Tag: football

Natty dread

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I’m not watching. I’ve not watched an IU football game this year– in fact, I doubt I’ve watched an IU football game since I graduated(*)– and if I decide to start now, they’ll lose. In fact, I’m going to do my best to ignore the internet during the game so that I don’t even get any accidental score updates. Hell, it’s been years since I watched an IU basketball game, and it’s more than a little shocking to me that I can name IU football’s quarterback and coach and am no longer able to name the coach or even a single player on the basketball team.

Sadly, my lifelong dedication to being superstitious about sports is not the only reason to pay no attention to this game. I am deeply pissed at IU right now, and while it’s genuinely upsetting to be cutting ties with the university I graduated from and that I’ve loved for literally my entire life, the way IU has been conducting itself recently has been beyond the pale and I can’t accept it any longer. I’m going to start telling people I graduated from Purdue. It’s that bad.

On top of that, the more I’ve learned how college sports works now, and particularly how college football works now, the less I want to do with any of it. We basically have a good football team now because Mark Cuban bought us one. Seeing video of Fernando Mendoza showing off his new diamond Rolex earlier today was literally disgusting. I’d rather suck, frankly.

I dunno. This sort of feels like Old Man Yells at Cloud to some extent, but I’ve not been a sports guy for decades if I ever really was, and ignoring a national championship run has got to be the last of a really large number of nails in that coffin. This hasn’t been fun for a long time, and now it’s actively repulsive, and I’m out.

(*) Not true, apparently, as WordPress dug up a post from last year where I talk about watching IU play Notre Dame in the football playoffs, a game I have no recollection of at all and which we, of course, lost.

I made it!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Good news— I have survived the first semester of my 21st year of teaching and still haven’t gone to jail, although I almost got sent to the hospital again earlier this week. (Mental note: never admit your wrist hurts after breaking up a fight.) My students did acceptably on their final— more data to come on that later this week— and I am about to curl up in front of the television to watch, of all things, my Indiana Hoosiers play Notre Dame in the college football playoffs.

What a fuckin’ world.

Maybe time to get the ol’ meds checked

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I have been in an absolute boiled-shit bad mood all day, and I am tired of virtually everything. In particular, I have never been more tired of the NFL in my life than I am right now; I have generally been content to ignore professional football and the legion of drunken cosplaying dweebs that follow it, but for some reason their fucking opinions keep making their way into my sight recently, and everything they think about everything is dumb.

I absolutely hate the fact that I have to have an opinion about Taylor Swift’s boyfriends again, and I’m especially peeved that this time I’m on her side. Fuck all of this; I’m exhausted.

And while I’m irritated at groups of people I’m generally content to ignore, everyone in their twenties and thirties needs to shut the fuck up about, like, everything. All of your opinions are wrong and most of them are wrong and dumb and you believe in your wrong and dumb things with your entire chests and I’m fucking exhausted over here. Off my fucking lawn, all of you, and by “my fucking lawn” I mean “planet Earth.” Even when your opinions are right you are invariably wrong about what to do about those right opinions and I just can’t any more. I’m losing my shit over here.

I swear to Christ that if I have a rage-stroke and die before the shitgibbon does I will find a way to haunt everyone, forever. Don’t test me, Goddammit.

The end.

In which I’m definitely back in schools again…

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

20180827_fbl_at_notre_dame…because my annual First Or Second Week of September Head Cold is back, after a two-year absence, just like goddamn clockwork.  I was hoping that not actually being in the classroom would allow me to avoid it this year, but no to that; it’s laying around and moaning all day for me!  Hooray!

On the plus side, there is Football tonight.  We’re in that magical nine days or so every year where I want to watch football, not because I enjoy sports in general or football in particular but because football represents summer ending and, finally, the beginning of autumn, which is my hands-down no-doubt favorite season. The hoodie months are approaching.  They’re almost here!  I can tell, there’s football on TV!

By next week I’ll be over it.  But there’s a Notre Dame game starting in about half an hour and the good thing about being basically immobile right now is that so long as I make sure I’m planted in front of the TV I’ll be able to watch the whole thing.

…uh, anybody wanna bring me dinner?

1000 words, etc.

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Everything I might want to write about tonight is exhausting, so I think I’ll just put this up and let you write the post in your heads:

black-power-salute

What is this I don’t even

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BRAZIL RIGHT NOW.

Just for the record

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve talked a lot of shit about goalies over the last couple of weeks, but Jesus, if it wasn’t for Tim Howard having the game of his goddamn career we’d have just lost 16-0 instead of going into jesus why is the game still going please someone fucking score time.

#BecauseWhyNot

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

maxresdefault… You’re supposed to think the Lego dude is giving you the finger here, right?  That’s not just my screwed-up mentality taking over?

It has been a singularly useless morning.  Not only have I not gotten any writing done, which isn’t exactly the end of the world– I got through basically two full drafts of an entire story yesterday, and am not yet so far behind that I’ve got any reason to be nervous– but I haven’t really done anything else with the time.  I’m pretty sure I spent an hour just lying in bed staring at the wall.  Like literally staring, not trying to sleep or reading or anything.  Just staring.

And now I’m watching soccer, which has been the other thing I do when I’m at home alone four days a week, and once the World Cup is over I’m seriously not going to have anything to do with my time other than yucky things like keeping my house clean.

I thought– at least partially due to a lack of anything else compelling to write about at the moment– that I’d take a couple of minutes to point out some of the things that I actually like about soccer since several of my other posts have either been critical or gently mocking in some way or another.  So have some positives, although keep in mind that even right now as I’m listing several of them in my head that a bunch of them are going to be stupid:

  • I love the opening ceremony for World Cup matches.  I assume regular soccer matches don’t work like this, with the anthems and the little kids and the picture with the refs and the ball and all that, but there really is a lot of symbolism there that I’m quite fond of– starting with both of the teams walking out onto the pitch together.
  • I like that the game never actually stops.  You’ve got 45 minutes before you get a break, go run your damn ass off, and when that 45 minutes are over we’re going to add extra minutes for the places where you screwed up and had to halt the game.  I know this makes American TV networks insane because there’s not as many places to stick in ads.  That’s a feature, not a bug, and I love it.  Fuck the networks; I like it when they’re inconvenienced.  I’ve entirely lost the ability to watch football over the past several years and a good part of the reason is the way a damn game will take three and a half hours because of all the pauses and time-outs.  (The other half is the evil; that’s another story, though.)
  • I like that even though every soccer player is born with a genetic condition that gives them terribly weak ankles and calves  that are incredibly easy to injure, they’re tough enough to shrug off those horrible injuries and get back up and get in the game like nothing happened.
  • Okay, that was unfair.  That said: the game has a weird sportsmanship to it, where once the players realize that someone is actually injured– it seems like someone gets hauled off in a bucket once per game– someone will generally kick the ball out of bounds to stop the game, and I saw at least one example where Team A kicked the ball out of bounds because a Team B player was hurt, and then when Team B took their corner kick they basically handed the ball straight over to Team A because that was the fair thing to do.  Then again, biting and headbutts.
  • While I still think the lack of scoring is a problem, it is really exciting when it does actually happen.  There could still be a little more, though.
  • I like intelligent announcers.  Soccer seems to have a preponderance of those, or perhaps I’m simply mistaking British accents for intelligence, but I don’t think I am.

I still think they should get rid of goalies, though.