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.
6 comments ↓
Congrats to Kansas! They certainly earned the win. Lucky for you, Dr. Veith, you can watch the part of the game that you missed at ncaa.com. They have every game of the tournament available for free online viewing.
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Zeus!! I’m disappointed. What about Moses having to have his arms held up by Aaron and Hur (not Charlton Heston) while the Israelites battled the Amalekites at Rephidim? Actually, I’m not disappointed. I just wanted to set up this question: What other parallel situations between Classical literature and the Biblical story can we come up with?
As a Kansas fan, I thank you for going to bed
Charlton Heston, I mean, Moses, too, S Bauer! There are actually quite a few parallel accounts: Pandora and Eve; the golden apple that started the Trojan War and the forbidden fruit that started the Fall of Man. Milton did a great poem bringing these together in his Christmas poem, in which he uses the myth of the baby Hercules strangling the snakes Hera sent to kill him to describe the baby Jesus strangling the serpent Satan.
Now Bill Self can go back home to….Oklahoma, eh?
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