I gotta get a life

Passing the hours away at work this afternoon, I found myself surfing through the dregs of pop culture.

I stumbled across this Wikipedia entry for the XFL, the shortlived sports league that aimed to combine pro-wrestling with American football:

The concept of the league was first announced on February 3, 2000. The XFL was originally conceived to build on the success of the NFL and professional wrestling. It was hyped as "real" football without penalties for roughness and with fewer rules in general. The loud games featured players and coaches with microphones and cameras in the huddle and in the locker rooms. Stadiums featured trash-talking public address announcers and very scantily-clad cheerleaders. Instead of a pre-game coin toss, XFL officials put the ball on the ground and let a player from each team scramble for it to determine who received the kickoff option, which unsurprisingly led to the first XFL injury. This type of "coin-toss" has since been referred to as the "injury zone".


It folded after one year. Which makes it about the world's only example ever of an idea failing because it underestimated people's intelligence.

Then there was this website, for IFOCE - The International Federation of Competitive Eating. Here's a snippet from their 'About' section:

The International Federation of Competitive Eating, Inc. supervises and regulates eating contests in their various forms throughout the world. The IFOCE helps to ensure that the sport remains safe, while also seeking to achieve objectives consistent with the public interest -- namely, creating an environment in which fans may enjoy the display of competitive eating skill.


...and amongst it's objectives (sorry, mandate):

• to compile, categorize and make available to fans of the sport a complete history of competitive eating along with an archive of photos and other historic material;


Sport. I shit you not.

For a while I was leaning toward satire, although on balance I suspect this is genuine. Sadly.

Check out the remarkably slender folks who have scored themselves an 'Eater Profile'. Perhaps it's a weight-for-age event.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to...
Read more

A place to rest my head

Image
I dream one day of visiting Pyongyang and staying in the wonderfully pyramidic Ryugyong Hotel. The outer shell of this hotel which dominates the Pyongyang skyline was built in the 1980s, and the interior was, well, never built. It seems possible that the project was commenced in a pique of optimism as North Korea put in a claim to share the 1988 Olympic Games with its southern brothers, but just as the offer was rejected - just like the bid to share the 2002 Soccer World Cup failed on the basis of North Korea's request to host the Opening Ceremony, Semi Finals and Final - the hotel was never completed. Nowadays, in stands pointing to the sky much the way that Kim Il Sung's statue does, both perhaps as a symbol of the excesses of North Korean enthusiasm. Instead of the Ryugyong, like most foriegn visitors to Pyongyang I found myself staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel. The Yanggakdo Hotel is a slice of Cold War Bondesque paranoia writ large. The hotel is located on an isla...
Read more