What other crazy stuff has been happening in professional sports while I wasn’t looking?

It’s true: I pay very little attention to professional sports of any kind. It’s not that I don’t like them, I’m just usually not that interested. I used to be; I collected baseball cards in middle school, and my peak of interest in pro sports conveniently coincided with “my” Minnesota Twins winning the World Series for the first time ever, in 1987.

Since then, it’s been all downhill. I was excited about the Vikings in 1998, only to be let down by Gary Anderson’s only missed field goal of the year, in the NFC Championship game. I watched the Twins’ tiebreaker game against the White Sox this year, only to be let down yet again by a team that has an incredible knack for falling ever-so-slightly short, again and again. Perhaps this “always the bridesmaid” trait common amongst the Minnesota pro teams is what makes it hard for me to be a sports fan. But more likely, I’m just not that interested, and that’s all there is to it. These days the only professional sports I actually get excited about watching are Wimbledon and the Olympics, and their relative infrequency probably contributes to my enthusiasm.

Yet, I am still drawn in by unexpected developments, like the Steelers’ 11-10 win this week. I knew that was a weird score, and I thought it was cool when I learned that out of the over 12,000 NFL games played in the league’s history to date, this was the first ever to end with that score.

But this fact still caught me totally off guard. I was reading kottke.org this morning and he just casually mentioned that the Seattle Supersonics had moved to Oklahoma City. To quote Dave McFly, “When the hell did this happen?” This year, apparently, and I had no clue.

Oh well.

You don’t run across this kind of stuff every day (anymore)

It used to be that the web was nothing but sites like this: rambling, semi-coherent… well, webs of absurdist humor with no interest in or consideration of making money or doing anything other than amusing an inner circle and confusing everyone else. Speaking of inner circles, there’s a fair amount of stuff on here devoted to Ayn Rand, but not as a genuine disciple of her grandiose quasi-philosophizing; rather, in parody and/or mockery of it.

I was particularly intrigued when I read the microprint at the bottom of the page and saw a passing thanks to someone who, while surely not the singular worldwide owner of his particular name, is nonetheless unique enough that I suspect he is in fact the same person I went to high school with, but who now lives in Sweden. I’m not sure what he’s up to these days, but seeing as his greatest claim to fame in the early ’90s was having screen printed a number of t-shirts featuring a blow-up of a frame from Bloom County, wherein a generic “Liberal” — who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to our band director — is popping prairie dog-like out of a hole in the ground* and shouting “No nukes!”, the connection would not surprise me.

And if you’re able to make any sense out of that last sentence, then you might enjoy reading on…

*OK, it’s not a hole in the ground; it’s a bush. But I was describing it from memory prior to my excessive amount of searching for the image finally bearing fruit, and afterwards I didn’t feel like rewriting the sentence.

Dog inequality in Walt Disney’s world

As I would have suspected, I am clearly not the first person who’s wondered about this.

I generally don’t think too much of Disney cartoons. (Interpret that sentence how you wish.) I appreciate the technical achievement of their older hand-drawn animated features, and I love the Pixar films, but, to paraphrase a political term, those are DINO — Disney in Name Only.

As a kid I had little interest in Disney. I preferred the sardonic, slightly (and sometimes not-so-slightly) twisted humor of Looney Tunes to the ingenuous, wholesome tone of Mickey and friends. But my kids these days are obsessed with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the Disney Channel. (“Hot dog hot dog hot diggity dog!” It’s on right now.)

With this increased exposure to the Disney cartoon characters lately, I am reminded of a particular aspect of these cartoons that has always troubled me. There are two dogs in these cartoons. You’ve got Goofy. He wears clothes, he walks upright, he talks, and he’s generally considered an equal and peer to the likes of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, etc. Then you’ve got Pluto. No clothes, all fours, mute (does he even bark?), pet of Mickey Mouse. (Yes, a mouse with a dog as a pet. What a world!)

I suspect that the problem here is that we’re talking about characters who were never initially intended to appear together in the same cartoon. Looney Tunes has suffered the same fate in recent times, such as with the abominable Baby Looney Tunes (which my kids also like), wherein infantile, diapered (yet surprisingly verbal) incarnations of Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Sylvester, Tweety, and a few other latter-day characters who previously occupied overlapping but distinct cartoon universes now all live in the same house with Granny as their caretaker. It’s fine if one character bridges these gaps — Bugs might appear in cartoons with both Daffy and Taz, but not at the same time; Kermit the Frog might appear on both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, but you’ll never see Fozzie in a twin bed with an F on the headboard, next to Bert and Ernie.

So really… maybe it’s not Walt’s fault. It’s probably just a case of latter day marketing “geniuses” who’ve twisted and combined these previously disparate, carefully constructed cartoon worlds into an illogical hodgepodge… and then thrown in just enough educational content to be able to stick the “E/I” badge in the corner of the screen to meet the FCC’s requirements. (Never mind the fact that cable channels like Disney aren’t subject to FCC regulation.)

OK, I guess I have no explanation. It just makes no sense. (After all, Pluto has been, since day one, the pet of a much smaller animal.)

Wow, I thought the spike in traffic might last a little bit longer

Last week I was excited by the prospect of increased traffic here when I discovered that a New York Times blog had linked to a 2-year-old post on this site.

I eagerly watched my hit count go up. The post received over 500 hits in the 5 hours immediately following the appearance of the NYT link. But wow, did the traffic drop off fast. I’m still getting a trickle of hits on that 2-year-old post each day, but my overall site traffic is back down to pre-NYT levels. Here’s a chart of hits on my site over the past month. Can you tell when the NYT link appeared?

For what it’s worth, I think the earlier jump in activity from late October occurred because that was right around the time I worked with my hosting provider to reinstate some third-level domains (such as coltrane.room34.com) for links to subsections of my site. I had used these third-level domains several years ago but they had been “turned off” for at least 3 or 4 years. I can only assume from the increase in traffic that there are still sites out there that have been linking to these URLs for all of that time, even though they didn’t work.