The gym stays quiet for the first 10 points so the autistic, noise-sensitive brother of a player can attend a volleyball game.

WAOW reports. 

"My coach, [Justin] Jacobs, came up to me and asked if Payton was going to come to any of the games," [the player, Malina Carratini] recalled.... "Two days later, [Jacobs] came up to me and was like, 'I came up with this idea. It really hurt me that Payton wouldn't be able to come,' so he was wondering if we would do a silent night"....

"So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite."

"I was proud to a be a woman, and it didn’t fit well in that culture," said Candice Wiggins, speaking about the culture within the Women's National Basketball Association. She's abandoning her stellar career 2 years early, because of her "mental state." She says she was bullied for her femininity and heterosexuality.

"I didn’t like the culture inside the WNBA, and without revealing too much, it was toxic for me. … My spirit was being broken.... Me being heterosexual and straight, and being vocal in my identity as a straight woman was huge,” Wiggins said. “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women. It was a conformist type of place. There was a whole different set of rules they (the other players) could apply..... People were deliberately trying to hurt me all of the time. I had never been called the B-word so many times in my life than I was in my rookie season. I’d never been thrown to the ground so much. The message was: ‘We want you to know we don’t like you.’... It comes to a point where you get compared so much to the men, you come to mirror the men,’ she said. “So many people think you have to look like a man, play like a man to get respect. I was the opposite.... There were horrible things happening to me every day...."

I don't know how much of that to believe. I don't understand the nature of the razzing that goes on behind the scenes in sports, whether Wiggins was unusually sensitive or arrogant, and what sexual orientation had to do with it. The other women are not telling there side of the story, so I feel compelled to imagine it.

If you read the story at the link, you'll see that Wiggins is writing a book, so she has a motive to stir up interest in her story. I'm interested in seeing how well this angle plays — this notion that she had more femininity than those other ladies and that there's something especially brutal about lesbians.

There's also the problem that the WNBA is just not popular, and that's what's really bothering Wiggins, who said: "Nobody cares about the WNBA. Viewership is minimal. Ticket sales are very low. They give away tickets and people don’t come to the game." And she's switching over to beach volleyball —where she sees a "celebration of women and the female body as feminine" — which people do seem to like to watch (perhaps because we only watch it every 4 years when the Summer Olympics come around).

"We had a real hard time with Inky."

Said Kelly Sheffield, the coach of University of Wisconsin volleyball team, which lost to Stanford in the NCAA tournament regional final last night.

Redshirt senior Inky Ajanaku, who led the Cardinal (25-7) with 20 kills and 11 blocks and was named the tournament’s MVP, said her team was a “little flabbergasted” after the first two sets. But after she gave her youthful but talented teammates a pep talk at intermission, she could sense they were not about to give up.

“I looked in everybody’s eyes and I saw they were ready,” Ajanaku said. “They were ready to be there all night and they were ready to fight.”

AND: Isn't it strange that volleyball is the sport with the most violent lingo? Kills. Where's my trigger warning?

Am I the only one noticing how bad the lighting is for the Olympics broadcast?

Do you see the 4 shadows forming an X at the feet of each Beach Volleyball player? That's so annoying! It made me think for the first time about how good the lighting is at nighttime baseball and football games. You never notice shadows — certainly not a stark pattern of shadow from each player. Those shadows give the outdoor night games a dreary, indoorsy look.

The varied angles on the gymnasts frequently include glaring banks of light fixtures up at the ceiling. These should be off camera. Gymnastics should look great. It's all about how it looks, and it's hard to see. When the lights are visible on camera, they are the brightest thing in the frame. The gymnast should be lit up!

"Misty K. Snow is the first transgender nominee from a major party to run for a U.S. Senate seat and she shares the distinction of being the first transgender person to run for Congress."

"Misty Plowright, a transgender woman, claimed the Democratic nomination in Colorado's conservative 5th House District on Tuesday."

Reports The Salt Lake Tribune, confusing me on first read. I was thinking why did the last name switch from Snow to Plowright? Eventually, it dawned on me that there are 2 Mistys, one in Utah, nominated for the Senate, named Snow, and one in Colorado, nominated for the House, named Plowright.

Transgender people are choosing their own names, but is there some reason why Misty would be a popular name for someone making a distinct, personal statement of a desire to be seen as female? "Misty" is most notable to me as the great song. Look at me....



Johnny Mathis is still alive. I'm reading the awkwardly written Wikipedia article about him...

Mathis was misquoted [sic] in a 1982 Us Magazine article, where he was quoted as having said, "Homosexuality is a way of life that I've grown accustomed to." However, he made no further comments on this, and Us Magazine later retracted the statement. In 2006, Mathis revealed that his silence had been because of death threats he received as a result of that 1982 article. On April 13, 2006, Mathis granted a podcast interview with The Strip in which he talked about the subject once again, and how some of his reluctance to speak on the subject was partially generational.

Johnny Mathis is 80. I hope he's doing well.

I doubt if the modern-day Mistys, Snow and Plowright, chose their name because of the beautiful old song. I'm thinking it was more likely the influence of Misty May-Treanor, the volleyball star, or Misty Copeland, the ballerina. It could have been the pornographic Mistys, Rain and Stone. There are so many Mistys....



ADDED: The song "Misty" was written by Erroll Garner, who played it in an ultra-schmaltzy style that's quite enjoyable....



Johnny Mathis heard him play it and said if it had words, he'd sing it, and that's how we got all that "kitten up a tree... puppet on a string..." business.

And speaking of names, Garner is a fine last name, but don't let me catch you using "garner" as an ordinary verb as if you think "get" isn't a real word, in sentences like "He's playing you guys like a fiddle, the press, by saying outrageous things, and garnering attention," which is something Jeb Bush said about Donald Trump. Donald Trump will never say "garner" for "get," and it's interesting to think of Trump playing the fiddle with his famously short fingers, and I was just thinking about Trump's short fingers as I watched Erroll Garner play the piano so gloriously with what are startlingly short fingers.

Jerry Seinfeld: "Will you please explain to me why the entire nation has decided to put on shorts? I'm just so sick of this shorts."

"What is this? A barbeque? A volleyball game? What is everybody in shorts for?"

That's from the new episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee":

From Crackle: Two Polish Airline Pilots

I was sent there by a reader, who emailed: "Jerry talks about shorts on men and I thought of you."

"There he was, back in high school, a fresh-faced member of the volleyball team and a student leader in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution..."

"... ordering teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads. He stood there, excited and proud, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers."

Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads. He did not object. He simply fled. “I was too scared,” he recalled recently in one of several interviews at a restaurant near Tiananmen Square, not far from his alma mater, No. 8 Middle School, which catered to the children of the Mao elite. “I couldn’t stop it. I was afraid of being called a counterrevolutionary, of having to wear a dunce’s hat.”

"Handless man throws volleyball-size rock through KFC window...:

"The 46-year-old also allegedly chucked a brick through KFC’s drive-through window..."

ADDED: An element of this mystery — why did he do it? why doesn't he have hands? — is that he was (allegedly) brought into this country by the United Nations. Could it be that in his home country, he had a penchant for throwing things through windows and he was punished by having his hands cut off?

"Competitive cheer may, some time in the future, qualify as a sport under Title IX."

Wrote Judge Stefan R. Underhill of the United States District Court in Bridgeport:

“Today, however, the activity is still too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”...

Underhill’s decision was a victory for the five women’s volleyball players who, along with their coach, sued Quinnipiac in 2009 after the university announced it was cutting their team and adding competitive cheerleading....

This is a complicated issue. Penn & Teller took it up in the first episode of the new season of "Bullshit!" I thought they woefully underplayed the Title IX legal issues, which they mainly cheaply disparaged by showing a feminist in an unattractive light and accusing her of wanting to force young women into her stereotype of what a woman should be, as this preview shows:



ADDED: The question shouldn't be what does "sport" mean in a general sense, but how it should be defined with respect to the pursuit of gender equality in education. As for the Quinnipiac case, the judge has to deal with the existing statute, regulations, and case law.

"Artist to feed convict to goldfish."

Because I think maybe there are some people here who'd like to talk about something other than Sarah Palin, I give you this, a story that has it all: art, fish, crime, death, weirdness, lameness, law.

Gene Hathorn, who has been on death row since 1985, has given his consent for artist Marco Evaristti, the bad boy of the Danish art scene, to use his body as an art installation.

"My aim is to first deep freeze Gene's body and then make fish food out of it. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it," Evaristti told the Art Newspaper.

Oh, bullshit. How is this different from scattering ashes on... wherever... a beach volleyball court in China?

The artist imagines that the work will somehow make an argument against capital punishment. I make my living trying to fathom legal arguments, and I don't see it at all. Now if Evaristti sat in a cage in a gallery subsisting on freeze-dried Hathorn until he approached death, I would understand the argument. I'm not saying I would buy it, but I would understand it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Cannibal jokes.

"I wasn’t exactly sure what to say to you, except to start with, God, I love our country and I love what we stand for."

Bush at the Olympics.

What moves people to be this sour about something so basically nice? If you click to the other picture that Andrew Sullivan is sneering at, you'll see it depicts what is described this way at the first link:

“Mr. President, want to?” said Misty May-Treanor, half of the dominant American beach volleyball, turning her backside toward the president for the sport’s traditional method of encouragement: a slap.

Mr. Bush complied, though with a discrete flick of the back of his hand on her lower back.

How better could he have handled that situation? You're really just demonstrating that you'd slam him for anything.

Why not mention his visit to the women's softball team?

“It’s good for the world to have girls playing softball,” Mr. Bush said, his back marked by a chalk handprint, a prank of the centerfielder, Laura Berg, “and these women are going to show girls how to win.”

There's no reason to portray him as disrespecting women.

The swimming pool boondoggle.

Madison has five lakes and many beaches, and it has private swimming pools that are undersubscribed, not to mention a short swimming season, but some public leaders here have long pushed for a lavish public swimming pool project. The current political momentum for the project has been generated from a private donor pledge of $2 million. Here's the description of the pool that is supposed to get us all enthused:

[T]he pool ... would offer something for everyone: The preferred option is a $4 million, 16,400-square-foot "family aquatic center" with capacity for 1,000 people. It would have an eight-lane, 25-meter lap pool with two diving boards, a pool with beach-style entry and water fountains for young children, a deep well pool with two waterslides, dressing and shower rooms, concession stands, a sand volleyball court, group shelters and a sand play area for young children with outdoor showers.

Something for everyone? Well, there's nothing for those of us who don't want to go swimming, but I assume there will be something for me in the form of a tax bill. Oh, but there are private donors? That description says it's a $4 million project, which is already twice what the donors are offering, and that project described sounds as though it's going to cost a lot more than $4 million. Even if the described fantasy pool could be built for $4 million and the full amount could be raised privately, there will be no end to the costs for maintainance, employees, insurance, and the like. One must be awfully naive not to see all the tax money that will flow into this huge pool. How about raising a private endowment that would actually pay for the ongoing costs of the luxury of maintaining a elaborate public pool in Madison? I'm tired of the public fawning over two donors whose donation is a small part of the real costs. It is as if these two have simply bought the right to direct public policy!

UPDATE: An emailer writes:

I think your concerns about the public swimming pool are spot on. I live in California, in a community that highly values its swim teams - summer is just not summer if we aren't at the pool every day for practice and every Saturday a.m. and Wednesday evening. for meets. An "aquatic center" was built several years ago on the grounds of our high school due to a large grant from a donor. It is a huge 20 lane or so pool, bleachers, changing facilities etc. plus 2 separate pools for warm-ups and water polo. From what I understand, the pool has consistently lost money every year, even though it gets $$ from user fees. Every year our swim league holds a huge 2 day meet there (1000 swimmers plus spectators) and even with the fees that meet generates the aquatic center can't break even. And the center is used year-round, due to our weather! You are right to be concerned.

That reminds me. I forgot to mention: our high schools already have indoor pools! Our high schools are terrific, by the way, and I don't mind paying taxes to make these schools great. Read about East High School here and West High School here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I just fixated on the expression "family aquatic center." What an absurd phrase! Why say "aquatic center" instead of "swimming pool"? It's as if you wanted to be made fun of. And, more seriously, why "family"? If there is "something for everyone," why use a restrictive term? Are you trying to telegraph that this is about parents and young children, and no one else belongs here? (Ah, it would be so much cheaper for the city to just subsidize memberships at the private pools for lower income residents!) Or is "family" just a word that is supposed to mean "good, clean fun" or "uplifting, wholesome activity"? How I detest that cornball use of the word! But maybe the point is to make the place seem so hopelessly square that no teenager would want to set foot in the place and the parents with young children can feel warmly cosseted at the swank aquatic center.

Not blogging on trashy TV shows anymore?

I'm really in the mood to blog about trashy TV. Ah! For the days of "American Idol 3" and "The Apprentice." I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm not watching any trashy shows at the moment. I've given the Olympics high priority on my TiVo "wish list," and there's really not much to say about the Olympics, other than it's getting a bit tiresome, even with TiVo--or maybe especially with TiVo. I've got all those old "episodes" to watch. It's really grueling getting through all those rounds of gymnastics. How many stuck and unstuck landings do you need to see? The mind drifts. I find myself wondering why the men wear long, roomy stirrup pants and the women wear high-cut leotards. Does it have anything to do with the fact that the women have substantial, muscular legs and the men have strangely undersized legs (at least in proportion to their gigantic upper bodies)? And racing: What's to watch, really? Somebody or another is going to get there first. There are no fancy antics on the way. Ennui sets in! Are the team sports better? Not for me. I care least about the team sports. There's the vague amusement at the large amount of airtime given to women's beach volleyball, but to me it drives home the point that much of what we are doing as viewers is ogling extremely specialized, well-developed bodies. That's slightly fascinating for a while. And yet, at this point, I'm quite tired of it all. I've gotten to thinking that it will be fun to watch the Republican Convention next week, which is really rather an absurd thing to think.