I always thought Key Arena was fine place to see basketball. Couldn't understand what the Sonics' problem was with the venue.
Well, anyway, I saw the Rat City Rollergirls at Key Arena last night. It was quite an entertaining show, with roller derby matches, drum and air guitar performances, interviews from the stands, decent stadium food, cheerleaders in drag, and one or two things I can't begin to explain.
One of these things I can't explain is the ritual pictured above, performed by the members of Grave Danger, one of the four roller derby teams.
When the cloaked and daggered ritualists set off, they left behind what the emcee described as a "gigantic, bleeding cupcake."
You gotta love an Olympic sport that moves as slowly as a game of chess but takes place on a super-sized bowling alley. Where the "stones" roll like solemn, celestial hockey pucks.
The dark side of curling? No, I doubt there could actually be a dark side to curling. There is something weird going on with scale, speed and time, however.
The video clip and pics here are from yesterday's Olympics bronze medal match in Vancouver, between Sweden and Switzerland.
MI6, her brother-in-law and I watched Bristol City and Watford play to a 2-2 draw in a Championship league match at Ashton Gate Stadium in Bristol yesterday.
It was brilliant. We sat near the "pitch" just opposite a segregated section (guarded by police) of Watford fans; so we were on the corner of the field where the visiting Watford players would goad on and acknowledge their supporters (and flip off the Bristol City fans where we were seated).
The game was physical. All kinds of tugging and pulling and interlocking of upper bodies seems to be allowed; only tripping seems to be called for fouls. MI6's bro-in-law remarked later that he was surprised at how aerial the game was, by which I think he means ball movement by headers and long kicks, rather than short passes on the turf (keeping to the ground may be characteristic of the Premier League?).
This Watford player looked to be hurt. But he wasn't really. He got up seconds later and resumed playing, under full steam. It seems to be a ritual: getting tackled, falling to the pitch, affecting immobility or else writhing, having the fellow with the medical kit trot out, not dropping the pretense until a brief but decent interval has passed; there's a code in all this I'm sure you have to learn from childhood to truly understand.
Though I don't know the rules of football the way I do those of baseball, I did intuitively recognize Ashton Gate Stadium as an "enclosed, green place," where, to further quote the late Commissioner of Major League Baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, "we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious."
