips." "Exotic." I keep thinking of the tagline to Deliverance: "This is the weekend they didn't play golf."
One of the sources of conflict between Sanford and the Legislature over the last six and a half years has been his insistence on centralizing and expanding the power of the Governor's office at the expense of Legislature and the state bureaucracy. So it's been kind of ironic to watch Sanford and his allies try to make the case that it's really not that important to know where the Governor is always. I won't be surprised if the Legislature tries to impeach Sanford over this. Or if they succeed. They've got him over a barrel now.
Not getting rid of South Carolina when we had the chance was a real mistake.
They've got him over a barrel now.
Exotic!
116: Tried both. Hiking is better.
The barrel thing sounds fun, though.
[Transplanted because I liked it.]
And let this be a lesson to you, young people: government stimulus leads to inflation and then BAM! you're in an Argentinian.
max
['Don't come for me, Evita.']
I watched it. I always cut politicians slack on affairs because, geez, who cares? Unless they've spent their careers nattering on about the sanctity of marriage, in which case, they get what they deserve. Far as I can tell, Sanford hasn't had much to say on the issue.
#120. We're too small to be a republic, Not Prince (and too big to be an insane asylum).
124: Yeah, the most bashable bit seems to be the disappearing act, but the state doesn't seem to have fallen into the Atlantic in his absence.
and too big to be an insane asylum
Population of South Carolina: 4,479,800
Population of Florida: 18,328,340
Nuff said?
I kind of feel sorry for the guy, but I also wonder why he couldn't manage to plan a trip to Argentina without the weird disappearing act and media circus.
The most bashable bit is that visiting a foreign mistress hurts the current account balance in a time when every dollar spent abroad is basically borrowed from China. We should be encouraging affairs where somebody has to travel to the U.S.
Yeah, there's a shoe that hasn't dropped. As things stand now, the only reason he had to come out of the closet about the affair is because of an inexplicably badly handled trip -- there's got to be something that will make it clear that the affair was due to come out somehow.
The affair seems so badly planned, I feel there must be more to it. He left the country for several days with no cover story and no one to front for him back home?
Maybe he had an accomplice who decided to betray him.
You'd think American politicians would be better at cover ups.
131: The little head isn't always so good at the planning thing.
I always cut politicians slack on affairs because, geez, who cares?
I basically feel this way, except that so many of them seem to cause massive amounts of avoidable collateral damage. (I'm bracketing out the family damage, which I think is not the business of voters except insofar as we sympathize with them on an emotional level.)
Take this one. Let's say something had happened -- I dunno, a minor-but-mysterious explosion at a chemical plant, or even just a stupid glitch in a law-enforcement training exercise that somebody forgot to warn the locals about. The kind of thing that makes a medium-sized 12-hour splash in local news coverage, and requires a quick response from the governor, and then life goes on.
Having the governor out of town instantly makes that sort of thing a power vacuum. Is is the Lt. Gov. going to step up? Is somebody going to issue a statement in the governor's name? Is the police commissioner or a pol with dreams of higher office going to stick his or her oar in? Now a 12-hour story has turned into a two-day story, and attention is getting diverted and anxiety is getting stirred up.
It's just flat-out careless to hold high executive office, to be the person that legally everybody's supposed to turn to for decisionmaking, and to leave your staff without a very clear game plan.*
*I'm speaking generally here, although it appears from the amount of fumbling around that Sanford's staff wasn't given such a plan.
128: I think that it's something of an occupational hazard: By the time you're governor you are so used to having all decisions made via a collective process with your staff that when you are forced to fly solo you just don't have the knack for seeing how to avoid doing stupid things. It seems to be a fairly common thing that senior politicians do absurdly stupid stuff when they are trying to keep their own staff out of the loop. Perhaps it's not so much the lack of staff advice as the need to maintain a consistent lie for family, friends, staff, and media. The level of bullshitting required to shine on the very people whose job it is to help you craft effective lies is hard to pull off.
In other news, Monkey Urinates on Zambian President.
133: The funny thing, though, is that the lack of a game plan hasn't got anything to do with the affair. "I'm out of the country for a wilderness trip, the lt. gov. is in charge while I'm gone," would have been perfectly easy. Might have led to suspicions itself, but much less than just disappearing.
I'd strongly surmise that the reason for the poorly handled trip was that someone was going to blow his cover on the affair in the immediate future, so there wasn't any point in covering his tracks anymore.
when you are forced to fly solo you just don't have the knack for seeing how to avoid doing stupid things. It seems to be a fairly common thing that senior politicians do absurdly stupid stuff when they are trying to keep their own staff out of the loop.
Eh, maybe this is it.
134.2: How does the monkey feel about ex-presidents? Is Dallas suitable habitat for that sort of monkey?
he only reason he had to come out of the closet about the affair is because of an inexplicably badly handled trip
No, I think it's pretty clear that his marriage is on the brink of disintegrating. A reporter asked whether they were separated and he said something like, "I guess it depends on what you mean by it. She's at the beach and I'm here, but there's nothing formal."
135.2 seems likely to me too, but I still think 132 is a significant part of it.
Awful lot of trouble to go to just to change your party affiliation. (Ew! Spector!!)
137: If it's the kind I'm familiar with they are pretty open about their choice of pissing victims. I'm a monkey pissing survivor myself.
138: Yeah, I think that might be your uncooperative accomplice.
142: Right, two container loads to Dallas ASAP. Will they accept payment in tubes?
The reporter for The State who ambushed him at the Airport said she was acting on a tip. I think there must have been some cover up plan that just failed.
Also, do we know that the Dear Dear Friend is female?
Also, do we know that the Dear Dear Friend is female?
He referred to DDF as "her".
Also, do we know that the Dear Dear Friend is female?
There's nothing queer about our Governor Sanford.
I always cut politicians slack on affairs because, geez, who cares?
Well, aside from their family, but as a political thing, I agree with you. But it'll be interesting to watch rank-and-file South Carolina Republicans react to this news. They're going to be torn between their dislike of adulterous politicians who chase foreign poon and their inclination to excuse one of their own. I'm betting the tut-tutters win. Lindsay Graham, of all people, made his name scolding Clinton during the Lewinsky affair.
Before we come to any conclusions about the eptitude of politicians at conducting affairs, we need to be certain that we are not assuming that having an affair equals having been caught having an affair. Now, to take a Bayesian approach, we should first ...
Lindsay Graham, of all people, made his name scolding Clinton during the Lewinsky affair.
Sanford voted for 3 of the 4 articles of impeachment.
their dislike of adulterous politicians who chase foreign poon
Yeah, they might get past the affair, but with a Mexican?
152: Right, burn him.
152: Maybe that explains why Sanfor was so quick to come clean (i.e. it isn't the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you).
138: No, I think it's pretty clear that his marriage is on the brink of disintegrating.
From the hints in his profile, he seems to be a lot weird, and his wife seems to be the ambitious one. (In the style of Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush.)
So the dude seems to be depressive, self-denying and not actually all that interested in being governor. Great. Good for him. However, because he made such a fuss about the stimulus money, which you gotta figure that was worth at least several tens of thousands of jobs, plus a number of unemployed (probably black) people with no benefits, plus the aid and comfort for idiots like Rick Perry and Rush 'Hermann Goering' Limbaugh, he has significantly increased human suffering in service of some overarching morality that apparently has no supporters capable of upholding it.
I believe there is a Chris Rock routine about some black guys being proud of paying their child support that applies here.
max
['Gah.']
I note the the US Ambassador to Argentina was very surprised that Sanford hadn't checked in and considered it very unusual.
I think we peasants have a hard time understanding the demands on a high-level politician. Like, total.
I can imagine three widget manufacturers and a movie company in Buenos Aires, negotiating deals to do business in Sanford's state, saying:"A week in Buenos Aires, and Sanford didn't drop by? I'm gonna look at Georgia instead."
IOW, Sanford could not tell his staff he was going to BA, because his staff would have given Sanford a schedule he could not refuse.
Also, either he didn't try to get his wife to stand beside him at the conference or she refused. Whichever, that seems like an improvement.
152: Right, burn him.
Of course, the argument would be (and was) that it wasn't the adultery but the perjury, so.
Lindsay Graham, of all people
I have no problem believing that Lindsay Graham does not fuck women he isn't married to.
or she refused
Given the tone of her remarks to the media during this whole thing, my money's on her refusing. Which doesn't necessarily contradict him not asking. I get the feeling things are pretty icy between the two of them right now.
No dead woman or live boy, Sanford was pretty weak Presidential material and the election season is 3 years away anyway. Unless Obama screws up very badly, which is possible, Republicans better put a Texan on the ticket to keep from a LBJ style blowout with coattails.
So I am not nterested in Sanford.
Firedoglake:
Sanford presser:292 comments
Rahm WH Open to Dropping Public Option 82 comments
Sigh
Unless Obama screws up very badly, which is possible,
Entirely possible. Still playing the 1930 game, we are.
Republicans better put a Texan on the ticket to keep from a LBJ style blowout with coattails.
Who? Perry? Can Perry win Texas at this point?
max
['Kay Bailey ain't dumb.']
164: Pretty cunning of Obama to arrange the whole Argentine affair to distract attention from the health care thing. It seems to have worked on the media powerhouse that is firedoglake, so we can assume that CNN, NYT, and other lesser outlets will fall into line.
On the original topic: what I want to know is why so many sound board operators do such a crappy job. Nearly every concert I see now involving amplification has boomy, overloud bass (and kick drum for that matter), inaudible keyboards (if the band has them, that is), and the vocals too low. I hate going to the 9:30 Club because I suspect that the sound board guys all have hearing damage that prevents them from doing a good mix.
If a no public option bill passes I'm willing to commit to giving money to any and all primary challengers to Democrats who voted for it, and those that survive the primaries will see my checks going to their GOP opponents. If Obama signs it I'll give money and my vote to his GOP opponent in 2012.
I have what passes for good health insurance in the US, and I'll be paying ~$5000 out of pocket this year.
Also, no surprises: Insurance companies respond to incentives, and when the incentives are to be evil shitheads...
As for tubes/valves, I have both a pair of single-ended triode monoblock amplifiers and a tube-modded CD player. Counterintuitively, I know objectively that what I'm getting is distorted sound, but it sounds more natural to me than a very clean solid state amp (of which I own two). I'm willing to admit it's entirely superstition and snake oil, but man, did I fall in love the first time I heard a tube amp.
The solid state amps I've got can get much, much louder without clipping, but I live in an apartment with neighbors on three sides so this isn't really something I ever need.
169: I think these things are driven by fashion. Back in my day bass was just one element of a complete musical experience. Now it's like 90% and the kids with the pants falling off and the piercings and would it really hurt to not dress like a slut just one day of the week I can't believe you're wearing that to church!
Personally I prefer the vocals far louder than current fashion dictates, the bass far lower, and the overall volume about half what it usually is. And I prefer you damn kids stay off my lawn, of course.
I have no problem believing that Lindsay Graham does not fuck women he isn't married to.
Seriously. The guy is such a screaming queen. I have to comment on it every time I see him on TV. I just cannot fathom how this escapes the notice of the people of SC. Maybe they don't care since he's not, y'know, uppity.
Mom, toglosh won't get us get our ball back.
... given that the odd harmonic distortion characteristic of vacuum tubes is fairly easy to generate, even without going to digital, it seems to me the most likely explanation is social or psychological, not technical. From your explanation it seems to me the driver is not authenticity so much as something along the lines of conservatism.
It's conservatism, ad-hockery, laziness, going with what you know, superstition, and any other number of utterly illogical reasons. Partly one wants to sound just like one's idols, and when one can pick up those components cheap why not? And then once you get into a habit you just keep going.
But the "sounds just like a tube amp" thing has been around since at least the 80s, and I know the first few digital effects processors I heard didn't sound just like a tube amp at all. Now? If nothing else you can run the guitar track through a zillion different plugins to Pro Tools until you get precisely the sound you want, so the attachment to tubes is partly practical (you know you can duplicate the sound live without clicking any buttons) and partly romantic. It can be impractical when your rectifier tube blows the night of a gig and none of the guitar shops in town have any in stock, though. I could see running everything through a Mac, though, if one wanted to get everything just so.
Whichever, that seems like an improvement.
Amen.
re: 169
Good engineers are rare. I remember a friend's band doing a 'battle of the bands' gig. One of the other bands playing had brought their own engineer and offered to let him do my friend's band's sound.
Not sure who to trust he said no. Big mistake. When the other band took the stage they sounded totally epic. Huge sound, crystal clear, every level exactly right. The sound just screamed 'class act'. Every other band -- who had a soundcheck and were free to adjust the mix, use their own engineer, etc -- sounded like they were coming through about 3ft of mud.
re: 175
I bought a new digital modeller just two weeks ago. State of the art within its price range [which wasn't huge, but the same chip/algorithms etc are used in much more expensive gear]. It's damned impressive. I'm still not convinced it's 100% all the way there yet on every possible tone -- the almost but not quite distorted tones seem much harder emulate than the full-on distorted tones -- but some of them are absolutely first rate. You could gig with it and no-one in the audience would know the difference. I have another modeller which is maybe 6 or 7 years old, and the improvement over the intervening period is tangible.
It sounds like the affair has been known about within certain circles (beyond just the family) for quite a while. Disappearing for a few days gave the opening for people to start asking "where is he?" without having to look like they were specifically exposing anything, while knowing that there was a very good chance of the affair being exposed. The State (via TPM) has yet another set of, uh, revelations.
Adultery is a crime in South Carolina with "a fine of not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars [and/]or imprisonment for not less than six months nor more than one year".
So's fornication. The "abominable crime of buggery, whether with mankind or with beast" is a felony even.
181 - That poor guy. I don't think he likes being governor very much.
"abominable crime of buggery, whether with mankind or with beast"
.... is a little bit long for pseud.
183: Not now, certainly. Publishing the emails seems gratuitous, but it makes me wonder whether it was the wife who leaked them.
Publishing the emails seems gratuitous
Someone is getting a knife in, there.
I admit reading the e-mails immediately after seeing a link to them, but the whole thing does make me uncomfortable. Really gratuitous is the way they're apparently marketing them as excerpts - with the full e-mails to be revealed tomorrow. Everyone buy a copy of the paper!
Oof. I started to read the emails and then had to stop. They made me squirm -- in the same way I couldn't stand it when teachers would post any notes they intercepted the kids passing. Not fun to read!
(In grad school a dirty email from one student to another was sent to the wrong printer. The student printing it kept hitting print when it wasn't emerging from the printer next to him. It was printing in the dean's office. The dean brought the copies up to our department chair who posted the emails around the department on various bulletin boards. It was wildly obnoxious and made me think less of him [and I adored him at the time].)
Not sure who to trust he said no. Big mistake. When the other band took the stage they sounded totally epic. Huge sound, crystal clear, every level exactly right. The sound just screamed 'class act'. Every other band -- who had a soundcheck and were free to adjust the mix, use their own engineer, etc -- sounded like they were coming through about 3ft of mud.
That's a great story.
OT:
I don't suppose you guys would be willing to weigh in on a photo contest?
How come you liked 3 better than 2, nosflow?
Oh, sheesh. Those emails. Stop, stop!
Publishing those things is just a bit over the top.
Nineteenth century Japanese wood prints featuring the enormous testicles of the Japanese Raccoon Dog. Via Andrew Leonard.
Not sure who to trust he said no. Big mistake. When the other band took the stage they sounded totally epic. Huge sound, crystal clear, every level exactly right. The sound just screamed 'class act'. Every other band -- who had a soundcheck and were free to adjust the mix, use their own engineer, etc -- sounded like they were coming through about 3ft of mud.
That's not an entirely uncommon phenomenon, is it? (I haven't read much of the thread about this.) But back when I hung out with bands, you have your bands who insist on their own soundman because he's damn good and they know it, your bands who insist on their own because they've got him beaten down and all he really does is stand behind the soundboard (desk) and follow their instructions -- bad, wrong! A person likes to see a band for whom the soundperson is an equal member of the band.
That is not how we do weightlifting at my gym.
196: Maybe you should find a new gym.
Or grow massive testicles and work out anywhere.
The lithographs of racoons who use their breasts for those purposes are not extant, sadly.
Poor guy. He just might have married the wrong woman.
Also, no surprises: Insurance companies respond to incentives, and when the incentives are to be evil shitheads...
The funny thing about that is that some of them are admitting it. Many make nice noises, but United Health's Golden Rule, Tonekin, and Assurant Health
201: Yeah, well, the US system fucking sucks for not letting its politicians diverge from the standard love-and-marriage-for-ever-and-ever template. Guy shoulda been able to get divorced while still carrying on with his professional life, as well as his personal (though, distance problem there). As it stands, it appears he flaked out and bolted for a few days -- over which I'm utterly sympathetic. I'm sorry for all the personally involved parties.
Holy shit, did he ever marry the wrong woman. Not to be too harsh on someone who's suffering, but that's one of the shittiest things I've ever read.
I only read the first three emails, and felt guilty enough for doing that, but based on those, I'd say the Governor comes off very sympathetically. He's in lovelovelove, for reals, and suddenly his day job seems meaningless. That's human; I know that.
The New Republic has been irritating in many ways over the years, but Michelle Cottle's habitual lulzfest over these situations is a whole new paradigm in irritating.
When I was in college, I did sound for a few friends' bands. With very rudimentary boards, you basically just had to get the levels right -- but that required actually listening and forming thoughts like "oh, the bass is too loud." This was apparently beyond most people.
I've heard from friends who've worked at venues and played in bands that professional sound guys are really tetchy -- kinda like Soviet doctors, you basically have to bribe them to provide competent service.
204: I didn't think it was so bad. Seriously, she's got to be in a ton of pain; seems like she's doing the best she can.
But yeah, it's hard not to sympathize with the Guv based on the e-mails; he's just a dopey guy with big pink hearts whirling around in his eyes.
209.1: No doubt she is in pain, but wouldn't it be better just to keep her mouth shut? What that press release basically says is "I am a very good person, that two-timing sorry-ass son of a bitch has done me wrong, and now I am going to make him fucking CRAWL." Which might even be true, but did you really need to tell the whole world?
did you really need to tell the whole world?
How else to make him CRAWL?
203: The thing is that in general the voting public doesn't give a shit. It's the media that it's invested in promoting the wife-and-two-kids template.
(The movie Bulworth had a subtle (for Hollywood) joke about political marriages. It was clear without ever being mentioned explicitly that Bulworth and his wife had split up amicably a long time before and that his wife had a new boyfriend, but they maintained a sham marriage for the sake of his political career.)
210: You have to put it in context of evangelicalism, though. Walking down the aisle in tears and abasing yourself as a sinner in front of the congregation is central.
I would love it if he walked out of his governorship and flew to Argentina and they were happy because they were truly in love with each other and not their crazy circumstances. They could live happily ever after in a little apartment and take the boys summers and winter break. The wife could be the next governor.
That sounds like the best option to me.
"He never read an American newspaper again."
Let us not forget in our liberal love of adultery that Mark Sanford is a monster.
No doubt she is in pain, but wouldn't it be better just to keep her mouth shut?
Maybe, but people were surely wondering why she didn't speak up when Sanford's aides were pulling up all the rugs and sofa cushions in North America looking for him. Plus, she's a public figure, and every news agency in the U.S. is talking about her; she's not out of bounds in giving some talk back.
Under the circumstances, I really think it's the best she can do -- she says she wants to try to work it out with the guy, and that she thinks he's a great governor, but she can't say she'll unequivocally take him back, cause then she'll look like a doormat. And that won't help him either.
Let us not forget in our liberal love of adultery that Mark Sanford is a monster.
That may be, but because there is no world that exists outside of California, I don't know anything about Mark Sanford. I didn't even know that South Carolina was a state until today.
This way back in 105 is one of the funniest things I've ever read: But... but... family values! Small government! Lower taxes! If you stick your peepee in the wrong hoohoo, you're crowding out vital private investment!
I read it at work, and I had to cover my mouth so that no one would hear and ask me what I was laughing about. Fortunately I was laughing too hard to breathe, so it was easy.
123 is also funny.
218: He turned down stimulus money because it would mean more benefits for the unemployed. 'Cause really, fuck the unemployed.
Maybe Mrs. Sanford should have written a book and attacked the mistress for trying to destroy her family.
218: I live one state over and the only thing I knew about Mark Sanford was that he tried to reject the stimulus money.
221: But why? If i lived in California I'd do my best to forget the existence of South Carolina as well.
213: Fair enough, but yuck.
217: Eh. Nobody has much doubt now why she wasn't saying anything, and she doesn't say that she wants to work it out. She says she'll give him a chance if he's abject enough. Just leaving him to twist in the wind would have sent that message just fine and with more dignity.
And I hate, hate, hate the idea that looking like a doormat is something decent people ought to worry about. People do all kinds of things with, for, and to their spouses that others don't understand and don't need to understand. But the most horrible fear of every American is looking like a chump, so all that "love" and "privacy" and "family" shit goes out the window once that gets triggered?
212: The thing is that in general the voting public doesn't give a shit. It's the media that it's invested in promoting the wife-and-two-kids template.
Disagree that the voting public doesn't give a shit -- no way. (Especially in South Carolina, but even then, I know a lot of democrats who came to fucking hate Clinton, who admittedly wasn't in lurve.) Though, yes, the media pushes the scandalous aspect of matters.
Mrs. Sanford's invocation of the psalms is a bit much; she's playing to the crowd. Damage control. Maybe as a public figure that's her task.
she can't say she'll unequivocally take him back, cause then she'll look like a doormat. And that won't help him either
How would her looking like a doormat hurt him?
And I hate, hate, hate the idea that looking like a doormat is something decent people ought to worry about.
People worry about looking like doormats, because the world is full of doormats. Every bully finds one.
The problems is that people who are likely to be hurt are unlikely to worry that they are doormats. They've been trained good. But people who are likely to be exploiters are plenty worries that they might be doormats. They have an image to protect.
228.2 is weird, rob. I'll have to think about that.
228: Ta-Nehisi Coates has written some very good stuff about how well "I ain't no punk" works as a principle for organizing your social interactions.
Has this been remarked upon yet? Holy crap!
The win over Egypt was shocking enough. They looked like they were at their ten-year nadir after the total failures against Costa Rica, Italy and Brazil this month, and now this. This is like the Rockies getting to the World Series.
Further to 228.2: rob, why is the opposite of a doormat an exploiter? Why isn't it, say, someone who isn't, or is no longer, playing by the same rules, thereby rendering the other person a doormat by simple virtue of trampling all over the rules?
233: This is the first one I remember seeing. More here.
I'm of the opinion that the spouse who is betrayed pretty much gets a free pass to do whatever. Mrs. Sanford didn't create this situation, but she has to endure it. Whatever she decides to do to get her through it is her business. Pretty much anything she does short of going after him through the kids is her prerogative, IMO.
229: Parsley, I was thinking of specific groups that often fall victim to what they sometimes call "learned helplessness." It takes genuinely oppressed people a lot of time and effort to let others know they are being walked on. The powerful, on the other hand, whine at the tiniest slight. Hence, the republican titty-babies crying reverse descrimination at the drop of a hat, compared to a 100 year long civil rights struggle.
231: Pleasepleaseplease let them play Brazil. And crush them.
236: I don't buy that. We don't know what was going on in their marriage before he started the affair and we really don't have any basis (or need) to be taking sides. Adultery is one of a lot of ways that spouses can hurt each other. Sometimes the marriage is fixable and sometimes not. But if it's fixable, there's nothing to be gained by publicly castrating the guy, and if it's not, there's still nothing to be gained by publicly castrating the guy.
Seriously, what in the statement amounted to public castration?
155: You pay him for the pizza.
You tell him you've already bought magazines from the drummer.
No more masturbating to California.
240: Pretty much everything. Every "I" statement is basically contrasting her decency with his sin, and there are a whole lot of "I" statements.
234:The people do the polka
Dominance
Submission
Radios Appear
Adultery is one of a lot of ways that spouses can hurt each other.
We don't even know that he's the only one who has committed it, for that matter. But, you know, people do all sorts of hurtful things during breakups that they may or may not come to regret later. Having a marriage fall apart while the national media covers it sure would be unpleasant.
235: And thanks for the first link. A google search had turned up too much to be helpful in finding an original explanation.
244 and previous: I hate to say it, but I'm agreed with NPH that Mrs. Sanford's statement is pretty heavy on the martyrdom thing, and ... this is just a difference in preference, perhaps, but I'd prefer to stay pretty damned private about this stuff in that situation. The world is probably different in South Carolina.
231, 232: I actually came home early from work to watch it and am glad I did. Good show; Spain pretty much dominated from 30 minutes on (after they were down 1-0), but Howard did not crack in goal and the US got a bit lucky on a muffed clear on a counterattack. For those not playing along at home it was a semi-miracle that US was in the game at all, as on Sunday they needed to beat Egypt by 3 and have Brazil beat Italy by 3 to get through. That basically *never* happens at this level of play, but both games were 3-0. Final this Sunday* at 2:30 EDT.
*Speaking of Sunday, those in P'burgh, might consider catching the Old 97s for free at Hartwood Acres at 7:30. I'll post a bit more on this tomorrow, but e-mail me at address at my pseud if you want to try to meet there.
231: I was in a restaurant where I could see a sports crawl. I saw that score, and figured it was far more likely that I misunderstood than that it had happened.
And I hate, hate, hate the idea that looking like a doormat is something decent people ought to worry about.
Wait, politicians are decent people?
Mark Sanford's wife is a politician?
Let us not forget in our liberal love of adultery that Mark Sanford is a monster.
I kind of like Sanford, he always struck me as wrong but honorable. Rejecting the stimulus money was one of the few examples of ideological consistency from the Republicans we've seen in decades. If the Republicans had been consistent on spending and taxes from Reagan on then they would have stayed a minority party.
Mark Sanford's wife is a politician?
Sort of. More a relationship communicable minor form of the disease, really.
Mrs. Sanford's statement makes me wonder whether she'd be interested in her own political career.
She did run his campaign(s?). She is the granddaughter of the guy who started Skil and is from Winnetka. Had some manner of Wall Street job at one time.
256: I suspect that's true of a lot of people who are likely to marry a career politician with any sort of ambition. Not all, of course.
I saw that score, and figured it was far more likely that I misunderstood than that it had happened.
I didn't even bother watching the game; I figured it'd be a bloodbath. Goddamn.
I am so conflicted about US Soccer. On the one hand, the World Cup and international matches are incredible spectacles, and it's fun to be able to root on your country and see results like we saw today. On the other, there is something I find really grating about the relentless cheerleading for this to become a real American sport, when it so manifestly isn't really a popular or traditional sport in the USA yet -- the NY Times is a particularly bad offender here. There's something that's just SWPL and offputting about the whole way the sport is treated here that I find unbearable. Maybe when the US team is full of kids from East LA instead of from Dartmouth or we have an indigenous soccer tradition based in something other than private schools my attitude will change.
The US team in fact contains a lot of ethnic minorities and the children of immigrants. The profusion of guys named "Clint" doesn't make that wrong.
261: I dunno, I think the tide is turning on soccer's popularity. ESPN now carries the Champions League, and they've been featuring more soccer highlights on SportsCenter lately (although ESPN Deportes is still better). Plus, with the network scoring rights to broadcast EPL matches for the three seasons following this coming one, I expect to see more and more.
I should say that my attitude comes from a place of deep prejudice and ignorance. But I also find Sportcenter's relentless pushing of the premier league and other soccer annoying (particularly as this seems like a pure manufacturing demand move on ESPN's part after they bought up the rights to the premier league). That's not our sport, damn it!
261: I think your critique is a bit out of date if you check the bios of the current players. It is true that the broad base of the US Soccer "pyramid" is disproportionately stocked with suburban white kids and US Youth Soccer is stiflingly over-organized, but I think a more genuine grassroots level of support is growing. Pretend I am not pwned.
Maybe when the US team is full of kids from East LA instead of from Dartmouth or we have an indigenous soccer tradition based in something other than private schools my attitude will change.
Um, you don't have a tradition based solely on private schools & there's something SWPL and offputting about the authenticity kick here.
(In terms of popularity, well, it seems popular enough & in terms of tradition, there's been US professional leagues going back to the 1890s)
265: You have your timeline backwards. ESPN was showing EPL highlights last season, but they only won the broadcasting rights within the last week.
The better complaint is that their highlights suck; they feel the need to jazz them up the same way they do NFL or NBA highlights. I much prefer getting my highlights from the Sky Sports broadcasts on Fox Soccer Channel. (Plus, it cracks me up when they go through the headlines from the various sports pages, and actually have the anchor sitting there with a bunch of newspapers.)
Incidentally, Sanford may have hewed to the party line with Clinton, but when Livingston happened, he made it pretty clear that it was about the adultery, not the perjury.
"The bottom line is that he lied under a different oath - the oath to his wife."
Some sportswriter (I think the execrable Bill Simmons) said something like the reason organized soccer will never catch on in the US is because everyone went to high school with soccer players and knows that they're the preppy guys who say "dude" all the time and hit on your girlfriend, which basically sums up my prejudice.
But I'm sure that I'm out of date and that things are changing. And, indeed, on my dead-end street here in the gentrifying ghetto, kids set up two soccer goals pretty much every weekend day and holiday, and the black, Mexican, and belizean kids all play together, at what looks to me like a pretty high level.
In re 267, I'm pretty sure that the US soccer "tradition" such as it is, was kept alive for most of the past 50 years in prep schools and fancy suburban public schools, but I'm perfectly willing to grant that massive immigration is now changing that and that there are plenty of non-rich kids who play. As I recall vaguely, there was some chance of a native soccer tradition developing around the turn of the century, but that basically didn't happen, and in any case it's just wrong to think that it's a traditional major American sport along the lines of baseball, basketball, football or even hockey. With that said, even though I think that the interest of the NY Times and others in pushing the sport has a SWPL component that, as I say, I find a bit offputting, even though I don't really care if people want to watch a sport they find exciting, and maybe the sport really will take off here in a more broad-based way.
US soccer interest for the 1st half of the 20th century was not surprisingly almost completely immigrant-based, with St. Louis and the east coast being hotbeds (my Austrian-raised father-in-law played in some northeastern semi-pro leagues right after WWII). Pittsburgh had some good mining community-based teams, some of which have ironically transformed into clubs full of suburban kids. But it is true that immigrants (often at the coaching level) continue to be the straw that really stirs the US soccer drink.
I suspect that not-terribly-well-off immigrants kept football on the go more than preppy public schools to be honest, although official football might have been v. UMC.
(ok, i'm biased 'cause of the repressed history of nz football.)
& there's something kind of xenophobic about finding football threatening as a sport to be honest.
Keir, that's a pretty weird analysis. And you do have to admit that the coverage on ESPN is annoying.
Squad for current tournament:
Tim Howard - black father, mother from Hungary
Jonathan Bornstein - half Mexican half Jewish
Carlos Bocanegra - Mexican-American
Conor Casey - white guy
Oguchi Onyewu - parents from Nigeria
Heath Pearce - white guy from California
DaMarcus Beasley - black guy from Fort Wayne
Clint Dempsey - white, grew up in poor mostly-Mexican area
Charlie Davies - black preppie
Landon Donovan - white guy from California
Marvell Wynne - black, son of MLB player
Michael Bradley - white guy from...Princeton
Ricardo Clark - black guy
Danny Califf - white guy from California
Jay DeMerit - white guy
Sasha Kljestan - parents from Serbia
Jozy Altidore - parents from Haiti
Brad Guzan - white guy
Freddy Adu - born in Ghana
Jose Francisco Torres - half-Mexican
Jonathan Spector - white preppie
Benny Feilhaber - born in Brazil to Austrian Jews
Luis Robles - Mexican
So it's an enchanting blend.
God, if soccer became popular here it would suck. Worldwide dominance of soccer is no different than the worldwide dominance of Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
275 -- wow, actual data! But I say it's not a real sport until Sasha Kljestan changes his name to Sasha Ocho Cinco.
I think the prevalence of Californians in the roster might explain my reaction to:
I'm pretty sure that the US soccer "tradition" such as it is, was kept alive for most of the past 50 years in prep schools and fancy suburban public schools, but I'm perfectly willing to grant that massive immigration is now changing that and that there are plenty of non-rich kids who play.
Basically, wtf? Everyone I grew up with, rich and poor, in my very diverse (in a Californian way, aka, deep poverty to super rich and a mix of Hispanic and Anglo) town. I was an outlier for NOT playing.
Um, insert a played soccer in there after town. Got a bit ahead of myself.
277: 275 -- wow, actual data!
I've restrained myself so far, but jeez go fuck yourself in the ass with a meathook.
280 -- Um, what? I guess you can fuck yourself, too, but I'm not sure I understand this exchange. I was actually glad to see CN's list and was, you know, kidding. With a meathook. In my ass.
278 -- I dunno, I grew up in CA, too, and played youth soccer as a kid, but pretty much all of the guys except a few stopped playing at about age 12 and went on to other sports. Not true for the girls, girls soccer was a bigger deal. I may be a bit older than you so this may have been changing rapidly.
281 - Yeah, I was thinking it might be generational. I'm a child of the 80s (1981 vintage). The soccer players were not quite as well respected as the football players in my school, but they had cachet, and plenty of women and men continued with the sport.
re: 195
Yeah, I think so. Good engineers are worth their weight in gold.
A friend of mine used to be an engineer* and it was striking how much difference he could make. I remember one of his projects while he was at college involved being given the masters for a really bad 24 track demo and being asked to 'fix' it.
The end product was night and day from the original. It helps that my friend is a really talented musician, so he just took off about 75% of the backing tracks and retracked them himself**, but the difference a good mix and some editing made was amazing.
*not seen him for a few years so no idea if he still does it, it's a hard business to break into at the pro level.
** also not uncommon, I think
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Literary faux pas of the week: I saw the name of a friend of mine on the acknowledgments page of a recent work of fiction. I wrote on her Facebook wall that I thanked her too, especially if she contributed any awesome to what was a great read.
She wrote back that he was an abusive boyfriend, and she's in therapy to deal with the fallout from their relationship.
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Keir, that's a pretty weird analysis.
Not really; anti-football as xenophobia is pretty common and ties into euro-weenie narratives. See also calcio etc.
Also, comparing football to mcdonalds is kind of stupid -- if football is more fun than baseball or whatever why shouldn't people play it? It doesn't have any negative health effects and isn't a primarily a money making scheme for immoral multinationals.
& of course if people in the UK want to play basketball, that's a good thing too.
Football will become a major US sport around the time the US becomes majority Hispanic, which I understand is scheduled for about 30 years from now.
isn't a primarily a money making scheme for immoral multinationals.
I question this. In Britain it's used to launder Russian mafia money.
I don't think that's related to objecting to the pretentious falseness RH was describing, of the sort ESPN and (I gather) the NYT produce. That ties in more to swipple pretension than indigenous popularity or the prevalence of pick-up games (which it's a fantastic sport for). #80: The Idea of Soccer.
It's never taken off as a spectator sport in the US or the antipodes to anything like the degree they like to make out. It may do one day (though I don't see it), but until then it's artificial to pretend otherwise.
It's never taken off as a spectator sport in the US or the antipodes to anything like the degree they like to make out. It may do one day (though I don't see it), but until then it's artificial to pretend otherwise.
It is just false to allege that football hasn't taken off in the antipodes. There's a thriving professional league in NZ & Australia which attracts crowds comparable to the NRL, Australian Super rugby or the lower end of the English Second Division, & football is about even with rugby for youth participation in NZ with similar numbers in Oz.
Sure, not challenging either Aussie Rules or Union (in NZ) for dominance, but then neither are League or Union (in Oz) and nobody would say they hadn't taken off and weren't traditional etc sports.
And the idea that there aren't long standing football traditions in NZ and Australia is really quite annoying & IME arises out of classist and racist ideas about what's authentic and what isn't. (See also: chip on shoulder, possession of.)
I just don't get the hating. People like football, and some of them aren't from traditional `authentic' footballing heartlands. So?
(And yes ESPN sucks in general.)
ESPN now carries the Champions League,
They've carried it since at least 1994. They had some Premier games on in the mid-90s (some were even live, I think) and some tape-delayed Spanish league around the same time but apparently the North American rights fees were too high to be worth it based on ratings. The Champions League games would have a bunch of promos that applied only to those with access to ESPN non-American broadcasting. Fox Sports has been running a Premier League highlight show since at least the late 90s. I would guess that increased coverage beyond the Champions League reflects the growing popularity of soccer more than it's trying to generate it (though it's surely doing that too).
ESPN's coverage of any sport is annoying, with the possible exception of the actual live broadcasts. Every time they get a new contract, they increase the coverage of the sport, including even popular American sports like baseball where you'd think they were already saturated. Remember when they didn't have broadcast rights to the NBA? And when they had less baseball? The coverage of both sports intensified as soon as they signed up for more games. Meanwhile, their NHL coverage mysteriously dropped when the NHL moved to other networks. Their influence over various sports' popularity is probably not as strong as they'd like it to be, but they clearly try to milk every single investment for as much as they can. Which makes them nearly unwatchable.
It is just false to allege that football hasn't taken off in the antipodes.
It really isn't. It's very much a third or fourth-tier sport (as a spectator event and professionally - amateur participation, as you say, is pretty high everywhere, and just isn't what's at hand here, so let's stop shifting the discussion to that).
The A-League does pretty well. It's not a joke like MLS. It slots in behind all those sports you list, plus cricket, netball, and probably basketball. The crowds are comparable to the NRL only in the sense that "smaller than" is a comparative (and there are half as many teams). It does ok, because there is a longstanding tradition. I don't think anybody suggested otherwise. There's even a gradual upwards trend.
arises out of classist and racist ideas
This seems to have more to do with your chip than with observable reality. I can't off-hand even think of an ethnic or "class" association for the sport in NZ. Kids, especially, of all stripes play it in large numbers across the board.
It's unlikely to take off much more in the US for commercial reasons. Imposing copious advertising breaks would be a travesty, but necessary for the television market and widespread following. The national team gets little genuine attention outside major newsworthy events (like now), much like in NZ and Australia. That may change, but it's how things stand right now.
I just don't get the hating.
This is projection too. I don't see any hating, I see annoyance at the artificial pretension of making it out as something it's not. Nobody has objected to it as a sport, or to play, or even to watch. It's not unreasonable to find the faux cultured affectation the SWPL post refers to bothersome regardless of whether you like the sport or not. Maybe even more so if you do. Merited attention would be positive; artificial attention is tiresome. Suggesting it's xenophobia to feel that way is silly.
Another sport ESPN covers out of all proportion: Major League Lacrosse. Probably for the reason eb suggests. And it's tiresome then as well, though not quite so high on the pretension.
Is South Carolina conservative enough that women don't have much of a chance for political careers of their own (or at least ones that go a long way up)? The state House membership list helpfully appends "Mrs. [name]" to many of the women's names.* There appear to be no women at all in the state Senate. I have no idea what the numbers are historically.
* The full bios appear to list spouses for both men and women (as "m. [name]". I only clicked on a few but I assume this applies to all of them. There must be some single legislators. And possibly some who have been through a divorce.
A few years ago, I read through some letters and diaries of a woman whose husband was in the U.S. Senate at the time (in the late 19th century). Her interest in politics and her frustration at not being able to participate as her husband did was palpable. Things are obviously not as restrictive today, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar dynamic were in effect in some places, even if it does not apply to the specific case of the Sanfords (and of course I have no idea if it does).
BTW, Fox-associated channels will cover Champions League in the U.S. next year (they outbid ESPN). ESPN will, as mentioned, be picking up the Premiere League and also La Liga (sub-licensed through GOL TV).
As for TV coverage of soccer and its popularity as a spectator sport the U.S., it has definitely grown considerably in the last 5 years. The Champions League and Euro 2008 finals have gotten a couple million viewers (for something happening in the middle of the afternoon on a workday, that's pretty good).
I can't off-hand even think of an ethnic or "class" association for the sport in NZ.
Wogs, sheilas poofters is Aussie, but much the same thing here.
WKAFC, Wellington Olympic, Island Bay etc etc.
That football was primarily a working class immigrants sport surely isn't arguable, and that lots of the reasons people don't like it and claim there isn't an indigenous tradition are essentially classist/racist isn't that new.
It's not unreasonable to find the faux cultured affectation the SWPL post refers to bothersome regardless of whether you like the sport or not.
Yes, posers suck (glory hunters man u etcetc). But I think someone from Glasgow who walks around in a Rangers scarf but couldn't name the starting line up is just as bad, even if he has a legitimate authentic traditional connection. The anti-football feeling isn't just a dislike of posers and so-on; it really seems like there's something more going on, which given that people said very similar things for entirely xenophobic reasons makes me as suspicious as hell --- ok, maybe y'all haven't been reading italian fascists on football/calcio, but it sounds a lot like. (there is no such thing as an American sport anymore than an American art.)
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These ideas all look a bit predictable and boring. I'm sure people here can come up with better suggestions (references to 'Overheard in New York' are deprecated).
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It strikes me as an unlikely xenophobic critique that complains that soccer is SWPL. And there is a whole system of soccer that is confined to well-off suburbia and tended (at least when I was in school) to lose its good athletes to other sports. Soccer was something the speed players on other teams did to keep in shape in the off-season. I've heard soccer referred to as a "girl sport" jokingly, but with the understanding that everyone would get the joke, because our pro teams aren't very good compared to the rest of the world, and we usually get spanked in the World Cup except for the women's team.
I suspect this is changing as there are more recreational leagues for grown-ups, and demographics suggests we have about 30 years before we start winning more with the men's team and become thoroughly obnoxious about it.
297: "Notes From the Underground," surely.
293.---Is South Carolina conservative enough that women don't have much of a chance for political careers of their own (or at least ones that go a long way up)?
That's why I mentioned Liddy Dole. She seems like a good example of a conservative Southern woman who parlayed her husband's career into one for herself. (She took a fall for the 2006 elections, but that's another story.) It seems to me as though the national GOP is really interested in recruiting female candidates, as well.
285
... It doesn't have any negative health effects ...
Brain damage is a concern.
Cala in 298 gets it right. For years there's been a desperate desire among a certain UMC group for the US to "join the world" and start liking this sport that has simply never been popular* here. And, frankly, it's annoying. The desire, not the sport. But, at least among swipple types, saying that you dislike soccer gets similar reactions to saying you don't like other SWPL. Which, as I think we've hashed over before, people find annoying.
* Yes, there are 300M of us, so any activity will have millions of adherents. But compared to any other widely-known sport, soccer has always been unpopular; it's becoming somewhat less so
(there is no such thing as an American sport anymore than an American art.)
I'm not entirely sure what this means. Lacrosse* comes from Native Americans, which seems like it should count. I've never read anything indicating that the Naismith origin of basketball is false. Baseball is closely tied to British games, of course, but I've generally heard it mocked by Euros as being a sport that no one but Americans care about. It just seems like a weird claim.
Also, I have no idea what calcio is.
* Talk about a sport kept alive by UMC prepsters, albeit witha couple of pockets of broader popularity
300: Not many female names in the State House, but one of them is running for governor.
Baseball is closely tied to British games, of course, but I've generally heard it mocked by Euros as being a sport that no one but Americans care about.
It's mentioned without mockery by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (to the extent that anything is mentioned without mockery in Northanger Abbey). It just went out of fashion. Nothing is forever. Every game in the world called football is ultimately related historically.
Which, as I think we've hashed over before, people find annoying.
Not half as annoyoing as the self-loathing "I hate SWPL" reactions you, Halford and wispa have come back with. Soccer has had a long-standing immigrant-driven minor* sport status in this country (ebbing and flowing with this graph-- immigration by year for the US). Starting about the 60s and growing especially since the 80s there has been a more suburban (and not completely SWPL) growth in soccer especially as a kid's sport. No big surprise that this is the most visible element to SWPL people on this SWPL blog. And yes it has also been pushed by the more "worldly" SWPL media elements like the NYTImes. That paper also happens to serve a metropolitan area with quite a large non-SWPL population interested in soccer. And historically, American football came in as the upper-class college alternative to soccer. It is now of course the corporate-driven "heartland" sport (and big-time soccer is absolutely no "purer" as practiced in Europe etc.). But these appeals to sports "authenticity" are totally bogus. David Brooks couldn't do it better.
*Yes, I certainly acknowledge that it is minor, but these things do change and rapoidly sometimes, look at basketball in many nations over the last several decades (how big was basketball down under 30 years ago?). And I do admit to being an advocate here.
242: Of course, the Republicans aren't willing to lay off any of the corrections officers. They're not really state workers. It's funny, in MA we've had cuts in a lot of areas--including aid to cities and towns. And they recently stopped enrolling the poorest people automatically in Commonwealth Care. The Republicans in CA just want to cut services to the poor. They're like a caricature of themselves.
Robert Halford:
On the other, there is something I find really grating about the relentless cheerleading for this to become a real American sport, when it so manifestly isn't really a popular or traditional sport in the USA yet -- the NY Times is a particularly bad offender here. There's something that's just SWPL and offputting about the whole way the sport is treated here that I find unbearable.
Keir to Robert Halford in response:
Um, you don't have a tradition based solely on private schools & there's something SWPL and offputting about the authenticity kick here.
I TOLD YOU PEOPLE NOT TO START USING "SWPL" ALL THE TIME! NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS!
306: How does that not apply to all arguments about authenticity? Let's displace all of the world's cuisines by McDonald's, while we're at it.
SWPL: Single White Palestinian Liberationist
@303 which makes them both canadian sports in some very rough sense.
Interestingly (or not) up there lacrosse is a quite popular blue collar game in a variant called box lacrosse. Thing of a rougher version of hockey played on concrete...
Call me skeptical that the NYT is covering the soccer victory for the benefit of immigrants. And I don't think the SWPL critique of soccer-fans-who-went-to-London-for-a-semester-and-bought-a-Tottenham-scarf is code for not liking immigrants any more than not liking baseball is code for not liking Dominicans.
As far as authenticity goes, there's certainly no Platonic form of American sports running around. Bigass country, lots of sports. But baseball, basketball, and football are iconic in a way that tennis or golf or soccer or hockey isn't. I think soccer will be there in a generation, both because of increased immigration and because of adult rec leagues.
This way back in 105 is one of the funniest things I've ever read: [...]I read it at work, and I had to cover my mouth so that no one would hear and ask me what I was laughing about. Fortunately I was laughing too hard to breathe, so it was easy. [...] 123 is also funny.
Why, thank you, Walt! 123 was too much of an econ joke I suspect. (As was 105, actually.)
Also, Sanford is supposed to be sympathetic, which I just can't manage.
(Q: Can't you be sympathetic to the poor guy who just fell in love with the wrong woman and is trapped in a world he never made?
A: Well, since he's a really weird guy who digs giant holes on his property and leaves them open to breed mesquito, and he seems to like the idea of having his kids live w/out AC while he goes to work in the governors office, and he's a paragon of the whole kulturkamph thing, AND because he's one of those species of supposed moral paragons who love to use their position to stick it to the poor and black, particularly in SC, land of slave rape... not really, no.)
max
['Maybe if he ejected his head from his ass.']
Bigass country, lots of sports.
The most awesome minor American sport I've heard of was donkey basketball. There are people who play basketball sitting on top of donkeys.
I've heard that girls' lacrosse has a certain niche popularity in England among public school girls. It's kind of like the earlier American preppy interest in soccer.
The most awesome minor American sport I've heard of was donkey basketball.
You know, it always puzzled me how you could make a 24 hour sports channel and not spend most of your time digging up stuff like this and reporting on it.
I'm still waiting to see my first dunk in donkey basketball.
As I understand it, donkey basketball is a sport that pits a team of teachers at a local school against a team of disc jockeys to try to raise money for charities with names like Kourage 4 Kids 4 Life.
I've never read anything indicating that the Naismith origin of basketball is false
Yeah, right. Four foot ten and brittle-boned, and we're supposed to believe he invented basketball?
...oh, sorry.
#173. I just cannot fathom how [Graham's screaming queeniness] escapes the notice of the people of SC.
I knew someone once who was pretty obviously gay and who visited his family in South Carolina for one week every summer. His mother "knew" but resolutely avoided the topic. His father might have "known," but acted as if he didn't. In Graham's case, there are those who know and don't care, but dislike him anyway; those who know and don't care, really, but who might not vote for him if he came out; and those who really have no clue at all. Interestingly, Kirby Dick couldn't get anyone to go on the record about Graham for Outrage and as a result left Graham out of the movie entirely.
Re: Sanford: So far, I think the national media has failed to keep an eye on the people who have pushed the Sanford story, namely State Sen. Jake Knotts and Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer. There's a long history of hostility between Knotts and Sanford and an extra year in the Govs office would give Bauer a leg up on Henry McMaster, his almost-certain-to-be Republican opponent in '10. Pretty obviously, Knotts and Bauer saw an opportunity here to stick a knife in Sanford, but the details haven't been reported on yet.
a really weird guy who digs giant holes on his property
????
Also, Sanford is supposed to be sympathetic, which I just can't manage.
Despite myself, I went and read the emails. Maybe if I knew more about the guy, I'd be less sympathetic. But I have to say, I found the emails rather sweet.
320: I was curious myself.
http://gawker.com/5302126/mark-sanford-a-very-strange-man
When his father died, TAC reports, "the Sanford family buried him under a pair of oak trees overlooking a river, according to his wishes. Mark built the casket."
Sounds reasonable to me.
323: Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. It was the digging holes that mystified me. If I had enough land and a backhoe, I'd probably find some reason for digging at least one giant hole (at least if nobody reminded me of the phrase 'attractive nuissance').
It strikes me as an unlikely xenophobic critique that complains that soccer is SWPL
Really? A critique of football as a sport of rootless cosmopolitanism, with people going off to Europe and becoming corrupted by the `girl's sport' (i.e unmanly & foreign & effete) seems very xenophobic to me, and there are clear ties to anti-immigrant stereotypes and class definitions of authenticity.
(Calcio is Italian for football & there was a strain of fascist thought that held very similar beliefs about football's (and cricket's) authenticity and so-on.)
I have a cousin who is about 40 years old, lives in Key West where he works as a chef, and is unmarried. My great aunt would always lament about how he'd just never met the right girl.
Keir, if you're determined to combine your twin passions and see xenophobia in soccer, I'm sure you can come up with a rationale, but it's not justified. You're responding to statements nobody made. The objection here has been only to the pretension, which exists*.
And it is not a "working-class immigrants' sport" in NZ. In all probability it was at introduction (of course), but it isn't now, you're transplanting foreign associations. It has a little more of that in Australia, both out of endemic racism and specific large and passionate immigrant communities, but there really isn't much of a class factor either.
* It doesn't nearly so much in NZ and Australia - you do get the smug fans, but they're all genuine fans. There's no cachet to affecting it. Possibly that's a distinction that isn't apparent to you in the objections to treatment from the NYT.
See this and this for example.
And obviously nobody is going to come out and say they don't like wogs; the point is that claims about traditional authenticity and so-on all basically come down to a combination of not liking wogs and not liking Europeans, neither of which are particularly nice sentiments. (See also disco and rockism.) In particular, if you don't like football, you don't have to read about it or watch it*; it isn't crowding out baseball or basketball sports writing.
As for the NZ claim, look at some of the early winners of the Chatham Cup; Tramways, Harbour Board, Waterside, various Technical Schools (cf the FA Cup or rugby competitions). Look at the origins of Wellington football clubs -- worker's clubs, Wellington Technical old boys, ethnic groups. Lots and lots of anti-football feeling can be directly connected to that, even if football is no longer that sport, which, I er, never actually claimed it was.
* ESPN is universally sucky, see Smythe with a y,
which, I er, never actually claimed it was.
A sentiment you should keep in mind while fighting these straw men, hey?
If your claim is that some people use dislike of [some artifact] as cover for dislike of [ethnic/religious/sex/other] group associated with that artifact, yes, it's true of any combination of those you like, including this one. It's the link you're making to this topic that's tenuously offensive.
Not that anybody here who makes claims about football's authenticity etc personally dislikes wogs; it's just that's the sort of intellectual pedigree here.
330 written before I saw 329, btw.
Seriously, compare to disco & rockism; there's cultural politics about the construction of authenticity and tradition and so-on here that just get skated as if Bourdieu never wrote anything.
Eh, I don't think this conversation is worth continuing. You're probably right that there's something a bit anti-Euro about some soccer commentary in the US, but I think you're way overstating your case. I mean, soccer just hasn't been a major American spectator sport for the past 50 years, so in that sense, it's just not an authentically traditional American spectator sport. If that changes, great. The only point I was making is that there is a fair amount of media pretension and prescriptiveness about US Soccer as a spectator sport, particularly the national team and MLS, that seems to me to outstrip homegrown fan interest in either the national team or the professional league, and that I personally find a bit annoying. It's not that big a deal. If you like watching the sport or want to promote it here, more power to you.
RH said what I should have been saying, but sidetracked myself from, and with concision and clarity.
The only point I was making is that there is a fair amount of media pretension and prescriptiveness about US Soccer as a spectator sport, particularly the national team and MLS, that seems to me to outstrip homegrown fan interest in either the national team or the professional league, and that I personally find a bit annoying
As noted in the piece Keir linked to, more people watched the soccer World Cup than the baseball World Series in the US. Would you say that the media attention devoted to each reflects this?
Halford's view is reasonable enough, but this is barking mad.
Well, I wondered about that statistic as well, and it seems to be, charitably, misleading. It's surely true that the total ratings for the World Cup in 2006 exceeded total ratings for the World Series, which only went 5 games in 2006 (and was between Detroit and St. Louis that year, two small-market teams).
As far as individual games go, some quick Googling suggests that the Italy-France final had a Nielsen rating of 7.1; the World Series that year averaged a Nielsen rating of above 10 per game. Not shabby at all for the World Cup, but it's not really fair to compare the biggest soccer match in the world, which happens only once every 4 years, with the ratings for a not very exciting World Series between two small market teams. By what I'd consider more relevant metrics of fan interest, particularly over a full season (as opposed to the one-off event that's the WC) I don't think soccer is close to being there yet.
Another source I glanced at suggests that the highest rating a Champions league game has ever gotten on US TV is a 1.3, which is probably a more relevant metric of "fan" interest in the game as it's played on an ordinary basis, as opposed to world cup gawkers. Ratings for the MLS network are around .2-.3, which is truly tiny. Although obviously the networks and newspapers see a market and are hopeful that ratings will be higher, which is why they keep running soccer stories. And it's certainly true that Americans are somewhat interested in watching the World Cup (that includes me, by the way).
By way of comparison, the Superbowl, which may be the more relevant comparison to the WC (giant national-event style game) gets something on the order of a 42 rating.
None of this is to slag soccer by the way, just to point out that the specator-sport soccer market in the US has plenty of curiosity around it, but is also being bolstered by cheerleaders, of which the linked article is a decent example.
336: Another beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact... thanks for doing the checking.
nobody is going to come out and say they don't like wogs
...now that Ogged is gone.
331: Seriously, compare to disco & rockism
I should also stop on this, particularly given my little outburst the other night, but I will just say, "Yes, this." Precisely the same analogy thing occurred to me. And who amongst us does not like Nascar?
. I mean, soccer just hasn't been a major American spectator sport for the past 50 years, so in that sense, it's just not an authentically traditional American spectator sport.
Figure skating has had better TV viewership. I'm not sure why. People blame advertising, but I am not confident in that explanation.
The last part of my comment concerning soccer. Figure skating has better TV viewership because Tonya Harding's husband whacked Nancy Kerrigan in the knee, and then Michelle Kwan won everything for a decade. Drama + championships + sparkles = TV viewership.
341: I thought figure skating had a pretty good run going much earlier in the US, given that for a long time it was the US's only real success story in the Winter Olympics. Plus some compelling stories and drama, Dick Button, the Jenkins, Carol Heiss, the late '50s plane crash that killed most of the US team, Peggy Fleming etc.
Or as Cala says, Drama + championships + sparkles = TV viewership..
340: Ballroom dancing for the ladies. Athletic young ladies in skimpy clothing for the straight blokes. Sequins for the gay blokes. It's a demographic perfect storm!
318: I always laugh when I go by the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Hartford, for that very reason.
Is there some other Naismith besides the basketball inventor? Google does not help me learn about this.
Is the fact that CN's comment is the second #346 due to suprression of insidious sockpuppetry or second thoughts? Just want to understand the rules.
346: Googling Naismith brittle-boned should help you out...
348: or Googling Miles Naismith, for that matter.
30 ff.: Cry for Argentina, Cry for Argentina, Masturbate for Argentina, Cry for Argentina.
