In part I, I attended a Christmas party where others kept moving to different rooms of the house. They would move and only later would I notice I was alone. In part II, walking home, there were cars everywhere. Some were even parked on top of houses. There was a crowd noise up ahead. It…
Watching The Brain. In talking about Tiger Woods’ putt, they guess that he really has consciously removed all anxiety by entering “The Zone”. (Must be old.) The physical manifestation of this is supposed to be his lack of blinking. Now that Tiger is not doing so well, does this mean he is blinking a lot…
This mention reminded me of a study where men experienced difficulties remembering the news when the speaker was a beautiful woman. Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive…
It seems to me television programmers between college and professional football there would be at least 1,000 games per year which would provide the necessary data points for understanding how long these games typically last. Yet, consistently the games which start on time still run about an hour or more longer than the 3 hour…
Some things are easy to buy online. A few times in the past month I’ve gone looking for a soccer jersey for any of the many football (soccer to my fellow Americans) team I follow. Three futile hours later, I am considering changing which football I follow since stores can carry appropriately sized apparel for it. I’m…
Soccer clubs are tied to a neighborhood or city. Doing well inspires local pride. National teams expand the base of supporters. Beirut-born Ibrahim (or Youssef) Bassal displayed a 70′ x 20′ German flag to show his family’s solidarity during the World Cup where millions of smaller flags are everywhere. Only people keep vandalizing the flags because…
I wonder how many Americans became soccer fans after the upset tie with England? It seemed like the furor over the Slovenia tie became more conversational than I expected. After the amazing win over Algeria, even more people wanted to talk about the World Cup. Well, the loss to Ghana didn’t sustain the conversation. May Instant…
Sports are entertainment. Some watch it for the feats. Some like discussing tactics. Some just want to see scores. Some love the bloopers (aka mistakes). The second you feel a sports player seen on television wronged you by a decision on or off the field (or court), it is time to turn off said TV.…
So, the perfect set up for killing a bunch of their fans would be an amazing play with seconds left to go. Manning hit a touchdown with 35 seconds left on the clock. Probably a hundred people are on their way to hospitals. Should the team be held responsible? From “Super bowl could be hazardous…