hey, sports fans

I have just been reading a "Sports Night" story in which some reference is made to the fact that Dan is among those (as is Casey, don't get me wrong) who understand the infield fly rule. This has reminded me of the bit in Bend It Like Beckham where Jules and her dad take great pains to help her mum understand the offside rule. And in both cases, what I want to know is this:

What's not to understand?

Maybe it's because my sport is curling (on which subject, by the way, I've seen a lot of cheap shots in the Sports Night fic in recent days - boo, is what I say about that), although we don't have particularly inscrutable rules either, but when I hear people talk about the incomprehensibility of the infield fly rule (or the offside rule), it makes me wonder if I do in fact understand them, because they're apparently so difficult to understand? That the thing that makes complete sense to me must be wrong?

Yeah, no. It turns out I'm fine on both of them. (I suppose I can be sympathetic to confusion on the infield fly rule because it's not black and white but depends on the umpire's judgment; see also icing, below.) I'm so okay with the offside rule, in fact, that I got really confused recently at a hockey game when offside was called; I turned to my friend and said but there were like nine guys between him and the goal!, which, as those of you who are hockey fans will know, is - in hockey - irrelevant. (Also impossible. Well, illegal. "Like nine" is a figure of speech I've heard myself use lately. It means approximately the same thing as Torah means when it says "forty".)

But speaking of hockey, though, it took me a while to understand when icing is called and when it's waved off, and I'm still not entirely sure I've got it. (The wikipedia article is only marginally helpful; it seems to say that (a) an opponent must touch the puck for icing to be called, but (b) icing will be waved off if the linesman judges the opponent could have touched the puck but chose not to - these appear contradictory to me. Or at least mutually exclusive. Under (a), if the puck crosses two red lines and nobody touches it, there's no icing call, which would make (b) irrelevant, wouldn't it? Hockey fans are welcome to help me out here. (Just with icing, though. My friend explained hockey's offside rule and I understood it in about .7 seconds.))

hey, sports fans (part 2)

I'll tell you something, though. I learned the infield fly rule from my brother - and it wasn't that I didn't understand it before, it was just that I'd heard of it and didn't know what it said. So we're sitting at dinner, and I said to my brother, "So what's this infield fly rule that I hear is so impossible to understand." And he told me, and after I wondered briefly what was so difficult about that, my sister-in-law and I wondered where he'd learned it from. And he shrugged and said he just sort of knows it. And I mentioned how I'd been confused about offsides at the hockey game and he said "Right, hockey's offside rule is different from soccer's", and went on to demonstrate that he knew both.

Now, my brother has always liked baseball, and used to play soccer, but we grew up in Cleveland, where there are no hockey fans. How did he know this? How did I spend so long thinking goaltending (in basketball) was a sort of offside issue (it's really, really not)? How, more to the point, did he not spend years under this misconception? How did he learn so much stuff that I missed?

My sister-in-law and I were both flummoxed by this. It's not, she pointed out, like the commentators ever elaborate when they tell you what rule was just invoked. (At least in football the referee announces the penalty in real words, and the penalties have descriptive names, like "illegal man downfield".) Do they take the boys aside one day in high school and teach them all the different but similarly-named rules in the different sports? Is it what they're doing in health class while we're learning about tampons or something? Honestly.

day one

So today was the first day I took the new change-my-life bite guard for a spin. I'm to wear it at all times except when I'm eating; I wasn't specifically told to take it out to drink, which is good, because I'm drinking water all day and that would get tiresome (and be much less helpful). It has so far been extravagantly slobbery when I take it out - it fits very snugly over my bottom teeth, so I can't just lift it out, which I don't know if that contributes to the slobberiness of it, but yeah, wow, it turns out that this thing that hangs out right where my tongue normally goes but cannot be dislodged by my tongue on its own is in fact a big ol' drool reservoir. So that's fun. It kind of hurts where it fits over the presumably-cracked tooth in the back, a sort of low-grade constant dull pain. Everywhere else it's a strange pressure and not much more, apart from on the bottom front teeth earlier this evening it was feeling kind of achy. It isn't now.

I still feel like I'm talking very slightly funny. Like my consonants are a little odd - especially the fricatives (all of them except /h/), and sometimes I miss (come up a little short) when I reach for an /m/. But ellen_fremedon and cinco both said they couldn't even tell what I was talking about; and the former is a trained linguist, and the latter actually asked me if I even had the thing with me when I was talking to her. So I guess my self-consciousness about my new There's Something In My Mouth consonants is just misplaced. ... I wonder what I'm going to do about rehearsal on Monday night.