Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

We still have time to mess this up!

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Second rate reporter says what?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread

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(Jeff Danziger’s website)
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Now that the high holy days are over, I guess it’s safe for a non-participant to ask: Anybody read Joe Nocera’s NYTimes piece on “The Cost of Football Glory“?

… After talking to Booth, I tracked down one other person from Super Bowl X: Jean Fugett, now a lawyer in Baltimore. “Would I play football again if I could do it all over again? Probably,” he said. “But I cried when my youngest son took a football scholarship.”
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Today, says Fugett, he can’t sleep more than three hours a stretch without feeling pain somewhere in his body. He has no idea, he told me, how many concussions he sustained; back then, “you didn’t take yourself out of the game unless you stuffed two ammonia tablets up your nose and your head didn’t jerk back. That’s when you knew you were really concussed.” And he views himself as one of the lucky ones. Most of the former players he knows live with far more pain than he does.
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Thanks to rule changes aimed at lessening the chances of career-ending injuries, football is a tad less dangerous than it once was. But it is still a game whose appeal lies in its violent nature. You cannot play football at the professional level without having it affect — and quite possibly shorten — the rest of your life…

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  1. 1.

    Cacti

    I love watching football, but I hope my boys never want to play it.

    One of my good friends in high school was a team captain, middle linebacker, and had two bad knees at age 17.

    My 60-something father has a deviated septum from his football days.

  2. 2.

    JGabriel

    I hear there caucuses ‘n’ primaries ‘n’ shit tonight.

    Are we expecting any good comedy out of tonight’s proceedings, or can I just catch up on Justified instead? I’ve two episodes backlogged, plus a new one tonight.

    .

  4. 4.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Any good comedy? Santorum is expected to do well in Missouri, but turnout is also expected to be light, as it’s just a beauty contest. When you’ve only got Santorum, Romney, and Paul to chose from for a beauty contest, well…

  6. 6.

    JGabriel

    Cacti:

    My 60-something father has a deviated septum from his football days.

    Well, yes, cocaine use was a known hazard of football in the 70s.

    .

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    I understand that when someone proposes changes to the rules of tackling in the gridiron sport to make it safer for players, there are objections: the changes affect the character of the sport, make it less exciting to watch or play, and so on. Is this true? It certainly strikes me as plausible, given the culture of machismo that surrounds the game.

    Also, rugby is just as much a contact sport as American football, And yet one never hears about long-term injury or head trauma blighting the lives of former rugby players.

  10. 10.

    dmsilev

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    When you’ve only got Santorum, Romney, and Paul to chose from for a beauty contest, well…

    …you make damn sure to change the channel before the swimsuit competition.

  11. 11.

    Anoniminous

    @JGabriel:

    36 pledged delegates up for grabs in Colorado. 40 unpledged in Minnesota. Bugger-all in Missouri except bragging rights and 24/7 pundit foo-foo.

    Santorum is expected to win Missouri since Gingrich isn’t on the ballot, uniting the Not-Romney Fundie-Con vote.

    Colorado is expected to go Romney with Santorum in second but there are a LOT of Evangelical morons in the state, very little polling has been done, and it’s possible Frothy can pull this one out. There’s also a lot of Mormons so it could go either way.

    Not much polling in Minnesota either and what little has been done is all over the place. Public Policy Polling has Santorum in a 2% (within the MOE) lead over Willard. PPP has been pretty accurate so far this year; see if their string continues.

    And – yes – I AM an election nerd.

  12. 12.

    smintheus

    @Amir Khalid: Rugby players tend to be badly banged up within a few years. But they aren’t bashing their heads into one another, so there is that slight advantage between two more or less equally dumb sports.

  13. 13.

    Veritas

    @Amir Khalid:

    Also, rugby is just as much a contact sport as American football

    Uh no. No it’s not, Amir.

    As explained very nicely here:

    Try this test: stand with your head against the wall and push. Hurts a bit? That’s rugby. Now step back a couple of yards and hurtle at full speed at the same wall. Did you survive? That’s American football. If you didn’t survive please make your dying action one of closing down your browser window so that I am not held to blame for your injuries. Thankyou.

  16. 16.

    YellowJournalism

    Hubby has a bad knee from football and hockey. He’s torn on the boys playing those sports some day for the injuries, as well as the fanatical parents who ruin a good time.

  17. 17.

    JGabriel

    @slag: That Romney photo is genius. Are you sure it’s photoshopped? It looks real, like they were trying to spelling out Romney and the “m” and “o” just got mixed.

    Or maybe the kids switched places on purpose. For the lulz.

    .

  19. 19.

    Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor

    I hear that the Mormons are actually quite popular in Colorado…

  20. 20.

    Anoniminous

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):

    Amp-up the comment numbers, tho. ;-)

    Apparently Ari Fleischer was on CNN earlier talking about how the GOP voter participation is down because Romney has it in the bag. Most everybody else figures not as many people are voting because the candidates are a bunch of slobs one would not put in charge of a Put-Put golf course.

  21. 21.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @Amir Khalid: Over the last hundred years we’ve built football players to be people that go from 0 to 0 as violently as possible. Rugby’s a marathon, football’s a sprint.

  22. 22.

    JGabriel

    @Anoniminous:

    Colorado is expected to go Romney with Santorum in second but there are a LOT of Evangelical morons in the state, very little polling has been done, and it’s possible Frothy can pull this one out. There’s also a lot of Mormons so it could go either way.

    Then I’m betting on Santorum, because, in fact, there aren’t a lot of Mormons in CO. Mormons are only about 2% of CO’s population.

    And thanks for the update on the other states as well.

    I guess I’ll be holding off on Justified for another night then.

    .

  23. 23.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Anoniminous:

    You have to remember that Rove is the sooper genious who, in 2006, had no worries at all about the GOP losing control of the Congress, because he had the math.

    Uh huh.

  25. 25.

    beergoggles

    It’s not just football – playing any sort of sport competitively (past the NCAAs into the pro level) will change your body in ways that will make you pay for it for the rest of your life. I still have a spine that’s curved to one side from my right side developing more than my left from hours of practice as a pre-teen, knees that were creaking by the time I was 30 and a neck that just needs me to sleep wrong for less than a few minutes before my arm goes numb.

    I don’t regret it much – it opened up so many opportunities for advancement in life that I otherwise would never had gotten access to.

  27. 27.

    JGabriel

    @Amir Khalid:

    GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Brain bleach! Brain bleach!

    True. In the crowd of GOP candidates, only Newt really has the breasts to pull off a bikini.

    .

  28. 28.

    Raven

    I broke my leg in 18 places falling out of a tree AFTER football practice in 8th grade. I broke my back in a car wreck in 1975. I’ve had a broken nose, collar bone, wrist and toe. Two badly chipped teeth playing basketball. Life is dangerous unless you don’t play.

  30. 30.

    Veritas

    Tonight’s primaries?

    Romney sweeps ’em all except for Missouri, which is 50/50 but Missouri doesn’t matter.

    Big wins for Romney coming right up!

  31. 31.

    Anoniminous

    @JGabriel:

    With the lower GOP turn-out this time I’d expect them to have a greater affect on the outcome than their over-all numbers. (But then I could be full of what dropped outta the tall bull’s behind.)

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Teh Maths. Dey iz hard.

  32. 32.

    bemused senior

    @JGabriel: Nate Silver said 10% of Republican caucus goers were Mormon (still not an enormous number). It was in a post I read this morning … sorry no link atm.

  33. 33.

    Martin

    @Amir Khalid:

    Also, rugby is just as much a contact sport as American football, And yet one never hears about long-term injury or head trauma blighting the lives of former rugby players.

    Not even close. The problem with football are the rapid decelerations coming from that heavy helmet to helmet (or helmet to ground) impact. You can’t do that in rugby – you’ll die, almost instantly, but the helmet protects the exterior of your head by cushioning it against the blow. But you can’t cushion the brain inside, so it doesn’t much matter how much helmet you put around you, if you allow the same contact with the same deceleration (that’s what does the damage) you’re going to get the same brain injuries.

    Does it make it less exciting? Sporting-wise, no. Basketball is exciting without helmet to helmet contact. But fans really like the big hit. It’s not that the player was stopped, it that the player was stopped with authority. The fans that oppose the rule changes are the ones that are really looking for something fairly barbaric in sport.

  37. 37.

    pragmatism

    I saw a segment on Real Sports with Bryant gumble that highlighted the use of Toradol on game days. If NFL players look like they could run through a brick wall it is because they probably can. Toradol is no joke as a full body painkiller. It is usually administered after surgery. The players described a line of half the team or more on game days to get it. In addition to aggravating existing injuries because players simply can’t feel things, toradol thins the blood. This could aggravate concussions. A few players have had kidney and other organs fail. It’s FDA approved but a small group of retired players filed suit. A couple teams don’t allow it. You can watch it at hbo’s site.

    http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/01/24/urlacher-admits-use-of-painkiller-toradol/

    Urlacher was honest about it. Made baseball roid deniers look worse (somehow).

  38. 38.

    handsmile

    This may be a decidedly minor interest around these parts, but I’ve been waiting all day for an “Open Thread” to note that today, February 7, is the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens! Do lift a mug or a glass!

    Dickens is arguably (?) the greatest novelist of the English language. I imagine that everyone reading this thread, indeed everyone scanning this website, has read at least one of his novels, and hopefully enjoyed it. (The common high school assignment of A Tale of Two Cities may have snuffed the enthusiasm of many.)

    Much of my own fiction reading this year will be devoted to returning to his works (or in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit finally getting to it.) Great Expectations was dispatched in January. At the moment, I’m negotiating the 770 pages of 9 pt. typeface of the Norton Critical Edition of Bleak House. That will take a while.

    The Guardian has been publishing a series of articles on the bicentennial celebrations for the past several weeks. Among today’s is a feature on a commissioned Penguin Books poll naming Ebenezer Scrooge as Dicken’s most popular character.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/06/ebenezer-scrooge-most-popular-dickens-character?intcmp=122

    Well, I’ve here discharged my high culture duties. Now back to regular scheduled programming….

  44. 44.

    Martin

    @slag: Doesn’t matter. The deliberate misspelling of his name is going to be the ‘I can see Russia from my house’ of this election.

  45. 45.

    Schlemizel

    Daughter tore up her left knee when she got ‘Pete Rose’d” in a fall fast pitch league. Interesting story there. When I coached boys little league it was an automatic out to hit a defensive player with the ball & position – it was also illegal for a defensive player without the ball to force contact with a runner. The girls softball rules do not outlaw that crap – its more dangerous than the boys sport!

    A lot of kids end up with life altering injuries & never make a dime from the sport. Football is the worst but there are injuries in many of them. Stick with tennis & golf, MAYBE gymnastics.

  46. 46.

    Schlemizel

    BTW – when I say Pete Rose’d I mean the runner coming in from third put her shoulder down & blew through her like a middle linebacker. I give her credit, she held the ball up for the ump to see & then started crying. Went to the hospital in an ambulance. There was no good reason for it, the runner was out by a good 15 feet.

  49. 49.

    suzanne

    @Martin:

    The fans that oppose the rule changes are the ones that are really looking for something fairly barbaric in sport.

    Which seems to be most of them.

    I hate football; I can’t see much athleticism in it when most of those guys have bodies like they do, and whenever I’m assured that there’s a great deal of strategy involved, I think of the interviews with the players afterward who are stupid to the point of incoherence. I am convinced that people just like blood sport, and we’d just feel (somewhat) guilty if someone actually died while playing.

  51. 51.

    Raven

    @suzanne: “I can’t see much athleticism”

    “players afterward who are stupid to the point of incoherence.”

    Unfucking real. Why don’t you comment on their race too?

  52. 52.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @handsmile:

    Dickens is arguably (?) the greatest novelist of the English language.

    Two words: Jacqueline Susann

    “Ah. The classics.”

  53. 53.

    pragmatism

    @Schlemizel: Thanks for clearing that up. I was thinking of a head first slide, not a ray fosse demolition. Sorry to hear about your daughter. I hope the girl who did it at least got plunked in her next ab.

  55. 55.

    Anoniminous

    Holy shit!

    Frothy is kicking Mitt’s ass in Missouri 54% to 25.7% and they’ve called for him.

  56. 56.

    Cacti

    @suzanne:

    I can’t see much athleticism in it when most of those guys have bodies like they do

    I assume you mean the linemen.

    Most of the skill position players have bodies like a greek god.

  57. 57.

    Cacti

    @Anoniminous:

    Frothy is kicking Mitt’s ass in Missouri 54% to 25.7% and they’ve called for him

    Not surprising. St. Louis and KC have significant Catholic populations. Southern Missouri is bible belt protestants.

    Not a lot of Mormon love in that state.

  59. 59.

    Anoniminous

    @Cacti:

    ACK that, however Santorum did about 10% better than expected.

    Now if Minnesota and Colorado can come in for Man-on-Dog over Man-With-Dog-on-Car I’d really start buying the popcorn.

  60. 60.

    WereBear (itouch)

    “Sport” should be about grace and power; to me, making injury an unavoidable part makes it no linger a “sport” and something else entirely. But then, I was always a geeky bookworm, and you can easily say I don’t get it.

  62. 62.

    suzanne

    @Raven:

    Unfucking real. Why don’t you comment on their race too?

    Yes. You’re right. Because the smartest people I know run around smacking into each other in order to do… what, exactly? Oh. Wait. NOTHING that is measurably beneficial to humanity in any way.

    These people literally risk life and limb over a fucking GAME that doesn’t actually mean jack shit, and I’m a racist for saying that I think that makes them stupid? (And for noting that most of them don’t seem to be the most intellectual of folk?) Awesome logic there. Let me guess where you learned that.

  63. 63.

    Linnaeus

    One of my former neighbors was an ex-NFL player, whose name you might recognize if I mentioned it. Anyway, just watching this 6’6″ (at least) man go up and down short flights of stairs was painful. He winced every step he took.

    We shared a porch and sometimes he’d be outside smoking. We had a few conversations and he told me some stories about his career. Huge needles injecting him with cortisone so he could play with broken arms, etc. He said, “there’s so much that people don’t know about football.” I knew that persistent injuries were an issue, that pro football players dealt with lifelong problems, etc, but living next door to this man illustrated that better than any story I ever read.

  65. 65.

    brantl

    @handsmile:I found Dickens to be the most pedestrian of writers that I have ever had the misfortune to have recommended to me. I have grudgingly read worse (momentarily), and the only reason I finished a Dickens novel was because it was part of a high school English course, and I was too honest to get the Cliff Notes.

  66. 66.

    Paul in KY

    @Amir Khalid: That’s because it is illegal in rugby to launch yourself like a missile at an opposing player. Also, rugby players don’t wear helmets.

  67. 67.

    Paul in KY

    @Schlemizel: If the runner was out by 15 feet, in hindsight, she should have been ready to pivot out of the basepath & apply the tag as the runner careened by.

    Hope she is OK. Sounds like a tough kid.

  68. 68.

    Paul in KY

    @brantl: Certainly not all of his books are great. He has a tendency to say with 1,000 words what could be said with 200.

    However, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is a monumental work, one of the greatest English novels.

  69. 69.

    handsmile

    In the unlikely event that you return to this thread:

    @brantl:

    Dickens, pedestrian? That certainly is a singular and iconoclastic opinion. Would you be willing to name authors whom you believe worthy of esteem?

    @Paul in KY:

    I trust you may know that almost all of Dickens’ novels were first published in monthly or weekly installments. This kind of serial production was a conventional publishing format in the Victorian era. Once the series of installments of a single work was completed, it was bound into one or two volumes for purchase. So it was to Dickens’ financial advantage “to say with 1,000 words what could be said with 200.” (And several generations of readers are deeply grateful for that.)

    Also, such omnibus novels, ones stuffed with plots, characters and scenes, were themselves a convention of 19th century literature (cf. Tolstoy, Balzac).

    I must admit I don’t share the degree of your enthusiasm for A Tale.., but it is regularly included among Dickens’ masterpieces.

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