Angry Tulips

A while back The Daily Beast had an article about the declining popularity of basketball among whites, which the author ascribed to the predominance of black players in the NBA. Not racism but realism says the author: white people want to watch white superstars, a hard-to-find commodity in basketball.

Coming out of protracted labor troubles and with a now-curtailed season, basketball has other problems besides race. But I think the most serious problems are the game itself:

(1) The first half -- hell, even the first 40 minutes -- of basketball is relatively meaningless. Yeah, it's better to have a 12 point lead at the half than be 12 points behind. But even at the five-minute mark a team can erase that advantage with a few quick three-pointers.

It's the problem with all contests where you arrange the rules so that last minute, come-from-behind victories are more easily accomplished. Whether it's triple-point values in Family Feud or the onside kick in football, it does make the end of the game more exciting. But there is a cost, both in the legitimacy of the come-from-behind victory as well as sustaining fan interest during the first three-quarters of the competition. In this respect, baseball has a purity about it. Sure a team can come back after giving upfive runs in the top of the first, but it's hard; and when it does happen, you know something grand has been accomplished.

(2) The team with the best players usually win in basketball. Sure there are surprises, but in other sports (notably football) they seem to come from superior coaching or special chemistry. In basketball, personnel is everything.

(3) Even though the last five minutes of a basketball game decides everything, the tit-for-tat fouling in the last two minutes is now de rigueur. It's a lousy way to end a game. 

Sure, it heightens the suspence 

With all the talk of China investing in Australia for her natural resources, I was shocked to see a chart in an article in The Australian that showed Britain having 13 or 14 times China's aggregate investment level of about $40 billion Australian  (I assume) dollars. 

Of course, trajectories do matter -- China had little investment a few years ago, and the UK has had of course strong business ties with Australia since its birth. And I don't know anything about the composition of those totals, and to what extent China's number may be more "real" or have more impact than the UK's (or for that matter, the reverse). 

Still, it's yet another indication of how current news events tend to skew our sense of the overall picture, at least for those not uncommonly thoughtful, like me.

Liberal relatives and friends scoff about my complaints of the left-wing bias in the news section of the New York Times. But I continually find a lack of even-handedness; today's article on the November jobs report is a case in point.

The employment report was signficiantly positive, but the 0.4 point drop in the unemployment rate substantially came from a contraction in the workforce.  WSJ, USA Today, BBC, Reuters...all of them mentioned this in the first few sentences of their reports, even in their headlines.

In the Times, you have to read down to the EIGHTH paragraph to discover this crucial fact. It's certainly there, it's not glossed over, but it's positioning devalues its importance.

I find this again and again and AGAIN in Times's news stories. Ostensibly, they're balanced. But in politically charged areas -- and no area is as politically charged as unemployment numbers -- one way or the other, the Times continually manages to slant things to the left.

Reading over the Comments in various center-right blogs, there's an air of wondrous despair of how, in the end, Republicans are left with two such unpalatable choices as Romney and Gingrich.

There must be some people out there who have some passion for Romney, but they're certainly hard to uncover. The interview on Fox the other night revealed him as thin-skinned, ungenerous, and just generally unappealing.

As for Gingrich, besides his heavy "baggage," do people think he could ably manage Godfather's Pizza, much less the country? There is a frisson of excitement, of course, at the thought of someone with so much intellectual firepower and inventiveness running the country. But put in practice, it would likely be a disaster. I keep on thinking of Robert Bork's answer to why he wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice: it would be an intellectual feast. I fear Gingrich feels much the same way; good for him, not the country.

I'm constantly getting confused between 緊, 堅, and 賢. The first two are especially difficult to distinguish, because their meanings — "tight" and "hard"  — are similar, and their associated meanings sometimes overlap.

The top halves of the kanji are all written the same. For 緊, I associate 糸 "thread" with tight.  For 堅, I think of hard 土 ground or soil. And for 賢, I think of the related meaning of 貝 (shell) as "money" — smart people make money.  
  

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