Feb. 16th, 2006

Thun! der!

Feb. 16th, 2006 11:59 pm
cincinnatus_c: loon (Default)
High today, here: 1. Dewpoint then: 1. High dewpoint: 1.
High today in TO: 1. Dewpoint then: 0. High dewpoint: 0.
Low today on the balcony: -2.7. High: 4.6. Currently: 4.6.

Quite a day of weather. I've never seen so much lightning on a winter day before. The temperature's still going up. Scheduled to crash heavily tomorrow.

Karaoke cancelled for undetermined, but probably overdetermined, reasons. Alas.

And so all that's left to do is finally read that "Metaphysics of Baseball" article (by Roland Garrett, from Philosophy Today, 1976) I've had kicking around for ... many years. It's just not that good, which is why I've never gotten through it. But it is about baseball. And now I've stopped reading it, and maybe I won't get through it now, either.

It has long struck me that there's something deeply morbid about figure skating. Almost everyone fails. (Whereas in something like downhill skiing, a couple might crash, but almost all of them, to the naked eye, are just indistinguishably awesome.) I was mulling this over today, watching them fall down, and otherwise variously screw up, one after another. (I was watching this mostly because L. saw a thing on TV a few weeks ago about shiny happy Jeffrey Buttle vs. dark brooding Emanuel Sandhu, which gave the whole thing Drama. Although I probably would have watched it anyway, since they cut away from hockey to it.) I was reminded of that old Michael Jordan commercial, where he recites a litany of his failures ... that old baseball saw about how if you fail seven times out of ten, you're an excellent hitter ... but you know, the thing is, Jordan says at the end, "and that is why I succeed", and if you go 2-for-5, after the game, the lasting impression you have generally isn't the three outs you made. (Though sometimes it is: my last competitive game of baseball, I went 3-for-4 with 6 RBIs, but in my last at-bat, in extra innings, I grounded weakly into an inning-ending bases-loaded force-out, and we lost in the bottom half of the inning, knocking us out of the playoffs.) But in figure skating, the screw-ups seem to define the whole performance.

But maybe that's just it, that figure skating is a performance, and something which is essentially aesthetic just can't withstand errors like a simple test of abilities can. You flub a line, or fall down, in a play, and the whole thing's instantly second-rate.

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