Rather Quite Obvious, Now That You Mention It

It is the sort of question you might be tempted to answer simply and bluntly, such as by saying, “Well, we’re Americans.”

At least two people have died from heart attacks while shovelling snow in Buffalo, New York. Every winter, about 100 people in the US die doing this. Why?

(BBC)

Turns out the answer appears to actually be medical:

A study looking at data from 1990 to 2006 by researchers at the US Nationwide Children’s Hospital recorded 1,647 fatalities from cardiac-related injuries associated with shovelling snow. In Canada, these deaths make the news every winter.

Cardiologist Barry Franklin, an expert in the hazardous effects of snow removal, believes the number of deaths could be double that. “I believe we lose hundreds of people each year because of this activity,” says Franklin, director of preventative cardiology and cardiac rehabilitation at William Beaumont Hospital, Michigan.

His team found that when healthy young men shovelled snow, their heart rate and blood pressure increased more than when they exercised on a treadmill. “Combine this with cold air, which causes arteries to constrict and decrease blood supply, you have a perfect storm for a heart attack,” he says.

Well, yeah, it would be medical anyway, even if the answer was, “He froze to death.” Then again, we cannot predict that such a notion would have any effect. After all, we’re Americans.

You know how it goes: Sure, it happens. But not to me.

And then one day you fall over, face-down in the snow. Such is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Just … you know, take care of yourselves. The only upside is that you won’t be around to hear your mates razzing you about it at the pub.

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British Broadcasting Company. “Why do so many people die shovelling snow?” BBC News Magazine Monitor. 19 November 2014.

Image credit: Derek Gee/Buffalo News

Just Another Rant (#ENGvGERmix)

It is easy enough to denounce the lack of attention paid women’s sports in the United States, especially when the idea that the local women’s professional soccer team aims for a sixty percent attendance increase to a six thousand per game average for a team featuring that much international play talent. And it is easy enough for Americans to scratch their heads in puzzlement—since awe and soccer are a forbidden combination in this country—at the thought of the best-attended MLS team averaging twice what the next team draws, the word out of England regarding Sunday’s match at Wembly is a kick to the shin:

England women’s midfielder Karen Carney believes their historic game at Wembley on Sunday proves there is an appetite for the women’s game.

“TV are behind us and we’ve just got to do the business now. I think the rest will take care of itself,” Carney said.

Tickets have sold out, but sales have been capped at 55,000 due to London Underground engineering works ....

.... The game begins England’s preparations for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which takes place in Canada, and will be the first women’s international fixture played at Wembley.

(BBC Sport)

Fifty-five thousand. Sold out. With allocation capped because of disruptions caused by public infrastructure work.

Just a reminder: Our U.S. Women’s National Team just won the CONCACAF Championship, with world-record goal scorer Abby Wambach notching a ridiculous four goals against Costa Rica, and we are supposed to be impressed by the 11,625 who showed up to watch the game in person.

If something about the previous statement seems amiss, I promise you it isn’t the statement.

Well, okay. Supposed to be impressed? Yeah, I kind of made that up. Women’s soccer in the U.S. is only supposed to be impressive if it’s a World Cup match. Or one of the players pulls off her shirt after scoring a goal. Preferably both at once, then all the guys can feel like they tuned in for a reason.

And, you know, at times like this I recall a t-shirt, of all things. One of my daughter’s classmates happened to be wearing it one day when I was at the school. It was a soccer shirt, with a silhouette female mid-plant and about to deliver a hard shot to the upper right corner of the net. The slogan read, “You only wish you could kick like a girl!”

Cool shirt. I applaud.

Then again, that’s also what it comes to.

I just don’t get it. Is a woman playing soccer not sexy enough unless she whips off her shirt? No, seriously, what is the problem here? To the one, soccer is the most popular team sport on the planet. To the other, the U.S. has some of the finest talent in the history of women’s sports. To the beeblebrox, we also have an untapped talent reserve of unimaginable size. What, exactly, is the problem here?

Fifty-five thousand will gather at Wembley to watch the English women’s team host Germany. I’m not going to knock this particular match, but come on, really? The USWNT can’t even sell out eighteen thousand tickets at PPL Park? For the freaking CONCACAF Championship?

What … is … the … problem … here?

Get your heads out. Open your eyes.

Watch … in … awe.

The U.S. Women’s National Team has a tournament next month; four matches in eleven days.

Seriously. Open your eyes and watch in awe.

Oh, right. After all that, I forgot: Congratulations, Karen Carney; we hear you’re up for your hundredth cap. Good show, madam. Indeed, great show.

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British Broadcasting Corporation. “Karen Carney: England women forging place in football market”. BBC Sport. 20 November 2014.

The Pigskin Preposterous

“As soon as I adopt that quitting attitude, I’ll have it for the rest of my life.”

―Daijail Arthur

Talk about burying the lede.

Okay, time out: This probably means more to me than it does to you. A’ight?

Jeré Longman reports, for the New York Times:

The Louisiana high school football playoffs opened last Friday, but it hardly felt encouraging as the East Iberville Tigers boarded a bus for a five-hour ride north toward certain defeat. The team was 0-10 for a second consecutive season, so overmatched that four players decided not to make the trip.

This left a squad of 15 suited up for the Tigers’ Class 1A playoff opener here, including a freshman quarterback, two eighth-graders — a safety and a lineman — and a seventh-grade receiver.

The inclusion of winless teams in the playoffs is an unintended consequence of a much-debated action that Louisiana’s principals took before the 2013 season to split public and private schools into separate playoff tournaments for football.

Each state is left to make its own bylaws. In a number of states, the football playoffs have expanded for several reasons: tension between public and private schools over recruiting and scholarships, inclusivity and aligning football with the postseason tournaments in other sports.

One result is that teams with losing records routinely enter the playoffs because there are not enough competitive teams to go around. A quick survey found winless teams in the 2014 postseason from Texas, New Jersey, Utah, South Dakota and Missouri. Virginia had two playoff teams with 1-9 records.

There is so much wrong in those paragraphs that it is hard to know where to begin. This is not necessarily a result of Longman’s reporting; rather, the buried lede speaks more of our society. To that end, we might make snide remarks about market demand, but that would only further obscure what really is a very, very important issue.

Let us return to the second paragraph:

This left a squad of 15 suited up for the Tigers’ Class 1A playoff opener here, including a freshman quarterback, two eighth-graders — a safety and a lineman — and a seventh-grade receiver.

Please tell me this paragraph is a joke.

¡Lunch Time!

Actually, I just needed an excuse to walk away from my desk for a bit. After all, lunch time was a couple hours ago.

Does coffee count as “lunch”?

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Image: Detail of framegrab from FLCL epsiode 1, “Fooly Cooly”.

The Problem with Local News

Sometimes we adore local news, and you can take the word “adore” in that derogatory context, so loathsome it’s adorable.

CBS Los Angeles, which is a local affiliate and not a crime drama spinoff, reported yesterday on an exclusive story about an auto service receipt that had already achieved viral status:

A man in Riverside who went to see an auto mechanic said he was personally offended by what was written on his receipt – and it wasn’t the price.

Customer Ruben Rodriguez said, “I saw the words ‘stupid’ and I just kind of was like, ‘What?’ And I read it and reread it.”

CBS2/KCAL9′s Crystal Cruz confirmed that scribbled at the bottom of the receipt was “customer to stupid to understand normal thinking.”

Rodriguez said it was written by George Fritts, the owner of George Fritts Auto repair in Riverside. He’s quick to point out a grammatical error: Fritts should have used “too” when he wrote “to stupid.”

“That is one of the issues that I pointed out when I went back into the store. And I don’t think he was too excited about that, but I did my best to help him out,” Rodriguez said.

It should be pointed out that even if the term is unfamiliar, we are witnessing a variant of Skitt’s Law, an internet axiom suggesting that pedantry will be subject to pedantry. You know, like writing “to” instead of “too” when denouncing another person’s stupidity.

Setting that aside, what makes the story adorable is CBS News “Inland Empire” reporter Crystal Cruz:

Yes, this rude receipt, sort of gone viral. The customer posted it on social media, has gotten a lot of mixed responses regarding this receipt. Tonight we’ll let you decide who’s in the right or the wrong.

Really? Who’s in the right or wrong? How is this actually a question? From a business perspective, we need not merely observe that the customer is always right; there is also the fact that this sort of thing chases off other customers. A more general perspective might wonder about advice on keeping oil clean; the first thought to mind is that we use oil filters for this purpose, but then perhaps it might be that the mechanic is just a poor salesman trying to con the customer into using some sort of additive. Given a chance to respond, the mechanic only said that he stands by his assessment, and offered no details toward what his advice about keeping oil clean actually was. In the end, there isn’t really a question about who is right or wrong. More than the receipt itself, CBS 2’s “exclusive” report is a waste of time, money, and human resources.

And this is why local news is adorable. Certes, cable news has myriad problems of its own, and print media looks more and more like its sorry electronic version, but local television news makes Kenny Brockelstein into a modern prophet and casts the abysmal midday talk shows offering homemaking tips for the housewife audience between soap opera reviews and teases media geniuses. CBS 2’s “exclusive” report is a genial presentation of style lacking any sense of journalism in general or reporting specifically.

Which, in turn, only highlights the importance of Australian anchor Karl Stefanovic’s bit with the blue suit. The problem here isn’t a matter of wardrobe or hairstyle, but, rather, what passes for reporting in the twenty-first century.

And that’s the problem with worrying about her hair or wardrobe; maybe we should start asking reporters to pay attention to their reporting.

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CBS 2. “Exclusive: Auto Mechanic Leaves Shocking Note On Customer’s Receipt”. CBSLA.com. 19 November 2014.

A Falling Star

It’s over.

While The Washington Post has fallen somewhat from its glory days as one of the nation’s newspapers of record, it’s hard to ignore the coincidence of the masthead and Paul Farhi’s rhetoric:

Bill Cosby’s dazzling, decades-long career as one of America’s most beloved entertainers appeared to be toppling this week amid a succession of allegations painting Cosby as a serial sexual predator.

On Wednesday, NBC — the network that roared back to television supremacy in the 1980s thanks to Cosby’s warmhearted family sitcom — joined the list of entertainment companies and TV programs that have abandoned projects or distanced themselves from the 77-year-old comedian and actor amid the cascade of shocking headlines.

And Farhi’s headline for the paper’s Style Blog (?!) is grim: “As NBC distances itself from Bill Cosby, a decades-long career crumbles”.

Automated Vengeance

Coincidence. Synchronicity. I don’t know, God’s will? Hell, why not get mystical, right?

Or is it just that we happened to see the same article as Zach Weiner?

Which would bring us back to coincidence. But, hey, we don’t know.

Question for an interview that will never happen: From conception to posting, about how long does it take you to produce a cartoon? Or is that already answered in a podcast?

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Weiner, Zach. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 20 November 2014.

Logic, Love, and Something, Something, Something, Dark Side

Britney Spears in Las Vegas, Newt Gingrich on his third wife, Ray and Janay, O.J. and Nicole, the list goes on ad nauseam. It’s a point that keeps coming up, and once again we find ourselves choking on the laughter that seems our only decent retort: The sanctity of marriage? Uh-huh. Right. Whatever you say.

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Beeler, Nate. “Holy Matrimony”. The Columbus Dispatch. 20 November 2014.

Another Look at Voters and What They Just Voted For

And that’s where the confusion kicks in. The American mainstream strongly backs the same policy agenda Democrats want, but that same mainstream just elected a Congress that will make it impossible for Americans to get what they say they support.

―Steve Benen

It might seem to need some unpacking, but in truth the point holds.

There is, for instance, the temptation to point out the Senate shift, and remind that this was the “mainstream” in places like Iowa, where voters clearly prefer uneducated, tinfoil trash and threats of sedition from elected officials. Or Kansas, where voters are cheering on the destruction of the state government. Or Colorado, where 2010 saw Sen. Michael Bennet win a narrow victory, but only because it was a statewide election, and just enough voters were offended at the idea of sending a prosecutor who aids and abets rape to the U.S. Senate; it should be noted that in the state’s Fourth Congressional District, Colorado voters had no qualms about sending the abettor to the House of Representatives. Of course, voters in the states’ Fifteenth Legislative District also sent a paranoid, homophobic exorcist to the legislature, and in the overlapping Fifth Congressional District, returned Rep. Doug “Tar Baby” Lamborn to the House in celebration of ignorance and hatred. Looking at the Senate swing, it’s easy enough to fall back to the comfort that, for the most part, Democrats lost where they were expected to lose.

But a broader picture of voters can also be found in the midterm election; Republicans made enormous gains in state government across the nation. Certes, in a state like Washington, where ballot measures were the only statewide votes, things went about as expected; we don’t match the national trend, but that in part is because we had nothing to do with the question of Senate control.

But it seems this will be the defining legacy of the 2014 midterms. Voters said they want something, and then voted against it. At this point, we cannot begin to explain the result without accounting for irrationality in the psychopathology of everyday life. A dialectic of neurosis might explain the preference of party labels over real results, but is it a twisted identity politic or something deeper, like a craven need for perpetual Manichaean dualism? Close, low-scoring contests are the height of professional sports^α, but disastrous for political outcomes.

It’s easy enough to express what just happened in the sense that Republicans just won big in an election. The harder answer is to figure just what that actually means in terms of voters. As to governance, the answer is clear: The ability of governments in the United States to function appropriately will be further degraded as Republicans move forward feeling empowered to prove their thesis that government just doens’t work.

It is, furthermore, easy enough to say we want nice outcomes. It is harder to accomplish those nice outcomes, though, and nearly impossible for voters to admit that, no, they don’t really want that stuff. And that, too, might well emerge from a dialectic of neurosis, that people only say they want good outcomes because they fret about what the neighbors would think if they came right out and admitted what they’re really after.

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^α The basic principle: Offense wins games; defense wins championships. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer … you name it, the principle holds. And let’s face it, outside the SEC, most American football fans are pretty much sick of sixty-point blowouts.

Benen, Steve. “NBC poll: Public attitudes clear as mud”. msnbc. 20 November 2014.

What It Comes To (Choke On It Mix)

Rule number … er … I don’t know, give it a number: Don’t fuck with the nurses!

The case of a Navy medical officer who refused to force-feed prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay prompted the country’s largest nursing organization on Wednesday to petition the Defense Department for leniency, citing professional ethical guidelines that support the officer’s decision.

The officer is a nurse and 18-year Navy veteran whose commander has called for an internal inquiry into the refusal, his lawyer said.

(Carey)

Okay, look, this is a problem. We have heard versions of it before, dealing with “enhanced interrogation”, but to what degree are war crimes really worth redefining the role of medical professionals in our society?

And that is the whole of the question; everything else is a matter of policy and procedure, but at the core is this fundamental question.

We are holding these prisoners for no good reason, in violation of our own principles and in dubious relationship with our own laws. To the one, they have every reason to try a hunger strike. To the other, if you’re going to force-feed them, do it your fucking selves.

Which is the other thing: We’re Americans, damn it! Get your heads out, close this atrocity of a prison, and stop trying to redefine our society for the purposes of fostering warfare.

This should not be our heritage and legacy, yet for some reason history defies American principle. Indeed, Guantánamo will become one of our shameful tales, like biological warfare and genocide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It happens, we don’t like to talk or think or give any sort of consideration about it, so it happens again.

The military’s aggressive interrogation policy, at Guantánamo and elsewhere, has forced agonizing decisions on medical professionals. Psychologists have helped design the torturous techniques, which have included sleep deprivation and isolation; they have also monitored the interrogations. Medical doctors have advised on caring for the detainees. Details of these professionals’ roles have fueled debates within major medical associations; such debates have played a role in elections in at least one major group, the American Psychological Association.

One of the main issues is whether the medical associations should discipline members who have taken part in interrogations in any way, even as observers. The Navy case represents the flip side of the equation. It is the first known defiance of Guantánamo’s force-feeding procedure, and the nurses association is acting to defend, rather than to condemn, the medical officer’s actions.

But, seriously, do not screw with the nurses.

And, no, you don’t need a proverbial slippery slope to understand the problem; all you need is some comprehension of what medical professionals pledge their lives to, and a modicum of human decency.

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Carey, Benedict. “Nurses Urge Leniency Over Refusal to Force-Feed at Guantánamo Bay”. The New York Times. 19 November 2014.