Some people think gymnastics isn’t a sport because the result is determined by judges. I think gymnastics isn’t a sport because puberty is a career-threatening injury.

-Jeff Neumann of RealClearSports

Also, here’s a great article about the silliness of cutting softball from the Olympics to make room for BMX biking / synchronized diving / underwater kite flying etc:

For my money, there should be a two-part litmus test to determine which sports are Olympics-worthy:

-No sport shall be added that owes its visibility to made-for-TV programming (read: beach volleyball).

-If a sport has a championship competition that is bigger than the Olympics, it should not be included (read: tennis, men’s basketball).

…

All of which brings us back around to softball. It is a perfectly wonderful sport played in more than 100 nations.

When it comes to universal appeal — a term IOC President Jacques Rogge likes to throw around to justify some of the organization’s half-baked decisions — softball supersedes, say, beach volleyball and BMX in terms of global exposure.

No matter how Rogge and his cronies try to spin it, the decision to evict softball from the 2012 Olympics is classic anti-American bias.

Sure, the U.S. has dominated the sport since it debuted in the ‘96 Summer Games. In ‘04, the Americans outscored everyone else 51-1. Right now, the U.S. appears to be coasting to the gold. So what does the IOC do? Pull the plug.

Why? Other nations dominate certain sports — China in table tennis, for example — but those sports remain part of the Olympic experience.

Another way of looking at it: Is swimming going to be eliminated just because nobody could beat Michael Phelps?

I don’t think so.

I haven’t been able to find it in print yet, but on the radio this morning they said that the trade agreement contains a poison pill, whereby if the Jets trade Favre to the Minnesota Vikings, they have to give the Packers three (yes, three) first-round draft choices. If true, that tells you something about how stupid the Packers’ management is. If you think Favre is still good enough to be a threat to you by ending up on another team in your division, then he’s certainly better than your current starting QB who has a grand total of 0.5 meaningful games of NFL experience.

So, who had the Twins in first place on August 4th? The F-bomb is back, the White Sox Annual August Meltdown has begun, and life is good.

Two of my friends on the jet ski.

See all of my photos at Flickr.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

What I liked:

Heath Ledger’s joker. I was pretty cynical about it going in - figuring 90% of the hype over his performance was media/Hollywood/Heath-loving girls overdoing things because he died tragically. Wrong - Ledger was unbelievably good, so much so that you wouldn’t know the joker is him unless someone told you. Creepiness factor off the charts, up there with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (and I don’t throw that out lightly).

Maggie Gyllenhall. Way more believable and better-acted Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes in Batman Begins.

The Batmobile. Sadly reduced to a lesser role than it played in Batman Begins, but for my money still the coolest movie car around.

Special effects. They did a good job of working in some cool effects (Batman landing on the roof of a car and crushing it, the building exploding with a major character inside) without making this a “special effects movie.”

Terrorism. At its core, The Dark Knight is about terrorism. To what lengths can (or should) a society go to defend itself against an enemy who has ceased to function like a human being? The Joker is Gotham’s bin Laden (or Saddam. or whatever), and writer/director Christopher Nolan effectively ridicules moralized hand-wringing over narrowly applied laws while murderous evil points a gun at your head. Interrogation tactics, wiretapping, the rights of terrorists under law, it’s all there, and the picture Nolan seems to be painting of us is very uncomfortable. And brilliant.

The pencil scene.

What I didn’t like:

Terrorism. The thick-headed way that Nolan portrays the Gothamites’ response to Batman (”things were better before you got here!”) is inaccurate if he means the film to be a reflection of modern America. Meanwhile, Nolan trades the good vs. evil moralism of the old Batman cartoons for an equally unsatisfying “it’s all too complex! Who knows!” view of the proper response to terrorist threats.

Bruce Wayne. Christian Bale was far and away the star of Batman Begins - complex, interesting, mysterious, etc etc. He’s kind of a bit character in The Dark Knight, which is much more about Harvey Dent and the Joker than it is about Batman and Bruce Wayne.

Pacing. The plot pretty much sprints along at breakneck pace from beginning to end. The end result is that you don’t have much time to process what the film is trying to say, and you start becomming numb to (and bored with) the various twists and turns. One reviewer I read described it as “constant climax” which I think is accurate.

The pessimism. The key line of the film is when Harvey Dent says “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Again, we’re trading the “Truth, Justice & the American Way” characature for a system of moral logic where nihlism equals intelligence. The film raises good questions but ultimately fails to provide any good answers. The terrorists will keep trying to kill us, and we’ll keep destroying ourselves (morally, at least) because of the measures necessary to defend against them.

The Minnesota Orchestra played for an hour or so prior to the fireworks:

They shot the fireworks off from a barge in Lake Minnetonka. We got there early enough to have front-row seats. The lights you see in the background are mostly boats:

This is my wife peeling out on the jet ski on Saturday afternoon. I may have discovered a way to have boat ownership and a happy marriage at the same time.

View all of my photos at Flickr.