My brother Mitch, my father, and I went to a Colosse Canes baseball game. It worked out perfectly because they already had tickets and it gave Mitch and I the opportunity to spend some time together. My other brother Oliver has a wife that‘s giving birth in the next week or two has since given birth, so he’s sort of tied up at the moment.

I hadn’t realized that I would be going to a baseball game or else I would have bought down my precious Canes baseball cap (precious because it’s a size 8, difficult to find). I don’t have any shirts or anything else, but as luck would have it my father has one that he goes running in and so I was able to be appropriately attired.

I was a bit conflicted as to how to cheer. I haven’t really been a fan of the Canes since leaving Colosse or really for a while before that. I mostly bought the cap out of regional pride. I wanted to buy the cap from when I followed the team, but alas the most current was all they had available. But the real reason I was conflicted was that the starting pitcher for Queen City was a fellow alum of Southern Tech University. Not that I knew him or anything, but he pitched for our team.

The game did not stay close for long. The Trumans make a point not to get bored at baseball games and we never, ever leave early. So we entertained ourselves with talk of the league. A while back I created a spreadsheet with all of the markets for the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Mitch and I talked about where the MLB would expand to if they took my advice. I quizzed both Mitch and Dad on which market is the biggest without any teams in those three leagues and which market is the smallest to have a team in any of those leagues (anyone who wants to hazard a guess is free to do so* – using real-world city names, of course).

Dad was really proud of himself for having taken a plastic knife with him. I didn’t understand why until we got our chili dogs and I struggled to part mine up with just a fork. It’s amazing how times change. There was a day when Dad would die rather than spend $7 on a hot dog. Or I would die rather than spend $8 on a beer.

Budweiser is apparently running a deal where if you agree to be a designated driver they will buy you two free soft drinks. Dad took them up on that, but I declined. I figure I don’t get to go to games very often and a beer at a game was something I wanted to do. As with my previous experience with alcohol when I was stranded in Meriwether, it didn’t take much to get me inebriated. Mitch and I drunkenly discussed the future of college football on the way home.

* – Update: Since a couple people are actually taking a stab at the questions, I figured I would post a bit about the methodology. The answers are in the comment section, so don’t read through the comments if you intend to guess.

The most important is that if a city is within a 90-minute drive of another city with a team, it’s considered too close. That bumps up to 150 minutes if the cities do not both have teams in any league. So Green Bay and Milwaukee are considered the same market, as are Orlando and Tampa and San Jose and San Fransisco. Raleigh and Charlotte (and LA and San Diego) would be different cities.

Yeah, the rules are kind of arbitrary, but I needed a formula for what I was working on at the time. I was aggressive about coupling markets together, but that was to deprive the person I was debating with of an easy argument (“You list all of these potential markets but some don’t count because they’re too close to other markets and therefore I am going to conveniently ignore all of your other points!”). It was related to this.

The numbers are taken from the MSA from the census. In the event that there is an “anchor city” (Milwaukee to Green Bay, San Antonio to Austin) we’re looking at the population of the MSA. The original census numbers I was looking at were from a few years ago, though I’ve done some spot-checking to see what’s changed (ie New Orleans, Oklahoma City getting a basketball team, and so on). Feel free to challenge if you think I missed something.

There are two cities of any significant size near Callie, Alexandria and Redstone. Redstone is a little closer, so when I need a “big city thing” like a Walmart, I go to Redstone. My doctor’s appointment, however, was in Alexandria. A lot of people prefer to drive the extra distance to go to Alexandria anyway. I am coming to prefer Redstone and all of is decrepit rustic authenticity to Alexandria’s yuppie charms.

I will say this of Alexandria, though. Toenail polish here is kept to a minimum. Maybe only half the women in open-toed shoes (common in this season) seem to be wearing toenail polish. I applaud this development. Callie has more in the way of nail polish than I would have guessed. Deseret didn’t have it nearly as much and Callie is only a couple hours away from Mocum. I was thinking, hoping, that it was a western thing. Nail polish was less frequent in Estacado, too. It’s nigh-universal in Colosse and Delosa, alas.

I had to drive Crayola, my almost-teenager of an economy car. Since taking on my Census Route, I have been driving Ninjette, Clancy’s fully-teenager (but really quiet and smooth) full-size. Unfortunately, she had to visit a doc in Redstone the same day I had to visit a doc in Alexandria. Since I was the one that arranged this little inconvenience, I volunteered to drive Crayola. It’s good to get some quality time with him before we swap him out in August (we think/hope), though I had gotten quite used to (a) cruise control and (b) the ability to accelerate.

But I’m not really thinking about that as I drive. Instead, I am thinking “Man, I wonder what happens next?!” Tom Clancy audiobooks will do that.

A while back, Herb Kohl (D-WI) was wanting the government to get involved with NBC’s (mis)handling of the Olympic Games. To which, James Joyner responds:

The Olympics are not a public good. There’s no right whatsoever to see them unless you’ve paid for a ticket.

The initial problem here is that the Olympics proclaim themselves to be something of a public good. It’s not really a private affair. While NBC has the right to do with its broadcasting rights whatever it wishes, if the Olympics were what they proclaim to be, they would make sure that clauses included not just gobs and gobs of money, but also a certain level of accessibility. But the Olympics simply isn’t what it claims to be and there’s not much to be done. I’d leave it at that if Joyner hadn’t gone on to say:

Nor, for that matter, am I a fan of exclusivity deals. It’s annoying, for example, that the only way for me to watch Dallas Cowboys games that don’t happen to be on my local FOX affiliate is to subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, which in turn requires me to be a DirecTV customer. But, again, the NFL doesn’t owe me anything. I’m free to choose to take what they give me for free or to be held hostage to a single television provider; I’ve opted for the latter.

Here again we have an organization that proclaims itself as a public good when it’s convenient but then gets to nitty-gritty profit protection even at the expense of what would benefit the public. When it comes time to hold a team for ransom unless the taxpayers foot the bill for a nice new stadium, we get to hear about how much good the NFL does a community or a city. But then when it comes to cracking down on fans that use slogans not invented by the NFL or churches that fund-raise with Superbowl parties, well we all have to understand that they are a private business. Which, of course, they are. They are not the public good that they represent themselves as being.

The difference between the NFL and the Olympics, though, is that the NFL (along with MLB and NBA) relies on government and the people to do what they need to do. From the people they demand money for new stadia. From the government, they demand and receive broadcasting anti-trust exemptions. For them to demand anti-trust exemptions, in my mind they have certain obligations. By that I don’t mean “Give away all your games for free!” but I do mean that they ought to stop restrain from using their position as the nation’s premier football league in order to maximize profits at the expense of access in virtually all cases.

Exclusivity deals are a part of that. I half-believe that we’re headed to a future where the Superbowl is going to be a PPV event. They allow us to watch some games for free on network television and through various providers we can watch even more games with cable. Increasingly, though, the real money is with exclusive contracts. Not like with NBC and the Olympics, where nearly everybody gets NBC. And the same really goes with ESPN. The issue is with DirecTV, who pays a fortune not just to be able to show all the games, but to be the only one that is. Offering games on networks and cable is win/win because it increases availability and profit. The NFL’s arrangement with DirecTV increases one very much at the expense of the other.

The games have to be played on some network(s), but the availability of the network in question should be as much a factor as dollars and sense if they are to be a public good. The benefit that the consumer gets from the NFL’s relationship with ABC is pretty concrete. The benefit of their relationship with DirecTV only works if you believe that what’s good for the NFL is inherently and always good for the NFL fan.

Beyond that, the NFL’s restriction on the number of teams it has is another example. Right now there are 32 teams in a nation of roughly 310 million. That is the worst ratio the NFL has ever had and at every decade marker since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970 that ratio has gotten worse. This despite the fact that there are more avenues than ever for games to be shown on television. Cities considerably larger than NFL host cities were when they had teams do not get a team (and no, I’m not just referring to Los Angeles). Even now, there are cities without teams that are notably larger than cities with them (and not just New Orleans or Buffalo). In fact, there are between 7 and 10 markets larger than the bottom five current host cities. So why do the host cities still have those teams? In some cases because they got them when they were more vibrant locales (New Orleans, Buffalo) and or because of an intense potential fan-base (Jacksonville)

I see very little reason to believe that the NFL could not expand by a good half-dozen teams and maintain profitability. It’s not hard to figure out why they’re not itching to do so. The fewer teams, the less competition. The less the big market teams have to subsidize smaller-market teams so that the latter can stay competitive or split their own market. The easier it is to blackmail cities into building them stadiums or else they’ll move. The model is working for them. That doesn’t mean that it’s working for us.

I pick on the NFL mostly because it’s the most profitable. The others have pretty good excuses. The NBA is hemorrhaging money at the moment, the NHL learned the hard way how regional their sport is, and Major League Baseball has other problems on its plate. On the other hand, adding a half-dozen new teams would take a lot of the focus off of… other goings-on.

When I wrote previously here and on Ordinary Gents about playoffs, one of my objections was that a small playoff would become a large playoff and would render the regular season meaningless. I would not object too vociferously to an 8-team playoff, but anything beyond that and you’re letting in 9-3 teams. Since Division I-AA has 16 teams, I just cannot imagine that I-A would not get there in pretty short order and perhaps beyond. Playoff proponents argued that this does not necessarily have to be the case and that 8 will be enough. So I have to point out a couple things:

First, starting soon the I-AA will not have 16 teams. They’re upgrading to 20. This adds a whole other week to their playoffs for the inclusion of a measly 4 more teams. But at that level, nothing matters but the playoffs. So why not?

Second, college basketball, which had admirably stayed at 64 or 65 for quite some time, is now looking at 96. It’s hard to imagine that 128 is not far behind.

A few years ago, when we were living in Deseret, we were visiting its capital where there was a guy talking about… well, I can’t remember what now but I heard every word. He was very loud. Someone at another table commented, also with a voice loud enough that I could hear, “You know, there’s one at every table.” I laughed, they saw me, our tables acknowledged each other, and we all collectively rolled our eyes at the really, really loud guy at the other table. Ever since then, “There’s one at every table” has become a staple of the sort of long-term couple private dialogue that occurs between Clancy and I.

Clancy and I were eating out at a restaurant on our move out here to Arapaho when there was one at the booth behind us. It was a guy talking about… well, everything. He was talking disapprovingly about sluts and waxing philosophical about the failures of his generation and the poor prospects of marriage out there because of all of the sluts. To be fair, he was disapproving of guys that sleep around a lot, too, though I don’t remember what word, if any, he used to describe them.

He was sitting at the booth behind Clancy and was alone with a young woman. He looked to be somewhere in his early-to-mid thirties. He apparently dated a girl for quite a while. One night, she went to a party that he didn’t go to because he had to work and the next day she broke up with him. He thinks that she had perhaps been unfaithful. He thought she was a promiscuous sort – or at least had taken a step in that direction while he was working. That seemed to be his defining story. He talked about her alot.

The young woman was more attractive than he was. She wasn’t stunning, but looked like of like Aubrey Plaza with less even skin. He was a stocky – but not fat – fellow. But he was kind of funny looking. Sort of like his face was put together by an 8 year old on one of those rudimentary face making applications on the web. His nose was a little too big. His eyes were a touch too close together. Something… off. Not ugly, just… ah, well, the words escape me.

And there was something about how his story, and the way he told it, and the way he looked, and the way he looked while telling it, all failed to match up quite right. It sort of felt like the guy was trying to invent a personality and was failing. It was impossible to tell whether he was on a date with the Aubreyesque young woman or whether it was just a dinner out between friends, but he seemed to be putting on a show of sorts. Either trying to get a date or a second one. In a Michael Scott sort of way, he struck me as a guy with a certain, sad darkness in him trying like hell to compensate and just be… normal. Not even spectacular. Just normal. Well, sometimes to be impressive and sometimes to be normal. You get the feeling that at first he wants to be accepted but then the second he is, he wants to be admired.

She got maybe 100 words in all night. The conversation was completely and entirely about him. Not just his previously failed relationship, which itself took up half the conversation, but about his thoughts of sluts, sexual promiscuity, marriage, and so on.

After we left, Clancy and I speculated as to whether it was a date or not. She said it sure came across to her like one and I couldn’t disagree. I said that if it was a first date, though, it was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. I then cited that in addition to being something of a bore, he also completely overlooked the cardinal rule about never dominating the conversation too much or talking too much about yourself on the first date. She and I related some of our experiences. I talked about a couple of opportunities that I really fouled up. She told me about a couple of dates that couldn’t end soon enough for her.

She also told me about several years ago with this one guy she’d recently met that drove her to Pontchartrain once who wouldn’t stop talking the entire way and how she thought, “Gosh, this guy sure talks a lot.” Thankfully, she said, it didn’t stop her from eventually marrying the guy.

The dollar theater is an interesting place. I guess it takes an interesting business model to be able to make it by seating people for a dollar or two. I still don’t entirely know how they make their money. You would think it would be through the concessions, but those are relatively cheap, too. You can get a hot dog for a dollar, which I frequently do. And of course it’s an interesting crowd that goes. Back in the dollar theater near where I grew up, the common theme was that it was really, really cheap babysitting. I guess as a product of the movies that I see, that’s less the case out here. Instead you get an odd mixture of cheapskates, enthusiasts, and poor people.

Back when the weather was colder, that last bit was kind of a problem for a little while. I didn’t mind that homeless people would consider a dollar or two for a few hours a good way to get out of the cold drizzle, but it was obnoxious how they snored.

The place has been going downhill. I hadn’t entirely realized that it was possible, but it seemed that each time I went there, something else was gone. The ticket-taker was replaced by a combo concession/ticket cashier. The bathrooms would lose their soap dispensers. Eventually they just tore the carpet out and decided that the uneven concrete beneath wasn’t really so bad.

Yesterday was my last trip to the dollar theater before we head out to Arapaho. It was a pretty uneventful affair. Not so much a few weeks ago when I went to see an action movie. I’m not generally an action movie sort of guy unless it involves capes and cowls or maybe aliens, but I’m also not much of a theater guy. The two go well together.

So I went to see my action movie and it was not a very good crowd from the start. It wasn’t the worst I had been to, but it wasn’t far from it. There were a couple of people near the front bickering a bit about something. It sounded like one guy was not as conscientious as the other guy would have preferred in terms of making noise. As the movie progressed, the loud guy in a red hat got worse. He was mumbling at the screen. The guy behind him in the hoodie told him to be quiet. This would happen periodically.

It was about the time the movie was reaching its climax that it all came to ahead. The guy in the red hat said one too many things and the guy in the hoodie told him to shut up one too many times. The guy in the red hat darted up and the guy in the hoodie got up and backed up. I would call it a “fight” but it wasn’t much of one. Red Hat lunged at Hoodie who was in a defensive posture. One punch and Hoodie was down. Red Had said to a stunned crowd. “Yo. I’m out. Enjoy your movie.”

This is the part where, if I was braver or more stupid, I might have done something. Not confront Red Hat, but something. Maybe alerted security (while they had fewer ticket-takers, they did add a security guard). Instead I just sat there. It took a couple minutes to process that Hoodie was not getting up. But even then I wasn’t sure what to do. Someone else went and contacted the security guard, who came in with his flashlight. It was impossible to watch the movie at that point. He woke Hoodie up and walked him out. I followed them to say that I had seen what happened. No surprise, Red Hat was long gone by this point. But he knew exactly who I was talking about when I described him. In other words, had I done something sooner, he might have been stopped. Or I might have been knocked unconscious, too.

From there it got a bit murky. The problem was that the people that reported to him initially and I had two different version of events. Theirs was basically that there was a fight. Mine was that there was a one-sided assault. The guard asked us both to wait for the cops to arrive, so we did. In the meantime, Hoodie started getting really antsy and wanted to leave. The security guard tried to calm him down, in effect saying that since he was bleeding profusely (Red Hat was wearing a ring, apparently, and Hoodie’s cheek was gushing through onto a rag) and the other guy walked away that he had nothing to worry about. Even so, Hoodie wanted to go home. I was anxious to get home, too, though I wanted to tell the cops that it was a pretty one-sided affair and that the other guy was disrupting the movie. Considering that I’d let the guy bleed all over the theater floor, it was the least that I could do. Hoodie was acting pretty weird at this point. I wondered if maybe he was high or something. If he was something, it wasn’t drunk. I also wondered if the combination of the punch and hitting his head on the wall from the force of the punch had done a number on him.

When the cops arrived, they pulled Hoodie over and asked him some questions. The next thing I know, Hoodie was in handcuffs. The security guard came over to me and the couple that initially reported the incident to him and told us that we could go home now. I asked what happened and they said that it turned out that Hoodie had a warrant out for his arrest. At this point, the fight didn’t really matter anymore. And with that, they took Hoodie away. To the hospital, I assume, then to jail.

Hoodie had a very bad day.

And I did not enjoy the rest of my movie.

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen were kind enough to give me a platform to explain my opposition to a college football playoff system. A follow-up discussion occurred at the Fourth Estate.

The LoOG title suggests that it’s a defense of the BCS, which I am frankly not in the mood to defend. I’ll take the BCS as an alternative to a cumbersome and season-marginalizing playoff, but there’s a lot to dislike about it. I’m in the “mend it, don’t end it” camp.
(more…)

8:30: “Ready to eat? I am. Let’s drive around downtown Gemini Falls and see what’s out there? If we don’t find anything, maybe we’ll eat at one of the city’s four Thai places. Surely we will run across one of them.”

8:45: “Hmmm. Okay. Maybe we’re missing something. Let’s consult the GPS.”

8:46: “Why is the GPS acting so buggy lately?”

9:15: “I swear, I’ll find my way out of the university one of these days. Did you happen to notice when we actually entered the university?”

9:35: “Down that way is a Dark Road. Having already been down two Dark Roads tonight, let’s not go down that one.”

9:55: “Hey, there’s our hotel. How did we end up back here? Okay, so no Thai place. Let’s see if there’s anthing that appeals to us.”

10:05: “Ssshhh… if you listen really closely, you can hear our culinary expectations shatter.”

When I heard about this video, I was under the impression that some sort of fight broke out. I have to confess that I was smitten with the idea of Mormon soccer girls gone wild (except with punching rather than the Hammy tearing off of their shirts), but the BYU girls were the victims over and over again. and there really was only one transgressor that was just mowing everybody down.

If this type of thing were more common, college girl sports would be much more popular.