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Castellers are Totally Badass

February 22, 2010 | 1 comment

Proof of my nerd cred: among my occasional pastimes is picking an image from the “Images for Cleanup” category at Wikimedia Commons and, you guessed it, cleaning it up. (If you’re curious, here’s an example of my handiwork.)»

Nerdiness sometimes brings unexpected little rewards: last night I came across an image at the Commons that only needed to be categorized. The photo that caught my eye showed something like an enormous game of Jenga… an enormous game of Jenga, made of people. As the kids on the internet say, OMFG.

It turned out that I had found a photo of the Castellers de Vilafranca. Castells, I learned, are human towers, the building of which is a traditional Catalan sporting activity. I also learned that it is fucking insane — and I mean that admiringly.

Check this out: here are the Castellers de Vilafranca on August 31, 2009, attempting history’s first tres de nou amb folre i agulla — roughly translated, a nine-level tower with two base levels, three people each on the upper levels, and an agulla (“needle”) of one person per level inside the main tower. If you can’t understand the commentator’s Catalonian-accented Spanish, don’t worry; the changes in his tone of voice pretty much say it all.

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before after
Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi, the first African-American U.S. Senator

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Peter Gammons on McGwire

January 13, 2010 | Comment

gammons

Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)

Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:

I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.

What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.

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Oregon’s Big Reveal at the Rose Bowl

January 1, 2010 | 2 comments

First of all, welcome to 2010. I don’t know about you, but I feel better already.

Late in the previous decade (i.e., about three weeks ago), at the end of a post about the University of Oregon football team and their Amazing Technicolor Uniforms, I wrote:

This coming New Year’s Day, Oregon will face Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. The questions abound in the minds of the Ducks faithful… will the “steel”-colored pants appear in Pasadena, or will it be one-and-done for the gray trousers? What if they combined those with the day-glo chartreuse jerseys and the yellow helmets, for a perfect storm of mismatching?

RoseBowlWell, now we know: straight-up green and white. Nice restraint. Certainly nothing like the possible train wreck I envisioned. Despite looking good, right now the Ducks would surely rather feel good, which seems unlikely in light of their just-completed 26-17 loss to Ohio State. Read the rest of this entry »

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Oregon Ducks Take Forever to Get Dressed

December 9, 2009 | 1 comment

I’m going to slag off the University of Oregon football team. Not because they are going to the Rose Bowl and the team I support, Stanford, isn’t (I dislike such petty player-hatin’). I won’t even be mocking the fact that their mascot is the Ducks. …OK, maybe I will a little. But my real point is that U of O’s team should be called the Clothes Horses.

It’s not news that the athletic program in Eugene has assloads of money, very much of it flowing from alumnus Phil Knight, founder of athletic apparel behemoth Nike, Inc. As a result, this football team has a bigger wardrobe than a Lake Oswego debutante. I’ve been a football fan for a long time, and I’m used to your basic two uniforms per team: home and away. I’ll admit that the NFL’s mixing in nostalgic “throwback” uniforms appealed to my own history-nerdiness, save for the occasional ghastly misstep (of which I blogged not long ago). However, the Ducks have taken things to a new level, all but erasing the line between football season and fashion week. Check out this fancy shit:
preseason unveiling
According to GoDucks.com, this first re-design of the football uniforms since all the way back in… um, 2006, is all about sound science: Read the rest of this entry »

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The Denver Broncos: Winning Ugly

October 21, 2009 | Comment

The Denver Broncos soundly defeated the San Diego Chargers on this past Monday night to improve their record for the season to 6-0. However, they are certainly not undefeated, at least not in all senses: for the second consecutive week, the Broncos donned throwback uniforms that were nothing less than a sartorial train wreck.

For years now, the NFL has tinkered with the look of its on-field product by having teams don “throwback” uniforms, i.e., ones designed to replicate the look of the team’s uniforms from an earlier era. This costuming of the players for a game or two had proven popular in Major League Baseball, and the same has generally applied in football. If nothing else, the fact that they continue to do it is evidence that it has been a shot in the arm for the league’s merchandising revenue.

ugly broncosThen the Broncos took the field in Denver on Sunday, October 11, 2009 in what the team’s website called an “American Football League legacy game against the Boston Patriots… to commemorate 50 seasons of Broncos football,” and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that some history is best forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

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