No.  Word is that a new football league may be established in Canada – the LFL.  According to the Regina Leader-Post:

In a Twitter aside, a fellow I follow by the handle of @cdnbeer tweeted that he was crushing hard on some of the cute girls playing in the Scotties Tournament of Hearts (the Canadian women’s curling championship, in case you’re out of the loop).

A bit of a back-and-forth ensued, with me suggesting that we create a hashtag. We debated #hotgirlsyellinghurryhard and #rockmystones before I had a brainwave — we needed a tournament-style bracket, to determine the curler with the ultimate cuteness.

And #tournamentofmyheart was born.

Download the pdf version of the bracket by clicking here, suitable for printing at 11×17. It’s two pages, and it’s pretty small type It also contains photos, though they are small photos, pinched from the team profile pages here.

Look, I know nothing about sports tournament brackets, so I kind of winged this, but I think it’s a double single-elimination bracket. That is, each girl is seeded twice, once facing off against her teammates, and again facing off against the other people who play her position. The winner of each side can face off against each other — if it isn’t the same person!

As I say in the “official rules”, feel free to judge each player based on anything that tickles your fancy,  it’s just for fun and I don’t want to raise the hackles or the ire of anyone who thinks I’m debasing the sport of curling by focusing on looks. Besides, there are plenty of women who watch sports for the hunky men in tight pants.

So, turn on your TV, and enjoy the game. But if you want, now you can play your very own parallel tournament.

“Spanish matador Julio Aparicio is gored by a bull during a bullfight during the San Isidro Feria at the Las Ventas bullring in Madrid,” says the caption of this photo, which was recently declared Picture of the Year in the Sports Action category by POYI.

Don’t worry, says the anonymous* photographer, “Aparicio underwent surgery and is out of critical danger.”

Yeah, but how’s the bull?

Thanks to my friend Tim for bringing this one to my attention. It really snapped my head around.

(*Photographers are kept anonymous on the site until after judging is complete. They will be revealing winners in different categories until Feb. 22)

Krystal D’Costa has a fascinating post up at Anthropology in Practice delving into the true heart of a baseball. Literally. From ripping out the stitches to unravelling the yarn to cutting open the rubber core to reveal the cork within, this is practically a baseball autopsy.

And, while it tickles the “take it apart” urge inside me (my parents couldn’t buy clicking pens when I was a boy), the post is more because it also delves a bit into the history of the game (cork? rubber? wool?) as well as into the sources of all those products and the labour that makes them.

Baseball may be as American as apple pie, but the ball they play with is global to the core.

If you’re interested in the anatomy of a baseball, click here.

(via @anthinpractice)

John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France each have won two sets, and they are tied in the fifth set at an incredible 59-59.

Better than the game, perhaps, is the coverage of this marathon.I particularly like Xan Brooks at the Guardian:

4.05pm: The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It’s tennis’s equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they’re watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.

On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.

Ooh, I can see the football out of the corner of my eye. England still 1-0 up!

Buzzfeed has highlights, but it’s almost better to read through the whole thing.

I’d love to pick a team and follow it through the tournament, but it’s too possible for any team to get knocked out in the first round. I can’t make an emotional investment with such a high risk of loss. Instead, I suspect I’ll wait for a compelling narrative to emerge (secretly, I’m hoping for a North Korea Cinderella run) before I jump on a bandwagon.

So, in four years’ time, I urge the powers at FIFA to consider an alternative format for the tournament. I propose three-sided soccer.

Firstly, it will level the playing field — all the teams will have to contend with new strategies and unusual situations.

Secondly, it will shorten the tournament — there will have to be a third fewer games. Plus, with one winner and two losers, the cream will rise to the top sooner.

And thirdly, it will introduce a whole new audience to the concept of three-sided soccer.

Look, it’s weird: it’s played on a hexagonal pitch, and the aim of the game is not to score the most goals, but to concede the fewest.

Even more bizarrely, the concept of the game arose out of some kind of Marxist critique of the bipolar, antagonistic nature of class struggle. I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

It was devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain his notion of triolectics …. The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle.

For further reading, there’s a full (?) set of rules here, which calls three-sided soccer “a game of skill, persuasion and psychogeography.” (There’s also a bit in there about the homoerotic nature of regular soccer, and how three-sided soccer disrupts that.)

And, I particularly enjoyed an account of an attempt to actually play the game, organized (if that’s the correct word) by a group of anarchists who used a mental map of the moon to find their playing field:

Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them …. Embarrassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.

Both the other two groups press towards our goal, indulging in an orgy of free-scoring libertarian collectivism.

Yes, I think this would be a great addition to the next World Cup. Perhaps as a qualifier?

It would have been the third perfect game this season — which is intense, considering there’s been less than two dozen in all of major league baseball history.

But Detroit’s Armando Galarraga, as the photo above indicates, wuz robbed. The Associated Press tells the tale:

DETROIT—Armando Galarraga squeezed the ball in his mitt, stepped on first base with his right foot and was ready to celebrate the first perfect game in Detroit Tigers’ history.

What happened next will be the talk of baseball for the rest of this season and likely a lot longer.

Umpire Jim Joyce emphatically called Cleveland’s Jason Donald safe and a chorus of groans and boos echoed in Comerica Park.

Then Joyce emphatically said he was wrong and later, in tears, hugged Galarraga and apologized.

Here’s the play, on YouTube:

We can watch it over and over — the runner is clearly out. Already there is a growing clamour out there to give umpires the same benefit we’re enjoying: the benefit of using video replays to judge calls. This incident is only likely to intensify that.

But I say no. I say video replay is wrong for the sport, and not only because it would slow an already lengthy game.

Sure, umpires are fallible. They’re human. They make mistakes. Let that be part of the game. Let bad calls happen — the same way that dropped catches, wild pitches, and runners stumbling happens.

If pitchers never made mistakes, they would pitch “perfect” games more often than not. But pitchers miss their marks. If hitters never made mistakes, they’d bat 1.000 every year (and a single inning would last forever).

But we acknowledge that the players are fallible, and we watch to see which team is better than the other.

Well, let’s consider that the officials are a sort of “third team” out on the field. And, just like we don’t demand do-overs when two outfielders run into each other while chasing a pop fly, and we don’t demand a second chance if a throw is wide of the base, let’s not force umpires to double-check all of their decisions.

Bad calls will happen, sure. And they’re frustrating. But so are ninth-inning meltdowns.

Bad calls are part of the game. They add an element of unpredictability — keeping baseball a human endeavour instead of a computer simulation. They’re the real wild card.

I say I like ‘em, and I say let’s keep ‘em.

I think darts is kind of where bowling was, maybe a decade ago, except crossed with poker. There are some big-money tournaments, and some large crowds, but the crowd I was watching seemed dominated by trashy-looking girls with gigantic plastic cups of beer.

And the darts players looked like they had stepped out of stereotypical central casting. Burly men with tattoos and greasy slicked-back hair dominated, and the open-chested bowling shirt seemed like it was a uniform.

Then, there was this guy: Simon Whitlock. His hair was so astonishing that I actually called Amy over from the stretching room to see it.

An Aussie, apparently Whitlock is a bit of a darts superstar. Here’s a video that recaps a recent, epic championship battle between him and Phil Taylor. Whitlock lost, but check out the hair (he’s the guy in the black and yellow):

See what I mean?

No disrespect intended, but it’s like darts is this sub-culture that is developing an odd fashion sense completely removed from the rest of the world.

Too funny.

Sadly for my patriotism, Canada lost 7-6 to Sweden.

Annoyingly, though, I clicked through three separate news sites that all had a variation on the same headline: “Settle for silver.” I guess they had to come up with something quickly — and at least they didn’t use “Silver lining” — but it still made a mockery of the idea of the Internet as a cacophony of different voices.

So I did a quick Google News search: “Settle for silver” and “Silver lining” each brought back a huuuuuge number of news articles — but crazily, they “… and 5,350 more” bit at the end was the exact same number. Does Google News max out at a certain amount of news?

So I checked “Good as gold.” Yup, precisely 5,350 more articles.

Weird. I refreshed it a couple of times, and the number changed, but each time I refreshed the page, the number changed slightly — but each search refreshed to the same number.

My favourite was when there was exactly 5,678 articles left. I felt like I was on the Sesame Street version of Google News.

So, the upshot? Either Google News arbitrarily stops searching after about 5,000 articles have been found, assuming (probably correctly) that you don’t need that much news, or frighteningly every single sports cliché is used exactly the same number of times.

I hesitate to Google “Gave it 110%”

Well, maybe and maybe not. I’ve read justifications of lopsided wins in tournaments where, if there’s a tie in the standings at the end, total goals, or goral differentials are used to break that tie. So running up the score makes some sense.

But questions are being raised as to whether there should be a “mercy rule.” I don’t know how it would work — if you’re ahead by (say) 10 goals, do you win automatically? What if that’s at the end of the first period, and the underdog team still has two periods left to come back?

Or, are you just not allowed to be more than 10 ahead — so you can put the puck in the net all you want, but the score won’t go from 10 to 11 until the losing team gets at least one point?

And, why are we all so concerned about this in hockey? Let’s extend this to other sports. Frankly, in downhill skiing, where the winners are often decided by fractions of a second, the last-place contestant might be several seconds behind — doesn’t that count as a drubbing? Shouldn’t those insensitive winners be reined in a little?

Or what about figure skating. If some jerk pair gets perfect marks in figure skating, that’s just not fair to another couple who tried their best but got defeated.

Also, I think that I should be allowed to go to the Olympics and compete. I’m pretty sure that, by myself, I might be able to hold those Canadian women to, like, 16 or 17 goals.

Ice hockey … has always been the great exception to the national culture of modesty, civility and pacifism. The game, especially the way the Canadians play it, is rugged and antagonistic, and may be the escape valve that makes Canadian niceness possible.

Now, I’m not sure I agree. Frankly, I like to think of myself (don’t we all) as typically nice and easy-going. Perhaps that’s more because I’m a Libra than a Canadian? But I just couldn’t care less about hockey — and partly, that’s because I find the violent culture that surrounds it takes away from the game.

But it’s an intriguing thought: hockey as the great national escape valve.

What do you think?

Snowed: Deceptive Advertising by Ski Resorts, by two Dartmouth College economics profs, shows that ski resorts in the U.S. inflated their snowfall amounts near weekends, when they thought they could attract more skiers. Ski resorts that were closest to population centres, and therefore had the most to gain, inflated their numbers the most. Weather Service data doesn’t show a “weekend effect” that would explain the resorts’ numbers.

From an NPR story:

According to Zinman, resorts reported 23 percent more snow on weekends. And the resorts that had the most to gain by fluffing up their numbers did more of it.

According to Zinman, resorts with more people living within driving distance inflated their numbers more, as did resorts that don’t offer money-back guarantees.

The researchers didn’t single out specific resorts in their report, choosing instead to make broad statements about the industry as a whole.

Most interestingly, half way through their study, they watched as a new iPhone app was released, which allowed skiers on the slopes to report numbers back themselves. What happened? Suddenly caught, the ski resorts immediately stopped inflating their numbers.

At least, the ones with iPhone reception did.

(via Poynter)

At the time she only got a yellow card — for tripping, not the hair pulling — but after the video made the rounds, she was suspended from play.

Lambert has now spoken of the incident for the first time since it happened. In a New York Times story, she says she didn’t recognize herself in the video, deeply regrets what happened, and is even going so far as to get counselling for her aggression.

However, she also argues that the story wouldn’t have gotten as much attention if she were male:

“I definitely feel because I am a female it did bring about a lot more attention than if a male were to do it,” Lambert said. “It’s more expected for men to go out there and be rough. The female, we’re still looked at as, Oh, we kick the ball around and score a goal. But it’s not. We train very hard to reach the highest level we can get to. The physical aspect has maybe increased over the years. I’m not saying it’s for the bad or it’s been too overly aggressive. It’s a game. Sports are physical.”

As someone who played soccer from about 8 until 18, I have to disagree with that claim.  No one ever treated me or any other girls like we just kicked the ball around, and the games always involved physical contact.

In fact, I once had an injury to my ankle (from being kicked) that caused me to go through physiotherapy. Not to mention getting more cuts and scrapes than I can count, as well as several occasions of verbal abuse.

What made this story so different and newsworthy, I think, is the apparent viciousness of what she did. No matter how physical a game is getting, I don’t think anyone would think of going as far as Lambert did.

Just think of hockey: yes, it’s a violent game, with fighting being a huge part, but when a player does something intentionally vicious, they get penalized for it, sometimes even suspended, fined, and charged (remember Todd Bertuzzi?).

In my mind, the dissemination of the video had nothing to do with her being a woman, but everything to do with how violently she reacted in a heated situation.

The odd part is that she only got a yellow card, or a warning. Since the video emerged, her team has suspended her, though.