A Curious Little Blog

My eldest son, who is 10, has become extremely intereted in professional wrestling.  This is bad for so many reasons.  Even the good guys on wrestling make terrible role models for the most part, especially the constant bragging and trash talk.  Even worse is the false idea of violence that wrestling gives.  I'm not opposed to violence in principle, but I don't want my son to think that you can hit someone over the head repeatedly with a blunt object and he will still be able to get back up a minute later to keep fighting.  I fear that such a false impression might cause someone to do permanent damage under the impression that he is just doing normal wrestling stuff. I also enjoyed professional wrestling when I was 10.  It's understandable at that age.  But when the camera pans around the audience and shows normal-looking adults in the audience, it concerns me.  I'm not sure which is worse:  that they think the fighting is real, or that, th...

I listen to sports talk radio when I'm in the car, which means, here in Middle Georgia, that I often hear the Bill Shanks Show. He didn't bother me too much until recently, when he was criticizing Atlanta Braves' manager Bobby Cox for platooning players at a certain position. "Platooning" means playing one player against right-handed pitchers and the other against left-handed pitchers. Shanks hates the idea, explaining, "Hitting is hitting, and pitching is pitching." That's the kind of serious thinking that he gets paid for. Who can argue that hitting is not hitting? That sounds like the kind of paradox Zeno of Elea would come up with. Of course hitting is hitting. But right-handed hitting is not the same as left-handed hitting, at least not against the same pitcher. Baseball players usually hit significantly better against pitchers who throw from the opposite side of the plate, i.e., right-handed hitters bat better against left-handed pitche...