‘Murica?

Because I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe Bobby Charette can help.

(The website is okay, but the promo video on the landing page is insanely NSFW.)

Update: Imagine a real-life Kenny Powers. Only lower-class. And drunk. And possibly on meth. With strippers. As part of a circus side-show.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a trailer as visually stunning as the teaser for Mad Max: Fury Road. I’m open to nominations.

Possible contenders: Inception, Matrix: Reloaded

Pursuant to our discussion last week about the Reason proposal to do away with separate sports for men and women, Galley Friend L.B. left a comment that’s worth posting on its own:

A very silly Reason article (but I repeat myself) — thanks for carving it up, JVL. Dumb article aside, if you haven’t seen the video of Kacy Catanzaro on “American Ninja Warrior,” you should check it out. It’s an impressive display of athleticism — her gymnastic training (she was a Div. 1 NCAA gymnast) no doubt helped her discover how to use her momentum and agility to make up for her lack of raw strength and tiny frame:
http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2014/7/15/5903209/american-ninja-warrior-gymnast-video-obstacle-course-kacy-catanzaro

On the larger point — you’re right about the inevitable result of “gender-merging” almost any sport. I started wondering if my own obsession, golf, might be an exception — i.e., whether the very best women golfers might at least have a shot to be competitive in mens’ tournaments. So I did a little research…

First: Physical differences b/w men and women golfers *do* make a big difference. Some 2010 data here from the PGA and LPGA show that the male pros have an average clubspeed about 15-18 mph faster than the women (depending on the club); as a result, the men average a 270 yard carry with the driver, while the women average just 220:
http://thesandtrap.com/t/32498/trackman-data-pga-tour-vs-lpga

Now, any serious golfer who wouldn’t sell his soul for 50 extra yards off the tee is a liar. Still, at the highest levels of the game, the old saw “Drive for Show, Putt for Dough” seems to be true, and you don’t need any strength at all to be a top one-percentile putter. So couldn’t a top female golfer — one with great (for a woman) distance and accuracy off the tee and a great short game — hang with the men?

It turns out we already have an answer, and it’s not from that brat Michelle Wie’s ridiculous appearances in third-rate men’s tournaments. Twice in history (that I’m aware of), the acknowledged greatest female golfer in the world has played in a mens’ tournament. In 2003, Annika Sorenstam, almost certainly the greatest female golfer ever, got a sponsor’s exemption to play at the Colonial Tournament in Ft. Worth. It’s not a major, but it’s one of the better PGA tournaments with a solid field — most of the greats (Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Mickelson, etc.) have played and won there. Sorenstam was 32 and in the prime of her career at that point, and she wasn’t trying to make some feminist statement; it was a one-time thing for her — she was so utterly dominant on the ladies’ tour that she accepted the invitation just to see how she’d stack up against the men.

The result? She shot 4-over par for the first two rounds and missed the cut, finishing tied for 96th, better than only 11 men in a total field of 111. (Her putting stroke abandoned her on the back 9 in the second round; a more typical performance on the greens probably would’ve gotten her past the cut.) Later that year she played against Fred Couples, Phil Mickelson, and Mark O’Meara in the Skins Game and finished an impressive second, but that’s a made-for-TV exhibition and not the same as a real tournament.

In January 1945, Babe Didrickson Zaharias, one of the greatest all-around female athletes and best ever female golfers, played in three mens’ tournaments. She made the weekend cut at all three, missed the Saturday cut in the first, and in the latter two she finished tied for … 33rd and 42nd.

So: If you merged the PGA and LPGA tours … well, arguably the two best women ever to swing a club would probably make some cuts — and almost certainly finish in the bottom quarter of the money list/rankings. And that’s the two greatest women golfers EVER, not your average lady pro or even top-50-ever lady golfers. As a fan of the sport, I’m glad Annika Sorenstam had the LPGA tour — where she could show what a brilliant player and competitor she was, rather than being a curiosity finishing in the middle-to-rear of the pack every week on the PGA tour.

The Atlantic’s latest clickbait piece is an essay asking “Why Are There So Few Ramadan Marketing Campaigns?”

And then, in the third graph, the author answers her own ridiculous question:

In the U.S., the growth of the Muslim population is projected to climb from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030.

So the reason Ramadan doesn’t get marketed to is because because only 0.8 percent of the American population is Muslim and of that tiny sliver we have no idea how many American Muslims actually observe Ramadan in a meaningful way. There are more than twice as many Mormons. Heck, there are more Buddhist in America, too. Islam in America is an incredibly small niche.

On the other hand, you can see why Muslims might be a little put out by the lack of mainstream discussion of Ramadan. After all, the percentage of Americans who self-identify as gay is only twice as large as the percentage who are Muslim, yet the United States has generally acted as though radically changing the 5,000-year-old institution of marriage to accommodate homosexual unions was the Most Important Issue Ever.

In that context, you might think a commercial about Ramadan during Big Bang Theory is perfectly natural.

It’s a Comic-Con giant Avengers: Age of Ultron poster.

And it is awesome.

(Santino deadpanned to me: “Black Widow is punching so hard right now.”)

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

The new trailer for Interstellar was just shown at Comic-Con, and the general impression seems to be that it feels a bit like Contact.

Why is it that people don’t revere Contact? For me, it’s one of the two great under appreciated sci-fi movies of the last 20 years.

I suppose part of the reason it gets overlooked is that to really appreciate it, it has to be on a giant screen with big sound. It suffers from the home video experience as much as movies such as Gravity and Avatar do.

Update: My other candidate is The Fifth Element which, in addition to being a weird, great sci-fi movie–it’s Brazil, but with a heart!–is also probably the Frenchiest movie ever made. The vaguely Moorish thugs are troublesome immigrants, but they’re foiled by government bureaucracy; the real villain is from Texas; even in space, in the distant future, opera is still the highest form of art; oddball American comedians can be misunderstood geniuses; all beautiful women should be as nearly naked as possible, at all times; the Catholic Church is a pleasant cultural relic; and the most powerful force in the universe is amour. This is Luc Besson’s worldview in The Fifth Element.

I don’t know that Godard or Truffaut ever made a statement du Francais more comprehensive than that.

Reason has a trollish essay up arguing that we should stop segregating sports by gender. Like a lot of libertarianism itself, it’s a superficially interesting argument that would lead to practically terrible outcomes with no actual benefits, to anyone.

The piece is hung entirely around the success of a single female contestant on the show American Ninja Warrior, which leads to the following conclusion:

If a woman can play basketball or baseball well enough for a men’s team, then it’s hard to think of even marginally credible arguments for not letting her. Likewise, it’s hard to think of a good reason for separating male and female golf, or track and field, and so on.

The only plausible explanation for keeping women out of men’s sports is that it also keeps men out of women’s sports. If you let women compete against men, then you have to let men compete against women, and gender physiology makes it likely that a lot of women’s teams could soon become JV men’s teams instead. Men who couldn’t quite make the cut in the NBA, for instance, could try out in the WNBA — and some of them would elbow women aside.

Here’s what would happen if you “desegregated”–which in all practicality would mean merging–gender differentiated sports: The number of women playing those sports would approach zero at every single level in which the sports were desegregated. About a dozen years ago I looked into this question for a piece which isn’t online today. Some highlights:

Take the 2000 Olympics in Sidney. Marion Jones went into the games as the most ballyhooed female sprinter in history, and she made good on her promise, winning gold in both the 100 and 200 meter events. But how do Jones’s times stack up against high school boys from, say, New Jersey?

In the 100 meters at last year’s state championship meet, Jones would have finished fourth (At the Olympics Jones won in 10.75 seconds; the boy who was state champ in New Jersey last year ran a 10.30. In the sprint world, a 0.45 second difference is like winning by three touchdowns.). She would have fared no better in the 200 meters–her Olympic time would have put her, again, fourth in the state.

What we didn’t know back then was that Marion Jones was juiced up and she still couldn’t hang with a bunch of male high school sprinters.

Tennis gives you pretty much the same result. Back in 1998, the Williams sisters decided to play a full set against their hitting partner, a guy named Karsten Braasch, who was ranked #203 in the world. It was 6-2 against Venus, 6-1 against Serena.

Which means that if you merged Olympic track and field, there wouldn’t be a single woman at the Games. If you merged the tennis tours, it’s unlikely that there would be a single woman playing professional tennis. Ditto for the NBA and WNBA. Ditto for soccer. Ditto for pretty much anything except, possibly, motorsports, billiards, American Ninja Warrior, and a few other obscure activities where technology sufficiently mediates physical gender differences. And this would happen at every level where the sports were merged: Semi-pro, college, varsity, and JV. It would mean the end of women in anything other than recreational sports.

Now, maybe some people might view this as a positive good, A=A and all that. But while women’s sports don’t especially interest me, I like that idea that female jocks get a pretty good chance to experience athletic life, except at the professional level. And I think we’d be worse off, in general, if we destroyed those opportunities in the pursuit of some crazy notions about gender equality and the meritocracy.