Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think it was objectively way weirder: "I know the answer but I'm not going to tell you"? Huh?
You have to buy the book. It's like he has opinions that are for subscribers only. What a leader!
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
That woman doesn't look fat to me. Well-covered; ample; Rubenesque.....
She does weigh 263 pounds.
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Can journalism survive the internet?, in reply to Peter Calder,
Does no one else feel even slightly dispirited that there are two responses to this - one from the originator - and, so far, 87 responses to the question of whether one should refer to the area shaved in preparation for a vasectomy as the scrotum or the balls?
No. If for no other reason that this area of public address always gets few comments because of how the forum operates. It's the blog posts that are followed by a discussion.
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Field Theory: An important message for…, in reply to Amy Galvani,
Well if you disagree you can easily test this by not watching the last ten minutes of any game. See if you still enjoy watching competition if you can never know the outcome :-)
Yamis never said you only watch for the quality, he said there isn't only one reason. If you think there is, and it's uncertainty about the result, it wouldn't quite explain how come I've switched off so many different sporting events in the past when it transpired they were just too boring, even if the result was still in doubt. Nor indeed would it explain why people watch some sports and not others.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Message - women must not age naturally.
I was talking about this the other day with a friend who has just been to Italy and was commenting on the general fabulousness of middle-aged women there. When it's surgically enhanced (the case of old Fellini actress Sandra Milo is perhaps the one that springs more readily to mind) you pay for it some time in your sixties, when you go from looking an attractive forty to a Madam Tussaud exhibit, a-la Cher. It seems to me that these days the demand on women is two-fold: do whatever you need to do to look impossibly young for as long as possible, and then age naturally. Which is of course impossible. The alternative, for women whose looks dictate their career, is to drop out at ages when they don't conform. So you go from forty and employed to fifty and unemployed and then you start getting parts as a beautiful old woman. Or you still get parts as an attractive forty year old at fifty but then can't be employed as an old woman because you don't look old, you look like an alien pod person.
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(Which maybe takes us away from the point of Hadyn's post, which might have been (?) a comment on the exclusion of the world cup winning women's rugby team from Halberg consideration perhaps? On that front it might be worth noting that since 2001 women have won the supreme award six times out of ten.)
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Field Theory: An important message for…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I will go occasionally if I am reminded there is a game on. You're arguing women's sport should be restricted to people actively seeking it, because, what, men's teams deserve to attract casual sports fans and women's teams don't?
It seems a weak argument to me. To have casual fans at the fringes you need to have hard core fans somewhere too. One thing I used to do when I lived next to the Basin Reserve was going to see state championship cricket occasionally. The games were advertised on radio sport, with regular updates and spots of commentary. Even so, players regularly outnumbered the crowd and sometimes my son and I would be the only people on the stands. Oh, and attendance was free.
If a sport can't attract an audience, any audience, without promotion, no amount of promotion amongst the casual fans will make it attractive.
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Field Theory: An important message for…, in reply to Amy Galvani,
People don’t watch sports for the quality (i guess you mean skill) of participants. They watch it to see who wins.
Actually, I'm going to have to partially disagree there. I went to early Phoenix games with every intention of cheering and enjoying but in the end the quality of the games was just brutal compared to what I had been accustomed to. Parochialism and gambling and cheering for a family member are all factors but there is in fact an aesthetic dimension in sport.
And so you can’t say the lack or support for women’s teams is because of a difference in quality.
So why is it? Is it really because the games are not advertised? I can readily find out where my son is playing every saturday, how hard can it be to find out when the white ferns are playing?
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Field Theory: An important message for…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
It's always so nice to be reminded of what I know. Otherwise I might start having thoughts. Like, 'Bullshit'.
When the women's version of a sport is played by amateurs and the men's played by professionals yes, the gulf is pretty obvious. Also, duh! But when they're either both played by amateurs or both played by professionals, I'm buggered if I can tell the difference in quality at the top level (ie the level that gets televised). In some cases - notably tennis - I'd rather watch the women's games. And of course a man in the top 100 might beat a woman in the top 10, that's hardly what constitutes "quality". Marlene Ottey is a manigifcent sprinter, yet for physiological reasons a lot of male plodders could beat her on the track. I'd always much rather watch her run however.
(And no, it's got nothing to do with the fact that she's the most gorgeous woman ever to have lived. Kind of shot myself in the foot with that example, didn't I?)
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Field Theory: An important message for…, in reply to Paul Williams,
There's exceptions to this rule though, Netball being the obvious, but I agree with the thesis. I saw a number of the Women's Cricket World Cup games in Australia in 2009 which was a fantastic tournament (particularly the game where beat Australia) but wasn't televised (it did get covered by ABC though).
The difference between the two events though that at the cricket world cup - which was actually televised here - there was nobody in attendance. Netball is popular amongst fans and gets televised. So does tennis. So does volleyball in Italy, which is the equivalent of netball here I guess. So do lots of women's events in athletics and the olympics. So does women soccer in some nations, but not others. There are some sports, and they seem to be mostly team sports, where the women's version might have tons of practitioners but doesn't get a following - soccer back home is an example. It's a little chicken and egg, insofar as less media attention can translate into lower attendance figures, but I'm not entirely sure it's such a strict correlation.