Somebody asked Richard Sherman a(nother) stupid question (how can we stop football players setting a bad example by going to strip clubs?), and he gave a better answer than it deserved (he doesn’t go to strip clubs, and also, try to encourage the strippers that ‘there are other avenues… to make money’). Susan Shepard, at SB Nation, stands up for the profession:
… It’s hardly the fault of football players that women strip. They strip because it’s a job, and because plenty of customers who are not professional athletes choose to spend their disposable income in the strip club. There is a demand, there is a supply, we’re all consenting adults here. I look forward to future questions about the bad examples of players fathering children outside of marriage, leaving college before finishing their degrees and promoting the consumption of fast food…
Stripping is one of the few gigs where women are paid more than men. It’s also, like football, a way for a small number of talented people to do very well for themselves — think of Blac Chyna, Dita Von Teese, or Gigi Maguire, the MVPs of stripping — while a larger number just earn a living for a while and then, when their bodies can’t deal anymore, go do something else. Something like two to three percent of college players go to the NFL; an even smaller number continue on to careers of serious length or remuneration. One bad injury and you and your non-guaranteed contract are gone. On the other hand, you might make some good contacts that help you later in the working world…
But then, having actual fun does not seem to be the plan for the Superbowl Experience, per Jenna Marotta at NYMag:
In the early hours of Saturday morning, hundreds of people drank Budweiser products, under six-tiered chandeliers made of beer bottles, at the Bud Light Hotel Lounge, the site of the Playboy Super Bowl party. Men wore suits and collared shirts while most women wore flammable dresses with cutouts and exposed zippers. There was some grinding, and headliner Nelly launched n-bombs through gaps in the strobe lights. Cooper Hefner, 22-year-old ambassador for his dad and the family brand, described Big Game Sunday at the mansion as “tame.” “It’s 60 to 100 people, and it’s intimate family, friends my dad invites,” Hefner said. “No one’s getting naked for the Super Bowl.”…
David Roth, also at SB Nation, talks about the real SuperBowl whores:
… At this point in its and the NFL’s existence, the Super Bowl is a huge but hugely self-contained thing, a series of VIP Events and marketing stuntlets and concurrent synergies that create their own microclimate. The host city exists to provide hotel rooms and extend public services, and then those hundreds of cops then mostly just stand around and watch people — people who most likely are not going to the game, since very few people can afford to do that — as those people take photos of their kid standing next to a man in an M&M costume or something.
There is no distinctive thing about any of this, and that is by design. There is no reason to have the Super Bowl in the same place every year, because the NFL makes sure that, at some essential level, that is already happening…
In the end, what Super Bowl Boulevard reflects more than anything is over-leveraging. Football as a sport has problems, but is also thrilling and strange and utterly unlike any other sport. It’s a unique and very good product, and that is why we buy so much of it. But all this other stuff — the things spun off and grafted onto the Super Bowl, the fortnight of craven, blundering bombardment and meta-bombardment by the NFL and its aligned brands — is just so much, so much more than anyone could want. It works, but only in the way the NFL wants it to work. It does not necessarily give us what we want, but it could only be said to fail if we stopped wanting altogether, which is not happening….
Suffern ACE
I don’t get the need for Super Bowl boulevard at all, honestly. Just a few weeks ago, it was called Times Square. But it didn’t have a robot football player. Ok. It’s Times Square with a football robot and no crosstown traffic. Whoopie.
NotMax
@Suffern ACE
Times Square hasn’t been Times Square since Disney kicked the strippers out, anyway.
Suffern ACE
@NotMax: even without strippers, I bet the naked cowboy is safely ushered to Columbus Circle for the week.
Fuzzy
Broadway Joe Namath is claiming football gave him dain bramage….not his NY, mink coated lifestyle. No way. Joe’s strippers are all grammas now even if they have recurring dizziness from pole dancing.
PurpleGirl
@Suffern ACE: The actual football game is being playing in a stadium in NEW JERSEY. The host/sporing committee needed something tied to the game in New York City to provide entertainment to the locals and tourists who can’t afford to go to the game. Doing the same activities wouldn’t work in New Jersey because people would have to drive to the “Super Bowl Boulevard” site. It’s a different atmosphere in New Jersey.
Hence taking over 12 blocks of Broadway for Super Bowl Boulevard. Sounds like a prime Bloomberg idea — remember he wanted to build a football stadium on the West Side.
SatanicPanic
@efgoldman:
THIS. Oh god, I like to watch sports as much (well, almost as much) as the next guy, but I can do without all the nerd shit. I got my own nerd shit to think about.
MikeJ
One thing you can always count on, no matter what the event: World Series, Super Bowl, Olympics, World Cup, there will be plenty of posts to shit on it and remind you that you and the rest of the ignorant sheeple just ain’t cool enough.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I will watch every second that I can of every bit of coverage any year the Packers are in the Super Bowl. Otherwise, it is game only.
dp
Since it’s an open thread, a diary I did on DailyKos about postal banking. Click on and act as you see fit.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/01/1274323/-My-whitehouse-gov-petition-in-support-of-postal-banking
mclaren
Speak for yourself. The Stupor Bowl is shite. The people who care about the Stupor Bowl are human garbage, “passages for food” in da Vinci’s words. The human remoras who make billions off the Stupor Bowl are below vampiric.
Banning professional sports would start America on the road to sanity, which is why it will never happen.
Suffern ACE
@MikeJ: well you could redeem yourself by explaining that you follow a sport that’s been overlooked that’s the best sport we’ve probably never heard of, although it’s big in some European country with a well known social democracy.
Omnes Omnibus
@dp: It is a very good idea. Many Euro countries have post offices that offer a variety of similar services. It seems to work well. OTOH, there are entrenched powers the would fight it tooth and nail.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Yep, the US is the only county with professional sports. Go back to your fantasies about McMegan.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: Rugby? Alpine Skiing? Nordic skiing?
Alison
@Omnes Omnibus: Quidditch, obvs.
xenos
@Omnes Omnibus: Team Handball!
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison: I don’t have a decent broom.
@xenos: Good lord. Is that big in Lux?
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: alpine skiing? Hah. Those guys sold out in 72 when they stopped using beeswax for something BASF developed. I nominate Brokartök Glima as the hip sport.
Mnemosyne
My big decision for tomorrow is which game I’m going to watch live and which I’m going to TiVO, the Puppy Bowl or the Kitten Bowl, but Cracked.com has one of their patented lists up in honor of the occasion:
#1 is especially interesting because it debunks some of the debunking about the domestic violence claims about the Super Bowl. The writer doesn’t address it, but when reading that, it made me think of another possible reason calls to domestic violence centers go up during the Super Bowl: the woman knows that her husband/boyfriend is busy watching the game, so she has some private time to call the hotline that she doesn’t have other days of the year.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
D’oh! Sorry, here’s the Cracked link.
xenos
The kids in school play it regularly in phys ed, and every decent sized town has a court that is adjusted for basketball and futsal games, and local ,matches get more coverage in the papers than regional football, especially with Metz getting relegated.
It is a niche that is very popular in the small countries leagues.
Violet
Several years ago the Super Bowl was in the city I was living in at the time. Had theater tickets for the Thursday prior to the game and the theater was close to whatever the equivalent was of this year’s Super Bowl Boulevard. So after the play was over, we headed over there to check it out.
It was crazy busy. Tons of people on the street. Every bar and restaurant packed. We managed to get a late table at one restaurant and ended up sitting next to a middle aged couple from the Midwest. They go to every Super Bowl. It’s their annual vacation. He looked thrilled. She looked bored. I couldn’t imagine anything less interesting, but they were excited to be there.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suffern ACE: Klammer was pure punk rock.
ETA: Or this which garnered a 2d place at the 2011 Hahnenkammrennen
jl
@dp:
Thanks. I am just checking in, and have to run off. But I will sign it, and tell anyone about it who I think might sign. Besides being a good idea on its own, it might help get popular awareness of the potential for USPS services, and get the Ben Franklin’s great idea out of the strangle hold of the GOP House, that seems to want to kill it.
@Omnes Omnibus: Actually, I think most of the old European postal banking services are defunct. I don;t know the politics of it. Maybe consumer banking regulations there made them less needed. But many European postal services have been allowed to expand their services in what in the U.S. would be seen as a wild and crazy entrepreneurial way, while within a public service mandate.
Not sure what game the GOP is trying to play with the USPS. I read the the private deliver services do not in fact want the first class postal business for the whole country, because it would not be profitable. Maybe the idea is to maim the post office enough so that the profitable package delivery and urban service can be spun off to for-profit companies, and then starve the remaining USPS service in small town and rural areas into some some fourth rate skinflint BS.
That would be betraying the a big chunk of dupes who are loyal unto death to the their GOP champions, who would be tapping another vein to suck their supporters blood. But then, what would be new about that?
Omnes Omnibus
@jl:
They are who they are.
NotMax
For those of you who like/enjoy/revel in the game, enjoy.
For the vast bulk of humankind for whom attention to the game is minimal to non-existent, Happy Groundhog Day on Sunday.
chopper
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t even own a teevee, you sheep! yeah, keep bleating for your masters as they line you up for slaughter. your shrink-wrapped liver will make a fine Pâté.
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper:
One should probably avoid my liver. I do, however, have a very big brain – I believe brains fry up nicely.
jl
Hmm… I should have checked the wiki article first. I guess a lot of postal banks are still in operation. The article has changed a lot since the last time I read it. Nothing there now about the Scandinavian postal banks, though a link take you to an brief article about the Norwegian version, which is still running.
Another link says that the US had postal banking from 1911 to 1967, though the deposit limits were so small, it lost popularity.
I’ve heard commercials for a new American Express service that sounds like it is trying to undercut the payday loan racketeers and provide consumer financial services at a reasonable price. I should look up what that is about.
xenos
Human liver would make terrible pâté. Although you could rework the analogy by using the image of a force-fed duck, I suppose.
jl
Beef for de death house, dey no ken de whistle.
Fellow grad student from W Africa taught us pidgin English, which I thought was a cool version of English. That above was my favorite proverb that he taught us.
NotMax
@chopper
Still leery that that new-fangled radio is just a flash in the pan.
jl
Ooops forgot wiki link on postal banks
Postal Savings Systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
xenos
@jl: The french post offices run their own systems of ATMs, In most countries you get either a nationally-sponsored low-cost retail bank that has expanded to compete commercially or a co-op that has done the same (I am thinking of Quebec’s Caisse Populaire and Italy’s Banco Popular, both linked to Sockialist parties, historically).
Go look up the Mass statutes on co-op banks… it is interesting to see who’s name is all over the legislation (future supreme court judge). A real mensch. No wonder all the right people did not like him.
max
Actually, I think most of the old European postal banking services are defunct. I don;t know the politics of it. Maybe consumer banking regulations there made them less needed.
$MONEY$.
Not sure what game the GOP is trying to play with the USPS.
They want to get rid of it, as part of the great drive to privatization. That’s why the USPS stopped being a part of the government and was reorganized as a company owned by the government. (The idea being to sell it off.) At the same time, no GOP congress critter wants to be responsible for grandma’s price for stamps going up, nor do they want to pay for the pensions, and also they want post offices all over their rural districts.
That’s why the USPS is near-bankrupt. As a going business concern, it’s fine except Congress won’t allow the price of first-class stamps to float, and they won’t allow normal pensions rules and so on.
aybe the idea is to maim the post office enough so that the profitable package delivery and urban service can be spun off to for-profit companies, and then starve the remaining USPS service in small town and rural areas into some some fourth rate skinflint BS.
Basically, except, after privatization, they want the Democrats to kill off the remaining crapped-out rural post offices so they can then tell their constituents the Democrats did and campaign on fixing the problem. (Straight-forward method: pay the privatized post office to keep the rural post offices open.) Then the private company makes money off the profitable mail, makes money off the government for the non-profitable mails, busts the postal union in the process, and the Republican ideologues are happy because the ‘badly run’ post office isn’t run by the government anymore. (Bonus: if the post office is a private entity they can get it to censor the mail.)
That would be betraying the a big chunk of dupes who are loyal unto death to the their GOP champions, who would be tapping another vein to suck their supporters blood.
And also bankers hate competition, so they’re goign to be down on the postal banking. I like postal banking and have been pimping it for 6 years. (I think they should also be able to offer OTC stocks and bonds and savings certs, and they should also offer federal ID cards, which would make life simpler.)
max
[‘Cue whining from McArdle.’]
James E. Powell
@efgoldman:
I like games of all kinds; I’m too damned old for all the ancillary bullshit.
I’m with you. I often miss the opening kickoff because of my determination to avoid the national anthem and any flyovers or other displays.
scav
@PurpleGirl: Funny thing about the ‘”locals” though. Apparently the locals actually in East Rutherford don’t count as important enough to get any NFL attention. No official party, can’t even use the holy name for the party they throw themselves. Shut up and provide parking seems to be one take on it. Odd. Or not.
xenos
@max: “…they should also offer federal ID cards, which would make life simpler”
Sure would not make life easier for the Republicans! This is a really good idea. We may never have obligatory federal ID cards, but it would be great to make one optional but available. You should not have to get a passport or a federal job to get a federal ID card.
Suffern ACE
@max: you left out the part where that huge pension fund surplus will be available to pay off the debt of whatever group buys the post office.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
For the association football fans: Is there any likely way that Chris Wondolowski will make the trip to Brazil as part of the USMNT this summer? Yeah, I realize that when he plays it’s usually against traditionally weak opponents, or the B-squads of otherwise decent opponents…But the guy can’t help but to score goals right now.
xenos
@Suffern ACE: 10 points for following the money! I had not thought of that angle. Explains a lot about the particular way the Rs have gone about killing the post office. An exquisite grift, that.
Alison
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I don’t know. Klinsmann is stricter about who gets the call-ups than Bradley was, and this *is* the World Cup. There are a few more friendlies, and if Wondo can continue to score, then maybe. It also matters how he would fit into the formation. You’ve got Dempsey and Altidore, and possibly LD too though he can drop back and play midfield more.
AxelFoley
@xenos:
You should try it with some lava beans and a nice chianti.
Svensker
@jl:
I actually signed up for it a few months ago but haven’t figured out how to use it yet. And now I’ve forgotten my password. Oh well.
Tripod
@Suffern ACE:
Meh. Telemark skiing or it isn’t real, and don’t get me started on that goddamned snowboarding. Also, get off my snow.
Tripod
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Strikers, like baseball hitters, always return to the mean. It’s one thing to knock in a couple, at home against a second tier side, another to make something of the few chances those group G teams will give up.
Unless there’s a rash of injuries, probably not.