It’s never going to go away is it?
It’s always there, right on the front page, subtly dominating your thoughts as you scroll through the Pit, looking for the electronic fight club meet, hoping for a good barney. A bit of wallop and biffo before you log out, just to finish today’s session off nicely.
Perhaps this time Techchick will lose it for good, and announce that she’s leaving the SDMB, or maybe handy will carefully summarise an earlier poster’s position and rebut it point by point with links and cites, or a dutch moderator brusquely apologise to a sixteen year-old curious about bongs.
And you see it screaming at you again. You know you looked into once, you didn’t enjoy it, but you can’t remember what it was about. The British Royal family? And so many people have posted to it. Three pages!
So…let’s just click and … taking a while… ah yes, here it comes
OH GOD !!! NOW I REMEMBER - IT’S ABOUT SPORT!!!
Close it! close it! - look just close the damn thing or I’ll fucking put a brick through your - ah, thank you.
How could you have forgotten? It’s a SPORT THREAD!! A sport thread where they felt they had to SHOUT while they set it up.
It’s a lot of blokes being blokey, having li’l jabs of testosterone humour, sharing the glories of the unarmed combat, the noble testing of youth, in a repetitive clash after clash after clash.
Look sports guys, do you not get it? Sport doesn’t go anywhere!.
The hockey game you feel so strongly about today is over tomorrow and then you’re all excited about the next game, and when that’s over there’ll be another and on and on it goes. There’s never any conclusion. No one comes out of it any better.
You may be sad you lost or glad you won, but on the whole you’re neither touched nor altered by the whole thing. You’ve learned nothing - just killed time.
I mean I know Shakespeare comes out the same way every time, so at least sport has the advantage of an element of suspense.
But each Hamlet is different from the one before. One actor might show us a tortured poet, another a solid man of the people. And those differences cast light on the rest of the play, and there is plenty to think about and ponder.
So too, music is the same piece each time in one way, but multifariously different in many other ways. There is a richness of response, a complexity that might take years to be aware of, with an increasing sense of pleasure in the growing understanding.
Art and creativity engender thought and emotion, and, of course argument, as we try to remember, compare, sort, best each other and sometimes come to a consensus.
But sport?
[ul]Our team is the best.
So you won this time, but we’re playing you again in October and we’ll beat the shit out of you then.
Go (choose one) Tigers!/ Eels!/ Wombats!/ Wolves!/ Pixies!/ Elves!/ Goblins![/ul]
I wouldn’t normally post a thread attacking a Whole Other Thread, and a damn popular one to boot, without reading the Whole Other Thread first. But I couldn’t get past the OP and a few moments of skimming. It’s boring. I know - you love it and it’s fun, and who’s it hurting after all?
But I come here for the intense and stuff born out of pain and anger. That is, for the totally innocent men on 'bikes being given tickets by five police officers at once, for the stuck-up straights giving gay men a hard time in their workplace, for the sudden inexplicable bursts of murderous rage from women who usually post about kitties and babies, for the high school students falsely accused of plotting another columbine by their families, for the mean and crazy old ladies with hundreds of cats, for the antipodeans irritable at having the outcome of crass TV gameshows revealed… That’s the Pit I like.
But LORD STANLEY is feeble and sporty and those capital letters are DRIVING REDBOSS CRAZY!
Guys, unless you’re all insulting each other with nasty wounding remarks somewhere back in page two, what are you doing here in the PIT???!!!
Couldn’t you move the thread? Rename it in lower case? Stop flaunting your hearty enjoyment of it all?
Or just lose interest in sport?
Well of course when I actually write it out in black and white…
Silent. Thinks for a bit.
Well I still hate you all!
I hope all your teams lose, and your favourite seat is taken by a group of really HUGE (insert most feared racial group here) men who are all for the other side.
I wish that the lights for the night game may blow, the beer run flat, the ice melt, the grass die, the advertising expand to cover the entire field and that the cheer leaders all get pregnant.
I pray that every player on every team gets his own achilles tendon injury and asthma, and that due to the subsequent shortage of able-bodied players the whole game is acted out by young muscly men who limp about the field at about 2 miles an hour with walking sticks, wheezing, bickering, complaining, stopping for little rests, losing their enthusiasm, and irritably slipping away home, one by one.
I fervently wait for the timekeepers to lose their watches, the scorekeepers to lose their count, the young impressionable boys to lose their interest, and the players to lose their hair, their teeth and their figures.
Let Lord Stanley renounce his blasted title, pick up his saucer and go home. Let the thread unwind, let the lock be locked, and the front page be given over once again to bitchy pay-back, nit-picking acrimony and and general contumely.
Give me back the Pit of my younger days…
[sub]well, March actually[/sub]
Lord Redboss
