Daily Blog Thingie
Not much to say today, too much work on other things, and feeling stressed out.  Just sort of itchy and anxious over things, no concentration to sit still and write.  I am at least harvesting more quotes for the QotD, going over Perspectives from old Newsweeks.

Got this on a spam email today:

Note: this is not a spam email. This email was sent to you because your email was entered in on one of our websites requesting to be a registered subscriber. If you did not request this email, please click below: However, we urge you NOT to cancel. We spend a lot of time each day to give you a listing of good quality sites that you might want to explore.

There was a "reply to be removed" address at the end of it.  My immediate comment upon reading this was, "$5 it bounces".

It did.

Do animals with no visible pupils have no soul? Or just less of a soul than animals with visible pupils?

Cats have real eyes, but cooler, with their slit pupils.  ("Slit" is almost always a fun word.) Dogs do a little bit, though less so than cats or humans.  Dogs are generally just trying to get you off your guard so they can maul a two year old or hump your leg.  Owls have cool lenses in their eyes, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a soul.

Animals with black, shiny, 8-ball style orbs like horses and cows and Canadians are clearly without souls.  Don't let their larval stage fool you; baby seals for instance are very cute in their bashable white furry stage, but when they grow up they are big smelly noisy health hazards.  La Jolla cove here in San Diego is infested with the goddamn things, shitting everywhere and galumphing around and horking.  Rats appear to have uniformly black eyes, or at least dark brown, but they do have pupils; if you hold them up to the light and look closely you can see a dark little dot.  That doesn't make them any closer to soulful though.  They'll gladly eat entire chicken bones like a little furry pencil sharpener, and that's never a good sign.

I think I've made my point.

One sports comment, that will make no sense to most everyone.

Why does Baseball have such a higher level of contemplation and intelligence in the writing about it than other sports?  At least other spots in the US, there might be similar quality writing on sports I never read about.

Football, Olympics, Basketball, Hockey, auto-racing, etc.  All have lots of writing about them, news on who won and some analysis and such, but it's hardly ever worth reading.  Predictions of winners and game recaps sure, but the day to day articles are just lists of game events, or injury reports, or 

Baseball has such scholarly research papers, analysis, challenges to conventional wisdom, etc.  Most of it isn't yet in circulation in the big leagues, with the old boys network still running things in their clueless fashion, but anyway.  Authors like Rob Neyer, sites like Baseball Prospectus can be seen online, and each year there are dozens of books and reports on baseball, analysis of great teams, statistical devouring, rotisserie leagues, and more.

My question isn't why or what, I'm not willing to debate the fact of the writing, anyone who reads widely about sports will agree with my observation.  My question is why Baseball writing is so much better?  I hardly care about baseball or watch it, but I do enjoy reading about it by scholarly guys with stats and analysis.  Normal media articles about who won aren't any more worth reading than they are about Basketball or Football or Stock Car Racing.

I think it's just that Baseball is so totally an individual sport, with virtually no team aspects to it that it's possible to analyze it so much more thoroughly.  Everything in the game except for defense is possible to break down to incredible lengths, since it's a pitcher vs. a hitter.  Football and basketball and every other sport are so much more chaotic, with numerous people going in every direction, and players are so dependent upon others.  Greatest QB in NFL history will suck if he's got no receivers and poor blocking.  But Babe Ruth would still be great on a bad team.

Or perhaps it's the culture of the writers.  If some of the baseball writers applied their analysis to football would we see more comprehensive analysis of who was really good, instead of which running backs were really good, instead of which just happened to get a lot of carries behind a good offensive line?  If there is writing like that going on now, I've not seen it.

In case you're wondering, that animals - eyes - soul thing was total sarcasm.  I'm not superstitious, I don't believe in souls in animals or humans or fireplugs.  I just found the topic amusing after it occurred to me out of the blue.

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