Last night, I finally saw The Other Dream Team, the documentary that proposes to tell the story of the 1992 Lithuanian Men’s Basketball Team that beat the Unified Team to win bronze at the Olympics in Barcelona. Of course, the story makes no sense without the necessary context of how this team, playing for the [...]
A journalist friend once said that he’d never write a certain airline’s name “airBaltic,” because he refused to do their brand management for them. I can’t remember if he chose to call them “Airbaltic,” “AirBaltic,” or “Air Baltic” instead, but the lowercase initial was beyond the pale. In English, of course, proper names are always [...]
Continue reading about Free advertising and trademarked names
Coworkers today, knowing of my deep interest in football supporter culture, asked me what I thought of what happened in Egypt yesterday, where 70+ people were killed in violence in Port Said after a match in which al-Masri defeated visitors al-Ahly 3–1. I meekly responded that the football pitch is often a proxy for the [...]
Continue reading about Organization and tactics: when football isn’t just a game
Yesterday I put together some data on the Premier League to see if an old hypothesis (relegation leads to the same couple of teams going up and down) was true. Turns out it wasn’t. In the 18 completed seasons of the Premier League, 43 different teams have participated, and most teams that come up, stay [...]
Continue reading about Right, then, Premier League running averages
Today’s huge news, regarding the agreement in principle of a sale of Liverpool Football Club to New England Sports Ventures (the company that owns, among other things, the Boston Red Sox) has prompted me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long, long time: look at the history of the Premiership table [...]
Continue reading about Relegating thoughts while glancing at Premiership tables
Yoann Gourcuff is blaming the vuvuzelas for France’s uninspired play on Friday night in Cape Town. The players couldn’t hear each other on the field, he whined, and they had to rely on gestures. Patrice Évra added that the players can’t sleep because the vuvuzelas start going off at 6am every morning.1 Twitter has been [...]
Continue reading about Imperialist n00bs: quit complaining about the vuvuzelas
Yet again, I’m putting off the “Fieldwork vs. Armchairwork” post, which began as a joke threat, but is actually slowly turning into a few ideas about methods courses from a total neophyte and non DGS. In the meantime, I’m getting very excited about 64 other “vs.” coming up in the next six weeks, namely the [...]
When I last wrote about the World Cup ads in March, they were just starting to appear. Now Nike has tossed out an initial try with their “Write the Future” ad campaign: It’s a cute enough ad, to be sure, on the first viewing, and it gets me a bit excited, but there are some [...]
Since 1998, part of my excitement over the World Cup has been stoked by ads leading up to it. Usually, Nike makes charming and witty ads, like this one, in which the Brazilian national team messes around at the airport, having just been told that their flight to Paris is delayed: What Eric Cantona is [...]
Continue reading about The cringe-inducing South African World Cup ads have begun
The quarter is over, and that means that Male Fantasy Sports is also over. Since I wrote up the baseball section, I should write up the soccer section. The first book we read was Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. The book annoyed me to no end, largely because Hornby comes across as an insufferable poser, [...]
Continue reading about More Conclusions in Male Fantasy Sports