Fuck you LORD STANLEY, and fuck the cup you threw up in!

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

Bwhahahahahahaha

It’s far too cold to even contemplate the pub tonight in Sydney, and that post cheered me up no end.

We could always listen to the cricket…

Poor Redboss, he just doesn’t get it.

[sub]just wait till I get tuned up about the World Series[/sub]

Me too. However, you forgot one horribly overlooked group…people who can’t ignore threads that they’re not interested in, and then bitch up a storm about them. This place would suck eggs if everyone could just stick to the things they liked and they weren’t forced to read a thread which has contents beyond their interests, when those contents are clearly indicated by the thread title.

Oh, the humanity!

I don’t understand something, I don’t enjoy something, therefore it is a waste of time, and all who do understand and enjoy it are knuckle-dragging imbeciles.

:rolleyes:

On the other hand, I do agree with you about not having a clue what that thread is doing in the Pit.

Golly.

I’m not a bloke at all, and I’m all over that thread, hell, I’m all over hockey. I just watched poor Mr. Klemm get escorted off the ice… :frowning:

Sports inspire HIGH emotion, and I think that thread was thrown in the pit because Feynn (is that who started it) probably forsaw some horrible, pitish arguments involving naughty compound swear words.

My father has GLAUCOMA because his blood pressure was so high during the 1984 baseball playoffs. I couldn’t even WATCH the 1986 Superbowl in the same room with him because both of us were swearing and throwing things.

I watch sports as much as I can, live, on television, I listen to it on the radio… And redboss, I’ve really liked you and I think you’re very very smart, but if you are going to try to imply that sports doesn’t have an element of drama, you’re INSANE.

Every time you watch a sport, you have the opportunity to see history made, to see violence, to see triumph, to see grown men weep, or bleed or celebrate. You could see a no hitter, a hat trick, a punt return for a touchdown…a bench clearing brawl! When I watch the Olympics, I literally CRY with emotion.

I’m an actress and a writer AND a sports fan, because I think all of those things are intensely emotional and dramatic and VASTLY entertaining.

You may not like sports, but don’t run around trying to tell us what they’re all about.

jarbaby

Well, I dont know if you enjoy physical activity, but I sure as hell do. And hey, I dont appreciate Shakespeare beyond the fact that his books are kinda cool. I’d rather get up and jump around and play a game than read.

Does this make me stupid? A cretin? I take no pleasure in debate. Hey, man, I like to lift weights! I’m accomplishing nothing. It’s not like I’m doing work; they weights return to where they started when I’m done.

The thing is, the brain isn’t the only thing that can be developed. I like developing my strength, and my skill, and the abilities I have in my body. I like the skill involved, the work I put in to working on that skill. I like the way I feel about myself when I do well, and I like the determination I feel when I don’t. The literary works of the renaissance hold very little interest to me at all.

People get passionate about different things. It dosn’t bother me that you like things that I don’t, and it dosn’t bother me that you don’t like things that I do.

I particularly like this line:

Now, I can understand why you wouldn’t like all cap threads, or that you think that intelligence today is going down the drain. If you think this is something that should be pushed, fine, push it. Of course, all your art and creativity are very important and very valid.

But don’t ever try to tell me that the things you like are more valid than the things that I like, based only on the fact that you don’t like them. It just don’t work that way.

shrug

GO AVS!

Now FUCK GEOCITIES! That would be a rant I could get behind.

I hate sports for one very simple, irrefutable reason.
Sometimes it pre-empts the Simpsons.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like a good sports-related riot to make me feel smugly superior to the rest of humanity. So I guess there’s an upside.

I can’t claim to give a rat’s ass about hockey, one way or the other, but that was a thoroughly enjoyable OP. I salute you, sir.

HE SHOOTS! HE SCORES!
Gary Glitter music plays in background

Number me among the sports fans, too. And, since I like Shakespeare as well, I guess I’m a semi-literate athletic supporter. :wink:

Hamlet? Music? Art? Hey, don’t bother me with that shit–the Penguins are in the conference finals.

By the way, the Pittsburgh Steelers used to have a player named William Shakespeare.

What really gave me the irrits:

[ul] - The ambiguous thread title (well, it was to me, anyway)

  • The ALL-CAPS title

  • The fact that it was in the Pit[/ul]
    As for the anti-sport thing, well growing up down under means you’re in a society that values sport a tad too much.

Footballer’s groin injuries make the Front Page of our newspapers, and all through my school career it was clear that sporting prowess was more important than creativity or intelligence. Not being Good At Sport meant that you were a dweeb and a nerd (although those words weren’t used then. “Sissy” was) when I was a youngster.

And Australian sport is full of violence. The officials and media people who live off sport, enjoy and encourage it, but act shocked when it happens. Like Jerry Springer, concerned at the unruly nature of his guests.

So the hypocrisy and double standards and sheer ubiquity of SPORT can be a bit depressing when you are young and don’t want to be part of all that.

As I think about it, that indulgent outpouring of hatred was really the only time I’ve been able to express my dislike of people who worship sport. And damn, I enjoyed it!

The truth is of course, that I don’t want to spoil anyone else’s party. And yes, dear jarbabe I have watched and enjoyed sporting events. I followed the Olympics avidly and was very affected at some moments (did you see the women’s walking race, where the leading contestant was disqualified just outside the gates of the stadium?).

And of course it’s true that there’s not really a glut of sports threads going on here. I’m quite happy to step around them when I see 'em coming, just as I don’t feel the need to read or react to threads about computer problems and software.

The wide range of subjects and people I meet here are what keep me entranced by these Boards, and there are few people I meet here for whom I don’t have respect. Even if (dammit!) they don’t agree with me.

So thanks DRY and all the other athletic supporters for letting me vent.

Band-aids for your knuckles (thanks Milo) are available at the first-aid tent, along with lost children and oranges for sucking at half-time. Now, as soon as that TV camera is fixed the game will get going once more…

Redboss

Redboss said:

But if you vent through your athletic supporters, they will no longer be DRY.

<<<drumroll>>>

Psst, MysterEcks: I think you meant <<<rimshot>>> Drumroll is the one building up to something, like at the Oscars before they say who the winner is.

I mean what I say! Goddam editors!

Yeah, go avs. Whatever.

As a St Louisan, I was wondering how far the Blues would take it until they started to choke. Barring a miracle, let’s chalk this year up as the 22nd year in a row the Blues made the playoffs without yet winning the Cup.

That’s “goddamn” editors.

Well, all right then. If you’re just getting uppity about all caps and a badly worded title, no problem.

So, who wants some Beer? :smiley: