Posted on by rjonakait

Marching Through Madness

In this time called by some March Madness, I learn yet again that I subscribe to TruTV, and I learn yet again where it is on my cable system. March Madness refers to the college basketball tournaments. They have so many games that some plop onto otherwise obscure cable stations.

Before the tournaments begin, sports commentators speculate and speculate some more about which teams will be the #1 seeds. There are four of them, which, of course, is contradictory, but the tournament is divided into four sections of sixteen teams each with a #1 seed. Despite all the discussions of #1 seeds, it hardly matters whether a team is a #1 or a #2 seed. The #1seed plays the #16 seed, and the number two seed plays the fifteenth seed, but the designation of fifteenth or sixteenth are semi-random. Although sports pundits may say some team should have been a one seed instead of a two, I have never heard a commentator say that a team got screwed by being designated a sixteenth seed when it should have gotten a fifteenth designation. Whether a team is a first or second seed, it is certainly a heavy favorite, and, of course, if the seeding really works, the first seed will end up playing the second seed on a neutral court. Whether a team is a first or second seed should hardly matter, so shut up about it.

In other sports such as tennis, commentators will say that a player has made it to the round of sixteen or the quarter- or semi-finals, but not in college basketball. Instead, it will be the “Sweet Sixteen,” the “Elite Eight,” the “Final Four.” Perhaps this was endearing or cute many, many years ago, but they are just annoying clichés now. (Battology: “The continual reiteration of the same words in speech or writing; the wearisome repetition of words in speech or writing.” You’re welcome.) Could at least someone stop using them? (No one has come up with something approaching alliteration for a team winning the first game and being one of the remaining thirty-two teams. No one says the Thundering Thirty-Two or the Thriving Thirty-Two. Someone needs to work on that.)

The men’s tournament concludes after March concludes. Don’t we need something for games played in April? Since the games feature scholar-athletes, perhaps we could have a semi-learned shoutout to T.S. and call it April Cruelty, since somebody is going to lose. But I guess it has to be at least some weak attempt at alliteration. The best I have is April Apeshit. April Absurdity is alliterative but does not seem right. Surely you can do better.

Many are saying that the women’s tournament has bigger stars and will be more exciting than the men’s side. This is partly because of Caitlin Clark. When she is mentioned, we are usually told in the same breath that she has scored more points than any other Division 1 basketball player, either male or female. This points out the difficulty of comparing players from different eras. Of course, women did not play Division I basketball at all until relatively recently. And while Clark passed Pete Maravich in Division 1 scoring, the rules did not allow freshmen (first-year students, if we are being woke) to play varsity ball when Maravich was at Louisiana State University. He played three years while Clark has played four. Moreover, there was no three-point line when Maravich was in college. His per-game scoring average was, in fact, much higher than Clark’s. This takes nothing away from Caitlin Clark, who is an exciting player, one I love to watch. Nevertheless, I offer just a small caveat about comparing players from different eras.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Have you wondered how many of those North American truck drivers protesting the vaccine have used uppers bought in a restroom in a stop alongside the highway?

Sometimes I see it spelled “Zelenskyy” (the only double y I can think of) and sometimes “Zelensky.” I assume that has something to do with translating from the Cyrillic alphabet, but I have no idea what it is.

Hearing the news about Ukrainian nuclear power plants, I recalled a book I read last summer, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019) by Adam Higginbotham. He wrote that the demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 and that coal, even though burning it leads to climate change, remains the world’s most widely used source of energy for the generation of electricity. Furthermore, particulates from the fossil fuels electricity plants kill 13,000 people a year in the U.S., and 3,000,000 people in the world die each year from air pollution from fossil fuel plants. Higginbotham points out that nuclear electric plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been a safer electricity generation source than anything else including wind turbines, and new nuclear designs may even be safer.

At this time of the year, the sports channels prattle about what college teams will be the number one seeds in the NCAA basketball tournament. I wonder how much it matters if a school is slotted first or second. A number one seed plays the sixteenth seed in the first round while the second seed plays the fifteenth seed. Are there any statistics on how much difference this makes? And if all goes to form, no matter who is seeded first or second, the number one and two seeds will play each other on a neutral court. 

I just watched Drive My Car. The movie is long and slow-moving and marvelous. It has depth and layers; one of them is that Uncle Vanya is intertwined throughout it. While watching the movie, I thought back to the three or four productions of that Chekhov play I have seen, and I realized that I remembered little of the play. I can’t summarize Uncle Vanya or its characters, but that is not unusual. I retain little of the art I see, hear, or read. I do, however, remember aspects of the first Uncle Vanya I saw fifty years ago, a legendary production. It was directed by Mike Nichols, and Nicol Williamson and George C. Scott had the two lead roles, Uncle Vanya and Astrov. Americans may have mostly forgotten Williamson, but he was called a genius actor by many who saw him. I then knew of Scott primarily from film roles, but of course he first came to fame with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. The cast also included Lillian Gish, Bernard Hughes, Conrad Bain, and Julie Christie. The production was at the Circle in the Square Theater, which has a thrust stage with most seats, including mine, only a few feet from the actors. And gosh and golly, I do remember how lovely Julie Christie was in her lacy morning dress as she stood a few feet away from me. As beautiful as she was, she could not match the presence and fire of Williamson and Scott. But while those facts and images came back to me while watching Drive My Car, the themes and language of Uncle Vanya did not.

But you don’t have to know that play to appreciate the genius of Drive My Car.