Alan Jacobs

Bison at Caprock Canyons State Park in the Texas panhandle, which I visited a couple of weeks ago. With that experience in mind I was glad to see this essay: “The Return of the Bison.” And yes, though you may not be able to see them in that photo above, there really are canyons at Caprock Canyons: 

The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees: An excellent in-depth study. None of the problems identified here are easily addressed, but I think the first steps should be: 

First: retrospective punishment for players who (a) surround the ref to intimidate him and (b) simulate being fouled. And not fines — the players are too rich to care about fines. I think the best option would be for players found guilty in these matters to begin their next match with a yellow card. That may seem strong, but there is a deeply-ingrained culture of bullying and deceiving that needs to be addressed. 

Second: eliminate VAR. Just get rid of it. Many years ago my persistent back pain led me to consult a surgeon, who told me that one-third of the people who had the operation I needed got relief from their pain, one-third were left unchanged, and one-third experienced increased pain. VAR is like that; and even when its decisions are correct it makes every single match in which it’s used worse, because fans don’t have any idea whether to celebrate a goal or not — it might be overturned. Almost any idea — including adding a second referee — would be preferable to VAR. 

One more thing about VAR: it’s even less reliable than people think, because one of its weaknesses is almost never noted. When VAR is looking at a potential offside, we’re always shown the players at the offside point and the line that indicates whether the attacking player is ahead of the defender or even with him. What no one looks at is the ball: Has VAR captured the precise moment at which the ball is struck? Typically you can’t tell, because the ball itself obscures the player’s foot. (Here’s an example, from the Premier League website.) VAR might have frozen the video at the precise instant that the player’s foot strikes the ball, but that’s highly unlikely. It’s much more likely that the video is stopped a fraction of a second early or a fraction of a second late; and that might make the difference between whether a player is offside or not. VAR is thus tasked with making decisions that it simply cannot make. Be done with it, I say! 

Treat time!

When Charlie Watts died in August of 2021, I wrote: “This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come.” I didn’t know at the time that Damon Linker had written two years earlier about “The coming death of just about every rock legend.” 

But it’s not just musicians, is it? Consider some of our most famous film directors: 

• Woody Allen is 87
• Francis Ford Coppola is 83 
• Werner Herzog is 80 
• David Lynch is 77 
• George Lucas is 78 
• Terrence Malick is 79 
• George Miller is 78 
• Hayao Miyazaki is 82 
• Martin Scorsese is 80 
• Ridley Scott is 85 
• Steven Spielberg is 76 
• Wim Wenders is 77 

(Obviously, other distinguished names could be added to the list.) Interesting how closely their ages correlate with those of the great rock stars — though the rock stars became famous a decade or more earlier. Won’t be terribly long before we’re saying “There were giants on the earth in those days.”  

It would be very difficult to determine the Platonic ideal of a Steven Wright joke, but I think it might be: “What’s another word for ’thesaurus’?”

Heads up: the Bono & Edge Tiny Desk concert is just fantastic.

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive:

The dream of the Internet was to democratize access to knowledge, but if the big publishers have their way, excessive corporate control will be the nightmare of the Internet. That is what is at stake. Will libraries even own and preserve collections that are digital? Will libraries serve our patrons with books as we have done for millennia? A positive ruling that affirms every library’s right to lend the books they own, would build a better Internet and a better society.