In Defense of a Referee

Oh, England sucked yesterday, and the general quality of the refereeing might have sucked more (Mexico-Argentina AR, I'm looking at you particularly hard). Frank Lampard tied the game for England with a blast that bounced off the bottom of the crossbar and landed a full yard inside the goal before bouncing out, except that neither the center referee nor the assistant referee saw it. No goal, no tie, and, ultimately, no quarterfinals for England. Efan Ekoko noted that of the 40,000+ people in the Bloemfontein stadium, those two men were the only two who didn't see a good goal, and the replays from the camera positioned high in the stadium at the goal line, and the one in the back corner of the goal, make it blindingly obvious that the referees biffed it.

And we instantly howled for cameras on the goal line, or chips in the ball, or SOMETHING to keep blind referees from fucking up yet another match.

One thing, though, keeps me from being able in good conscience to string the Uruguayan crew up next to Koman Coulibaly: Because both of the referees yesterday were properly positioned, neither one of them had a good enough view of the goal line to be absolutely sure the ball crossed completely into the goal. Cue the BoltGraphics Generator, please:

The red dots are England attackers, the black dots are German defenders, the green dot is the German keeper, the blue dots are the referees, and the x is the spot where the ball smacked into the turf. The center referee was roughly 30 yards from the goal line, the assistant--who was properly lined up level with the next-last defender--was at least 40 yards from the goal line, and both were partially screened by at least one player (in the case of the AR, the keeper). So with a vantage point quite distant from the goal and maybe six feet off the ground, tops, neither man had much of an angle to determine if he saw green between the ball and the line during the split second bounce before the ball came out.

Of course it's an obvious call when you're positioned either on the goal line or thirty feet above it, and it's especially obvious in slow motion. But standing on the ground, thirty yards distant, in real time, without x-ray goggles? Not so much. ARs are required to follow every ball to the endline, precisely to ensure they'll be able to determine whether it has completely crossed the line and avoid controversial situations like this one, but it's physically impossible to get to the endline at the same time as a 40, 50, 60 mph shot taken from 18 yards away. So yeah, it was a goal, and yeah, I was pulling hard for England, but no, I can't fault the referees on this one because they're not fifty feet tall or wearing jetpacks and thus couldn't know without a doubt that the ball was over.

If FIFA really insist on staying in the dark ages and not employing video or microchip technology, they could at least put a line judge on each end of the field, opposite the AR, whose job would be limited to goal/no goal, corner/goal kick. The dirty hippie in me doesn't need situations to be set up for everyone to win, but really hates to see people unnecessarily set up to fail unless they're playing euchre against me, and FIFA's refusal to add extra eyes, either human or electronic, to a 110 x 75 yard field with 22 players moving at top speed does exactly that.

The Tevez "goal" in the second game, of course, from a good two yards offside, is a whole 'nother thing, and that thing is a giant bucket of suck. See, I'm not totally a reffy homer.

General Announcement to the World

Except for the opening match and the US matches, I am at work during the World Cup, during which time I have my DVR set at home and am carefully avoiding any website that might contain the slightest whiff of scores so that I can watch the games when I get home and experience them fresh out of the package.

Please, world, do not text and e-mail me asking what I think about the latest upset, because what I am thinking is FUCKING HELL, PEOPLE, DO NOT TEXT ME SCORES!

*deep breath*

That is all.

Archaeology Interlude

Sometimes there are no more compelling explanations for chronological trends.

Click to embiggen.

Not a Good Sign for Women's Pro Soccer

Last year's WPS regular-season champion LA Sol went tits-up 45 minutes ago, after last-gasp attempts to secure an investor fizzled. The 19 players on the roster will be up for grabs in a special draft for the remaining eight teams in the league a week from today, making it the first time in the history of forever that the planet's Player of the Year for four consecutive years (!) in any sport will be shunted into an expansion draft mere months after collecting her most recent trophy.

The Marta Fire Sale may be complicated somewhat by league rules limiting the number of international players on each roster; under current rules only St. Louis, Boston, and Washington have spots available, and of these three, Boston is up first in the first round, with Washington next. Which means Washington snap up Johanna Frisk and then take their pick of the non-Marta Boston roster. You heard it here first. I'll wait for Jordy to weigh in on who she wouldn't mind seeing head south if it means watching Marta team up with Kelly Smith on a week-to-week basis.

In other women's soccer news, I am watching the semifinals of the CONCACAF U-20 women's tournament and thinking nobody on these nations' senior national teams need to be watching their backs anytime soon. US-Costa Rica in particular has been bad touch-bad touch-foul for the entire first half.

And I do hope the remaining teams have their shit more in order than LA did.

See, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

"The people of Massachusetts have spoken. We welcome Scott Brown to the Senate and will move to seat him as soon as the proper paperwork has been received," said Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

And with that final formality performed in fine lapdog fashion, the 60-seat supermajority evaporated and the progressive express train was derailed and... well, and Senate Democrats breathed a deep sigh of relief at not having to deal with this unfamiliar and uncomfortable thing called "power" any more, not that they ever really had much to begin with, considering the Blue Dogs' first inclination after the 2008 election was to see which one could out-Republican the others and Blanche Lincoln and Olympia Dukakis inexplicably became the most important people in the biggest Democratic-majority Senate the country had seen since before "Democrat" took on its modern connotations of social justice, civil rights, and lip service to the same before promptly rolling over to the whims of a minority party that wisely decided to stop acting like it ever lost power in the first place.

And a former nekkid centerfold with a pickup truck and a taste for tax cuts but not so much for the unprivileged classes slid into Ted Kennedy's seat nuts-first and the Dems wonder how this ever could have happened and we can kiss what was left of healthcare reform goodbye.

Never mind that healthcare "reform" in its current state probably isn't worth passing anyway. The teabaggers will crow that this special election in Massachusetts is a bellwether, the first tolling of the death knell for the administration's agenda. Never mind that said agenda barely rises above the status of business as usual; the important thing is that said business as usual was dressed up in a progressive Obama t-shirt trimmed with hopey lace and topped with change sauce, and that image is what took a resounding smack to the gob yesterday. And just like Jesus said, Harry Reid brushed himself off and smiled and politely held the door open for the guy.

Good job, Martha Coakley! Excellent work, DSCC! On the upside, now that everyone and their dog says this means Obama's a one-termer, does this mean he'll get busy on some of those campaign promises that were just too toxic to touch before being re-elected?

Whatchoo Talkin'....

Yeah, yeah. No. I'm sorry, but just no. No no no.

It will always be Sears Tower. Suck it, Willis.

Huh.

While I was busy with other stuff, somebody else built the career I thought I might have. This distresses me. I landed a book contract with the University of Utah Press, and midway through the rough draft the other guy published essentially the same book. I couldn't bring myself to read it, but I hear it's good. He's since cranked out another book or two and papers in journals that cheerfully reject my submissions. I don't read those either. The other half of my department is braver and tells me that we are essentially clones, soulmates, sharing a single stone tool-based brain and writing the same stuff in the same style.

I guess I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks about our subject matter the way I do, and that the ideas are getting out there to a wide audience. I'm just bothered that it's under his name rather than mine.

It's my fault, not his, of course. I never wanted to go back and polish up the hoop-jumping and ass-kissing skills that are necessary tools for navigating a PhD, nor did I want to sit through another introductory physical anthro class with a bunch of 20-ish baby grad students, nor have I ever had any interest in an academic career that would require teaching. So I toil in obscurity and wonder if I really have any idea what I'm doing after all after the drawing's done.
















My only reliable skill set. Shh, don't tell the boss.

Tantrum Tuesday

This does not happen often--although I suppose the degree of frequency is entirely dependent on your perspective, vis-a-vis whether you're inside my head or a hapless bystander on the outside--but when it does it sucks. It's eerily reminiscent of the early '80s, specifically, nights on which I would get totally fucking stuck on my math homework, stuck to the point of swearing I could feel a physical barrier inside my brain that kept all the knowledge and capability that just had to be in there from spilling forward into an area where I could access it.

Today it is the same nice Hohokam site as yesterday, still sitting scattered in the database, resolutely flipping me off on every attempt I make to pull up a chair and be friendly, rebuffing my offers to buy it lunch or maybe just a drink, before it goes back to the Times crossword and its cup of decaf. I don't want a commitment or even a second date here. I just want to talk.

Specifically, I would like to know what people living there were doing round about the year 1000, why they made the tools they did, what all they had to give up to the people at West Branch in order to acquire some lousy brown and slightly radioactive chert the West Branchers were sitting on, and if there was any real reason behind the changes they made in their technological behaviors from generation to generation, or if they were just bored or all like fuck that shit, no way I'm doing this the way my old man did, and by the way, did you notice we have to make everything using these goddamn rocks? And you want how much, again, for that lousy-ass chert that makes me glow green at night? Because I can get it way cheaper in Nogales, you scamming bastard, and la migra can't do a goddamn thing about it because they don't fucking exist yet.

Uh, because I kinda need to know these things, and kinda need to write a report about them by... 5:00 today? In! Trouble!

Argh

I like my job. really. But! I do not like needing to revise a five-year-old chapter that suddenly has a hard deadline of the end of this week and discovering that (1) it sucks, largely because (2) I did all the analysis and draft-writing while recovering from a grade 2 concussion suffered at the outset of the Iraq war, which means (4) the artifact sampling is inexplicably fucked up and (5) the syntax is even more tortured than usual but (5) whatever, I don't remember doing a shred of any of it anyway.

It is amazingly difficult to plausibly explain prehistory when you, uh, don't have any data.

Professionalism: I haz it.

Shit.

This Is Completely Unfair

Oh, what? Like I'm not going to put this up here?

So then--no, wait, wait, check this out, you--Michael Jackson's all like Thrillaaaah! Dillaaaah night!!!! And then all the zombies dance and, and, hey, wait, are you watching this or not?

100 and Counting

So the baseball gods sat down before the division series began and said what can we do to rip Cubs fans' hearts out this time around? The animal curses had been done to death, what with the billy goat in '45 and the black cat in '69, and the strokes of individual bizarreness had run their course after Leon Durham's classic ball-between-the-legs stunt of '84 and the epic for the ages that was Steve Bartman vs. Moises Alou in '03. What to do? They were stumped.

What about this, came a querulous voice from the back of the room. What about a stupefying total team meltdown for the guys who ran up the best record and best offense in the National League? Ooh, this one had merit. The mood around the table grew giddy as they considered the possibilities. First we put the bats to sleep! Yes... Then we make sure the Cubs' number one starter has less control than a Depends convention! Yes, I like it... and then, when the fans have convinced themselves that Game 2 can't possibly be worse? I know! How about the infield backing up Zambrano with an E-3-4-5-6 on the way to giving up ten runs? And after that they just curl up and die in Game 3, right? Right! Awesome!

Hey, guys? One more thing? Whazzat, kid? How about having the Sox come back and win the whole thing? I like the way you think, kid. And they clinked their glasses and drank.

So put away your dreams of a pair of championships on the eights to bookend a century of futility. The baseball gods are sadistic bastards. And they will not be denied.

In Which Our Evening Does Not Go As Planned

Huh. As I just now pounded out to Top!Secret G-woman, either Palin pulled off an epic five-week snow job for the ages, or Randy Scheunemann is a debate/presentation/life coach of miraculous abilities. I have not read any analyses yet because I am too sick to my stomach with the anticipation of the right-wing crowing her performance surely set off. Possibly accompanied by brass bands, fireworks, and free ice cream cones as well. She came off as completely capable. She spoke in comprehensible sentences. She was personable. She didn't seem particularly not intelligent or particularly not informed. If she had a presentation weakness, it was falling back on the "John McCain is a maverick" line too many times and saying "nucular" a lot. Beyond that, I got nothing.

Factually, she repeated the tax increase on $42,000 earners lie. She repeatedly credited the surge with gains in Iraqi security without mentioning the other two vital factors there--namely, the Iraq Awakening groups accepting US money to stop killing US troops, and al Sadr's cease-fire--and repeated that "surge principles" will succeed in Afghanistan despite the considerably different political and geographical situation there. She repeated the "Barack Obama voted to cut off funding to the troops" bullshit. She deflected questions on healthcare. Actually, she deflected a lot of questions or just declined to answer the question that was asked, preferring to flog taxes and energy, energy, energy maverick energy.

Biden was exactly as even-keeled as he needed to be, calling her on some of the more egregious mistruths as time allowed. I wish he had hit back on the details of the surge, but he defended Obama's tax and healthcare plans adequately. One point on McCain's $5000 healthcare tax credit I wish he had brought up is that regardless of how big any tax credit ends up being, people who have to buy their own coverage will still need to come up with the money up front, either in a lump or monthly, and if we have to cough up five grand even in monthly installments, well, we're not going to have coverage. Because we don't have an extra $417 a month, whether we get it back at tax time or not.

If you're going just on facts and expertise, Biden won. If you're going on not falling on your face when the world expects you to, Palin did worlds better than I ever would have expected, and a tiny win on principle is going to blow up into a blowout in the minds of people not inclined to think much past the familiar memes, talking points, and lies that have become as comfortable for McCainiacs as a favorite sweatshirt.

Both Biden and Palin oppose gay marriage. Both said they fully support equal civil rights for same sex couples, but both know that will never include key things like Social Security benefits or portability of rights until the federal government pulls same-sex couples under the umbrella of marriage. Most troubling to me was Biden's statement that both he and Obama oppose changing the civil definition of marriage because religious faiths define it as a man and a woman. Seriously, Joe? You're signing on to that conflation of civil law with religous dogma? He and Palin looked so pleased and relieved to agree on that one and be quickly scooted along to the next question that I had to tell them both to fuck off, and their running mates too. I'm too goddamn old and tired for this bullshit. Yes, hospital visitation is necessary. No, saying you're for that doesn't even come close to scratching the surface of showing you have the slightest fucking clue.

So after about an hour we pushed our Palin bingo cards aside and turned on the Cubs game for some relief, and the night promptly nosedived the rest of the way into the shitter. It was only 1-0, but the bases were loaded, and within a couple of batters they'd been cleared. Cubs are now down 6-0 after five. Early during the game last night, the TBS guys said that Wrigley was very quiet, almost as if the fans were nervously anticipating disaster. Kinda like we were about ten minutes into the debate tonight once it became apparent that what we thought was going to be a coast to victory was turning out to be something very different after all. At least the Cubs aren't flipping us off on their way down.

Shite. Shite, shite, shite.

Oh My

In a brilliant move calculated to win the heart and vote of every middle-aged former slacker who was ever called on in class unexpectedly after a night of MTV and Atari 2600 instead of the assigned reading for civics class, Palin nails this exchange with ABC's Charles Gibson:

Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

Palin: *blink*

Palin: In what respect, Charlie?

Gibson: The Bush -- well, what do you interpret it to be?

Palin: His world view?

Srsly?

Oh, absofuckinglutely beautiful! I got that look so many times from Mr. Chandler back in 1985! But! I was not running for Vice President of the US at the time!

I will not jump on Palin for saying we might perhaps have to go to war with Russia if Georgia were admitted to NATO and Russia happened to invade them again, since pledged military assistance is kind of the whole point of NATO in the first place. A better question might have been on her position on Georgia's (and other former Soviet republics') attempts to get into the military BFF club, given our current over-taxed military and substantially diminished standing as the world's primary law enforcement officer. That would be particularly interesting in light of Randy Scheunemann's preeminent position in the McCain campaign. Alas, it will have to wait until the debates.

Oh, and one more thing. I cannot take four more years of anyone in the executive branch pronouncing "nuclear" as "nookyooler." Please. If you cannot take a stand for responsibile foreign policy, environmental protection, renewable energy, women's rights, universal healthcare, and financial recovery, please at least take one for the language.

Liveblogging the Real Start of the College Football Season

Notre Dame-San Diego State! Let's dive right in!

Hmmm.

Huh.

Wha...?

Ah Christ.

Wait, no, nononono!!!!

Ah shite. Seriously?

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Oh, wait, they just scored after a blocked punt. Huh.

And that takes us to halftime! Not optimistic! Beer time!

Deep Breath, and...

Ah Christ. Can't blog. Too enraged.

Understanding that watching the McCain speech live would be an unhealthy choice, I waited until this morning to read about it in the paper and listen to whatever NPR happened to be saying during the ten minutes or so it takes to drive to work. Figured that would, you know, give me a better chance of postponing the inevitable stroke by another day or two.

Ha. Ha!

Yes, the AP Washington bureau now lives in the pants of the GOP, but the lede still grabbed me by something painful and then twisted hard. John McCain, a POW turned political rebel,

Blink. Yes, that is all we need to know. Reading the fawning op-eds in the Daily Star, listening to the NPR soundbites grabbed from convention-goers (Maverick! Maverick! Maverick!), all bring it home in a very disheartening way that all the reasoned thought, in-depth exploration of issues, nuance, and logic in the world simply doesn't matter. If you can find one word or catchphrase that gets repeated enough times, once it's drilled into Joe Public's forehead it's there to stay and becomes truth, and that singular truth swells up and crowds every other thought or room for new thoughts clean out of that noggin, and a man who dumped his faithful first wife after she was crippled in a car wreck in favor of a millionaire heiress and immediately jumped into bed with crooked bankers upon entering Congress and verbally and physically threatens his colleagues and has a campaign staff composed in large part of corporate and foreign lobbyists and spends 26 years in Washington and puts his wife on stage dripping with close to $300,000 worth of clothing and accessories and owns 8 or 9 or 10 houses and budgets a quarter of a million bucks a year on servant wages and mixes up foreign countries and leaders and outright lies about his own record and the record of his opponent and claims to support the troops while consistently voting against veterans' interests and spent the past eight years voting for Bush's position 90% of the time and dumped his first two picks for VP because the religious right went into conniptions over them somehow gets branded as a regular-guy man of honor who goes against the Washington establishment to do the right thing.

Did you hear he was a POW?

Here. Fast-forward to the 3:25 mark for the executive summary of the campaign.

It's like we skipped eight years back in time. It's a year 2000 do-over and all we need to know about the world is that the Democratic nominee wants to kill babies, Democrats wanna raise your taxes, and John McCain was a POW. That's all we need to know, and nothing for the last eight years has happened.

Shite.

Well, That Settles It

Screw it, I'm voting for McCain.

White Sox, that's baseball. Southside.

Oh no you di'n't!