You know that a practice has entered the mainstream when Microsoft records it as clipart:

From ESPN.com:

"They will not win Game 2, and you heard that from me," 'Sheed announced Saturday night after watching Foster share the hero mantle with Reggie Miller in the Pacers' 78-74 triumph.

"Put it front page, back page, middle of the page," 'Sheed continued, making you wonder what he plans to say if the Pacers do win.

"They will not win Game 2."

'Sheed then receded into Both Teams Played Hard mode, repeating the same answer to the next few questions he allowed, no matter what the questions were: "They will not win Game 2."

And, as a signoff: "They will not win Game 2."

smithers:

[Aside] I am taking a hiatus from my extremely hectic 2-3 posts-per-week publishing schedule to concentrate on converting sportsBabel material into book form, as has been promised in the sidebar for some time now.

Thanks to those who have read the blog during the evolution of my thought, and I'll be back soon. :)

[Exit]

A letter to Salon.com from reader Melissa McEwan responding to Farhad Manjoo's article on the Nick Berg beheading video:

Coincidentally, just before I read Farhad Manjoo's latest article, 'Horror Show,' my husband was pointing out to me the top searches list on MSN.com. For months on end, it has been the usual drivel; the week after the Super Bowl, the top five searches were something like Janet Jackson Super Bowl; Janet Jackson halftime show; Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime, Janet Jackson breast; and Janet Jackson Super Bowl breast.' And for months on end, we've been bemoaning the complacency of the American public; why aren't they searching for Fallujah, Taguba, something — anything — that resembles an interest in something other than celebrity scandal?

Today the top searches include Iraqi Prisoner Photos and Abu Ghraib. He commented that it seems like the tide is finally turning; people are finally interested. Perhaps, I said. Hopefully, I said. But the only thing that's changed, the only thing we can be sure of, is that there are finally pictures. Does the average searcher on MSN make a distinction between searching for pictures of Janet Jackson's breast and searching for pictures of Iraqis being tortured? Is it just more of a titillating sameness, or are people really starting to pay attention, now that they have something almost unavoidable to pay attention to? I hope it's the latter.

It is ironic, then, that the AI-generated Sponsored Links listing at the bottom of the Salon page featured this:

In another of the recent juxtapositions of sport and war, Iraq qualified for the Olympics in soccer after only being reinstated by the International Olympic Committee three months ago.

STAGES	ENVIRONMENT
	PERMEABLE BOUNDARIES WEAK RULES OF EXCLUSION No spatial limits; uneven terrain; spatial interaction between "players" and "spectators"; diversified land use.
	ENCLOSURE Limits of pitch defined; players segregated from spectators.
	PARTITIONING Embankments, terraces, grandstands; payment for entry; segregation of spectators by social class; start of segregation within crowd; specialized land use.
	SURVEILLANCE Enclosed ground; synthetic pitch and concrete bowl; TV replay screen; total segregation within crowd; panopticism; diversified land use. RULES OF EXCLUSION STRONG IMPERMEABLE BOUNDARIES

A four-stage model of the evolution of the modern stadium. Lines refer to possible freedoms of movement for players and spectators (from Bale, 1993).

I presented a paper this weekend at the University of Toronto's Building Bridges in Kinesiology, Physical Education, and Health: An Inter-and Multi-Disciplinary Conference. In a session on Body and Movement, I spoke about the "The Art of Work in the Age of its Mediated Simulation". My co-presenters included Linnet Fawcett of Concordia University, who spoke about "In-Between Spaces in Sport: Corporeal Re-creation and the Trick Skater", and Rae Johnson of the University of Toronto, who spoke about the "The Politics of Embodiment: Social Theory and Somatic Practice?"

Linnet's appeal for a sense of body movement that is in the moment resonated strongly with me, particularly given her allegory of skaters who leave the art of their lines on the ice only to be erased a short time later by droplets of water.

Rae told an anecdote from the body awareness and creative movement seminar she leads of a woman who was beaming with pride because it was the first time in decades that she had raised her arms above her head — the reason being that a lifetime of an abusive father and other cultural conditioning factors had made her feel vulnerable anytime she was expressive with her body, particularly in lifting her arms above her head.

These very positive stories of body movement set up my closing paper on The Art of Work. But it wasn't until the question period that I realized how relatively dystopic my work actually is. I promise I'm not this brooding nihilist in person, honest!

Thanks to the crew at U of T for putting on a very professional event that certainly exceeded my expectations.

Virilio again (p.61):

Whether we like it or not, races are always eliminative, not only for the competitors engaged in the competition, but also for the environment underlying their efforts. Whence the invention of an artificial arena, of a 'stage' on which to practise the exploit of extreme speed: stadium, hippodrome or autodrome. Such an instrumentalization of space signalling a tailoring, not only of the body of the athlete, trained to exceed his own limits, or the bodies of the racehorses in our stables, but also of the geometry of the environment supporting such motor performances: the closed-circuit connection of all those vast sporting amenities heralding the closed-loop connection, the final looping and locking up of a world that has become orbital, not only in terms of circumterrestrial satellites on the beat, but of the entire array of telecommunications tools as well.

Something to consider in terms of the cybernetic data flows of the professional sport-media-entertainment complex.

Adidas unveils the latest in wearable sports technology, the Adidas 1:

Adidas executives say the shoe is no gadget-dependent gimmick. Instead, its designers say it represents a leap forward in wearable technology. Each second, a sensor in the heel can take up to 20,000 readings and the embedded electronic brain can make 10,000 calculations, directing a tiny electric motor to change the shoe. The goal is to make the shoe adjust to changing conditions and the runner's particular style while in use.

"What we have, basically, is the first footwear product that can change its characteristics in real time," said Mr. DiBenedetto, who led the group that created the shoe, of its ability to adapt its cushioning as the wearer runs.

. . .

High-performance shoes, particularly those intended for athletic use, he said, have been augmented with an array of biomechanical enhancements, most of them involving compressed gases, shock absorbers and springs. But until now, he said, "I don't recall electronics being applied in shoes other than for lights."

Fifteen or so years ago, a 20-megahertz desktop computer was just being released on the market, and cost many thousands of dollars. Today, one is embedded in a running shoe and can be purchased for $250.

It really is pathetic
that our world is cybernetic,
so devoid of what's poetic
in our need to be electric.
You think that's copasetic?

Check it.

It is truly amazing to see the rise and spread of fads these days. The latest one to hit the sport of hockey was the team flag that flies from the rear window of an automobile. Seemingly overnight, everyone had one of these flags to display their tribal affinity to the team.

In the case above, of course, the notion of flags and tribalism take on added significance for the citizens of Leaf Nation. For the team's fans in Toronto and elsewhere felt the morale-draining loss of this model war more palpably than they do today's very real wartime losses as citizens of a nation-state.

From Virilio:

1. 19th century: TRANSPORT revolution
2. 20th century: TRANSMISSION revolution
3. 21st century: TRANSPLANTATION revolution

Advertising creeps further into the Great American Pastime: ESPN.com reports that a marketing agreement between Major League Baseball Properties, Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios, will see webbed logos of the upcoming film "Spider-Man 2" appear on bases and on-deck circles in 15 stadiums of teams playing host to interleague games from June 11-13.

Major League Baseball games are watched in some 200 countries worldwide.

Donruss, a sports card manufacturer, has announced that it will not cut up a Pat Tillman Arizona Cardinals game-used jersey and put the scraps into special edition cards, instead deciding to donate the jersey to the fallen soldier's family.

The move by Donruss is interesting, since a Tillman game-used jersey is estimated to be worth $25,000 at auction, while if inserted cut up as scraps into special edition packs, as much as $4 million in incremental sales could be earned.

Furthermore, this is the same company that paid $264,210 for a Babe Ruth jersey last October, then cut it up and inserted the scraps into packs.

I find the whole idea of scraps of game-used jersey adding value to a deck of sports memorabilia cards to be extremely odd. But when considered in the context of the recombinant logic of the post-industrial age, it makes a great deal of sense.

A sample from William Gibson's Idoru, in which I think he really articulates what I have been trying to tap into regarding professional athletes, the nature of their celebrity, and how their art catalyzes the production of vast masses of data by others. His point in this sample, and as an underlying subtext of the book, seems to me that Rez and Lo (and by my extension, professional athletes) are very much high-tech constructs just like the Idoru — the only difference being that they have a corporeal basis in "reality" while the Idoru's corporeality is an "architecture of articulated longing" and is thus distributed amongst its consumers around the world. In Mr. Gibson's words (bold emphasis added):

Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy's idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band's fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.