Entries Tagged 'Sports' ↓

Saturday is the Kentucky Derby. Here’s some background to the drama: Behind a Derby favorite, tragedy and redemption - USATODAY.com.

Horse racing is a sport that I know little about and so have never gotten into, though I’ve seen a few races and enjoyed them. I don’t think you HAVE to gamble.

Can any of you speak to this particular sport and sell it to the rest of us? Or is it nothing but gambling?

As I learned in Australia and as I have blogged about before, cricket is a great game, with many of the virtues of baseball. The teams from India are notable practitioners of the sport. A new league there is trying to modernize the sport, not just by a new three hour version (Twenty20), as opposed to a match normally taking nearly a WEEK, that perhaps might be a version suited to the American attention span. . . .but also by commercializing it and sexualizing the game.

One team has brought over the Washington Redskin cheerleaders into that famously modest nation to gyrate before delighted male cricket fans who, it is said, will have never seen so much female skin before their marriage. See Redskins Cheerleaders Shake Up Cricket In Modest India - washingtonpost.com.

The bringing of the aptly-termed Skins cheerleaders into cricket, with the rest of the accompanying spectacle, including rock bands and laser shows, is being associated with India’s newfound wealth and the over-arching goal of being like the Americans. Killer quote:
“Sexuality and cricket is the way forward. And it’s time India wakes up to the fact that it’s a different society. It’s a modern society. There’s no use keeping it all under wraps.”

The way forward for India is sexuality and cricket!

China just sentenced human rights activist Hu Jia to 3 1/2 years in prison for writing this article. Here are some excerpts:

China has consistently persecuted human rights activists, political dissidents and freelance writers and journalists. The blind activist Chen Guangcheng, recipient of the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award and named in 2006 by Time Magazine as one of the most influential 100 people shaping our world, is still serving his sentence of four years and three months for exposing the truth of forced abortion and sterilization. . . .

China still practices literary inquisition and holds the world record for detaining journalists and writers, as many as several hundred since 1989, according to incomplete statistics. As of this writing, 35 Chinese journalists and 51 writers are still in prison. Over 90 percent were arrested or tried after Beijing’s successful bid for the Olympics in July 2001. For example, Shi Tao, a journalist and a poet, was sentenced to ten years in prison because of an e-mail sent to an overseas website. . . .

Religious freedom is still under repression. In 2005, a Beijing pastor, Cai Zhuohua, was sentenced to three years for printing Bibles. Zhou Heng, a house church pastor in Xinjiang, was charged with running an “illegal operation” for receiving dozens of boxes of Bibles. From April to June 2007, China expelled over 100 suspected U.S., South Korean, Canadian, Australian, and other missionaries. Among them were humanitarian workers and language educators who had been teaching English in China for 15 years. During this so-called Typhoon 5 campaign, authorities took aim at missionary activities so as to prevent their recurrence during the Olympics.. . .

China has the world’s largest secret police system, the Ministry of National Security (guo an) and the Internal Security Bureau (guo bao) of the Ministry of Public Security, which exercise power beyond the law. They can easily tap telephones, follow citizens, place them under house arrest, detain them and impose torture. . . .

Chinese citizens have no right to elect state leaders, local government officials or representatives. In fact, there has never been free exercise of election rights in township-level elections. . . .

Please be aware that the Olympic Games will be held in a country where there are no elections, no freedom of religion, no independent courts, no independent trade unions; where demonstrations and strikes are prohibited; where torture and discrimination are supported by a sophisticated system of secret police; where the government encourages the violation of human rights and dignity, and is not willing to undertake any of its international obligations.

Please consider whether the Olympic Games should coexist with religious persecution[,] labor camps, modern slavery, identity discrimination, secret police and crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the Olympic torch has made it, after going out several times due to protests along the way, to the United States.

I mentioned the fact that I can never recall watching a basketball game in which my team has won. (The one exception is a high school game in my home town when I was in gradeschool.) Nevertheless, I turned on the NCAA championship game to watch my graduate school alma mater play Memphis. I was also in the middle of a writing project that I had to finish. I felt like Zeus in the Iliad with his golden scales, watching the back-and-forth progress of the battle. When I was looking at my computer screen, Kansas would pull ahead. When I looked at the television screen, they gave up the lead. Then I would go back to my computer and they would pull ahead.

At half time, Kansas had a slight lead. I had finished my article. It was 10:30 p.m. (This Eastern Time Zone is murder on watching sports!) The half-time punditry went on and on. I decided to do what was best for my team and went to bed.

This morning I learned that the Kansas Jayhawks won in overtime! I’m sure it was thrilling, but I’m also sure that, through some mechanism that I do not fully understand–possibly involving bosons or that quantum physics principle that observing a system alters it–if I had been watching, that final winning shot would not have gone in.

So I feel that I played a part in this victory.

I am glad to see that one of my alma maters, Kansas, is in the Final Four. You may notice that I say little about basketball in this blog. One reason is that whenever I watch basketball my team, no matter how highly favored, loses. I can tune in at half time with my team leading by 12 points, but in the final minutes that lead slips away and they lose at the buzzer. I just know from experience that if I had watched the Kansas game, this year’s team to come out of nowhere Davidson would have made that final 3-point shot and won the game. So I AM supporting my team by not watching it play. (I just hope writing about the Jayhawks on this blog will not have a similar effect.)

Should we boycott the China Olympics, or at least the opening ceremonies, because of China’s oppression of Tibet and other human rights violations? Lots of people now are calling for a boycott, including some athletes who believe that competing while breathing China’s polluted air will hurt them. Read this (which argued that Olympic boycotts HAVE been effective in this past) and this (arguing that the China Olympics are going to be a mess anyway).

While being utterly opposed to China’s policies–I still insist on calling it COMMUNIST China, which it still is despite its exploiting free market tactics to gain worldwide economic power, the capitalist phase being a pre-requisite according to Marxism for true socialism–my instinct is to oppose a boycott of the Olympics, though I’m not sure why. What do you think?

A letter-writer to the “Washington Post” fulminates at the way NASCAR allowed the Daytona 500 to begin with a prayer.  Not only a prayer, but one that “invoked Jesus Christ by name.”  This, says the letter-writer, is another step in the effort to make Christianity into our nation’s official state religion.  Read  the letter.  Notice what is happening.  Yes, the government is not allowed to favor Christianity in schools, the military, and public events.  But now that same standard is being applied to a private event that receives no federal money (why should NASCAR need to?).   On a much larger scale, we have been seeing the God-free rules of the government applied in private companies, as in stores not allowing their employees to mention “Christmas” even in Christmas sales.   This is phenomenon has not just religious implications but also political implications.   People evidently see the government as so all-encompassing that government standards should be applied to EVERYTHING.