Good times, good times

Patriots 'cheating'

Ok, so many of my friends will think that I am probably going to go off here about the Patriots' camera incident last weekend, but I frankly don't think its a big deal. I mean, coaching signals are coded for a reason, we worried about it in high school! Second of all, a certain amount of gamesmanship is expected in football, especially at the highest level. Finally, their has been a certain elevated hysteria in the discussion about this video taping of the Jets' signals, including most headlines with "spying" in them. As noted by King Kaufman from Salon:

What the Pats are accused of doing is "spying" on the Jets coaches as they sent signals to the defense. My understanding of spying must be different from the NFL's. Watching a guy flapping his arms while standing in the middle of 70,000 people and in front of a national TV audience doesn't qualify. Even if you point a camera at him.

I agree. The original offense on the face of it seems not that big a deal.

I also question whether it would work. I already assume that all teams change their coding every game, and simple protective systems rotating every series should defend against even videotaping. They could have a two-signaller system. You have two coaches doing slightly different signals, but each series only one coach is giving the real signal (which the defensive captains already know), while the other sends in a similar dummy. Then in the second half, you use different coding, and still use the same two-signaller system. All the work done cracking the first-half code is useless. Shouldn't teams be using this anyway?

On the other hand, the Pats stand accused of specifically being warned about this offense. Check out what nlf.com has to say:

Patriots under investigation for following rules, guidelines violations ... 1. Page 105 of the Game Operations manual says: "No video recording devices of any kind are permitted to be in use in the coaches' booth, on the field, or in the locker room during the game." It later says: "All video shooting locations must be enclosed on all sides with a roof overhead."

2. And, a memo from Ray Anderson, NFL head of football operations, to head coaches and GMs on Sept. 6, 2006 said: "Video taping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited on the sidelines, in the coaches’ booth, in the locker room, or at any other locations accessible to club staff members during the game."

There aren't really any two ways about that (by bolding). While I don't think their was any major effect of the taping, including even in the Jets game (I expect Tom Brady and Randy Moss will continue to torch opponents all season long; and as noted above, there are easy measures which seem to me like they could frustrate reading defensive signals), it is a rather blatant violation. The Sports Guy has a discussion with Aaron Schatz from Football Outsiders with a long bit of Patriot fan self-loathing, that I think even goes over the top a bit, but this bit struck me as true:

Here's the thing that shocks me: I always thought Belichick cared too much about his legacy to risk tainting it like this. He's a history buff and someone who allowed Halberstam to follow him around simply because he understood the intrinsic value of a great writer capturing his 'brilliance' in a widely read book. The whole thing is just bizarre.

Why oh why did the Pats do it? Especially since it seems to me particularly easy to defend against (just rotate between dummies rapidly and irregularly; or worst comes to worst, simply sending in the play call with a player). And they had already been warned? As Schatz put it:

What on Earth was Belichick thinking? The team had been warned by the league multiple times. They were playing the Jets -- did they think Eric Mangini had suddenly forgotten everything the Patriots had done when he was their defensive coordinator? Could you guys be a little more obvious with your cheating?

The crime seems irrelevant, and barely qualifies as cheating to me. The very act of trying to crack another team's signals is still considered sacred; nobody is disputing a team's right to have five guys staring at the other coaches writing down all their signals on a clipboard. Video might make it more effective and faster, but it is only a matter of one level of magnitude, and still the same act (cracking the other team's signals). So really it comes down to breaking the limits on rules, which seems hardly less ethical, just stupid. Petty, minor, irrelevant, stupid. But everyone is getting way to worked up about it I think.

In the Valley of Elah - my TIFF review

So I went to my first film festival movie today at the Toronto International Film Festival. I saw Paul Haggis's new piece In the Valley of Elah. The general plot focuses on the father of a soldier in Iraq (played by Tommy Lee), and follows his quest to find his son after the soldier returns from Iraq but goes awol. Before launching into it, I should disclaim the fact that I really like Crash (not loved, just liked).

Well, this was just as heavy and preachy as Crash, without the cliches, and with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron channeling their raw, concentrated emotions into you. It was brilliantly acted; really, really, well acted. My friend AB is sure TLJ is going to get the oscar nod, and I have to say, i could see this happening. Susan Sarandon briefly appeared a few times as the mom, and cried a whole lot. I deride her because I find most of her performances one smidgen over the top, but she did well here, with one particularly poignant moment when she sees her son's remains "is that it?..." she asks. Oscar nomination for TLJ, maybe directing nomination for Haggis, but no best picture I would say, the script was too loose for me. A few times I screwed up my face and went: huh? A few times the symbolism or dialogue felt too preachy, and at other times the clever humor felt inappropriate.

Anyway, the talk about this movie beforehand billed it as "one of the first films to explore the effects of war on the families of soldiers." Or something like that. Well first of all I disagree with the premise, in that it seems to me a lot of war films are about the effects of war on the families of soldiers. Second of all, the movie wasn't at all about the 'family effect' anyway, which is a good thing because that sounded kind of boring (although it was an enduring subtheme). To me the movie was about how this war morally corrupts those involved. Without a clear moral grounding, a real us vs. them, good vs. bad struggle, war quickly devolves into an all-consuming leviathan. Vietnam was like that. World War I was like that.

SPOILER ALERT





The climax of the movie, to me, was an amazing scene where a soldier confesses to killing Tommy Lee's son, not without remorse, but with a chilling detachment from the morality of the event. It was like he realized what he did was wrong, but wrong in the way that shoplifting a candy bar is wrong, or shooting a squirrel with a BB gun. His conception of the magnitude and gravity of the act of killing another human being had been totally skewed. The overwhelming power of the scene derives from the juxtaposition between the horrified shock of Charlize and Tommy Lee, and the almost cheerful narrative of the soldier. Awesome stuff. I would say a must see.

Memo to the NFL - get rid of the green dots!

So I sat down to my first solid wasted Sunday's worth of NFL football, only to discover that my beloved (and much maligned) league had snuck an obnoxious new feature into my favorite sport. The green dot on the back of QB's helmets. The first thing I realized was how often I saw the back of a quarterback's head, and therefore how often I was staring at an incongruous green blemish on otherwise pristine helmets (particularly egregious was the Spot on the chargers' white helmets).

For the 2007 season, apparently, the NFL has put large green dot stickers, about 1.5 inches across, on the back helmets of every quarterback on the field. The reason, apparently, is "to indicate which helmets have built-in headphones to receive play calls".

Ok, well this is amusing for several reasons. First of all, according to this Packers website, the rule was instigated:

because the league felt offensive teams had an unfair advantage on these plays because they could call in a fake at the last second, by having two quarterbacks (with communication ability with coaches) on the field at the same time.

What? What?!!! When does this happen? What examples of egregious manipulation of radio communications have unbalanced a game since these technologies were introduced? Did this happen last year? If not, are they just speculating? Should we maybe spread nets across the top of all open NFL stadiums in case Al-Qaeda/North Korean/Iranian/French paratroopers attempt to leap into a game in progress?

I have to stare at these stupid Spots for the rest of the season because someone fixed somethin that wasnt broke. So many other things about the NFL could be improved (see: HgH use, criminality, concussions, care of retired players), and some flunky at the league office chooses this. It wouldn't bother me so much, were the moronic dots not so conspicuous.

Ok, so lets take it as given that the Spot is necessary, for the one play a year in the many thousands of plays in which a team attempts to manipulate radio communications. For this one event, less than 0.1% chance of occurring, cant we just have refs paying attention? What does the dot ensure anyway? Couldnt you just have a functioning radio without the sticker anyway? If you're going to cheat, why is having to put a sticker on your helmet going to stop you? This is so stupid, Im putting it in the idiot file. And my blood is going to boil every time I see it this year.

On the nature of art

How pompous a title is that? Perhaps I should delete this post before I write it. Anyway, good piece from Slate, my favorite online mag, about Jack Kerouac's On the Road Again. While I haven't read the book (much to my friend MQ's disgust), my general point is simply not about the book, but on the general thesis of the piece:

Which is why it's no wonder that On the Road, a book that we've termed an
American Sacrament, is almost as widely and passionately viewed as an American
Sham. This started around the time the novel was published, when Truman Capote
insulted Kerouac's prose as "typing not writing," and has continued until this
afternoon, as shown by the profusion of readers' spitballs aimed at our rather
reverent discussion here. (One of these can be found under the heading
"Kerouac's 50 years of Crap," and it's not even the unkindest.) Would the novel
have been better as a memoir, you asked in your last note. Don't know. What I do
know is that there are countless detractors out there who don't regard it as a
novel at all but as a load of pretentious mental slobber. It might or might not
reflect true-life events, but it's still, to the skeptics, a bucket of foamy
word-slop that, for some devious or self-seeking reason (canny marketing by its
publishers? The doltishness of our nation's youth? The narcissism of baby
boomers who see the novel as their own creation myth?) has been borne along like
a chalice all these years and deserves, at long last, to be tossed back into the
gutter where its shiftless characters so often slept.

This discussion to me, while seemingly tangential, is actually the very heart of what the book was about. Or any book, movie, painting, poem etc. is about. It is not what the book says, or how it says it, or the detail of its prose, or the power of its central theme, or the detail of
its characters, or the passion of its writing. While all of these are independently worthwile, interesting, and engaging, to me the essence of art is simply that it got us going in the first place. I reject the notion that there is an objective 'good' or 'bad' about human art, yet I relish the argument about whether it is good or bad!

Even the haters in the above paragraph have emerged as better, more informed, more dynamic, more human after reading the book....even if they thought it was a huge piece of shit. People are thinking, and talking, and feeling, and debating about this book. They argue endlessly, and take positions, and think of new perspectives and new concepts. None of the actual opinions are material (at least to me), but it is the creation of those opinions that warms my heart, and makes me confident that the human race is in good hands. We'll be all right.