Dr. Metablog

On the Kindle with Tertius and Rosamund

I'm reading Middlemarch again. It's either my fourth or fifth time through the best novel ever written in the English language. If you want to know about the nineteenth century, start with George Eliot. 

I had the oddest feelings fifty pages in. (Actually, "pages" is an anachronism because I am reading on the kindle.)  Lydgate is flirting with beautiful, empty-headed Rosamund Vincy.  I thought "this time let him be smart;  let him not marry Rosamund."  I must have been in an unusally plastic frame of mind, or in some sort of reading reverie. I know that novels are immutable, but I was hoping against hope that Lydgate had learned something since the last time I read the novel. Even though he made a fool of himself with that actress in Paris. And then last night, just before I turned out the lights, Lydgate did it again -- fell for the blonde curls and the glistening eye. He's learned nothing, not a thing, in the last ten years. And now I have to live through the saga as his crush turns into crushing disappointment and bitterness. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Poor Lydgate.

 The kindle changes the input but doesns't do a thing for the outcome. 

Two (Possibly Three) Improvements to Soccer

Netherlands-Argentina was exciting and rather beautiful until it went to penalty kicks. What a foolish way to find a winner! It's as if, in basketball, tie games led to a foul-shooting contest, or if, in baseball, instead of extra innings they started hitting fungoes for distance. Soccer travesties itself by resorting to penalty kicks. A better solution: play until someone scores. Sudden death. I mean, sudden victory. I would hope the game (the match) would end before midfielders start to collapse from exhaustion.

Brazil-Germany offers a second opportunity for improvement. Is it not time to institute a mercy rule.  When there's a mismatch in junior high girls softball and one team gets ahead by ten runs, the game is called off. It's over. It should be the same in soccer. Team A, let us say, runs up a five goal lead -- stop the game, everyone go home.  Why should a team (Brazil, for example) suffer interminable humiliation.  

And a bonus recommendation: no biting. Recidivist biters should be banned for life.