Unhappy; defo not a frown as I know it here in Australia.
This is how I frown. If the brow(s) get involved, then it’s no longer a frown. It’s despair, or pain, or bad vision. Not a frown.
Which one is a frown?
By my lights, none of those. The last one is closest, frowning in anger perhaps (rather than say puzzlement or concentration).
The first one. YMMV
The sports league with the highest average attendance per game is the NFL (American Football). In 2nd place on this list is the IPL (Indian cricket league). The Bundesliga is 3rd.
However, in terms of total season attendance, MLB (American baseball) dominates. The 2nd placed team on this list has only a bit more than 1/3 the total season attendance of MLB. And that league is… the Nippon Professional Baseball League.
Prince Humperdinck is married to Monty Hall’s daughter.
For some reason, I found myself reading about Cannikin just now and learned a thing that dumfounded me.
I have a strong memory of being in the back yard on a cold autumn evening feeling intense anxiety. There had been talk of a major nuclear test that day, warning of possible earthquakes and or tsunamis, the latter not being a huge issue for us, but the former, yeah, could be a real problem.
Less than three thousand miles away, they set off a thermonuclear warhead several thousand feet under a cold, windswept remote island. It tipped the scale at a tad under 5Mt, the biggest underground test ever.
What I did not realize until now is that the warhead was designed to go on an ABM. One can hardly envision the damage several thousand big boys worth of bomb could do to a city. Probably millions of immediate deaths. But this was not an offensive weapon. It would not be used on a city.
So what the hell else is 5Mt good for? They intended to use it on incoming missiles. It just had to get close enough to a fast-moving ICBM that it could detonate its ridiculous warhead to take it out in its huge blast radius.
That strategy seems excessive. And as we now realize, folly, as a blast that large would almost certainly NEMP out a large fraction of the country.
I mean, can’t we all just get along?
Today I learned about a type of deer called the muntjac deer, which has an odd configuration of scent glands around its eyes. The video showing them is slightly unnerving.
Are motorsports excluded? The average attendance at recent Formula One races looks to be somewhere around 300,000, quite a bit more than any NFL stadium:
https://f1destinations.com/formula-1-attendance-exceeds-5-million-in-2022/
One thing to keep in mind is that those F1 figures are for the whole weekend. There are practice sessions and support races on the Friday and Saturday before each Sunday race. According to the stats given in that article for race day attendance at a few of the races, the actual number of bodies on Sunday seems to range between 1/3 to 1/2 of the weekend total. And a fair number of the Sunday ticket holders probably also were there for parts of Friday and Saturday, and are being counted more than once in the weekend number.
I’ve never been to an F1 race but I’ve gone to lots of IndyCar races, where the pattern was typically the opposite: Sunday was 60-75% of the weekend. (At least it seemed that way to me back when in the 1990s and 2000s, when I was actively involved.)
I suspect that the high prices for F1 race-day tickets are probably the reason. A lot of people can only afford to get a taste of the series by coming on Friday or Saturday.
Good question. I guess the article I read didn’t specify, and I’m having a hard time finding it. I guess they’re called motorsports, but I don’t look at them as actual sports. There are engines involved, and they are not all equal. I agree that skill and strategy are play a big part, but not as much as the “equipment”.
It could be RBF, but that’s just me. I have always looked to the spot between the eyes for a real frown, and that is without knowing the definition.
Friday is sometimes a free day to encourage new people to come see the races, often in a new market for F1. We workers have been known to hand out small bits to kids to encourage their interest. Earplugs, stickers, etc.
Some people just choose to attend Friday and Saturday and then watch the race from home for an obvious reason once they have attended the race. Can you imagine what it is like to clear a place of 300,000 spectators when the event is over? That’s why many series (though not F1) have a more regional race following the big event. It allows for the traffic to exit more slowly without raising tempers. Hey, we might as well stay, because we won’t get anywhere in traffic. Or, we can watch the race from home and skip the traffic altogether. Especially if the weather is not behaving properly.
Boy would I disagree. Equipment is important, perhaps crucial, but the level of athleticism is off the charts. Motocross folks vie for the highest level of fitness of any sport. F1 drivers are dealing with 5g forces and 130 degree temps. Even NASCAR drivers have to be top-notch athletes. Check out Romaniacs hard enduro to see if you think it’s the “equipment.”
Expanding on the argument that top level race car drivers are elite athletes, here is a post I’ve made a couple times before.
Driving a top level racing car (e.g. F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and some sports car series) is arguably one of, if not the, most challenging forms of athletic competition in the world, taking into account not only the physical, but also the mental aspects.
The physical difficulty is far greater than is generally understood by people who’ve never driven or ridden in a racecar. There are the G forces and other strength requirements Fridgemagnet spoke of, and the fact that, unlike almost any other sport, except marathon running and long-distance bicycle racing, a racecar driver must keep that effort up for two hours or more with virtually no breaks. (BTW: pit stops are not relaxation breaks: most drivers’ heart rates are higher in pit stops than in any other part of the race except the start and the finish. Besides, they only last between 2 and 20 seconds.)
So from a physical standpoint, a driver needs greater endurance than a player of almost any ball sport, none of which (IIRC) requires more than 20 minutes of continuous play.
Furthermore, a car moving at 220+ MPH (350 KPH) is travelling a the length of a football field every second. To make a turn at precisely the right point requires faster reactions than are needed in any other sport.
Oh, and the cockpits of these cars can easily get to 130-140 degrees F. For two hours.
On the mental side, drivers need to be engineers, capable of determining from feelings, sounds, sights, even smells, what the car is doing, and which of the hundreds of possible engine, transmission, suspension, or tire adjustments might be needed to make it perform even better. They need to communicate these to the team so they can be ready to execute them in the next pit stop.
They need to know strategy not just against one other team, as ball sport players do, but against a dozen or more teams, represented by 20 or 30 other drivers. They have to know the abilities of every other driver, who is safe to run side-by-side with, who is unpredictable, whose teams’ equipment may be more likely to break, etc., etc.
They need to maintain laser-sharp mental focus for the entire length of the race. A tiny slip of concentration can put them into a wall.
And here’s the bottom line: unlike virtually any other sport, if racecar drivers don’t do everything right, they could DIE. Fortunately, safety systems are constantly improving, and fatalities are now much rarer than in the bad old days, but they still happen.
So I think race drivers are certainly among the best athletes in the world, and pro level racing is among the most challenging athletic competitions going.
It would be different if you were driving a strange highway. You know where that turn is going to be, so you are acting more on something like proprioception than reacting to something (e.g., a player catching a ball). Granted there is a traffic dynamic to consider, but that next turn is embedded in your memory – if it is not, you should be preparing better.
The British comedy duo Flanders and Swan wrote a song in the early 1960s about a sloth (which hangs upside down in the trees). It included the verse:
The world is such a cheerful place
When viewed from upside down
It makes a rise of every fall
A smile of every frown
So the idea of a frown being a turning down of the mouth was being used in the UK back then.
Agree with you there. I used to ride dirt bikes a lot. Very nearly died once.
A motocross race is like running five miles in deep sand or something ridiculous like that. No cite, something i read long, long ago.
They should have named themselves Grandpa’s Hatchet.