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Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.
We have a perfectly cromulent outlet for regionalist jingoism, college football. At least until the TV money got large enough to drive the bus with conference consolidation and transfers becoming a whole lot closer to free agency.
The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.
I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points touchdown / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.
I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.
I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?
You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?
I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?
Sorry, "pick up" is slang for "to gain", "to acquire".
Yes, American football is essentially a hybrid turn-based/real-time game where each turn is a burst of real-time activity,.
In each turn, one team is on offense and starts with the ball. It is trying to either get the ball into the other team's endzone for 7 points or kick the ball through the other team's uprights for 3 points. The other team is on defense and is trying to stop that. If either the team on offense scores points or the team on defense manages to grab the ball away from the offense, the team on offense "loses possession" and then has to be the team on defense, and the other team that was on defense before becomes the team on offense.
A given team's offense and defense are usually made up of completely different players, but this is not enforced by the rules. It's just that in practice, no player is good enough at both offensive and defensive skills and has enough endurance to be worth playing both on offense and on defense.
The team on offense can throw the ball or run the ball as much as it wants, but with the extremely important caveat that it can only throw the ball forward once at most in any given turn ("down"). It can throw the ball backward as much as it wants, though teams almost never do this because statistically it is usually a bad idea.
When a team goes on offense, it generally starts at the part of the field where the other team lost possession when it was on offense. The team on offense then has four turns ("down"s) to move the ball, by throwing or running, at least ten yards closer to the other team's endzone than where it started. Each time it tries to move the ball, no matter what happens, then the next time it tries to move the ball, it starts at wherever the ball was stopped the last time it tried to move the ball. So let's say on the first down, the team on offense manages to move the ball 3 yards forward. Then on its second down, it starts 3 yards closer to that imaginary 10-yard line that it has to cross, the line that is 10 yards forward from where it first started the current set of 4 downs.
If the team on offense manages to move the ball past 10 yards from where it started on offense in those 4 turns ("down"s) it has, it then gets another 4 turns to move the ball 10 yards further from wherever the ball was last stopped. And if in those next chances it moves the ball more than 10 yards, then it gets yet another 4 turns... and so on... as long as the team on offense keeps managing to get at least 10 yards in 4 turns, it always gets 4 more turns, and in this way it can "march down the field" as they say and eventually get in the defending team's endzone. But if at any point the team on offense uses up 4 turns and fails to move the ball 10 yards forward in total between all the 4 turns, it gives us possession to the other team and then the other team goes on offense starting from where the offensive team had the ball.
At any point in a 4-turn cycle, the team on offense has the option of kicking the ball far towards the other team's endzone, hoping to run in the direction of the other team's endzone and stop whoever on the defending team catches the ball. Once the other team catches the ball, they become the team on offense. So the only reason for the team on offense to do this is if they feel that there is very little chance that they would be able to get 4 more downs by moving the ball past 10 yards and so it would be better to make sure that the team on defense gets the ball (and thus becomes the team on offense) close to their own endzone rather than at the place where the two teams are currently facing each other.
This is a lot of words but it can all start to make sense pretty quickly once one watches a game.
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