Monday, August 4, 2008

Ouch

Answers to Friday's quiz.

Here's what five famous writers had to say about five other famous authors.

1. Leo Tolstoy wrote: The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer ... is, like every other lie, a great evil.
2. Edgar Allan Poe wrote this about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems, by accident; that is to say, when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking.
3. Virginia Woolf wrote this about James Joyce: The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
4. George Orwell wrote this about Aldous Huxley: Huxley's book ... is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? he cannot get off the subject of flagellating women.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this: Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

And here's a bonus. Which 20th century American author called Mark Twain "... a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."


Confession time.
I awoke at 3 a.m. Saturday and sat bolt upright. I suddenly remembered misspelling a word in Sunday's column. I used "bare arms" for "bear arms." I got up and put the dictionary on my dresser next to my keys as a reminder to drive down to the office and correct it later in the morning. That was so I could go back to sleep. Unfortunately, I was stewing and couldn't sleep, so I read for a couple of hours before finally nodding off. When I got to the office at about 9 a.m. I found that one of the editors had already found and corrected the error. Whew.

That's one of the curses of this business, at least for me. Many times when I was publishing my own weekly newspaper I awoke in the middle of the night on deadline day and realized I had made an error. Back then I would drive to the office and correct it right away, since a courier would be driving the grids — the pasted-up pages — to the printer early in the morning.

Why did I make the error to start with? And why did it not enter my consciousness until the middle of the night? Your guess is as good as mine.


Here's Sunday's column for that immense audience of readers who both want to read it and missed it in the paper.

Football is the only sport; all other contests are games

How can Barack Obama claim to care about the serious problems facing this country but do nothing to solve America's most immediate crisis — getting Brett Favre back onto the playing field? All Obama talks about is ending the war, solving the energy crisis, getting free health care to the poor, blah, blah, blah.

Uh, heLLO! Training camp has started!

OK, I admit I get a little obsessed every year at this time. I'm worried that the preseason games won't be televised because of that little, you know, whaddayacallit track meet in China. Priorities, please.

I'm not saying football is the only sport. I enjoy some of the other games myself. In the off-season. There's nothing more relaxing than sitting in the bleachers at a ball park with a dog and brew on a warm summer evening watching a game of baseball. Once in awhile something mildly interesting happens on the field.

And basketball's not all bad. A close game, with the crowd on its feet, can really get the heart pumping. Except at the end when it's all free throws and timeouts, stretching 10 seconds into an excruciating hour and a half. Snore.

Even hockey can be exciting — until they break from punching each other's brains out to skate around with that ridiculous little puck.

I've been told there's even a sport where the players try to kick a ball down the field and into a big net, and they never use their hands. I'm not sure I believe it. Why would anyone make up a game like that? And if they did, who would watch it? The players would probably score, like, one point in a whole game. You might get distracted by watching the grass grow, which would be more exciting.

But not football. Football is more than just a sport. It is the essence of being. Football is to other sports what Elvis is to other singers. What the great white shark is to other fish. What the Grand Canyon is to other gullies.

In what other sport can you see one guy make a bone-jarring hit on another, drive him into the dirt and send his helmet flying, and not get a penalty? He might even get a sticker on his helmet for "lick of the week." And the reverse, in what other game would the coach bench you for failing to hit somebody?

Nothing in baseball compares to that. You've got a guy sliding into third who then stands up and brushes off the dirt. Brushes it off! While everyone else on the field waits. Did you ever see a 290-pound defensive tackle brush the mud off his jersey? Or the blood?

In basketball, a defensive player tries to draw a charge by falling backwards after a little bump by some guy driving to the basket. What the heck is that? If it were a real sport the guy on defense would body slam the guy on offense and then jump on the ball.

Track and field, which in some Third World countries is actually considered sport, is worse. You've got people running around on a soft rubber track in their underwear. First one across the line wins. Real captivating. The runners have to stay in their own lanes, and no elbowing. At least in roller derby you get to jostle the other players. What kind of sport makes you keep you hands to yourself? If we weren't supposed to bump others we wouldn't be born with forearms.

The only track and field event that doesn't have people snoring after five minutes is the pole vault, and that's only because there's a chance something might go wrong when the vaulter is 18 feet in the air. I mean, you've got some guy whose entire goal is to run a few yards with a pole to vault over a bar and land on a soft cushion. Nobody is even trying to stop him.

Hey, put some pads on him and let him break through a couple of lines of defenders on the way to the vault. Better yet, put another pole vaulter out there going the opposite way at the same time. And sharpen the ends of the poles. Call it the lance vault. Only one guy survives to reach his bar.

Oh, and get rid of those cushions. In football, does the receiver leaping into the air at the back of the end zone need a cushion to land on? Of course not. And he's about to get hit.

As for that that alleged game where they kick the ball down the field, at least put some boxing gloves on the players. If they can't touch the ball anyway, you might as well give them something to do with their hands — like punch the opposing players. People might actually come out for a game like that.

Football doesn't have to be the only sport worth watching. But it will be until they take a lesson from the gridiron and spice up the other games with a little contact.

Yeah. I'm ready for some football.

1 comment:

Old Tybee Ranger said...

Oh no! There's an ouch in Edgar Allen Poe. The correct spelling is ALLAN. But don't fret. Poe seems to respond well to cognac and roses on his grave every January 19 in Baltimore. Reminds us of another misspelling of a famous American name, Gen. Nathanael Greene. He is buried in Johnson Square in Savannah, Georgia, and we have no idea how to assuage an affront to his good name.