The one about Ebbets Field

There's an interview meme going around that I caught in Greg's blog. The rules are supposed to involve posting interview questions for anyone who wants to be interviewed in the comments (they are then to post their answers in their own blogs), but I don't know that I've got much interest in continuing it to that end, although if you beg I might try just so as not to seem like a bad memer. But anyway, Greg's questions and my answers mean a free entry, so here you go:

1. What generally-observed US holiday could you do without, and why?
I'm not sure whether this question asks about federal holidays or just ones that the entire nation takes note of. If the latter, I know it's an easy target, but I think Valentine's Day is stupid; really, it goes along with Mother's and Father's Days as well - a holiday made up to sell greeting cards and crappy gifts by suggesting that on this day you take time out to recognize someone you should have been recognizing the entire rest of the year anyway. Valentine's Day earns the fewest points thanks to the added bonus of endless loathsome jewelry ads. Of course, hating on V-Day has become so clichéd that the greeting card companies have started making cards just for people who hate it, so I guess this was too easy an answer. But it still sucks, and I'm not just saying that because it means I have to buy Alma two presents in five days, heh. As for federal holidays, they provide the bulk of my time off work these days, so I'd keep them all and add a few more while I was at it.

2. What was the last movie that made you weepy?
I cry at movies a lot, which is probably not the sort of thing I should be admitting, but it happens to be true. I could answer this question one of two ways too: the last movie I watched, period, or the last movie I watched for the first time that made me cry at it? It's possible that the latter goes all the way back to when I saw Hotel Rwanda in the theater (and I bawled at that one, holy shit). The last movie that I cried at, period, was probably the end of Field of Dreams.

3. What did you ever collect, if anything?
I tried collecting many, many things over the years. I'm not sure why I had such a zeal for it - I guess I just liked having different varieties of stuff. I collected stamps for a little while but that was almost a perfunctory interest as the classic "thing to collect;" I went more for coins and baseball cards. The coins are probably in a box in Maryland; the cards are actually all here in Chicago with me, putting the "crap" into "craphole" where my room is concerned. I also collected business cards as a kid (no idea how that one got started, except that I think I liked finding people who had interesting raised designs and stuff on theirs, and I recall being overly excited that the Staples in West Orange had a machine on the premises which would make you a single custom-text business card for a dollar; mine read "Robert Flaxman, Geography Whiz," which tells you something of how much of an unbelievable tool the 10-year-old me was), but that petered out once I got old enough to realize it was stupid. Then of course I most infamously collected soda cans.

4. Most Americans think soccer is boring. Why are they wrong?
This is a complaint I have not just about soccer, but about sports in general, and that is that most Americans think that sports are boring unless they feature a lot of points. I'm not sure where this idea came from; people of the past certainly seem to have appreciated great defensive struggles, pitchers' duels, things like that - the very fact that Jack Morris is considered a solid Hall of Fame candidate is almost entirely attributable to Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, for example. Yet unless someone turns in a no-hitter or goes ten innings, a 1-0 game is almost always derided as a snoozefest by the casual fan. Perhaps this is why I like baseball as well; the mercurial nature of the scoring means you can't ever really stop watching, and the relative rarity of it makes the scoring so much more interesting. Certainly this isn't true of something like basketball, where you can pretty much tune in for the final ten minutes only and do just fine. So tell me how that's more exciting than being on edge the whole game because something might happen?

The other major reason is that Americans hate ties. Heck, hockey had to do away with them entirely just to get people interested again. But ties can be fantastic drama, especially in tournaments. Of the three most exciting games I've watched in my life, two ended in a draw - Manchester City and Aston Villa in the 2006 FA Cup and US vs. Italy in the 2006 World Cup. (The third game, for the record: US 3-2 Portugal in 2002.)

The fact is, soccer is an incredible, sprawling game that at its best is full of brilliant moves, canny passing, and outstanding finishes. But it doesn't need to have seven or eight outstanding finishes a game to be exciting - half that many is more than enough. Plus there'll be plenty of shots to go "Oh!" at, and even before that, it's exciting just watching plays develop. Outside of just gameplay, soccer features some of the most interesting tournaments in any sport (World Cup, FA Cup), as well as regular international competition, which is pretty sweet. Baseball's still my favorite sport, but I think soccer has pretty much staked its claim to the #2 spot.

5. Was it always the Beatles? Who came before in young Flaxman's heart?
Considering I've been a Beatles fan since the age of 6 or so, I'd have to say no one. The LPs that vied for supremacy on the living room turntable at the Flaxman house were, for what seems in my memory like several years, pretty much just the following three: Sgt. Pepper's, The Rascals Greatest Hits, and Morrison Hotel by the Doors. There were probably others on occasion, but those dominated the player, or at least seem to have in retrospect. Still, I recall being particularly entranced by Sgt. Pepper's, and why not: for a kid, that cover is an incredible amount of stimulus, and this being the LP, there was even the back of the sleeve off which I could read all the words. Oddly enough, we didn't have most of the albums for a long time; on the third floor, where most of my dad's LP collection was housed, we had Abbey Road - which in retrospect it took me a shocking amount of time to find and listen to - and we had virtually nothing on CD at first (well, 1988, that's not that big a shock), accumulating the bulk of the catalog over the years as I got older and ever more interested in the Beatles, leading to the various birthday countdowns. Today of course I personally own every British LP (on CD), which leads to stuff like this, though somewhat ironically the Beatles make up a much smaller percentage of the music I listen to these days than they probably have at any point prior, and in fact I believe I tried to make another top 40 2-CD countdown for my parents in 2005 and just got tired of it after the first 20. Which doesn't mean the Beatles aren't the best band ever, just that you can't listen to one band that much for that long and not get a little worn out on them for a while.