Pursuant to this post from last week, Santino sends along the following to posts from Nation writer Dave Zirin. I’ll let Santino do the talking:

Zirin on June 14: Conservatives should love soccer but don’t, because they’re racist.

Zirin on June 23: It’s a shame conservatives love soccer so much right now because it promotes ugly American cultural hegemony.

You can’t make this up. What you also can’t make up is this bit from Zirin’s post yesterday:

I was watching the game in the offices at National Public Radio in Washington, DC, waiting to go on the air to discuss the outcome. Remember, this is NPR: the station that defines calm, even-tempered talk. Let’s just say that almost every cubicle and office let out an extemporaneous yelp. Yes, NPR went wild.

They don’t shout or cheer at NPR. They “yelp.”


Also precious, but not quite as fantastic is Zirin proclaiming:

The United States is not my favorite team by a long stretch. I’m an Argentina guy, myself. 

But of course.

If you’re able, go find some Wimbledon coverage. Jon Isner is all knotted up at 43-43 against Nicolas Mahut in the fifth.

You read that right.

Match time approaching 8 hours. Isner has 85 aces and is 73 of 112 net points. Serving at 73 percent.

Insanity.

Update: The decision to suspend play was exactly right. You don’t want a match–particularly a historical epic like this one–to be decided by low-light. (Which is a problem not just for the players, but for the linesmen.) Mahut shouldn’t have had to ask for it, though. I would have hoped that the tournament referee would have been thinking through the decision since about 50-50.

The stats on the match are really impressive. Isner served at 74 percent for the affair so far. Both players are something like +170 on winners/unforced errors. Only 2 breaks of serve total (none since the second set) and only 16 total break chances. That’s pretty clean tennis for a couple of guys who must be about to drop for exhaustion.

My default setting is to root for Isner. But after watching Mahut give up his body on those two ridiculous dives–who dives on the baseline?–his fighting spirit and reckless disregard for injury were mighty impressive. Isner was clearly trying to manage his service games and coast where he could. Mahut was fighting for every point. God bless the both of them.

It will be terrible to see someone lose tomorrow. I’m reminded of something the great Dikembe Mutombo said during Game 7 of the 1994 Finals. During half-time, Mutombo was asked about Ewing and Olajuwon and Deke said (I’m quoting from memory, so this may not be quite right), “It it like seeing two great men in the desert who come upon a glass of water and you wish so badly that they both could drink.”

WRM has a typically incisive post on Brazil’s retreat from its Iranian indiscretion. However, he includes this strange note:

[t]he light and casual way in which the world’s pundits (many of them utterly ignorant about Brazil’s long history of diplomatic disappointment) concluded from a single, ill-advised diplomatic initiative that Brazil had decisively changed its place in the world is evidence of just how little reflection and experience goes into world politics today.

Second, we should think about why so much commentary (and, unfortunately, serious policy making) is so frequently seduced by quick and silly analysis. 

I note with sadness the passing of Manute Bol, one of the great characters of the NBA. More importantly, he was the sport’s most courageous humanitarian. His life serves as something of an indictment to many current players.

I saw him play once as a kid. The Bullets were visiting the Sixers at the Spectrum and I was there way early. Before the pre-game shoot around, Bol came out to shoot on his. I watched as he bombed away from the 3-point line for several minutes. I don’t think he made a single one. Sometimes his shots would miss everything. I think he clanged one off the top of the backboard.

Despite being 7’7″, Bol wanted to be a 3-point threat. So much so that during the 1988-1989 season he took 91 attempts from behind the arc. Just think about that for a minute.

What’s really amazing is that he finished his career shooting .210 from 3-point range. (In his final season he was a gaudy 3 for 5.) .210 doesn’t sound like much, but I doubt I could ever get that accurate, while being defended, from the old NBA distance. Like everything else in his life, it was a testament to a man who believed–really and truly, not simply as a sentiment–that anything is possible.

Caught a large chunk of Top Gun in Glorious High-Definition over the weekend, and a few thoughts occur to me:

* You could argue that the movie would not have succeeded without the brilliant second-unit photography which opens the film. It’s gorgeous, amazing stuff and it captures the world of naval aviators better than anything which follows it. In fact, without it I don’t know that the rest of the movie really works. I wonder if Tony Scott did it himself or let one of the assistant DP’s do it, as is usual.

* If Top Gun was made today, it would be heavily reliant on CGI effects and it would be lousy. Nothing reminds you of the limits of CGI like seeing real planes flying. Sure, you don’t get the sexy camerawork, you don’t get missile-eye POV shots, you don’t get long, arial tracking shots that swing around one plane and then zoom to another.

What you do get, however, is infinitely more powerful.

* It is nearly inconceivable that the movie never got a sequel. A sequel would have been terrible, of course. But if Top Gun was released today, no studio head alive would be able to resist trying to turn it into a franchise.

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We’ll all be sad when we don’t have Tom Cruise to kick around as a leading man anymore. He’s not a great actor, but he’s always better than he has to be. And unlike most of his contemporaries, he takes being a movie star seriously: He never, ever mails it in. And even when he’s bad, he adds value.

* Also adding value: Michael Ironside. In every damn scene he’s in. Nothing against Tom Skerritt, but I’ll bet that Ironside also read for the Viper role. And if it had been up to me, I would have switched those parts.

AICN has the transcript. Some interesting stuff. Most tantalizing insight:

He doesn’t have email or cell phone. “It gives me a little more time to think.”

Makes you love him all the more. Also, he has reservations about 3D at the technical level:

“On a technical level I think it’s fascinating. On an experiential level I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating. The truth of it is, when you watch a film you’re looking at 16 foot-lamberts. When you watch it through any of the conventional 3-D processes you get about 3 foot-lamberts. It’s a massive difference.

You’re not that aware of it because once you’re in that world your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters to get up to the proper brightness you’re now sticking polarized filters into this thing and we’re going back worse than we were.”

– Also from a shooting standpoint, Nolan has even more issues with 3-D: “It requires shooting on video, if you mask it to 2.40 you’re only getting 800 or 900 lines of resolution. You have to use a beam-splitter.”

– Nolan doesn’t use use zoom lenses, only primes, because the image quality isn’t sharp enough on the long end of a zoom, so the idea of shooting a whole film through a beam-splitter doesn’t appeal to him. “There are enormous compromises, in other words.”

Arrested Development is back in the saddle, thanks to Orbit.

It’s not selling out if it’s funny.

And you think I take Star Wars too seriously? Galley Friend T.J. sends notice that a team of French psychiatrists have released a study concluding that Darth Vader was mentally ill.

their report, which was recently published in the medical journal Psychiatry Research, concludes that young Anakin Skywalker exhibited behavior that is consistent with borderline personality disorder, which may in turn explain his decision to embrace the dark side and become Emperor Palpatine’s apprentice. 

American shrinks are pushing back, though:

“Anakin shows borderline traits, but these do not persist into his adulthood,” UCLA psychiatrist Dr. H. Eric Bender said. “It’s important to note that any person, when put in highly stressful situations, may display certain traits, such as impulsivity, which are associated with borderline personality disorder.” The paper, he said, failed to prove that Skywalker had “enduring and maladaptive patterns” over the course of his entire lifetime, which would be necessary to adopt a formal diagnosis. 

Dr. Sue Varma, assistant professor of psychiatry at the NYU Langone School of Medicine, agrees.

“Teenagers are impulsive and can practice risky behavior,” she said. “They are trying to find out who they are and in playing around with identities, they show characteristics similar to borderline. But this is not enough for a diagnosis. Most teens come out the other side by their 20s.”