This Is Not News

Playing a little bit with the time space continuum, AKA the timestamp, on this post. I’ve talked about my natural nocturnalism before, and it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t work well with a schedule where you need to be out of the house by 7 AM. Last week I would get home, take a nap in the evening, then get up to watch convention speeches and blog, then try to take another nap in the early AM hours before getting up again for work. I have definitely concluded that that is not a schedule conducive to my long term sanity. I think I could probably make a 9 PM to 3 or 4 AM schedule work and fool myself into thinking I’m doing a night owl shift, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to function missing the prime time hours so often.

You’d think that by this point of my life my body would have adapted to this sun thing you normal people are so fond of, but so far, no such luck.

OK, back to tweaking my lesson plan for Harrison Bergeron and egalitarianism. Catch ya tomorrow.

Celebrated my niece’s second birthday today, which was nice. My mom gave me an office chair that she found uncomfortable and which seems like a vast improvement over the last one I was using, but we’ll see how it holds up over the next few days.

I also gave my brother back is copy of Batman #430. It’s cover-dated February 1989. It’s the first Batman comic published after “A Death in the Family,” the famous story that killed the second Robin as a result of a 1-900 number reader poll. (Am I the only one who remembers news stories about Robin’s death like they were last month?) It was also the comic he bought when he started collecting comics, and he started a month or so before I did. So it’s the beginning of a hobby and a collection that’s been part of our family for two decades. Since he decided not to collect Batman as a regular title and I did, he traded it to me somewhere along the line. He was younger than my daughter is now when he bought it. Now he has a daughter of his own. The cover has a couple of folds and wrinkles. The pages are a little yellow. The story’s been written out of continuity by at least a couple of universe-changing events DC Comics has published in the last 20 years. But in spite of that – maybe because of that – he wanted it back, and I was happy to give it to him.

He’s promised to give me another copy, which is certainly a fair trade. To be honest, I’m just glad he gave me a reason to pull it out of its longbox and relive the memories.

It’s amazing to me how much I can read thanks to the Internet. When I was a kid, I’d get one newspaper a day and maybe a newsmagazine or two each week. Now I’m practically inundated with online magazines, the blogs connected to those magazines, blogs by experts in fields like political science and education. Now that it’s election season I can totally get lost in it. And now I’m thinking about buying a Kindle. I can’t keep up with the information I already have and I’m trying to get more.

And I spend so much time dashing from site to site that I don’t know if I’m actually processing the information or finding ways to add to it. I’ll worry about that another time. Right now, I’m just gonna enjoy living in the future.

I am sure that mine is not the only household where this is true, but it certainly defies stereotypes. My wife is far, far more interested in the start of the NFL season than I am. I was already feeling iffy about the sport giving its reliance on violence and the possible effect on players’ brains, but throw in the fact that the NFL has locked out its referees and I just can’t bring myself to care. I’m willing to at least listen to the conversation when a struggling business says it has to reduce costs to stay competitive, but the NFL is such a money-printing machine that I have no sympathy when it tries to avoid sharing that wealth with the people who actually make the games happen. (And yeah, no one watches the game for the refs. But who’d watch a sport where anything goes or where the players were expected to call their own penalties?)

Meanwhile the NHL is getting ready to lock its players out as well. Never mind that the sport already has a hard salary cap and that the last contract negotiation involved big salary rollbacks. The way TV networks are throwing insane money at live sports programming these days, I can’t really buy into the league’s claims of poverty.

I don’t even want to talk about the hypocrisy of college sports. But you can go read Michael McCann discuss Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA.

I dunno. I used to be able to overlook the rooting-for-laundry aspect of sports fandom because these business, for all their mercenary nature, were supported by and helped to sustain a kind of civic identity. But if I don’t like the organization and what it does, should I want it to represent me? Should I tie myself to it just because of its location?

If you were to suggest that I’m going through this in part because I’m a Pennsylvanian whose state university and its athletic program are currently undergoing a major identity crisis, well, I don’t think I could argue with you. But I think there’s a deeper issue that recent events (and not-quite-so-recent-events like the Eagles signing Mike Vick) have forced me to think about, and that make it harder to be entertained by the games.

On the upside, it’ll probably improve my productivity if I have my Sundays free.