Lap dancing is something you pay extra for in a strip club. The young lady will come grind her butt in your lap, presumably for your enjoyment.
I don’t imagine it’s painful, but I would find it kind of icky to do that to a stranger.
Promotion/relegation is definitely an issue, but even if we did implement it (and the idea appeals to me, personally), I suspect it wouldn’t work. I don’t think any U.S. sports fans would tolerate the notion that their “major league” club could suddenly stop being major league. Major league status for clubs and fans is considered a permanent thing, and making that depend on continued good performace would be seen as interfering with the storied history of a club and its fans.
For example, the Chicago Cubs is a very popular club and is financially quite secure. However, it’s pretty much known for not getting anywhere near serious contention in the last 90 years. No one would really like to see the Cubs demoted to the minor leagues just because they don’t succeed on the field. Their lack of success and the doggedness of Cubs fans is an essential part of the story of major league baseball.
An opposite, but perhaps more important factor is that by and large sports fans would become apoplectic at the thought that their clubs could actually be demoted. Being “minor league” is a permanent status of shame. Any club that got relegated would suffer such a serious blow to its income sources that it would probably never be able to work its way back up to the major leagues.
You might notice some mockery of the Denver Broncos, Minnesota Vikings, and Buffalo Bills. Historically, these are by and large three very successful clubs. However, over a period of years they made it to the Superbowl (the National Football League championship) and lost several times. Okay, making it to the Superbowl is a sign of a really good team. However, these clubs have been roundly mocked and have semi-permanent reputations as “losers” (although Denver has managed to wipe much of that reputation clean with a subsequent Superbowl victory).
My point, I guess, is that this reflects a certain level of intolerance among American sports fans of “loserism.” Yeah, the Cubs can build a base through years of futility, but if you go to the extent of relegating them to the minors, I think it would be all over for them.
Just to clarify, by “scam” I meant that it’s a way for an employer to pretend that they’re offering you retirement benefits when they’re just offering you a savings account that comes with the risk of being depleted by market forces.
A common thing for Americans who had at least one black parent between about 1870 and 1950 was to look at their skin color and ask themselves, “Can I pass as white?” They then had the option to stay in the same community and continue to live as a black (and almost certainly suffer racial prejudice) or to move to a new community where no one knows them and to tell everyone that they are white. You would have to have a cover story about how your parents both died and you have no siblings so no one wonders why they can’t meet your relatives.
This is why not only does the average person in the U.S. who considers themself to be black actually has something like 25% to 30% non-African ancestry (mostly European ancestry, but also some Native American and some Asian ancestry), but the average person in the U.S. who considers themself to be white actually has something like 2% ancestry. (This doesn’t mean that the most white Americans have some black ancestry. It’s more like about a tenth of the American population has about 20% black ancestry.)
I fully agree that you couldn’t implement it in American sports, precisely because of the way they have developed - and you couldn’t take it away from European systems, either, or you would face a similar revolt from supporters. European sports (and supporters) have evolved with the system being absolutely integral (with the exception of cricket), while American ones have developed without it, so two very different cultures of support and allegiance have been the result.
I’m not a big football (soccer) fan – but I’ve grown up with the non-US promotion/relegation system and there being no penalty for a team that fails miserably throughout the season does seem tame. The apparently random selection of clubs that American football teams play also always surprises me – they obviously play the other teams in their Division but I have never understood how the other match-ups are decided.
As others have said it all seems to stem from the way the professional sports leagues came into being and this has led to a different balance of power between the clubs and the leagues. Outside the USA the clubs have control and the leagues – even the English Premiership – only have the power the clubs grant them whereas in the States most of the power seems to reside in the centre and the set up looks after the organisation as a whole. You can’t imagine Man U, Arsenal, or Chelsea agreeing to Watford receiving the best young player of the year just so they have a better chance next year (though maybe this would be a good thing 
) . Maybe an American doper can explain how this came about?
Of course this leads to the other big difference – the symbiotic relationship with college sport. Do all American professional sportsmen come through this route? I sort of understand how this works in the NFL (we get several matches each week on Sky Sports :dubious: ) but is it the same in baseball, basketball, ice hockey etc.? Do players ever come in from lesser clubs in the minor leagues or directly from school? I’m guessing signing players from Africa is not a big issue!
In the UK if you are asked for directions to someplace that’s within walking distance we normally would say “Oh it’s about 500 yards down that way”
Americans give directions by saying “X number of blocks”
How far is a block?
It’s supposed to be 1/10 of a mile. It may be more. With a direction like that, you have to count the blocks.
It depends, but a block is divided by streets. So, if you have to cross a street, you’re passing from one block and going to another. You’ll generally see this only in downtown areas.
Oops, I missed this one.
They play each team in their division twice, plus all the teams in one division in the other conference, plus six intraconference teams that are closely matched in terms of the previous year’s record.
In baseball and hockey, where there are farm teams, players may come directly from high school. It used to be the common route, but now colleges are recruiting more baseball players. Baseball used to have Armory Leagues, where one town, or district in a large city, would play others, and professional scouts used to come to these games. The kids were in high school, or just graduated. Of course high schools have been annexed into the faux minor league system as well, now. There are still some basketball players who skip college, but this is always controversial. I personally think they would be better served by playing three to five years in the NBA, then taking the money and going to school without the distraction of big-time sports.
So what you’re saying is that there is no hard and fast rule governing the exact distance of a block
Not even within a single city. In Manhattan, for example, the blocks are about 50 meters each if you’re traveling north or south and about 250 meters each if you’re traveling east or west.
Football and basketball derive the vast majority of their players from the college ranks (although NBA clubs are increasingly looking to European and South American clubs for players.) The NFL’s rules actually require that any player applying for the entry draft must be at least three years removed from high school graduation, so they have to go to college.
Baseball and hockey use the “farm system.” Once a player is drafted and signed by the major league club, he is assigned to one of the club’s minor league affiliates, and has the opportunity to play his way through the system until he makes the major league roster.
Typically, high school players will start in A-league baseball, while college players may start in AA or even AAA. International players are not subject to the draft.
The penalties are indirect - they don’t get to sell playoff tickets, their own resular-season ticket sales may be down (or at least command a lower price), and it’s no fun for anyone involved.
For the most part, yes - generally, US pro teams were formed to be franchises of a specific league, founded as essentially a single business unit, in recognition that teams need each other to survive, and that each market has to have a share of success if the league is to thrive, and the league must thrive if its members are to. There certainly have been shortsighted owners who’ve failed to recognize that, though.
Organized leagues seem to have followed the creation of UK footie clubs, though - *that * I have trouble with. Who did they play without leagues? Who would even try to start a club without opponents ready-made?
Almost all football players do, most basketball players (but the best for only a year or two, or even straight out of high school), and some baseball and hockey players. Others work their way up through the minor leagues, each of which has teams under contract to or even owned by a major league team, whose primary purpose is to develop players and only secondarily to sell entertainment. Players are chosen out of at least high school (internationals excepted) by a draft system in all pro sports, but in baseball and hockey players are normally taken for their potential and have to prove themselves in the minors first.
There are a few Africans in the NBA (basketball is a world sport), and even some Nigerians in the NFL who grew up in the US.
The distinction as to whether the players in major professional sport leagues come mostly from college or minor league sports teams depends basically on how the sport developed. Football and basketball developed as college and high school sports in the early twentieth century before there were any significant professional leagues in those sports. It was natural then when the professional leagues started to recruit the players from the college teams. This was codified later by insisting that a player had to be a certain number of years out of high school before he could join the major levels in those sports. The rules about this have been loosened recently. There are some minor leagues where rarely a new player goes to improve his skills before going on to the major levels in football and basketball. There are also some foreign players recruited from their own country’s teams in basketball (and perhaps in football).
Baseball developed as a professional sport in the late nineteenth century, and it was never considered important to play baseball in college. There was always a system of minor leagues in baseball. Baseball players now arrive at the major level by coming either through the minor leagues or from college teams. Baseball does a lot of recruiting of foreign players. Ten percent of the players in Major League Baseball are from the Dominican Republic. Indeed, it’s clear that in all the major professional team sports, we’re now increasingly outsourcing the development of our players.
Hockey didn’t develop in the U.S. at all. The National Hockey League is a Canadian league that began adding American teams until the point that it is now more American in the location of its teams than Canadian (although the players are still mostly Canadian). Hockey players mostly come up through the minor leagues, although they sometimes come from college teams.
Nope. And worse, sometimes you have T-intersections so that the number of blocks from point A to point B may differ depending on which side of the street you’re looking at.
So why not just say “X number of yards down thataway”
All this block business is confusing
Blocks actually work very well for directions if the streets are laid out in in a rectangular fashion with the streets always being the same distance apart going north-south and east-west. That’s the case in most cities in the U.S. If you didn’t use blocks, you would have to estimate the distance, and that’s hard for some people. Using blocks is the same as saying, “Count the stop signs” or “Count the traffic lights.” Yes, there are places where it doesn’t work well, but most of the time it does work well to give the directions using blocks.
Blocks are a great way to give directions when your city looks like this. A number of New World cities benefit from a certain amount of pre-planning: there are, as you can see in Manhattan, numbered avenues that run northwest-southeast; and there are named streets that run northeast-southwest. If you’re traveling from 40th to 85th simple math suffices: it’s 45 blocks. My own hometown’s layout is pretty grid-like too, but so is a large part of Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami, Florida, Houston, Chicago, and Kansas City, Missouri. I picked these cities at random, and they’re all designed along the same grid-like pattern.
Blocks as a measurement of distance are not so useful when your city looks like this or this, or this,, or this, or this, because the streets aren’t evenly spaced, or parallel for any appreciable distance, or numbered in any particular scheme.
Note that Americans don’t often give directions in blocks in residential neighborhoods, because a lot of residential areas, at least in my experience in this part of the country, are designed like this, with sort of an Olde Worlde Feele[sup]trademarke[/sup] for some bizarre reason. It could be that designers think residents like those windy, random roads better than they like tract housing in places like this. (It could also be that grid-like streets are easier to divide up and sell for commercial purposes, and winding roads provide various lot sizes that target a number of different price points.)
And all bets are off in the Frankensteinian layout of Boston.
The history of the league system in England is directly tied to the history of the game itself. The Football Association was formed out of necessity to establish a single set of rules rather than the numerous codes which existed at the time. And following that, and the introduction of professional employment of footballers, a regular set of fixtures was clearly needed rather than ad hoc arrangements between various clubs.
And from Wikipedia: