As Promised...

...I have a bunch of stuff to post about sports & games.

First off, did you see the article about the unruly mah-jongg enthusiasts in Osaka, Japan? Mah-jongg is a tile game which can either be played on your computer like solitaire or against another person. It turns out that the prefectural government in Japan constructed a facility for playing mah-jongg (like the chess tables in some parks in NYC) and then handed over the key to the facility to some guy who said he'd take care of it. Well, he has. He has turned the facility into a private club for his friends and he doesn't let anyone else in. The people of Osaka would like to use the park they paid to create, but the man now says he gave the key to a friend, and he'll try to get it back. Soon. Very soon.

Secondly, there was an article in ABC News about how the US government gave $500,000 to a program that intends to solve gang violence through the promotion of golf. Think about that for a moment. Let it seep through your brain. Picture what that would look like. Now, try to answer some questions...

1) Where are the kids going to play?
2) How would they be received by the other patrons of the courses they visited?
3) Is there a game more impossible to learn?
4) Why would you give troubled kids golf clubs with which they could beat each other?
5) If, and this is a BIG IF, you got a kid hooked on golf so much that he was willing to forgo his gang-violence-related-lifestyle...how would he pay to join a country club, travel there, get his own set of clubs, travel to tournaments, etc.??? Wouldn't you just be setting him (or her) up for more disappointment??

If you go to the website, you'll see there's more to the story, but I don't want to get into that here. (Short story: politics. Big surprise.)

Third, there was a little article in the New York Times about a case involving "spin rage." Turns out, two men were in a spin class and one was a grunter. During class he grunted at each breath and repeatedly shouted things like "you go girl." (To whom, exactly, I don't know.) Another man asked the instructor twice to get the grunter to be quiet. The grunter refused. Finally, the other man gets fed up, goes up to the grunter, and flips his bike over, knocking the man to the ground.

The grunter spent the next two weeks in the hospital, and the city of New York charged the other man with assault. A jury found him not guilty. It just so happens that New Yorkers, known around the world as some of the rudest people on earth, have standards for behavior in public. Unnecessary grunting will not be tolerated. (Especially, "you go girl"!!!) Another reason for the acquittal may have been that the grunter was really not that pleasant of an individual. Even the prosecutor trying his case described told the jury that he was " probably not someone 'you would want to hang out with regularly.'"

So, there you are.

More later.