Astounding Prescience

You have to admit that, on occasion, I can be astonishingly prescient.  I feel one of those instances coming on...

Today, at long last, we will hear the closing arguments in the Casey Anthony trial.  I predict it will go thusly:

PROSECUTION:  She did it!
DEFENSE:  No, she didn't!  You did!

I'm not stopping there.  The scuffed, worn, slippery grass of Wimbledon calls, you know.  ("Wimpleton," as the locals designate this annual Holy Tourney.)

Nadal will win. 

I won't even hedge by saying that were Djokovic to win -- in fine fashion, that is -- I'd also be thrilled.  It's gonna be a great match.

I'd say it's been an awesome weekend for my sporting interests, except that Tito Ortiz managed to knock out Bader in the first round.  On the upside -- Chris Leben has TOTALLY rehabilitated himself in my eyes, and Wanderlei Silva needs to do some thinking.  (I contend that he is the animated, ripped version of Homer Simpson.)  Congratulations, Chris. 

Leben was transferred to my good side when he took on Yoshihiro Akiyama with short notice and good humor, then submitted him with 30 seconds left on the clock.

I failed to note yesterday's instance of prescience in this blog, having been distracted by scream-inducing spastic legs and yet another puncture of said legs by one Buddy the Kitten. 

But you can trust me.

I called Sharapova's loss way-y-y ahead of time, based on my extreme disappointment in her semi-final match, a match that might as well have been played in the first round of some country club tourney.  In Antarctica (South Sandwich territories...).

None of that, though, impugns the accomplishments of Petra Kvitova: Kde je vlakové nádraží?!

Lastly, a bit of non-prescience for you:  Last year, or the year before, I cannot differentiate -- I wrote a post that included a discussion of women's tennis underwear.  The number of hits that post receives at this time of year is astounding.  Top searches include "tennis undies," "venus williams ass" and "serena williams cat suit." Also, somewhat inexplicably, given her [second] retirement in January:  "justine henin's boobs."

Okay, so now you know exactly what I know.

Uh-oh.

RE-POST in honor of THE BIG GAME 2009: in more better real time!

{originally posted during WIMBLEDON, 2009}

10:36-ish am. Federer comes from behind to take the second set -- winning 6 straight points. Roddick clearly choked and gifted him with at least 3 of those points. Grrr. Still, Andy is playing some of the best tennis of his life.

If Federer is true to form, he will now raise the level of play to a height unavailable to the rest of us mortals.

Or not.

Have I ever explained the Brother-Unit Grader Boob's theory that I am one of those mythical creatures now known as a jinx, and therefore should not be allowed physical occupancy in the room where the match/game in question is being televised? The theory involves Malted Milk Balls, the Duke Blue Devils, the Davidson Wildcats, even the Stanford marching band...

The Play refers to a last-second kickoff return during a college football game between the University of California Golden Bears and the Stanford University Cardinal on November 20, 1982. Given the circumstances and rivalry, the wild game that preceded it, the very unusual way in which The Play unfolded, and its lingering aftermath on players and fans, it is recognized as a highly memorable play in college football history and among the most memorable in American sports.

After Stanford had taken a 20-19 lead on a field goal with four seconds left in the game, the Golden Bears used five lateral passes on the ensuing kickoff return to score the winning touchdown and earn a 25-20 victory. Members of the Stanford Band had come onto the field midway through the return, believing that the game was over, which added to the ensuing confusion and folklore. There remains disagreement over the legality of two of the laterals, adding to the passion surrounding the traditional rivalry of the annual "Big Game."

If you've never seen it, you really should. It was hilarious.

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Etymology of jinx:
[Q] From Mark Raymond in Australia: What are the origins of the word jinx? It seems such a strange word.

[A] It does look odd, and its origin is in dispute. Explaining why is going to need a moment, since along the way we must take in the Ancient Greeks, the study of birds, witchcraft, nineteenth century vaudeville and the history of baseball.

First, the firm facts. The word jinx, in the sense of a thing or person that brings bad luck, is first recorded as sports slang from the US in the early years of the twentieth century. Most of the early American citations relate to baseball — for example, The Jinx: Stories of the Diamond by Allen Sangree of 1910 and Christy Mathewson’s Pitching at a Pinch of 1912, in which he says: “A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ball player”. From there it spread out into standard American English and later to other varieties of the language.

Most dictionaries say with varying degrees of conviction that the word derives from the classical Greek word iunx for the bird that we in Britain call the wryneck. It’s a member of the woodpecker family, a species that breeds across Europe and Asia. It has a strange habit of twisting its neck right round when it’s alarmed or when it’s watchfully at rest, hence its English name; it has an odd courtship ritual, in which the male and female perch opposite one another, shaking their heads about, and gaping their mouths to show the pink inside. Such curious behaviour made people think the wryneck was uncanny, and from the time of the Greeks there were superstitions attached to it, with links to witchcraft, divination and magic. Its Greek name passed into Latin and then into English, either as yunx or jynx. So it’s not surprising that dictionary writers often suggest that jinx comes from this bird of superstition.

But there are two big holes in this theory: the wryneck is not a North American bird and the word jynx for it was always a scholarly and uncommon one even in British English. Appropriate though it was, it would be surprising to learn that American sportsmen seized upon it.

Another theory has been put forward by Barry Popik of the American Dialect Society, an indefatigable researcher into the history of the American language, especially of sporting vocabulary. He suggested that it comes instead from a song, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. Following his tip, I delved into its history.

It was a famous vaudeville song, written and sung by William Lingard and first published in 1868. Captain Jinks was an unsuccessful soldier, who was eventually drummed out of the Army. The key verse is this:

The first day I went out to drill
The bugle sound made me quite ill,
At the Balance step my hat it fell,
And that wouldn't do for the Army.
The officers they all did shout,
They all cried out, they all did shout,
The officers they all did shout,
“Oh, that's the curse of the Army”.

This became all the rage, almost immediately spawning another song by Will Hays about the captain’s supposed wife: Mistress Jinks of Madison Square. It grew to be a well-liked square dance tune, and a popular song of soldiers in the American Army in the decades after 1870. In 1901, the young Ethel Barrymore starred at the Garrick Theatre in New York in Clyde Fitch’s melodrama of the 1870s which he called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines; in 1902 Ernest Crosby, a friend of Mark Twain, wrote a satirical anti-imperialist novel about the Spanish-American War with the title Captain Jinks, Hero.

So, even thirty years after the song originally appeared, it was still sufficiently well known that a playwright and author of the early 1900s could separately refer to it in titles in the expectation that their audiences would understand them. And these works appeared only three or four years before the first recorded use of the word in its sense of curse. To support his theory, Barry Popik has found that many of the early sporting references spell the word jinks.

Despite the authority of the ranks of dictionaries glowering at me from my shelves, I must say Mr Popik’s theory is persuasive. What’s missing, of course, is direct evidence that Captain Jinks, that curse of the army, was the inspiration for the term, or how it came to appear first in sports slang. That we may never discover.

Andy!

Like everyone else, I have always wanted to blow bubbles on Andy Roddick's belly.

He played really well today, taking Andy Murray in four sets.

He actually seems to be *executing* a game plan, mentally tough, focused -- instead of fighting through his matches in a reactionary mindset, not really controlling play.

Great service placement. Nice flat forehand.

Sweet peek at those tan, sculpted abs as he strokes through a backhand, his shirt tented in the swirl of the breeze...

He's a mature player now. It's his time.

Can Roddick take Federer in the final? I am not sure. I haven't seen him yet seriously raise the level of play on demand -- and that will need to be an available skill come Sunday.

Mentally? I never thought this would be true -- but Andy seems much more together than Roger.

I hope someone will take the time to advise Roddick against an overuse of drop shots. They worked well today, but not *that* well!

Awesome first serve percentage. 77%, around there.

On the technical side, his face has never been so sweet as when he fought back emotion just now, after beating Andy Murray. A clear smile free of worry.

Wow. An all American Ladies Final -- and if Roddick can take Federer? A heck of an Independence Day weekend.

About the ladies... I am not a big fan of The Sisters.

That said, I am pulling for Venus.

Wingnut with Moonbat Tendencies: The Political Blogger's Bait-and-Switch

Apparently, Darwin is not done with me. Bloggers that once prompted me to yank out strands of my strangely thinning hair are now making me guffaw aloud.

nota bene: My most egregious guffaws pale in comparison to the grunting and screeching of the women racket-euses currently breaking the sound barrier over at Wimbledon, or, as the locals call it: Wimpleton. Michelle Larcher de Brito is the current bad girl in the groaning arenas of the staid grass courts. She is sixteen years old and while cast as a future vedette, she is also being booed -- not the foundation for fond memories, for the tennis crowds or for the budding star. As usual, the world of tennis jurisprudence is laughable. TimesOnLine notes that: "Tennis officials are now calling foul on grunting. The problem they face is determining whether a noisy exhalation of air is natural or done on purpose to put off an opponent."

Wow, gosh, golly-gee, I hope they can dig their way out of that conundrum.

Back to the train of my thought.
Choo-choo-choo.

Oh, hell. I am not a preeminent blogger (O, get up off the floor and be quiet); This thing must be written in ways that make me laugh, in ways that answer my needs. Communication ought to be my goal, but really? I blog to feel better.

So screw the ready apologies, and enjoy a Thurber moment, from his essay University Days... which opens with Thurber's own trouble with the microscope in his Ohio State botany class and ends with Bolenciecwcz, a university football star, fumbling his way through Economics 101.

I need to do Thurber at least once a year, more often when my years resemble this year. Better to shut The-I-Me-Me-My down, better to be doubled-over from a severe case of Hoots -- than not.

I remember being forced to listen to Thurber being disparaged in a most unsavory and recherché comparison with Don DeLillo's End Zone. Can you believe that? DeLillo's End Zone versus Thurber's short piece University Days?

I'm just sayin'.

Somebody Somewhere Needed Tenure -- in a bad-bad way, way -- Way-y-y-y Down, Down, Down in Gothic Wonder-wonder Land!

ABD, the blessing in disguise.

Choo-choo-choo:

Another course that I didn’t like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn’t help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there directly from a physics laboratory.
He was a tackle on the football team, named Bolenciewcz. At that time Ohio State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwcz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along. None gave him more hints in answering questions or asked him simpler ones than the economics professor, a thin, timid man named Bassum. One day when we were on the subject of transportation and distribution, it came to Bolenciecwcz’s turn to answer a question.
“Name one means of transportation,” the professor said to him.
No light came into the big tackle’s eyes.
“Just any means of transportation,” said the professor.
Bolenciecwcz sat staring at him.
“That is,” pursued the professor, “any medium, agency, or method of going from one place to another.”
Bolenciecwcz had the look of a man who was being led into a trap.
“You may choose among steam, horsedrawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land.”
There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum.
Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room.
All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off. “Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully.
Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an 'lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.

Anyway! Now that I am rejuvenated, I must go back to my beginning -- you recall that, yes? My observation that I remain in the evolutionary stream? "Darwin ain't done with me yet"?

All because über-ultra-conservative wingnuts (I prefer the unadulterated wingnut to the hyphenated form. O, get up off the floor and be quiet) -- all because they have me stuttering when I write, laughing when I read.

They do things like write a fairly cogent post about, say, Sonia Sotomayor -- in the guise of -- oh, I don't know -- a post about Obama's inability to speak without use of the teleprompter. Follow along now, it makes perverted sense! Then The Dickwad -- oops, I mean The Wingnut -- directs traffic in the comment section, where perversion goes to be brought to fruition. Now... my example is of a Two-Stepper but to really make nice with The Evolutionary Bilge, you should go in search of a nicely done Three(or Four)-Stepper, usually constructed with an intermediary entry that serves to narrow the topic focus. In this instance, I could see a post about The Supreme Court reversing one of Sotomayor's rulings... and wouldn't it be absolutely Faustian were that to turn out to be something about discrimination "against whites"? Mwa-ha-ha!

Ah, but what actually happened in this particular real blog is... well, more boring. But very, very effective as wingnutting goes.

She advertised an upcoming post with the following headline: SOTOMAYOR GAY? WHO CARES?

It's freaking brilliant. You'd think she might even have schooled Limbaugh, given her facility with The Introduce-{Smile Benignly}-Then-Duck-and-Weave Maneuver. I used to give the standard warning -- don't do this maneuver at home -- but I must confess that, liberal though I may be, I believe that HOME is the ONLY appropriate place for such tactics!

Read, and learn:
"Okay, now the speculation about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is getting stupid. Whether she’s the sharpest knife in the drawer, or a bitchy bully, or a reverse racist seems mild in comparison to the current 'is she a Lesbian?' nonsense. So what? Even if she is, what the hell difference does it make?"

WAIT FOR IT WAIT FOR IT WAIT FOR IT. Short pause, then:
"Don’t get me wrong, some things I don’t know about her do worry me. Mainly because Barack Obama chose her, and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw the Empire State Building. I worry that she might not be supportive of abortion rights, or gay marriage. But, that’s because I worry that the Pretendident’s lip service to those issues hides a contrary agenda. The fact that he won’t actually take a stand and actually do something to protect women and gays not only worries me, it pisses me off. And, because I don’t trust him, I wouldn’t put it past him to try to put a stealth candidate on the Court. Sotomayor’s reticence on those issues is not exactly confidence building, ya know?"

And you, the reader, have left behind that titillating gasbag morcel of Homosexuality Crumbs (on sale at the Vermont Country Store, 4 oz/$12.99) for more Baseless Bashing That Is Really Incredibly Open Progressiveness.

Oh, what the hell. A bit more won't kill you. I think. The edges and ends become less round; The subtlety, what there was of it, is gone; The trustworthiness of the author? Well, Death of the Reader comes to mind as a suitable corollary for all those gasping, agonal promises about the Death of the Author.

"Some might posit that a closeted Lesbian is likely to take a harsh stand on gay rights issues in order to avoid being outed, while others would suggest that closeted or not, a gay person is more likely to have empathy for plaintiffs they can relate to identity-wise. Pure unadulterated happy crappy hogwash, if you ask me. Gay people are no more likely to behave monolithically than black people. Okay, bad example. But, I’m black, and knowing that doesn’t mean squat when it comes to my lack of support for the most Historically Historic Conveniently Black Candidate of Color Ev-ah being elected President of the United States of AmeriKKKa. Or, however the ya-gotta-vote-for-the-brother, Sistah, folks put it.

Like Sotomayor’s sexual orientation, Barack Obama’s skin color means nothing to me..."

Oh, I am blessed with an abundance of Hoots today.

Just to show you what a fan-freaking-tastic student of rhetoric -- be it wingnut or moonbat -- I am, here is a tantalizing hint about an upcoming elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle editorial effort:

Is anyone else scared (and I mean really heebie-jeebie scared) by the Burger King King?

Yeah, girder your loins, get snacks.
Choo-choo-choo!

Melanie Oudin

Okay, I am terribly remiss in my posts about the first week of Wimbledon (or as the locals call it: Wimpleton) and promise to take up the keyboard in a serious fashion soon.

Still, I wanted to take a moment to state my admiration for a rising U.S. star, one Melanie Oudin of Marietta, Georgia. She's a qualifier this year and just completed her 17th pro match today -- beating the Serbian Drama Queen Jelena Jankovic (who apparently suggested to officials during her official meltdown that an ambulance be brought to take her away...).

[My favorite JJ moment? Last year at the US Open, against Arvidsson, when she decided to lay on the main court, face-down, for a good minute or so, after failing to field a drop shot. Well, that and the "I-can't-feel-my-leg" moments, always followed by her racing energetically around the court.]

Oudin played with steel, maturity, and was mostly quite steady. I really came to like her, though, in her post-play interview. She's as yet untouched, almost virginal without being cloyingly stupid about it. She said Venus came over and congratulated her on her win, to which she responded something like: "And congratulations on your winning effort, too, Venus!"

We've needed new blood for a good while. Add on smarts and a good sense of humor? It's almost overload...