random thoughts of the month

Why is there not more attention paid to the collection of guys being rounded up in Pakistan? Good news is that the attention being paid to the "al-Qaeda 7" brouhaha is mostly negative and directed at the morons who ran the campaign against them rather than against the lawyers who did their jobs.

Why is there so much attention paid to Toyota having a minor safety defect that they are attempting to correct at great expense? It was funny for a couple nights on late night jokes, but it got old rather quickly. The biggest culprit for safety problems in cars is the driver. (full disclosure: I say this not because I have a Toyota outside of the safety recall period. I could care less what brand of car I owned or sought to buy in the future).

Why do people pay so much attention to glamour and glitz surrounding the Oscars? It's bad enough that I end up knowing who wins the damned awards (and often coming away wondering what the hell they were thinking). I don't need to know what they looked like doing it. I prefer only paying attention to actors and actresses and directors when they're acting and directing for my entertainment and competing for my entertainment dollar. Thanks. While we're at it, why don't they change the format. Instead of men's and women's awards for best actor/supporting actors, spread it into genres of film. Comedies, musicals, drama, and action/sci-fi are all sort of different kinds of roles. There doesn't seem to me to be a real distinction between the qualify of men and women at acting generally, at least not enough to justify the gender separation on how the awards are done. Or directing (though at least there, there's a gap of the number of women directing).

Since I'm busy being annoyingly sexist or something, I'm also confused about the gender gaps in sports. Women play poker at the same tables as men. They can play golf at a roughly competitive level with men (other than driving the tee shots). Anything sport or competitively related that doesn't involve a physical gap in athletic performance should be integrated. Baseball is probably the only major team sport that I could see getting gender integration in my lifetime (I could not see women playing football at all and I'm rather skeptical about the ability of women to play at the same level of men because of the immense amount of athletic requirement). Maybe soccer. The problem and the reason this would be less likely is that there's a competitive disadvantage. Women are filtered into softball early on and don't play baseball against the boys for years, depriving the probable body of qualified candidates. But as far as I can tell women ought to be able to hit major league level pitching if they get enough practice against it. Jeanne Finch is just as hard for major league hitters to hit against (she routinely struck them out in exhibitions). I don't foresee a 30 home run season out of a woman anytime in the near future, but there's no physical reason they couldn't hit the ball out of the park once in a while either.