Dr. Metablog

Cishet

We watched a Netflix series called Feel Good. I suppose that the series title must be taken ironically, because throughout the first two seasons, not one character seemed to feel even slightly positive or healthy. Just about everyone was miserable -- their unhappiness usually linked to romantic or more specifically sexual dissatisfaction. The program introduced many more eccentric varieties of coupling and frustration than I, a vanilla heterosexual, would have imagined. The main character, Mae Martin, played by Mae Martin, is a boyish lesbian; her on-again, off again affair with a womanly young lady is the focus of the story. Lots of obstacles both personal and social stand between the two women and the achievement of genuine happiness. Let's hope that they can figure it all out and find love at long last -- or at least by the end of Season 3. 

There was one scene that I found to be particularly curious and troublesome. A group of teachers assemble for a meeting, but before taking up business, every one of the participants reveals or defines his or her own sexuality. One young woman, surely the least glamorous of the set, refers to herself as "cishet." I didn't catch the word as spoken but fortunately we had the subtitles engaged and I was able to read the word, although in reading I pronounced it to myself as if the sh were a digraph for the lingual palatal fricative as in shut or shun. But I investigated the new word "cishet" -- and sure enough it exists and has become a feature of our contemporary culture. It's "cis" as opposed to "trans" which means not "across" but "this side" -- as the Romans referred to Gaul as either cisalpine and transalpine. In this coinage, "cis" refer to a person who accepts the gender designation assigned at birth by the appearance of one's genitals. "Het" is simply a truncation of heterosexual." "Cishet" therefore means someone who is unambiguously either male or female and is attracted to persons of the opposite sex.

Wow, that's me. After all these years of just thinking I was an ordinary guy, I now discover that I have a designation. I have a community, at tribe, perhaps even an interest group. Hey, I belong,

But I think that it's mighty odd and even oppressive that members of a school community, or any community, would feel that it is necessary or advisable to announce their gender classification before getting down to the business of the day. Shouldn't such information be allowed to remain private. If I want to be cishet, it's nobody's business but my own. But perhaps such formal revelations don't happen in real life -- only in satirical TV series. I sure hope so. 

Not so for Mae Martin, the first paragraph of whose biography reads "Mae Martin is a Canadian-born comedian, actor, and writer based in England. They wrote and starred in the Netflix comedy series Feel Good." So it appears that "she" is a "they" which in current modish jargon doesn't mean that she's plural but signifies that she feels inadequately represented by the simple and specific feminine pronoun. I can understand her motive, but frankly "they" confuses me and sticks in my ear. I appreciate its value as a statement of resistance to the "hetoro-normative" -- but by golly "they" sure throws a spanner into the grammatico-normative works. It would be good if English had a set of singular pronouns that are as gender indistinct as "they," but it doesn't, and to hijack the plural "they" and turn it into a singular is an awkward and I hope ephemeral innovation.  

Sometimes I receive communications from people who are much more up to date than dear old dad -- letters that are signed in the traditional way but to which is subjoined, "My pronouns -- "he his," or "she her hers" (or "they them their"). This habit, I suppose, clears the air and perhaps forestalls some embarrassing or awkward moments, but again, seems unnecessarily revelatory. It's limiting and partial. It seems to me to declare that such guys and gals were acting in the parochial interest of their own tribe or constituency -- much as if everyone appended to his or her name his own religion or nationality. I'm not happy with this innovation. Although it might seem progressive, it is in my opinion ultimately dangerously reactionary.

Therefore I am not so current that I would include my pronouns on any letters that I write. But I would like to append my adjectives,

Yours very sincerely,

Vivian de St. Vrain

(My adjectives:  "wise, upstanding, formerly debonair.")

Yellowstone

We watched the first season of Yellowstone (eight episodes, or about 350 full minutes, all told). It's not our usual fare, but because a close relative, an accomplished actor, has just contracted to appear in Season Four, it seemed important to investigate. Yellowstone sustained our interest but in my opinion it's mighty derivative. I think the title should be changed to The Sopranos Go West. The principal character, played by Kevin Costner, isn't precisely a Mafia don, but he's modeled on one. He owns a Rhode-Island-size slice of Montana and he protects his property with gangster tactics. Like Tony Soprano, he fights with his family, feuds with his consigliere, corrupts public officials, strong-arms his enemies, and doesn't hesitate to bribe or ice his opponents. Yellowstone creates a nasty dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe that offers only an occasional redeeming event and, among a huge cast, only two or three sympathetic characters.

Yellowstone is not at all pastoral. The spectacular western landscape is brimful with events common to gruesome noir and urban crime films. In the episodes we watched, two tourists fell from a cliff and splattered, a woman was impaled by a steel fence post, a teacher who tried to intervene in a playground scuffle was accidentally struck to the ground and developed a brain hemorrhage, a cowboy trying to leave his job was shot in the head and his body dumped in a ravine, a new Yellowstone employee was branded on the chest with a red-hot iron, a woman was crushed to death by a horse, two brothers-in-law were shot and killed in a gunfight, a 10-year-old boy was stranded in a culvert with a rattlesnake twice his size, a real estate developer was kidnapped and hanged, and a meth house blew up and burned its occupant to death. I didn't keep a running tally of the various atrocities so there were probably a few that I've forgotten. 

We're hoping that our relative has a continuing part in the series (he's supposed to play a doctor), but we're fearful that he'll be on screen for a minute and a half before he gets his throat slit or loses a limb or two to an enormous John Deere harvester. We won't know for a year.

"What Wondrous Life is This I Lead"

"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in the morning when I drove (I own a horseless carriage -- a circumstance Sir T. couldn't possibly have imagined) to our spanking new hospital to have my innards inspected. The MRI doughnut deployed a couple of teslas worth of magnetism to spin my protons into images, a process which, though incomprehensible to me, is a heck of a lot less agonizing than extracting the information from my personal body with scalpel and stand-by sponge, and is significantly more informative than inspecting my urine, which is what a seventeenth-century doctor like Browne would have done. Later, I took a short walk to the local bank to take care of business and moved some, well, not exactly money but virtual or magic money from one account to another. Back home, I conversed by cell to NGP who was on the road to Virginia in a horseless carriage of his own. Inasmuch as he was behind the wheel, we skipped the face time feature. Nevertheless the long-distance mobile communication experience was plenty miraculous. The climax of my day was a walk to a neighborhood theater where Angela Hewitt blessed us with an exquisitely rendered performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. She was in a zone; I was riveted. Is it more wondrous that Bach composed the Variations, that Ms. Hewitt performed them with such delicate power, or that the concert took place right around the corner, almost at my doorstep?  After the Bach, the day being now almost over, along came still another miraculous moment when I watched, supine in my own bed, in real time, the last minutes of an NBA game beamed in from Boston, Massachusetts, two thousand miles to the east, and almost at the Atlantic Ocean. It was an excellent game -- a stunning win for the Brooklyn Nets, and an equally remarkable triumph for my pixel-rich widescreen TV. It was a long day and a varied one, and I was beat, so while snuggling a-bed with the lady friend (an intimacy that is not only a miracle but a piece of poetry to boot), I instructed Alexa to give us a little opera. Alexa complied and chose WQXR in NYC, and for a drowsy hour we were grateful operavores.

No question but that my day was comprised of a series of miracles, each one more incredible than the other.

Nor do I even bother to tally daily miracles so commonplace that we cease to notice them: water in (both cold and hot) and waste out, electricity, central heating and A/C, refrigeration, natural gas to cook by, big bright cheerful windows, etc.

"What wondrous life is this I lead."

*Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, first published 1644.

Baseball 1958-2018

1958:  First batter of the game is Smith. He's batting .278. First pitch is a ball. Smith is 5'9", 155 pounds. Married, two children, makes his winter home in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Sells tractors in the off-season. Good curve ball hitter.

2018:  First batter is Smith. He's batting .278. His slugging percentage is .342. His OBP is .335. His OPS is .445. He hits .225 against right-handers and .303 against left-handers. First pitch is a ball. On first pitches he's batting .225. With a count of 2 and 0, he's batting .247. Second pitch is a ball. On two strike pitches he's at .175. On fast balls in the upper right quadrant of the strike zone, he's batting .345. On fast balls in the lower left quadrant he's hitting .175. On two strike pitches, he strikes out 25% of the time and hits fly balls 30% of the time. He bats .283 in his home park, .246 on the road. Day games, .290, night games .225. His OPS in away night games against a left-handed pitcher is .341. In this ballpark he's batting .283. He's batting only .125 against this pitcher, just two for sixteen lifetime, and one of the hits was a double, but that was in a different ballpark and in a previous season. He's batting .285 against fastballs, .276 against curves, .225 against four seamers, .215 against split fingers, and .275 against change-ups. He sees an average of 4.3 pitches per at bat against right-handers and 5.1 against left-handers. He swings and misses 38% of the time. Here's the next pitch; it's a strike. When he connects against a left-handed split finger fastball in the lower left quadrant the ball comes of his bat at an average velocity of 85 miles per hour to left field, 87 to center field, and 76 to right field. His average launch angle is 18 degrees. With men on base, he's hitting .285. With runners in scoring position, .290; his launch angle to right field against right-handed split finger fastballs in the lower left quadrant rises to 25 degrees, but only on his first at bat in a game. Afterwards, it declines to 17 degrees. But that's in April and May, on weekends. In August and September, under the lights, his launch angle is 20 degrees against change-ups from right-handers who throw into the upper right quadrant when there's a man on second or third and fewer than two outs. There's ball four.  

Here comes the manager out to the mound. That's all for this pitcher. We'll be back in a moment. 

Cliche of the Decade

There's this woman of a certain age, good looking, usually blonde. Generally, she's a detective but she could be reporter or a spy -- some sort of investigator. She has an instinct for her work, an unusual insight or gift. There's a murderer or villain out there and she's determined to get him; it's personal with her and often she has to violate procedures in order to bring this character to justice. She regularly confronts her superior, an older man who is a stickler for the rules and wants to shut down the investigation. As a last resort, she'll ask for 24 hours, or more rarely 48 hours, to bring the villain in. And guess what -- it turns out that her instinct was right all along and after a brief struggle, in which her life is in danger (often there's an attempted assassination, usually by speeding vehicle), the criminal/mastermind/murderer is handcuffed (British version) or shot (American version).

Small Screen Godlessness

We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights.

Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our attention. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall asleep once during the three long evenings, which is quite a compliment to the series, inasmuch as I've recently emerged as an Olympic-quality narcolept, prone to drift into sleep at the drop of a hat, even during the second overtime.  

The three most interesting features of Godless, were, in my opinion, a) the landscape, which, although it surrounds us here in Boulder, seemed particularly crisp on the hi def screen, b) the horses, which are noble beasts of their own and were respectfully depicted and admired by the cinematographer, and c) the character of MaryAgnes, played by Merit Wever, who was rather wonderful in the role and who was rewarded with a lot of the good lines. MaryAgnes is a tough young rifle-toting crack shot who plays for the other team but who you want on your side.  

I thought that Jeff Daniels who played the ruthless mass-murderer Frank Griffin overacted like crazy. If overacting were a crime, he'd be looking at a good twenty years in solitary. Plus I know it's the fashion that your deranged evil charismatic lunatic villain always has to be a bible thumper yet let's face it -- that's a cliche that has served its purpose and earned its retirement. Speaking of religion -- even aside from the title of the series and the observation that it's a godless country there's a heck of a lot of religion stuff both good and bad but mostly bad in this series. For example, much of the backstory evokes the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- one of the most dreadful acts of domestic terrorism in our nation's history -- which was perpetrated by Mormons (although Mormon participation is underplayed and instead the atrocity is attributed to a nonspecific religious fanaticism). There are frequent scenes of worship and pilgrimage as well as intermittent focus on the new church that the villagers of LaBelle are constructing and specifically on the fashioning of a substantial cross that is photographed as though it were brimming with significance. Moreover, the inhabitants of LaBelle wait six and seven-eighths episodes for the new preacher to arrive but when he finally appears he has only the most banal platitudes to deliver. Frankly, I'm not positive whether the writer of Godless thought the preacher's speech was genuinely profound or whether he couldn't give him better words, or whether he was trying to assert that the pieties of faith offered no consolation whatever to the beat-up townspeople. It would have been better if the preacher had just sung an appropriate hymn and let the LaBelleians join in so we could at least end with good music.

Godless offers a number of revisionist moments where tradition is overturned, sometimes too obviously. An instance: LaBelle is inhabited almost entirely by women and it is the women who make the decisions and take the active roles; men are passive bystanders. Quite an inversion of the usual macho practice. And also: usually in the westerns when there's the threat of intermarriage between the races, it's the dark skin who gets killed. This time the commonplace was turned on its head with the gratuitous killing of he white guy -- but I think it was a bit too pointed to name him "Whitey." And the Indians: now that we have the word "orientalism" to describe the mythologizing and falsifying of people of the east, we could apply the word "Indianism" to the romanticizing of the Paiutes, who are depicted as repositories of supernatural mystery and tribal wisdom (which is I suppose is a step up from brutal savages, but still not respectful or true). "Indianism" leads to a grotesque failure in the story when the sheriff is accompanied by a lone brave on horseback who may or may not be a ghost and who should have thudded to the cutting-room floor (along with some faux-spiritual nonsense, totally out of place, about the sheriff losing and regaining his shadow). 

The series centered on the conflict between father and adopted son -- a borrowing straight out of Red River, but this time around there's not going to be a reconciliation. The allegorically-named son Roy Goode winds up shooting his father, up close, pistol to temple. Which I liked a lot, because, first of all, I was by this time totally inured to violence, and also because the evil addled father-villain-prophet repeatedly claimed the ability to foresee his own death and "this isn't it." "You're wrong," says Goode, pulling the trigger. So much for prophecy. Immediately afterwards, the hero rides alone into the sunset -- not into a metaphorical sunset but a very real and carefully photographed sunset -- even though if he had his wits about him he would take his more-than-a-match lady friend with him. It's a unsatisfying conclusion and one that is dictated, I think, more by the zillion Saturday afternoon Westerns of my childhood than by the internal logic of the film. She loves him. But Western heroes named Goode just plain love their horses more than hearth, home and sex and they are all secretly afraid that if they marry and allow themselves to become domesticated they'll wind up like poor uxorious powerless Van Heflin in Shane.

Greek and Latin Basketballese

Now that we've at last come to the NBA playoffs and are heading toward another Warriors-Cavaliers showdown, it's fitting that we reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range.

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. 

Curiously, roundball jargon exhibits a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, simply "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. It used to be that a guard played on the "outside" and a center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players. A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates." Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block an opponent's shot, they "reject" it. In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary signification, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice, but not so in the language of basketball. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate." "Rotate," derived from "rota," the Latin word for wheel, properly means "to turn on an axis, to spin." A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting would not be an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical upgrade for switch would be "revolve.") Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' floppy bloomers. Just last night I heard a TV announcer declare that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality." (I suppose that if he fell to the floor he would have lots of "horizontality"). Players don't score; they "convert," as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert." They don't push an opponent out of the way;  no, no, no, -- they create space (Latin: creant spatium). Although I am not a physicist, I suspect that space is something like matter, and can therefore neither be created nor destroyed. At least not created by power forwards, however potent they may be. How silly of me to object; neither the laws of physics nor the usual constraints of language are binding on punditor basketballensis. OK, game's on; let's see how well they play -- oops, sorry, how well they execute.   

My Kind of Amnesia

In Breaking Bad, Walter White disappears for a few days when he is kidnapped -- he escapes only by murdering his meth-addled drug dealer. In order to cover his tracks and account to his family for the missing days, he feigns amnesia. And he's persuasive, possibly because everyone has seen so many amnesia movies. He's so persuasive, in fact, that the doctors think that the amnesia might recur. In order to get himself released from the hospital, he confesses to the state shrink that he was only pretending. "There was no 'fugue state,'" he admits.  That's a kind of theatrical amnesia in which I can believe -- phony from start to finish.  

A New Machiavel

I tried the first three installments -- a netflix diskful of episodes  -- of House of Cards. I plan to watch a few more, but I'm deep into negative enthusiasm, not at all sure that I'm going to continue. Cards certainly grabs you, and it's startling and theatrical, but it's also far too cynical and depraved for my rose-colored tastes. I just don't believe in it. I know that it's all the rage to assume that politicians are horrid and power-obsessed -- but every one of them, all the time, without a moment of relaxation or redemption?  And so I'm skeptical of every character, every twist in the plot, every nasty turn of phrase. And because I'm skeptical, I just can't, as they say, "get into it." Or at least, not all the way in.  (Full disclosure: during episode three I fell into a 'deep rest,' sometimes denominated a minor nap.)

The character who dominates House of Cards is Kevin Spacey's Frank Underbelly -- I mean  Underwood --  who is fascinating but not credible. Or rather, he is not designed to be credible, because he regularly violates the fourth wall and converses intimately with viewers. Underwood is ruthless, implacable, ambitious, vengeful, depraved, vicious, malignant, and amusing. He turns his audience into his co-conspirators.

And where have we seen this curious concatenation of traits before?  Think back, fit audience though few, to your college class in the History of English Drama. There you encountered the vice and his crossbred friend, the machiavel,who were ubiquitous in medieval drama. Shakespeare brought this semi-supernatural hybrid to perfection two separate times -- once in the person of Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and then again as Iago in Othello.

Richard of Gloucester winks to his audience that he "can smile, and murder whiles I smile,/And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, /And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions."  Now if that isn't Frank Underhill to a T, first spotted killing a puppy and a few scenes later baldly and straightfacedly lying to his President. Richard can "set the murderous Machiavel to school" in order to gain a crown; our unFrank friend Frank once wanted to be secretary of state, but now he just wants revenge. Richard and Iago are capable not only of falsity but even of murder to get what they want.  Both of them kill their own wives. "I'll have her, but I wlll not keep her long," says Richard of Queen Anne. 

And therefore If I were to offer advice to Zoe Barnes, the reckless young reporter for the Washington Herald, I would suggest that she steer mighty clear of Frank Underwood. I would tell her to read Othello post-post-haste and take careful note of what happens to Desdemona's lady-in-waiting Emilia.  Hint: "Fie, your knife upon a woman."  

Zoe, please, please, get out of there while the going is good!

In Shakespeare's plays, Richard and Iago both overreach and come to grief. Richard is left to die on the battlefield and Iago is subjected to the rigors of Venetian justice ("Torture will ope his lips.") And that's what is supposed to happen to machiavels.

I'm curious as to what will happen to Frank Underhill. By rights he should be publicly humiliated and die a ghastly death. But inasmuch as we live in an exceedingly cynical age, we can guess that Frank will only die when Kevin Spacey is offered better work, or when ratings plunge, or when the series jumps its inherent shark.  

Seventeen Hours of Downton Abbey

I've now sometimes zoomed but sometimes plodded through seventeen hours of Downton Abbey. The series is lovely to look at but also at various times lugubrious, false, and shamelessly gimmicky -- but apparently I'm easily seduced. Let me confess: I fell for it, mostly, but always against my better judgment. Let's face it, the primitive parts of my brain simply overwhelmed my higher critical faculties. I laughed and cried, even when I knew that I was being cheated and manipulated. 

My favorite parts: Mr. Pamuk and his Nelson Rockefeller departure ("he came, and went)," which took me totally by surprise, as did Anna's and Lady Grantham's resourceful disposal of the corpse. Lady Sybil as a nurse, in part because she was doing useful work for the first time in her pampered life, and in part because she looked so fetching in the uniform. My favorite performers -- Maggie Smith, reprising her role in Gosford Park (a much superior great house fiction), and Mr Carson's eyebrows, perpetually raised in shock at modern shenanigans. 

The series is pure, undiluted soap. It is also, as they used to say in Variety, a "costumer." Query -- would I have spent seventeen hours watching a television program set in a mansion in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012 in which a soldier returns paralyzed from the wars and miraculously regains his mobility, where terrible culinary disasters occur because the cook almost goes blind, where granny shows her goodwill by losing a flower show, in which the family is traumatized when a daughter runs off with the chauffeur, or where a presumably innocent servant is sentenced to death for the murder of his wayward wife. I don't think so. I would have said, "cornball soap opera" and clicked back to the NBA. Or to the advertisements for zirconite jewelry. And yet I went on. And on. And continued on even after Downton Abbey not only jumped the shark but vaulted the great white whale, Moby Dick himself, when it introduced into the plot a bout of supposed amnesia. Amnesia! Is there anything soapier?

Or perhaps my reluctant fascination proves that the traditional formulas retain their power. Here's a formula of comedy: "artificial difficulties overcome." In Downton Abbey, Lady Mary and Matthew are destined for one another, and every viewer knows it, even as steaming piles of artificial difficulties are strewn and heaped in their path. Shakespeare could slice through the impediments in two hours traffic on the stage, but here it's seventeen anguished hours until heir and heiress finally figure it out. And here's another formula of comedy: always bring it to conclusion with a feast and a dance. They did, and, sucker that I am, I was elated. Even though I saw the scam coming a mile down the o-so-picturesque road  

Too Many Fouls, Too Many Timeouts

Our local basketball team is in the Big 12. We're far from the best team in the league, but the Big 12 is a major conference and as a consequence we have the opportunity to see some well-played, exciting games and also a goodly number of excellent young players. Great athletes appear regularly, mostly, I must confess, on opposing teams, but we've sent a number of guys on to the NBA, including Scott Wedman, Jay Humphries and Chauncey Billups. Last week the U of Texas brought in a freshman named Kevin Durant. Remember the name -- he's going to cut quite a swathe in the NBA. I'm a fan; I've gone to almost every home game for twenty-five years or more. At its best, basketball is the most beautiful of team sports. But I have some serious bones to pick about the way the colleges play the game nowadays. Here are two of these many bones. 

a) Time outs.  Every four minutes there's a "media timeout," so that the TV stations, if there are any, can intrude their commercials. Media timeouts have everything to do with money and nothing at all to do with the sport. Media timeouts interrupt the flow. Team A is on a roll; the coach of Team B doesn't have to use one of this allotted legal timeouts to change the dynamics of the situation -- he just waits for the scheduled pause. Four extra timeouts in a half, at a minimum of a minute and a half each, add twelve minutes to the length of the game. And because each coach can hoard his legal timeouts, he has them all available at crunch time, which means that the climax of the game is far too frequently interrupted and the final moments become more the coaches' responsibility than the players'. 

b)  Fouls.  Too many ticky-tack fouls are called. The result -- teams are regularly "in the bonus" nine or ten minutes into the half. And into the "double bonus" four or five minutes later. All fouls -- offensive fouls, fouls away from the ball, incidental contact -- become shooting fouls. The first ten minutes of each half often have a pleasing rhythm, a bit of pace, but the second ten minutes are always stop-and-go; rarely is there a full minute of uninterrupted action. Boring?  You bet. Contests routinely turn into prolonged exhibitions of foul-shooting. A gazelle of a game now hobbled and shackled.

Our own basketball stadium is at altitude -- a mile high, in fact. Our opponents are almost always flatlanders. We should have an advantage because we're better conditioned to play at 5280 feet. But because the games are so long and punctuated by so many timeouts and fouls, our advantage is lost. No twenty-year-old is going to run out of breath when a forty minute game takes two and a half hours to complete.

Solution: a) no more "media timeouts." Oh yeah, I know, the teams need the money. Well, maybe there would be some revenue from increased attendance if the games were quicker and shorter and more exciting. b) better-trained and better-instructed referees. No bonus shots. No free throws except for fouls in the act of shooting. And teams should always be able to "decline the penalty," as they do in football, and take the ball out of bounds. Then there would be no incentive to foul in order to stop the clock. Take back the game from the coaches and from the referees. Let the young men play.

Common sense changes, in my carefully considered view, which, if adopted, would make life richer and more satisfying and more aesthetic.