In which let’s talk about soccer again

On June 22, 2014June 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

So I’ve figured out exactly why soccer isn’t going to ever really catch on in the States. It’s not the low scoring, although that’s part of it. It’s the inaccuracy. I just watched Cristiano Ronaldo, a soccer player so amazingly well-known and famous that I have heard of him, take a free kick on goal that missed the goal completely. It is at least the fourth shot on goal in this game that was not touched by any defensive player and literally did not even come close to actually touching the goal. I’m not talking about shots that were deflected by defensive players or the goalie. I’m talking about a guy with an open shot ten or fifteen yards from the goal who proceeds to miss the goal completely, and about the fact that this phenomenon happens all the time in supposedly “professional” soccer.

And it’s not limited to shots on goal either. Passes, corner kicks– why the hell is a corner kick even a thing?– regularly appear to go absolutely nowhere near where they are supposed to go. It lends the entire sport this weird atmosphere of amateurism and randomness that I don’t think us ‘Merkins really like to see in our pro sports.

I can hear the soccer fans. “Well, it’s difficult to <x>!” Well, I’m sure it is. That’s the problem. There appears to be no difference between athletic brilliance and pure geometric accident. Our goalie just pulled off what, on first glance, looked like an awesome save– but was it, really? There were two shots in rapid succession. One caromed off the goalpost– because, again, the offensive player missed— and bounced right back toward a bunch of other Portuguese players. One of them kicked it again, and our goalie, who let a goal in earlier by just falling down instead of doing some sort of, y’know, cool goalie thing, and who was already flailing around and stumbling because of the previous shot, just threw his hands up and just managed to deflect the ball over the top of the goal.

Was that an awesome save? Incredible athletic skill from one of the premiere soccer players on Earth? Or just dumb luck? Dunno; near as I can tell they look exactly the same.

(It’s halftime. Some doof sportscaster dude just said if you “take out the goals,” it would have looked like the US lost the last game and was winning this one. Can you imagine someone saying that about basketball or football? It means that scoring is basically random in soccer. That’s bad!)

I have a suggestion.

Eliminate the position of goalie entirely.

Think about it. Most of the missed shots in this game have been just that– missed shots. Each goalie has maybe a couple of saves, and I’m willing to bet that at least a couple of those misses wouldn’t have hit the goal anyway. It’s apparently really goddamn difficult to hit the goal. Why have somebody in the game whose job it is to make scoring even more rare? Get rid of ’em. Add another midfielder instead or something. It’ll make the game more exciting and at least make it look more skillful.

Get on that, FIFA.

On accomplishments

On April 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I have filed my taxes, like a good ‘merkin.

BE PROUD OF ME.

What I’m re/reading in 2014: The Crazy Man Chronicles

On January 12, 2014January 12, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Uncategorized12 Comments

As you might be aware, I read 201 books in 2013. That’s a lot of books, and while I think I did respectably in keeping my average-pages-per-book number high, I’m kinda tired of reading short books right now. I don’t plan on hitting half of the number of books read for the year in 2014 that I did in 2013. What I do plan on doing is reading long shit. And series. Lots and lots of series fiction. Here’s some stuff on the list for this year:

First plan: read the entire Wheel of Time series. The final volume finally came out in paperback, so this is actually possible now. Note that I’ve only read about half of these; I did those all at a gulp and then realized just how much Jordan still planned to write and stopped, and then Jordan died, and Brandon Sanderson finally finished the series. I’m going to start these pretty soon, actually.

Speaking of Brandon Sanderson, now that he’s done with Robert Jordan’s twenty-book megaseries, he’s got time to go back and work on his own. The second volume of The Stormlight Archive comes out in… March, I think? So I’ve got until then to reread the first book.

The third volume of Robert Durling’s magnificent translation of The Divine Comedy finally came out in paperback in December, which means that I can finally finish reading it. This isn’t as intimidating as it looks; there’s a lot of endnotes and backmatter and such so these aren’t as big reads as they seem to be initially. On the other hand…

Michael Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life cost my mother something like a hundred bucks when she bought it for me for Christmas a few years ago, and I haven’t read it yet– mostly because I can’t figure out how to hold the big sumbitch to read it. I will be fixing that this year if I have to invest in a lap desk to do it.

Speaking of books with bible-thin pages…

Yeah, I know, fuck Ayn Rand. But I’ve got a bunch of her books in this neat Centennial Edition on a shelf together, and I got through everything but Atlas Shrugged before deciding I was done reading books by dumb crazy people, and it’s been sitting on the shelf mocking me ever since. Over a thousand pages, maybe six-point font. I’m coming for you, goddammit.

And after that, a palate cleanser:

Disney has decided now that they own the Star Wars license that none of the books that are set in the future of the movies matter any more. That’s… rather upsetting to those of us who have been reading them forever. This is the New Jedi Order series. That’s not all of them— there are a couple of never-made-it-to-print ebooks and I own the very last volume in hardcover because I was too impatient to wait for paperback. I can read a Star Wars book in a day, though, so this isn’t the time investment it looks like.

Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns is the best science fiction maxi-series that you’ve never heard of; he keeps ratcheting up the tension and making you think that there’s no way the human race is going to survive the latest bit of terror he’s thrown at it and then he throws a monkey wrench into his entire series. Lather, rinse, repeat. Great action and drama and the plot just keeps twisting and turning throughout the entire series. Plus they make a pleasing orange block when shelved together. I haven’t reread this series; I think I’ll do that this year.

Oh, and this is my current unread shelf, which has gotten entirely out of control and is probably only going to get worse since I’m planning on doing so many rereads this year:

That Mencken collection in the middle, in particular, scares the hell out of me– it doesn’t look like much, but again with the bible-thin pages on those two books. It’ll take a while.

I almost put George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire on the reread list, but fuckit– A Dance with Dragons pissed me off so much that… well, who am I kidding, I’m not gonna not buy the next volume when it comes out, but I’ll scowl fiercely at it when I do. Take that, George R. R. Martin! Along with my money!

That reread can wait until the next book comes out, which will probably be sometime in the 2030s.

Whee!

On doing the math

On January 1, 2014January 1, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy2 Comments

$math-image$ Just before going to sleep last night (and yes, we made it past midnight thanks to a three-episode binge of Orange is the New Black, which we’ve just discovered) my wife and I had a brief conversation about whether our parents/other people older than us had the weird feeling of Perpetually Living in the Future that we’ve had for the last fifteen years, except in the 1980s and 1990s. While I haven’t actually asked anyone (because that would spoil my fun) I have to imagine that the answer’s yes, but that post-2000 This Is The Future Syndrome has got to be a lot worse. With the obvious exception of 1984 aside, most speculative fiction, even from early in the 20th century, still used years beginning with a 2 as an indicator of The Future. I’m sure there are more books and stories set in the near future from the perspective of the early-to-mid twentieth century, but there’s a lot more stuff set in the 2000s and beyond.

The other weird thing that living in The Future has done to me– and I really hope that I’m not the only one here, but who knows– is that it’s perpetually screwed up my perspective of how long ago anything happened. If something happened in this century, I’m fine. 2005 was eight/nine years ago, right? Got it, no problem. But I still, fourteen years into the 21st century, am doing “subtract from 2000” whenever I have to quickly determine how long ago any event that happened in the 20th century was. I referred to 1992 as “ten years ago” last week. I just realized this morning that the hundredth anniversary of World War I was coming up in July. I perpetually refer to WWI as “eighty or ninety years ago” (for some reason, saying “85” is too precise, but still wrong) during the rare occasions when I speak of it to my students. The 1960s? Forty years ago. The fifties? Fifty years ago.

It’s been the 21st century now for a bit. I probably ought to stop this.

Also, judging from the math I’ve done during this post and corrected, I appear to be skipping 2014 altogether and going straight to 2015. Sooner or later I’ll need to start rounding to 2020. That’s fucked. I can’t be alive in 2020. That’s the goddamn future. It can’t be the present; it breaks all of my stories.

In which I try new things

On December 31, 2013December 31, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

Dag.

I downloaded a new WordPress app yesterday for the iPad, because the stock app is clunky and annoying. I appear to have gone the other way with this one; this new app, BlogPad Pro, appears to be able to keep track of every single damn thing under the sun but as of right now is impressively complicated. Plus I don’t think I’m getting WYSIWYG when I add images– unless the text on this post is going to be insanely tiny or the picture is way bigger than I think it’s going to be, it’s scaling the pictures much bigger than I think it’s going to be on the actual website.

I am also considering a new Twitter app. I know, I’m a rebel.

Right, the picture: On account of the aforementioned sick baby I’ve got in the house, all renovation work has been put on hold, which didn’t keep me from getting a couple of things done during nap time yesterday. I went through my clothes and got rid of a bunch of stuff that I haven’t worn all year. Neat trick: flip your hangers backwards at the beginning of the year; as you wear and wash clothes, turn the hangers the right way. At the end of the year, toss anything that is still on a backwards hanger, because you haven’t worn it in a year. Got rid of about a quarter of my shirts, believe it or not; there are two bags of clothes and such in my car to take to Goodwill and I’m probably going to be trying to get some old electronics out of the house one way or another sometime soon too.

I’m hoping to finish going through my comic books today, finally; we’ll see if that gets done because there are thousands of them and it’s a big job. Apparently “declutter” is also a plan for the new year.

We have no plans for New Year’s tonight, which should not be surprising to anyone; my wife and I are both old people now and we have a two year old and plus it’s bloody Tuesday night, which is not exactly optimal party time for anybody. Tuesday might literally be the worst day for a major holiday. Maybe I’ll get really crazy and have a glass of wine at 10:15 before bed. We’ll see.

Go do something crazy tonight and blame it on me, ‘k?

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Stuff what I wanna do in 2014

On December 30, 2013December 30, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Uncategorized, Writing5 Comments

I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions are promises; promises get broken. That doesn’t say that I don’t have projects and goals; sometimes I get to them, sometimes I don’t. Last year I did a post like this at the previous incarnation of this blog over at Xanga; I’ve got that post archived somewhere, I think, but I remember the two big ones were to write more and to cook more often. Both of those goals were definitely achieved; I write just about every damn day here and I’m a much better cook than I was at the beginning of the year.

So what’s on deck for 2014?

Keep writing. This ought not to be a problem; getting back into regular blogging again was one of the best things about 2013; I’m just flat-out happier when I’m writing a lot. As always, I want to bend more toward fiction, but I always want to write more fiction. That’s not new.

Still a writing goal, but a bit more specific:

Self-publish Skylights officially. This book is already written although it could probably use one more editing pass. Technically it’s available on Lulu– I put it there so I could have them print one author’s copy and buy it for myself– but I want it on Amazon. Plans are in the works to commission a local artist friend to do the cover if I get the teacher creativity grant I applied for earlier this year. I may suck it up and do that anyway. Even if I don’t get the grant, I want this book available on Amazon by the end of the year.

Finish the bathroom renovation in a timely fashion. The boy’s home sick with me right now, which has slowed us down a bit, but I still think we can get the tub done by the end of break. The fear is that once that’s done the rest of the stuff will just sit in the damn living room for months because of the amount of work to be done and the lack of several contiguous days off of work. I’m going to DC over Spring Break with my kids, so it’s not like I can even back it up to that. MLK weekend is gonna be real busy around here.

Read big books. Spending last year trying to read 200 books led to me focusing on shorter fiction. I miss nonfiction a lot right now, and I’ve got a lot of stuff built up that’s gonna take me a while– for example, a 2600-page no-that-is-not-a-typo biography of Abraham Lincoln that is so big I can’t figure out how to read it in a physical sense– ie, how to hold the book while I read it. I’m reading it this year. I’m about 60% through Gone with the Wind right now, which is over a thousand. I also want to read through the Wheel of Time books; there are something like twelve or thirteen of them and they’re all close to or over a thousand pages each. I read about half the series before realizing how much Jordan had left to write and then bailed– and then Jordan died, and Brandon Sanderson took over, but now that they’re finally all written I can actually finish reading them.

Other reading goals: 1) Read every Stephen King book, in order (I’ve already started this, but The Stand is next, which is– again– a million pages long, so I put it off; and 2) I’m 1/3 of the way through The List and I want to be much closer to finishing that by the end of the year. That oughtta keep me busy.

(Have I talked about The List on here? I don’t remember. I’ll fill y’all in later if you want to know.)

Make it to Bloomington for a weekend sometime this summer. Also, Louisville, where I have some friends who I haven’t seen in forever. I haven’t been to Bloomington since 2005; it’s one of my favorite cities and it’s crazy that it’s been that long since I’ve been there. In addition, I’d like to go somewhere– and I’ll leave that generic– that I’ve never been to before. The boy’s old enough now that we can travel with him. Just come up with a place and go. (NOTE: This is the least likely of all goals thus far to actually happen. Overcoming my own inertia is insanely challenging.)

Buy a decent telescope, finally. Use it.

Learn piano, or at least learn a few songs I’m comfortable with. This is more achievable than it sounds because we actually own a piano; my wife plays. I failed spectacularly at learning ukulele this year, but I have some reason to believe that achieving at least moderate competence on piano will be easier.

Be a better teacher during the second half of the school year than I was during the first. Blah blah blah teaching sucks because reasons. Stop whining; do better anyway.

Watch less Sesame Street. Because gaaaah.

I’ll likely add to this as the day goes on. Feel free to check back ceaselessly if you like.