Picayune Plus: Why do we care about sports anyway?

& a Grande new measuring system

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses

Some of these messages are in reference to items in last week’s issues of the Picayune Sentinel

Lindsay G (@BlueEyesGreen) — Thank you for nominating my tweet as a finalist in this week’s poll! (Just once I want a doctor to ask if I've been eating enough potatoes.:") It's an honor to be recognized by writers.   The Rorschach joke — “Who is Rorschach and why did he paint so many pictures of my dad being disappointed?” — was on “The Daily Show” years ago and was posted on Twitter in 2008 and tweeted out by a joke-of-the-day service . The Groundhog Day joke — “They should announce a sequel to “Groundhog Day” and then just re-release the original” has been done too many times to count on Twitter, but I'm not sure where it originated. Both are great jokes, and I know you make efforts to find the authors of great content. Those are the only two I recognized as not being original. There are many of us who care about writing original jokes probably too much for it to be a healthy hobby.Part of that is searching the tweets we write to make sure the thought hasn't been done by someone else. 

Plagiarism is a chronic problem on Twitter and I usually rely on readers to call my attention to stolen/borrowed/unoriginal jokes. Some users are just thieves, scarfing up good content and passing it off as their own in order to gain followers. Others, I’m fairly sure, think of Twitter jokes the way many of us think of conventional jokes — something you simply pass along without attribution. In the written medium I think it’s only fair to indicate when a joke isn’t your own even if you don’t know or can’t be bothered to try to find out exactly where it came from

W.A.B. — Using BMI to create a weight limit for football players isn’t a good idea. The conventional BMI tables based on height and weight are highly inapplicable to highly muscled athletes.

Fair enough. I thought it sounded like it might be more reasonable than a straight weight limit, but maybe that’s wrong.

Marc. M — The best solution to catalytic converter thefts will be the transition to electric cars, which don’t have them. I would be hard to crack down on those buying stolen cats since they’re been required since the 70's and millions of them are being legitimately recycled. And it’s not hard to extract the precious metals. See: Precious Metal From Catalytic Converter and How Much Is A Catalytic Converter Worth? on YouTube.

Jake H. — No quality is more overrated than "passion." It's not enough to like or only tolerate whatever it is you're doing. You have to love it with all your heart, like you're on a mission from God. This is an unrealistic standard, and if you make it your expectation, odds are (literally) that you will be disappointed. But, worse than that, it's not even a particularly good or virtuous quality to have. You're lucky if you love your work, but "passion" suggests an unhealthy monomaniacal obsession and self-absorption. In young people, it suggests naivety or excessive confidence. Nothing is more ridiculous than young people acting like they know everything!

Perhaps, but life does go a lot more easily for you if your work feels almost like a hobby. The focus on “passion,” which might not be the best word, is meant to inspire young people, in particular, to understand what they love doing as they think about what they want to do most days of their adult life. It’s a bit of the “What Color is Your Parachute?” idea.

Joan E. — Can you explain to me why people are so in love with college sports? I truly do not get it. Even when I was in school at Ohio State, where most students are rabid about sports, I was indifferent. 

The essence of team sports is “our people against your people.” When I was a kid, the players on our youth baseball teams were the boys we happened to go to elementary school with. In junior high and high school, it was the best of the students who happened to live in our school district against the best of the students who happened to attend nearby, rival schools. That was pure and no doubt connected to ancient contests of strength and endurance between residents of neighboring village or tribes.

College sports retains the same appeal, even though at such schools as Ohio State and my alma mater, Michigan, the players aren’t those who just happen to belong to the student body. In most cases they have been recruited to come play and rewarded with scholarships. Students pretend that they are still “our people” when in fact they are in effect hired to be “our people.”

Professional sports distorts this essence to its extreme. Those who represent the Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks, Bears, Sky, Fire and so on are in no real sense Chicagoans, something we are reminded of when they are traded. They are paid to wear our laundry and represent us. And because we pretend they do, they do. It feels as real as it did on the sandlot.

Media coverage of local teams enhances the intimacy with the fans, and, of course, legalized gambling has heightened interest in outcomes. In short, it’s always more fun to watch a contest when you have or can manufacture a rooting interest.

Tom P. — How can you be such a fan of football when TV has made it nearly unwatchable? Studies show that there are some 20 advertising blocks in every football game featuring a total of about 100 separate commercials.  A third of the average TV football game is consumed by annoying commercials.  That’s about an hour of air time. The average college football game runs about 3 hours and 30 minutes.  11 minutes of that time is actually live football action.

If I watch a football game at all these days I try to catch the last two minutes.  That’s where most of the action occurs. I have better things to do than waste nearly four hours watching a game that features so little actual playing time.

I watch very little football live. I set the DVR then start watching at least two hours after kickoff. Skipping commercials, halftime jibber jabber, replay delays and some of the “action” between plays with the fast-forward features, I nearly always catch up to live action.

Kent F. — Soccer is the future of sports.  Young people don't have the attention spans to invest three hours in a game that has so little action.  Soccer is a two-hour game, and the amount of time without action (injuries, setting up penalty kicks and free kicks, issuing yellow and red cards, VAR, and the like) is a fraction of what is typical of a football game. If MLS could pay salaries and transfer fees comparable to what the top leagues in Europe pay, you would see even more American boys passing on football for soccer.

I don’t much enjoy watching soccer myself, but I will not argue spectating taste with those who do. All I’ll say is it’s been the sport of the future in the U.S. for decades now, and it turns out that even the American kids who grow up playing it don’t tend to become rabid fans of the pro game.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

YOU GET NOTHING! YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!

Adam @adamgreattweet

what are they serving at kfc then???

Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.

I didn’t include this one as I thought a lot of people wouldn’t get it. But should I have?

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

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