Yes, I Do Tease Mack about Boxing not Being a Sport…

…and yes, I believe wrestling and ultimate fighting to both be legitimate sports.  Who says a girl has to be consistent?

Anyway, Martin Kennedy picked me up and took me over to the Father Ryan-MBA meet and it was great!  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed wrestling. 

Two brothers coach the teams, but their teams’ approaches were very different.  Father Ryan’s wrestlers seemed to me to be a lot more strategic in their thinking–they’d come out early in the match just full on like some kind of force of nature, which tended to overwhelm the MBA kids.  But then, the Father Ryan kids would keep checking over with their coach, who was very involved in the matches, while the MBA kids were clearly intensely focused on what was happening on the mat.

A couple of the MBA wrestlers figured out that, if they could just stick the onslaught out, the Father Ryan kids would wear themselves out.

And there was one kid on the MBA team who had such a good sense of his own body and how it worked that there was pretty much nothing his opponent could do that he wasn’t able to roll or twist or leverage into his advantage.  You would have thought, by the way he was able to keep the other kid so easily under control that he outweighed him by 20 pounds, but of course he didn’t.

But, in the end, Father Ryan just thumped MBA.  They just seemed to have the ability to concentrate on the match at both a visceral level and an objective level in a way that most of the MBA kids didn’t seem to have.

It was a bit like when you’re watching a guitarist who is so good that they don’t really have to think about what they’re doing, even when they’re improvising, you know their fingers are going to go exactly where they should go.  That’s what a lot of these Father Ryan kids were like.  They knew what they were doing and could think ahead, where as it looked like the MBA kids knew what they were doing, but were right there in the moment.

I really enjoyed it.  Good fun.

Thanks for thinking of me, Martin!

This Explains So Much

This week, after Rep. Rob Briley made a heartfelt apology for his well-publicized drunken behavior, Rep. Gary Moore, the straightforward Joelton firefighter, made the excellent point that everyone battles secret demons. But the way he made it was hilarious:

“Some of us are alcoholics,” Moore said. “Some of us are thieves. Some of us are adulterers. Truth of the matter is, we reflect society.”

Rep. Charles Curtiss of Sparta said Moore’s comments might have been a bit much. But he made it even worse: “I don’t think there are any criminals in here. But we’re a cross section of society. There are people in there that drink, people in there that beat their wives, people in there unfaithful to their wives. No question in my mind about that.”

—Gail Kerr

(h/t Ben “We’re Paying for this Shit?” Cunningham)

I don’t know who needs to go down there and lecture some folks on the fact that women’s bodies are not their personal playgrounds, but someone, for sure.

Lessons I Learn So You Don’t Have To

If you have a tendency to get a little down when the Butcher is out of town and thus spend your Friday night (which is usually spent hanging out with him) watching television alone and feeding your dog pigs’ ears while you tell yourself it’s fine to eat one million Reese’s peanut butter cups as long as you only eat them five at a time and get up and walk to the fridge every time you need to get your handful, do not then lay there in bed in the morning because you have no reason to get up.

You do have a reason to get up, remember?

Pigs’ ears.

Dogs love ’em, but they go right through Mrs. Wigglebottom like butter.

Luckily, we made it outside just in time, but not without having to endure looks of complete disdain from the cats.

Now, I know, cats have a tendency to give you looks of complete disdain all the time, but trust me, this one was a look of “You know, when that other mostly bald ape is here, shit like this never happens.  Now, where’s our food?”