football, basketball, foers, syriana

Len Pasquarelli is one of the best — if not the best — writers on the NFL beat. He knows his stuff, has unparalleled sources around the league, and is an entertainingly informal writer who seems to have fun penning some purple prose on occasion. (Plus, unlike some of his colleagues, he doesn’t focus on the big-market teams at the expense of others. He’ll have more Saints items, for instance, than his peers.)
Every Monday during the season he writes the “Morning After” column, which sums up his analysis of the previous weekend’s games. And one of the best parts of that column is the “Scout’s Take” sidebar, which is supposed to be a bunch of anonymous quotes from sources around the league, evaluating players and coaches. It’s great stuff.
But I don’t believe a word of it! The quotes always sound like the same voice — a sort of forced folksy manliness, with sentences twisted into form halfway between writen and spoken. For instance: “Shawne Merriman really did a number on the Indianapolis offensive line. He went around them, over them, through them, you name it. Amazing what a pass rush can do, isn’t it? That San Diego secondary isn’t very good, but pressuring Peyton Manning up front made it a lot better unit on Sunday. Even Quentin Jammer played pretty well. The guy had five or six [breakups] and an interception. One of the better games he’s played all year, even if he gave up some balls to Marvin Harrison.”
No one speaks that way! The clauses are all wrong. Len adds a bunch of edits to bleep out the “swear words,” which makes it seem real, and I’m sure these are real ideas expressed by real scouts to Len. But I’ll eat my hat if those are exact quotes week in and week out.
Speaking of sports, Yocohoops is a good national college basketball blog. ACC BasketBlog does the same for (duh) the ACC.
In non-sports news, this might make a good gift for all your easily depressed friends. The DMN photo staff really did a bang-up job on Katrina, and it won’t shock me one bit if they win another Pulitzer because of it.
People have been bashing Wikipedia lately, which makes me sad. Some thoughts.
My internal class-warrior really wants to have a gut opposition to all the 20-something Foer brothers — novelist Jonathan Safran and journalists Franklin and Josh — because they all seem to have been bred like racehorses for wordsmithing success. (JSF getting on the NYT bestseller list in his early 20s; Josh getting his byline in top pubs while still at Yale — it just feels like they’re all behind a clubhouse door somewhere.) But in the end, I’ve got to admit they’re pretty good. Frank, in particular, just plain kickass. He’s been on a real roll at The New Republic, and he’s a very reliable voice on their very good new(ish) blog.
Saw Syriana over the weekend and ended up actively disliking it, to my surprise. Didn’t care too much for Traffic either, and for similar reasons. They both make art-house audiences feel good about themselves because they get to “see” past the surface to the conspiracies and intrigue Stephen Gaghan “exposes.” But they’re really just feeding into viewers’ preexisting assumptions.
An example: The movie (appropriately) takes pains to make every character’s POV understandable and even sympathetic — even (perhaps especially) a group of young Muslims training at a madrasa run by a terrorist. Every character, that is, except for every last Texan in the movie. They’re all reduced to blithering idiots, defined by their drawls. The normally more nuanced Chris Cooper becomes a parody of a Texas oilman, and Tim Blake Nelson is an absurd corrupt hick supreme. It’s Fahrenheit 911 rechannelled and given more legitmacy. Ergh.