Vendredi at Volume 5

One of the real gems of my satellite TV package so far has been Trace TV, the “urban channel”. I’m not sure how I survived without it for so long. I haven’t spent much time trying to figure out how global they are or from where they broadcast (some mysteries are better left unexplored) but the fact that you can’t have Trace on for one hour without seeing this video promoting condom use makes me think it must be based in (or at least targeted to) francophone Africa. The title means “don’t even think about it”.

On Flopping

I noticed (via Isaac) that the NBA is going to start fining players for flopping. This is, of course, good news at least insofar as it represents a recognition of the problem on the part of the league but I’m pretty doubtful that it will have much of an effect.

But this reminds me of something I often think about when watching soccer. Although I’m far from being the most knowledgeable or loyal soccer fan, I have a healthy appreciation for the game and I enjoy watching it—especially the World Cup. Like a lot of Americans who only watch soccer on occasion and who didn’t grow up in a soccer-obsessed culture, I sometimes find it hard not to be put off by the degree to which flopping and pretending to be severely injured are just “part of the game”. Of course some individuals, teams, leagues and countries are guiltier of this than others (I’m looking at you, Italy) but as a rule I think it’s safe to say that flopping plays a bigger role in soccer than in any other major sport. Additionally, flopping has potentially greater consequences in soccer because a single goal resulting from a flop in the penalty area has a much greater effect on a match than, say, two erroneously awarded free throws has on a basketball game.

Not to put too much emphasis on the cultural significance of this, but sometimes this seems as plausible an explanation as any for why the US so stubbornly refuses to become a soccer loving country. It seems like a large part of being a celebrated athlete in the US is about being (or seeming) tough: playing through injury, never missing a game, jumping back up on your feet after getting knocked down. Most American sports fans find something undignified about stopping the game to roll around on the ground and cry out in pain for several minutes, only to return immediately to the game without so much as a limp, as happens routinely in soccer. Sure, you see some flopping in the NBA and some exaggeration in the NFL (those receivers are pretty good at drawing pass interference penalties), but nothing like the shrieking in pain, carried off the field on a stretcher, “I’ll never walk again”, routine that you see in pretty much every soccer match.

Rasheed Wallace nicely captures the sentiments of many an American sports fan:

"All that bull[expletive]-ass calls they had out there. With Mike [Callahan] and Kenny [Mauer] -- you've all seen that [expletive]," Wallace said. "You saw them calls. The cats are flopping all over the floor and they're calling that [expletive]. That [expletive] ain't basketball out there. It's all [expletive] entertainment. You all should know that [expletive]. It's all [expletive] entertainment."

That also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to read this book for about two years now.

Cry Me a River

I'm getting a bit tired of all these stories about "pain at the pump" because unfortunate Americans are now paying $4 for a gallon of gas. Yes, it sucks when prices shoot up. And it's true that poorer people are harder hit by these kind of price spikes because gas makes up a larger proportion of their expenses than for rich folks. It's also true that I paid $6.08 per gallon this weekend and I live in one of the poorest countries in the world. It's not as if Americans haven't known about the volatility of oil prices for decades. It's just that we've chosen to do nothing about it. Worse, actually, we've chosen to spend a lot of public money on things that ensured that Americans become increasingly dependent on oil and, therefore, increasingly vulnerable to these kinds of price fluctuations. Rather than calling oil company executives to Capital Hill to excoriate them for making too much money maybe we should, you know, stop giving them tax breaks, subsidies, and a strong hand in setting the country's energy policy.

Vendredi at Volume 5

It's been a while since I posted anything for VV5. This isn't much of a video, but the song is nice. Another Malian! Enjoy

Update

For loyal readers of the Rest who prefer to get their bloggy information via Google Reader or some other aggregator, this site now features an RSS feed.

Dust and Rain

Last night it poured in Niamey. Aside from a few scattered drops here and there, this is the first rain since September and ought to mark the end of the dry season.

I was out running errands in town at about 6:30 and I saw a towering red cloud of dust bearing down on the city. People had told me that these big early season rains are often preceded by dust storms, but it was a much more dramatic event than I had expected. This giant, churning red wall just kept getting closer and closer, then within the space of about 30 seconds it went from full daylight to being dark enough that you couldn't drive without headlights (I was driving at the time). The wind whipped up and the dim light that remained was eerily red.

The rain came maybe 30 minutes later and didn't waste any time in exposing the places where my roof leaks, the biggest leak being, of course, directly above my TV, cable box, and DVD player.

My description here really doesn't do justice to how cool this dust storm was. I'll try and get some pictures next time it happens.

Reason to Hate CNN International #1: It's Everywhere and Unavoidable

I'm kind of a junkie for news and current events. Considering I've lived overseas in non-English speaking countries for roughly five of the past ten years, this hasn't always been an easy hobby to keep up with. My thirst for international English language news while living abroad has often forced me under the oppressive thumb of the hegemon, CNN International. After years of suffering under this abomination of a news channel I've decided to use this space to fight back by listing all the reasons I can think of to hate CNN International.

For reasons I'll elaborate on in future posts, it truly is a terrible, terrible news source to be forced to depend on. But if English is your most comfortable language, you're living or traveling outside of the English speaking world, and you're the kind of person who can't go five minutes without wondering if there's been a coup d'état, cyclone, or terrorist attack somewhere, there is simply no way to avoid it. If you're a college student living abroad for the first time and CNN International is being pumped into your bedroom while the lurid details of the president's affair with his intern are being broadcast to the world, are you going to change the channel to watch somebody babble incomprehensibly in Swedish? If you're living in a small African village relying almost exclusively on a shortwave radio and the BBC World Service to tell you what's happening in the world and your employer puts you up for a few days in a hotel with a TV and only one English channel, would you have the willpower to avert your attention?

Well, me neither. And when I finally broke down last week and got a satellite TV connection in my house, it was entirely predictable that I'd be drawn back to my old nemesis. Did Obama pick up any more superdelegates? Is the Burmese junta going to allow foreigners to deliver aid to the cyclone victims? What's happening in the NBA playoffs? Only one way to find out...

Guilty as Charged

Sometimes you stumble across an internet pearl of wisdom that seems to have been written especially for you. This letter to a young procrastinator makes me feel like the author was looking at an x-ray of my soul.

I'm here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I'm lazy. Extremely lazy.

Don't judge, pal—you're lazy, too. It's why you procrastinate. When there's a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don't want to do it. So you don't. Until you have to.

It's just that simple, my slothful friend. And guess what else? The trick to overcoming procrastination is even simpler. Ready? Here it is:

Get off your fat badonk and stop procrastinating. Right now. No, not after the Gilmore Girls rerun ends. Now now.

Will you do this? No. You will not. You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.

Anyway, back to scouring the internet for videos of famous people exploding into fits of anger in front of the camera. But really, tomorrow I'm going to sit down, focus, and really get some things done!

May 12th

I just wanted to write a quick post to say happy birthday to this blog's most loyal reader. Love you, mom!

National Popular Vote

Did you know that four years from now we might actually be preparing for a US presidential election in which the winner will be chosen by the national popular vote rather than the Electoral College? Hard to believe but true. The campaign to make this happen is known as the National Popular Vote and it is already well on its way to achieving its goal.

The Electoral College system creates two distinct problems. First, and most obviously, it allows for the possibility that the candidate receiving fewer overall votes can still technically win an election. This has happened 4 times in American history, in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000. The second and perhaps more pernicious problem with the Electoral College system is that it creates a situation in which the only votes that matter, from the perspective of candidates, are those in the few “battleground states” that could go either way. Candidates have little reason to campaign—and people little reason to vote—outside of those states.

The originators of the NPV effort found a way to effectively do away with the Electoral College without the nearly impossible task of changing the constitution. Simply put, the NPV campaign involves convincing states, one state at a time, to change their laws so that they cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote rather than the winner of the particular state.

Here’s a slightly longer way of putting it:

The Constitution gives states the power to decide how to allocate the electors who cast the vote for the president. The National Popular Vote is a campaign to get each state to pass a law entering into a binding agreement to award all their electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. This provision would only go into effect when states whose electoral votes total a majority of the Electoral College—currently, 270 votes—sign the compact. When that happens, whichever candidate wins the popular vote will automatically garner a majority of the electoral votes. While this arrangement is rather complex, it has the advantage of being fair and utterly nonpartisan—and could take effect as soon as enough large states agree to participate. If that happens, it would force public officials to represent a much broader segment of the populace out of electoral self-interest.

That’s from a good piece in the Washington Monthly that explains in greater detail the problems with the current system and this new effort to “dump the Electoral College without changing the constitution”. The most consistent and eloquent advocate of NPV that I know of is Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, whose posts on the subject I always enjoy and recommend. Four states representing 50 electoral votes have already passed laws binding them to the NPV plan.