The Weak In Rock

File this one under the heading of “Idiotic Lengths Parents Will Go To.”

Concerned with potential injuries, a group of “concerned” parents in Toronto have started up a non-contact ice hockey league for their kids.

I’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Non-contact ice hockey.  You can read all about it here.  Gee folks, what’s next?  Non-moving bicycling?   Non-swallowing eating?

Yes, I’m belaboring the point, but I really am getting tired of my fellow parents.  Yes, we love our kids, and we don’t want to see them get hurt.  I certainly don’t think getting is a concussion is a good idea for an 11 year old boy, but it definitely seems like the world of parents is overpopulated by the overly cautious and incredibly confused.  Ice hockey is a full-contact sport, just like American football or rugby.  Take the contact out of ice hockey and you’ve turned it into figure skating with sticks and a puck.  Not only does that sound stupid, it sounds boring.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is with kids playing ice hockey.  Anyone who grew up in Canada or the northernmost parts of the US will tell you that kids have been playing ice hockey forever.  The problem, friends, is the same problem I see with Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball - too much adult involvement.

Let me explain - games are things that kids play for fun.  When a handful of kids grab a football and head to the nearest park (or street) to play a game fun happens.  Likewise when a bunch of kids take their bats, gloves and a ball to the nearest empty lot or haul their sticks and skates over to the local frozen-over pond.  When a bunch of dads get together and drag their kids to a ballfield, an ice rink or football field, suit them up and commence to yell at them because they’re doing everything “wrong,” there is a distinct absence of fun.  In that circumstance what there is an abundance of are frustrated kids who want to be somewhere else, fancy/expensive uniforms that make the kids look like mini versions of pro sports stars and lots and lots and lots of structure.

What we parents forget way too easily is that our children don’t like structure.  They honestly get plenty of that at school (and they’ll get an ass-load of it in their adult lives).  So why do we insist on enforcing more and more and more of it on them?  Play, including play in the context of games, is by its nature an unstructured activity.  We adults tend to view things like rules, time limits and whatnot as things that are necessary, but kids don’t see the world that way at all.  Rules in a game are just tools to keep things moving (3 strikes in baseball, offsides in hockey or soccer, etc.).  Uniforms are pretty, but they’re really unnecessary to a bunch of kids playing a game - they know who is and isn’t on their team - they’re only necessary for spectators to tell the teams apart.

So, let me try to drag this back to this idiotic attempt by some parents in Toronto to overprotect their kids with a non-contact hockey league.  The problem isn’t that ice hockey is horribly dangerous in and of itself.  Sure, bumps and bruises and maybe even gashes and broken bones will happen from time to time playing a full contact sport, but I think the problem is the parental involvement.  By organizing the league, keeping stats (heck, keeping score), and dressing their kids up like midget NHL players the parents are not setting up games for the kids to play, they’re creating a forum for the kids to play at being NHL players.

What do I mean by this?  Simple - not only are the kids emulating what they see pro hockey players do, namely hit each other really, really hard and at full speed, but because of the stats, the scorekeeping and the other parents acting as spectators there’s pressure to perform and win.  That pressure causes the kids to play like there’s something more on the line than simple personal pride.  And the organized teams, complete with pre-season tryouts and coach drafts, encourage the kids to see not their schoolmates and neighbors in the uniforms of the opposing teams, but adversaries.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think organized sports are a good thing, but I question their value for kids 11 and younger.  I certainly don’t think that all this organization, structure and parental involvement makes the games very much fun for the kids at all.  So instead of trying to take all the bumps and bruises out of a game, maybe what we ought to be doing is taking ourselves out of the game.

As a side note: One of thing I’ve observed in my own neck of the woods is that there are so many organized sports leagues that for a good portion of the year it’s nearly impossible to find an unoccupied ball field in a park.   So, if you do have a bunch of friends, a pile of gloves, a bat and a ball you’re going to find it pretty tough to find anywhere to pull together a friendly and unstructured game.  Same thing happens during soccer or football season around these parts.

Well folks, as of Friday morning’s weigh-in I’m at 144 lbs.  Pretty impressive considering this past week has been the biggest shirker week I’ve had since the holidays.  I went to the gym a grand total of once this past week.

Granted, I ran 3 miles, but still, one trip to the gym a week is not a good plan.  I do have an excuse though.  I came down with some kind of very unpleasant virus last weekend that not only made me feel lousy (101 degree fever for one day) but also left me with a really sore throat.  It was bad enough that I actually went to see my doctor just to make sure it wasn’t anything serious.  His diagnosis: A virus, one that’s been going around (and he warned me that this one seems to take at least 2 weeks to completely get out of your system), along with a very high pollen count that’s causing sinus congestion that’s draining into my throat and further irritating it.  Yay!

Anyway, on the bright side I’m now 4 lbs. away from my final target weight and I’m only 2 weeks away from completing my running program.  Next step is to start genuinely training for the Tri-For-Fun in June.

I’ve got to give a lot of credit for keeping me on track to reading Andrew Heffernan’s Male Pattern Fitness blog religiously for the last several months.  Andrew gives good, solid and reasonable advice.  And he’s not afraid to state the damned obvious, such as this from today’s blog:

Whether it’s weight loss or muscle gain, improved athletic performance or pain relief, most of us already have the information we need to meet our goals:  we know what a good diet is.  We know what focused and consistent exercise feels like.  We know the drills that will improve our back pain-all we have to do is implement them.

In fact, today’s blog is titled, “Just Do It… Seriously.”

Let me say this.  I hate Nike.  I think they design and make pretty well made and useful products.  The quality of their wares is not my problem with Nike.  My problem is that they exemplify perfectly the soulless pursuit of profit at any cost that drives short-sighted American business these days.  Suffice to say, if you cannot be profitable without using child labor then you ought to go out of business, period.  Beyond that, I hate that their corporate branding has robbed the phrase “just do it” of its proper meaning.

It’s a good phrase.  Way too many people get bogged down with reasoning themselves out of action with regard to many things.  People don’t save money, they don’t exercise, they don’t write their first novel, they don’t take up the piano - all because they’ve talked themselves into believing that it will be too hard.  They’re missing the point.  Of course it will be hard.  Sometimes hard is the point.

Our lives have come to resemble those of tourists, wanting the experience, but not wanting to stay long enough to risk experiencing the realities that come with permanence and commitment. In fact, “hard” has become more of a scarlet letter rather than a badge of honor.

The above comes from another excellent blog I’ve been reading a lot lately called The Art Of Manliness.   I started my own quest to improve my physical fitness over two years ago, but I spent a lot of time, I should say wasted a lot of time, searching for shortcuts.  As difficult as training for and riding a Century with Team In Training was, I was at least partially motivated to join up because I thought 10 weeks of training for one event would undo 15 years of damage I’d done to my body.  I only started to see results when I disabused myself of the notion that there were any shortcuts to getting this done, manned up and committed myself to the hard slog of running and weight training regularly, vigorously and consistently.

As of my weigh-in this morning I am officially no longer overweight.
My BMI is below 25 for the first time in lord knows how long. I’m not
done, but I am almost there. At 146 lbs and some change this is the
lightest and leanest I have been since I was in my late 20’s.

I’m sort of overwhelmed. For those who know me well it will be no
surprise to hear that this project has not been driven by superficial
motives. Sure, I’m totally digging how I look right now, but that is a
side benefit. I feel better, right now, than I have in well over 15
years. I checked my blood pressure this morning (an area of no little
concern to my doctor as little as 2 years ago) and it’s back where it
was 13 years ago when my doctor told me I had the BP of a 13 year old.
My resting heart rate has also dropped about 15 BPM to 60, which is
just awesome.

I have done this while continuing to eat real and enjoyable food (pot
roast, roasted potatoes and sauted yellow squash for dinner last night
- yum). Heck, if I hadn’t given up sweets for Lent I’d celebrate by
making myself a chocolate milkshake. What I have eliminated is the
prepackaged garbage food from my life and started to pay much closer
attention to when and how much I eat. No more giganto portions for me
and no more late night snacking.

I have also starting doing physical activities I love (like running)
and some that I only slightly dislike (weight training). My ultimate
goal is to find an adult soccer league nearby. Now that I can run
again (3.36 miles on Monday), I’m ready to run for a reason on the
soccer pitch. So, if anyone knows of an East Bay league that will take
a 42 year old guy who hasn’t played a full game of soccer in 10 years,
let me know.

For now, color me stoked. The only downside is that now most of my
clothes don’t fit me very well. I can deal with my suits by simply
taking them into the Men’s Wearhouse to get them altered for free
(they’re gonna love me after they alter 5 suits and one tux) but the
rest of my wardrobe is going to need some rebuilding.

–
Sent from my mobile device

You know, I’ve about had it with this whole zombie trend.  If you hadn’t noticed, everything has zombies in it now.  I blame the success of two movies - Shaun of the Dead (which is actually pretty awesome) and 28 Days Later (which was just sort of freaky).

I think the trend has jumped the shark though folks, with this: Pride And Prejudice And Zombies .  Someone has taken the great Jane Austen novel and edited in sequences of zombie carnage.

Exactly what do you have to smoke to think this is a great way to spend your time as an author - rewriting a classic novel so that it includes incongruous bits of zombie violence?  Worse yet, you just know that book publishing is in big trouble when a project like this gets a green light.  On the one hand, I totally see it - the publisher doesn’t really have spend a lot to make this book happen.  90% of the story is written, has already been edited and proofread, so the advance to the author of the zombie bits isn’t going to be that much, and you can figure half your sales will come from whatever nitwits are currently fueling this zombie craze who will buy anything with the word zombie on the cover, and the other half is going to come from dimwits like me who love Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and simply must see how dreadful the thing turned out.

Ah, there is nothing like art in an economic downturn.  But let’s just skip the whole publishing world right off, shall we?  Honestly, relatively few people actually buy books anyway.  Let’s go straight to the film remakes.  May I suggest:

When Harry Met Sally… And Zombies
Wherein our hero and heroine struggle through a friendship stretching back decades to when they first met after graduating from college when Sally gave Harry a ride home from campus… and they were attacked by zombies.  Trace our protagonists through their youth and growing friendship… and repeated zombie attacks.

or, how about…

My Dinner With Andre And Zombies
Join Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory spend an evening sharing dinner, great conversation and… a battle for their lives against a rampaging horde of zombies!

or perhaps…

Saving Private Ryan And Zombies
See the D-Day landings as they’ve never been seen before, with scenes of battle so realistic and graphic you’ll think you were really there… especially when the hordes of Nazi zombies cascade onto the beaches to pick the bones of the fallen soldiers clean.

Ok.  That’s enough for one day. Any studios interested in pursuing productions of these films please feel free to mail your royalty checks to me.

Technorati Tags: zombie, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, book-info/store, books/products_id, 7847/title, Pride-and-Prejudice-and-Zombies/">Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, Jane Austen, When Harry Met Sally… And Zombies, My Dinner With Andre And Zombies, Saving Private Ryan And Zombies

Selig comes out today and says that A-Rod “shamed the game” by using
performance enhancing drugs.

You have got to be kidding me. So, one player, albeit a very high
profile player, brought shame to the game through PED use, but Selig,
all 30 MLB team owners and the half-wits who run the Players’
Association who conspired to keep a lid on PED use for 20 years
because more home runs meant more money for MLB are blameless?

Give me a friggin’ break.

And don’t even get me started on what’s happening to Miguel Tejada,
who is looking at the very real possibility of spending time in
Federal Prison because he used PED’s and lied about it (along with
Selig, Donald Fehr and a host of other jackasses) to Congress.

I have said it before and I will say it again - so what? Professional
sports are entertainment, pure and simple. They are not
“institutions” nor do any other overblown, hyperbolic
characterizations of pro sports deserve anything but a sneer and
derision by anyone with half a functioning brain. We do not threaten
movie & TV actresses with jail time for wearing inflato-bossoms or
claim that Bruce Willis or any other follicularly-challenged actor is
setting a bad example for our youth when they sport a rug in order to
appear more attractive or youthful. No one is horrified that the
crowd scenes in recent epic films like Gladiator are digitally
enhanced rather than populated by real live extras, the way they did
it in the olden days.

This obsession with purity in sports has got to stop. It has to stop
if only because it cannot be reconciled with our cultural preference
for everything else around us being completely fake and
technologically enhanced. We love fake stuff in the country and we
love technology. Heck, we even love technology when it’s applied to
sports. Do you see anyone moaning about the mechanically wound
baseballs that are precisely manufactured to ridiculous industrial
tolerances in automated factories and how that’s detracting from the
game because we don’t use hand-wound baseballs anymore? How about
bats - ever hear anyone complain about the finely machine crafted bats
(other than about the handles breaking too often these days) that
allow a player to whip the bat around with considerably more speed
than Babe Ruth ever had at his disposal? And every year you hear a
new chorus of malcontents who want to replace the live umpires behind
the plate with sophisticated cameras that can precisely call balls and
strikes with no risk of error. We love that shit.

We also love things that are bigger than big and grander than grand.
Stadia full of tens of thousands of people do not pay outrageous
prices to watching low scoring pitchers’ duels (much as I wish they
would, but that’s more about the general stupidity of the modern
baseball fan and is fodder for another post some other time). People
come out to pay piles of money ($20 for ticket + $20 for parking + $8
for a beer + $7 for a hot dog = $55 - and that’s not counting
transportation to and from the game) to watch a ballgame because they
want to see dingers, and if they pay any attention to the pitching at
all they want to see 100 mph fastballs. We are not a nation of people
who appreciate nuance and subtlety.

The shame here is that the old white men in suits are wagging their
accusing fingers at players for doing precisely what the league
bosses, union heads and team owners wanted them to do - hit the ball
farther, throw it harder and break some records.