Eccentric Flower talk:200907/Tennis and Tone
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:200907/Tennis and Tone
You want to know how boring I think watching tennis on TV is? I'll watch basketball before I'll watch tennis (and will gladly watch golf before either, since I find it strangely fascinating).
Also, my brain is done for the day. If you aren't going to do anything else, come home and lie around with me and the cats.
-- 21:20, 2 July 2009 (BST)
For some reason I always thought Hammarskjöld was the first secretary-general, but it turns out he was the second. It's probably because Trygve Lie was not so much an overachiever.
I am not saying that watching tennis on television is always exciting. But it is more consistently exciting than basketball, which I feel really needs a few rule changes.
-- 21:59, 2 July 2009 (BST)
What do you make of the high-pitched screams and grunts with every smash of the tennis ball? Martina never did that, nor did Billy Jean or even Chris Evert. What's up with all that... racket? (Ooo, sorry.)
I haven't seen televised Hockey in a while, but I recall a year that they somehow followed the puck electronically, much the same way they now insert the line of scrimmage in football. I was insulted by it, because it implied that I couldn't keep track, otherwise. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so critical, except that it seemed to me to be more like a video game and less like a live sports event. I don't even know if they still do that.
I'm using a Windows laptop. You got any idea how I could access some additional diacritical marks? I'd like to insert the occasional umlaut or accent aigu, par example, but have no clue how to do it.
-- 01:03, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Joy:
I love watching tennis on tv. Not sure why, because I pretty much hate any other telecast sport. (Well, except for Olympic sports, and there I go crazy and love the swimming, which I admit is most likely totally boring to most people.)
People have been lamenting the dominance of the power players for ages - since Stefi Graf and Monica Seles. Every time you listen to John McEnroe all he goes on about (okay, not all) is how no one goes to the net anymore or volleys. Martina Hingis kind of brought that all back briefly, and I haven't been keeping up with it enough the past couple of years to know about the style of the younger players so maybe there are some non-winning more subtle players. But yeah, the Williams sisters are mostly about power. Then again, when they are playing at the top of their game they are amazing.
BTW, you hardly ever comment back on comments that I make, so I know that I personally tend to comment less since there isn't a conversation about to happen. So, the disappointment in lack of comments/talking/whatever can go both ways.
-- 02:34, 3 July 2009 (BST)
The only time I have ever enjoyed watching tennis and golf on my TV screen has been in the movie "Pat and Mike," where Katharine Hepburn gets to play golf against Babe Didrikson Zaharias. (And I had to look up both Babe's last names, sadly.)
-- 03:54, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Bunny, I was reading an article somewhere about exactly that controversy - the grunters vs. the non-grunters, and how the non-grunters say the grunters are just doing it to put them off their game, and how the grunters mostly say, "no, we just always do that, and besides, tough luck, psych warfare is permitted, so suck it up."
I think that was about the gist.
Joy: Touche. In my defense, I don't always have anything to say back!
-- 04:01, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Iain:
OK, so, apparently, in defiance of logic, golf still maintains separate tournaments for professionals and amateurs, even though it's on the same prize system as tennis and therefore has the same issues.
...What on earth are you talking about? Amateur golf and tennis players (yes, there IS amateur tennis) get nothing more than a trophy or ribbon and the knowledge of a job well or poorly done. Professional golf and tennis players get serious gelt, scaled to how well they do in an event. Amateurs can play in open/professional events, but they're not allowed to keep any money they might otherwise earn.
-- 05:20, 3 July 2009 (BST)
BTW, I asked my guru about the symbols. He says it differs depending upon the site and how it's set up. If I wrote ampersand (I'd use the symbol, of course)u um semi-colon, would that show up as a u with an umlaut in your comments? Since I don't have to use hypertext to show a link, I didn't know how this notation would post. (I've been spoiled by being able to preview my work in LJ before actually posting it.) ü Woo hoo! It worked!
-- 05:48, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Actually, there's a way to leave a bare & in the text—it's “&”.
-- 06:22, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Joy:
Oh, I know Col, which is why I don't take it personally. (Or try not to. Mostly I just wish we lived closer so that sometimes we could, you know, go get dinner and talk in person.) But sometimes your readers/friends don't have anything to say back either!
-- 12:51, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Amateurs can play in open/professional events, but they're not allowed to keep any money they might otherwise earn.
OK, now, see, that's even worse. That makes it even muddier. What possible incentive would an amateur have to play in an allegedly "open" tournament if they would have to give back the money? And assuming this amateur won, couldn't they take the prize and say, "There, I just took money for winning, I'm a pro now?"
Or, put another way:
Since the line of pro vs amateur in sports seems to not be related to playing ability in any way, but merely whether you take money for playing, the open tennis system made sense to me because it seemed to be saying, "Look, if you're good enough, you can win the cash prizes and we don't especially care about any useless distinction of professional vs amateur - just how well you play tennis. Play well, win money, the end." Now you're telling me that's not the case.
So if I'm an amateur tennis player and I'm pretty damned good and I think, "Well, to hell with this business of turning down pro prizes, I want the cash," what do I have to do to become a pro? Just start calling myself a pro? Idiocy.
-- 16:05, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Re special characters:
Mediawiki is set up to use an exceptionally full character set (I believe it recognizes complete Unicode, so if there's a Unicode entity for it, it will at least TRY to show it, although in cases like Chinese chars, your browser may not have the font for it.)
When I paste in items from, say, The Economist or the NYT, which use non-straight quotes and long-dash characters, I remove them and replace them with simple quotes and hyphens, strictly as a matter of habit after years of removing the pests from formats that couldn't handle it. But on occasions when I've missed one, it has shown up fine.
Similarly, by long habit I type special foreign characters as their escaped entities. That is, when I set out to type a u-umlaut my fingers pretty much automatically type "ü" at this point. But others have pasted üs straight in from wherever they got them - the special character itself, not the entity - and they've generally worked.
Remember, everything can be edited. If you try something and get it wrong, you can either edit it yourself, or I'll see it and correct it silently for you. And if you really mess up a page, just shout and I'll revert from prior version. No worries.
-- 16:15, 3 July 2009 (BST)
Mel:
I just want to say that if you want me to comment, you're going to have to talk about something other than tennis, 'cause that's one subject I have very little to say about.
-- 08:23, 4 July 2009 (BST)
Platypus:
There was a Dag Hammarskjöld Room at one of the student unions at UW Madison. As a result, I can spell it, but I had only the vaguest idea who he was. Actually, I'm a bit surprised at my lack of curiosity, but there was no Wikipedia in those days.
Irrelevant comment is irrelevant, but I'm bored at work. It's not raining, but the three coworkers still present WON'T SHUT UP.
-- 21:01, 2 July 2009 (BST)