GrizGoBlue
I predicted that the home team would lose and I was right. Almost seems like they are jinxed but whaddo I know about team sports? Nevertheless, this morning was beautiful and pretty darn warm for this time of year. 49 degrees when I walked down to the farmers market at 0-skunk-30.
The GG then headed downtown on foot at 10 AM or so to see if it smelled like beer down there. Sometimes it does the morning of the Umich/OSU game. I don’t think it was quite as crazy as that this morning. The GG “blames” a crackdown on fraternities/sororities. I dunno if that’s true. I have never been all that crazy about the “Greek” element of college campuses. Maybe I am just an old grumpus about that, remembering the days when I didn’t exactly fit into the “In Crowd”. I cared then but I do not care now. Still, although I know that you cannot stereotype individual fraternity/sorority members, it has always seemed to me that a social system like that can lead to the perpetuation of a society where people are not valued equally. Call me a librat if you want. You never know what kind of life someone else has had or what kind of intelligence they can contribute. Or what burden they are carrying.
Tangentially, I just finished the book “Beartown”. I was a bit skeptical before I read it. I am not crazy about team sports and don’t care enough to try to understand the rules. I grew up in a “hockey town” of sorts but wasn’t ever connected to that sport or any other sport really, except for marching in the band at football games. I have always had a kind of an attitude toward football/hockey/whatever “stars”. I think that boys who are good at a sport are often placed upon a pedestal before they are old enough to even understand what kind of person they are and the adults they are surrounded by are not always effective at helping them sort that out, including how to appropriately deal with the young girls who idolize them. I didn’t idolize local sports stars as a teenage girl and so I never did quiiiiite understand this stuff.
Can I just say I LOVED this book? It presented all of the players and coaches and others as the complex people that they (and all of us) are. I had to suffer through a few bits of hockey rules that I didn’t totally understand but I did get the skating and slamming against the boards and the injuries and the beatings, etc. I was probably halfway through the book when I figured out that the setting was somewhere in Scandinavia (it couldda been the yooperland or northern Ontario) and that the author also wrote “A Man Called Ove”. I read Ove a while back and although I enjoyed that book, I LOVED “Beartown”.
Anyway… I walked downtown to meet the GG for lunch at the Griz and the pic shows what awaited me when I got there. We were a little earlier than usual, partly because the GG was downtown walking around all morning and definitely because FOOTBALL. The Griz was momentarily quiet when I got there (after a morning of brunch with lines out the doors) but it picked up quickly as the game began. The first quarter was loverly and but I gather things went downhill later on. I didn’t watch. We took the 31 back over to the west side and I read for the rest of the afternoon (except for the 2-second nap I took until my phone fell off the arm of the Green Couch). I’m back into dystopian stuff now — “Oryx and Crake”.
November 25th, 2017 at 7:46 pm
I do like that author, although it took me a long time to get into Ove. He was too much of a caricature. My brother and I were watching the game, and there was a chance, until OSU intercepted a pass from the Umich quarterback late in the game. My bro, who knows much more about football than I, wondered why UMich can never seem to get a very good quarterback. His pass was awful.