Why do we have Major League Soccer?

It's pretty bad. I'm not sure I know anyone who has been to a game. Even the kick-start that was heralded when poor stupid Becks arrived seems not to have materialized.

It's a league for people who can't make it abroad and for people who already have made it abroad but have since lost the use of one or both of their legs. This is the best the United States can offer. Just Landon Donovan and his absurd receding hairline (which is no worse than Arjen Robben's absurd receding hairline, but Robben is, get this, actually good at soccer).

It takes an all-star (soi-disant) MLS team to compete against a club from Mexico. This is pathetic.

And, even aside from the quality of play, the team names are embarrassingly stupid. Real Salt Lake? Do you know why half of Spanish teams are called Real? Yes? Perhaps because they have kings in Spain? And because "Real Mallorca" does not sound ludicrous? Or Dynamo Houston? Newsflash: Texas? Not a former Soviet state!

The feeling of ersatz European league is embarrassing; if we could sustain a league of our own we should actually make it a league of our own. With team names that make sense and aren't stolen from other countries.

And now Philadelphia is getting an MLS franchise, with a new stadium and all the fixin's. Hooray. A new sport in which Philadelphia can fail. The only bright side to this, as I see it, is that MLS itself might fail before Philadelphia gets into a rut. Did we learn nothing from WUSA?

Why does Amy get Laurie?

I have never believed it when Jo turns Laurie down. Now, I stop reading. Also I turn off the movie. And yes, I was pro-Laurie even before Christian Bale was in the movie.

But, even apart from Jo's inexplicable preference for weirdo Germans over the totally awesome boy next door: Amy?!

Amy burns Jo's manuscript, whines her way up hill and down dale, and is vain as a peacock. She clearly does not deserve anyone as excellent as Laurie, who may be hot-tempered and slightly lazy but is also generous and interesting.

I don't care if Little Women is semi-autobiographical, I still don't believe it. It's narratively disastrous and I protest.

Why have they made a Julius Caesar film since the MGM one?

The MGM one had Marlon Brando as Antony, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and some really attractive dude as Octavian. It also had Deborah Kerr and Greer Garson as the various wives.

It was perfect, in other words. The costumes were accurate, Caesar's death was affecting, and Marlon Brando even managed to speak without sounding as if his mouth were full of marbles.

So why, oh why, is there a Charlton Heston Julius Caesar?

Heston is Antony. This is absurd. Heston is good at gravitas and a certain kind of honest attraction. Antony, on the other hand, is a thug and exudes a certain kind of gross animal magnetism. (Thus Marlon Brando.)

Also, there were beards. I only saw it a long time ago, but I recall beards, possibly on Brutus. I'm not that picky about historical realism and the like, but no one in Rome had a beard until Hadrian went into mourning for Trajan. Well, except for foreigners, but they don't count. Contemporary portraits of all the figures in the drama are beardless.

So I don't know why the effort was expended to produce this film, and I really don't know why, having expended the effort, it was so atrocious.

Why do radio stations revel in making me feel ancient?

My favorite kinds of music are ones with melodies and words. I like Billy Joel a lot, and I grew up on the Beatles and the Police, and I also am a fan of British punk. I'll listen to a certain amount of pop, and I've been known to own a 90s alternative album or two.

So I'll be listening to the radio, and I will be enjoying a five song set, or whatever. They'll play some Pink Floyd, maybe a little 70s or 80s Bowie, and I'll know every word to every song and life will be good.

And then they pause for station identification and I find out that it's 97.3 Lite FM, or whatever. Or they'll call it soft rock.

This is humiliating.

The Rolling Stones are not soft rock. That implies a parallel to soft jazz or something, and that's just unkind. Even to the Stones.

And to me. I'm not fifty. I've heard of the Killers and Rooney and I don't like Celine Dion or Barry Manilow. I just like singable melody lines. Stop making fun of me!

Why don't people know to cut the threads on the vents on their coats?

Every so often I see someone wearing a nice jacket or coat, and I figure, "Hey, nice coat," but then I see that they have failed to cut the threads on the vent.

The vents are sewn shut so that the garment does not shift and then wrinkle in transit. That is the only reason. That is why the stitches are often in contrasting thread, and the stitches are also large. They are deliberately obvious. They must be cut off before wearing the garment.

Come on, people. Do you not look at yourself before you leave the house?

Why do people think hymns are modular?

(Blogging today as travelling tomorrow. Happy Easter, you lot.)

I was in church today, and, naturally, it being Easter, we got to sing Ralph Vaughan Williams' immortal classic "Salve festa dies." Or, I got to sing three quarters of it.

There are eight verses, of which the last two are pretty excellent. The whole thing is a carefully considered and crafted piece of art, and it is imperative, for the full effect, to sing the whole thing.

We sang six verses. This was because, apparently, they had failed to plan the procession properly, so that it would fill out the whole hymn. This is elementary ecclesiastical logistics, and completely unforgivable to screw up.

And when you've planned your procession badly, it compounds the offense when you are too lazy even to sing the whole hymn. It is an offense against care, against aesthetics, and, worst of all, an offense against R.V.W. himself. Shame!

Why is there a whole genre concerned with making fairy tales acceptable to women?

There are so many books like this out there, from The Mists of Avalon to Ella Enchanted.

In these books, it has been decided that the women will no longer be either villainesses or silly. And in doing so, it removes a great deal of narrative force and has the tendency to turn the men into patsies.

Take The Mists of Avalon. In it, Arthur is an easily led dimwit. Lancelot is a libidinous twerp (more so than usual--libidinous in multiple directions, and a really big twerp). And, in order to make the book plausibly from the point of view of Morgan LeFay (once one of literature's great witches), she is de-clawed and New-Age-ified and Guinevere is turned into a shrew. Guinevere has always been stupid, I will grant you. But she usually means fairly well. To recapitulate: the High King of Britain is a moron, his wife is both dumb and nasty, his best friend is jackass, and his nemesis is a well-meaning hippie. Huh?

Let's move on to Ella Enchanted, a Cinderella story, and Fairest, which is something approaching Snow White, and by the same author. In these, both young ladies are insecure about their beauty, and the Snow White is actually ugly. However, the princes concerned love them for other reasons (of course) and for a long time. This would wreak havoc on the Cinderella story, because you have to have a ball where they don't know each other, but this is accomplished by a series of balls at which the young lady wears masks, even though only one is actually a masquerade. I know what you're saying--the prince has known her for years, and they corresponded regularly, and yet he is not suspicious of the girl with the hair, figure, and bearing of his true love? What a nitwit. The Snow White one has to jump all sorts of inane hurdles that don't even make sense, and we are left to believe that the prince fell in love with her "grandeur." Which makes him a liar as well as an idiot, because that is total nonsense.

I pass over The Firebrand, or Troy as told by Cassandra, in which we are so progressive that Cassandra and Aeneas have an affair. Yes, that's right, the Aeneas, the one with pius tacked onto his name.

I can't understand the urge to add depth to these stories. They are fairy tales. Everyone in them is silly. We mourn for Camelot, not because we actually care, but because we have it in our cultural memory to do so. The stories are sweet, or they're not, and it is dangerous to invest too much in them. It is especially bad to make them crapulent in the name of some ideology. I liked Cinderella when both Cinderella and the prince were sort of silly and cute. When updating Cinderella means that Prince Charming is the dumbest thing on two legs, you can leave me out.

Why can't people use apostrophes?

Apostrophes do not appear in plurals. Apostrophes do not appear in archaic possessives. Apostrophes are not toys, and should not be given to children under the age of six, or, evidently, many people who are in the business of making signs.

"There," "their," and "they're" all mean different things. "There" looks like "here," so you know it refers to place. "Their" looks like nothing on earth, so it's pretty clear that it doesn't mean "they are." "They're" looks like "they are," except without the "a." This is how we form contractions. It's not difficult.

"His" and "hers" have no apostrophes. "Its," when a possessive, has no apostrophe. These things are always true. You must expend the effort to learn this rule exactly once.

If a family's surname is Williams, the plural is not "Williams'." It is "Williamses." That may look goofy, but I can't help that. At no point is it correct in this case to write "William's." Have you ever found a word that admits the random insertion of apostrophes?

The only situation in which apostrophes are a little bit sketchy is in possessives of names ending in "s." The question then becomes whether to write "Thomas'" or "Thomas's." The answer is, essentially, "yes." I prefer the former, as do most pedants, but the latter, for consistency's sake, is permissible. So, really, there's no excuse. Just so long as you don't write "Thoma's" or "Thomases," you're good. And both of those are patently ludicrous.

Which means that this whole thing is just not that hard, and if you screw it up you are either lazy or inconsiderate, and it is up to you to decide which is worse.

Why does bad light stop play?

And why is it so arbitrary? If it were really a safety issue, there would be a light meter at all times, checking at regular and short intervals whether there were enough light to play on.

As it stands, it's chiefly up to the batsmen and the umpires. I can't be the only one who thinks this lets in huge opportunity for gamesmanship and/or outright cheating. (I would be the first to admit that when my batsmen ask for the light it's because the sun has actually gone down, whereas the opposing batsmen are just sissies trying to gain an advantage.)

But seeing a test match end in a draw because day four ended several hours early on account of so-called bad light is monumentally unsatisfying. Who knows how many wickets might have fallen?

Rain stopping play I can stand. No one wants his nice cricket whites to get all wet. Many sports stop in the rain, and cricket is one that has a tea break, so it's not especially hard-core. But light? Seriously?

I think the main thing here is that when I want to watch a day of cricket it had better last all the way through Neighbours and if I don't get six full hours I get disgruntled.

Why does smooth jazz exist?

I'm sorry to use the "music" tag for this, but I really don't want to inaugurate a "music, soi-disant" tag, and tags don't admit commas anyway.

So we have the only real American art form--jazz. And it's wonderful and spontaneous and brassy. It has its great practitioners. Coltrane, Ellington, Hancock, Davis, and so on and so forth.

Kenny G is not on that list. Because what he plays is not jazz. It is not even music. It is fake and insipid and effete. Just as vodka does not a martini make, so a saxophone does not create jazz. Especially when it is slowly strangled as it maunders through some once-great standard.

I can't believe there are whole radio stations dedicated to this garbage. Philadelphia has a smooth jazz station and yet no real classical station. Now, I know that Philadelphia's fake classical station plays Respighi all the time and who wants twenty-four hours of that crap, but even Respighi is better than smooth jazz.

Why don't all actors die young like James Dean?

Your image of James Dean is young and hot. And he will always be that way. I'm not saying I'm glad he died, just glad that he never faced the slow, embarrassing decline of many of his kind.

The worst of these is Marlon Brando. The smokin', compelling Brando of A Streetcar Named Desire or even Julius Caesar made way for the wheezing, enormous Brando of Apocalypse Now or The Godfather. Would it have been less good if he had been less fat? I doubt it.

Or Omar Sharif. Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia make way for the saccharine and facile M. Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Coran, or the most likely atrocious piece of crap that was Hidalgo. Reduced to making bad Disney movies that star Viggo Mortensen? That has to hurt.

Or, in the same vein, Christopher Plummer. Once the strikingly handsome Captain von Trapp or the fighter pilot in The Battle of Britain, he is now appearing in cameo rôles in such gems as National Treasure, and as Diane Lane's dad in execrable John Cusack vehicles like Must Love Dogs. He didn't get fat, but talk about a fall from grace.

Can't they retire? Or, like Peter O'Toole, choose decent parts? He may have been in Troy, but he was the one bright spot in that movie. And at least he looks like he's having fun. The others are and were just miserable. It hurts to watch.

Why is it so fashionable for women to wear their hair down?

This especially drives me insane in the evening. Or with musicians.

I once had to watch a viola soloist who spent all the time between movements picking strands of her hair out of her shoulder rest. This would not have been a problem if she'd had her hair pinned up or back or anything other than down. With evening dress, it is proper to wear one's hair up. In fact, that's one of the things that makes it obvious that one is dressed for the evening and not just for dinner (for the curious: a long dress, gloves, and jewels are the others).

During the day, of course, same strictures do not apply. However, in my experience, people have to do things during the day. And wearing one's hair down, if it's any longer than a pageboy, gets in the way. And it tangles, and gets frizzy, and is just basically disastrous.

But women have accepted this cynical and work-intensive hairstyle. They get up in the morning so they can use a straightener and a hair-dryer. If they just wore their hair up, none of this would be necessary.

And I, personally, hate wearing my hair down.

Why do we still read the Brontës?

Now, I've only ever read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. But they were terrible. And I'm not at all inclined to read any more.

I suppose it makes me a Philistine, but I really don't enjoy reading books in which there are no likable characters at all. Well, I retract that. Mr. Rochester was fairly likable, but also a bigamist and mildly insane. And the only likable character in Wuthering Heights is Linton, whom I suspect one is not really supposed to like at all.

Jane herself is hateful. And Cathy and Heathcliff make me want to pull out my own fingernails. Their insipid melodramas make me sick.

I realize that we're supposed to admire the Brontës because they're female and ahead of their time, but I really don't think this obliges me to read dreadful novels.

Why do films play fast-and-loose with accents?

One of my biggest personal pet peeves is taking Welsh accents away from people who have them. Like, in the English dub of Howl's Moving Castle, when Christian Bale does Howl's voice and sounds colorless and American. This drives me nuts because Howl is Welsh. Kind of like Christian Bale. Or Ioan Gruffudd. Who sometimes plays English people, which is okay. But then in Fantastic Four, he also must do a stupid American accent. I guess Mr. Fantastic is technically American (that's comic book experience I don't have), but I don't think it would be narratively disastrous if he were Welsh.

So there's that. And then there's the other direction. And here comes the long-awaited Peter-Jackson-directed rage.

Sean Astin? Couldn't we have done better than that? Isn't there some questionably talented British actor who looks like a potato? Because then at least his accent wouldn't wander over all of the British Isles and much of the eastern United States. It really kills the moment when, in the midst of all the grime and Orcs, there's a random Yorkshireman out of nowhere. Man, it's the worst. I pass over Elijah Wood.

But I cannot pass over Viggo Mortensen. The man sounds like a dying cat is lodged somewhere in his vocal cords. And laid over that is this quasi-British proto-accent that drops the Rs but does damn-all for the vowels, because no one has yet had the decency to kill the damn cat.

Now, I understand that sometimes the main thing for a rôle is the appearance. But we complain when people are just terrible actors. And, actually, talking in a remotely plausible manner would be part of being a good actor. Please, people.

Why is the past participle disappearing?

I know, I know, languages change organically, yadda yadda yadda.

Bull.

I was going past a restaurant, and they had a sign in their window that said, "Close." Close to what? Eh? What they meant, of course, is "Closed."

Or the everlasting "first come, first served" issue. "First come, first serve" is nonsensical. The verbs ought to be roughly parallel; this formulation implies a tennis match.

If people just thought, a little tiny bit, none of them would come up with phrases that drive me insane. Can't they have a little compassion on my nerves?

Why are people so keen on sexing up the Tudors?

I mean, first Jonathan Rhys Meyers and now Eric Bana?

This is Henry VIII. After Edward II, he's pretty much the least appealing English king. To women, I mean. For a different reason, though.

Now, I believe it is the case that he was fairly attractive before he got all bloaty, presumably some time before he hit Catherine Howard. Power is an aphrodisiac, but probably not that strong; six women is a lot.

But I'm damn sure he never had the sexy feral cat thing going on like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, or the absurdly distractingly handsome thing going on like Eric Bana.

Come on, people. There are sexy people in history. Why don't we let sexy actors play them?

Why do films use "fuego" and "feu" to mean "fire," as in weapons?

"Fire!" to mean "fire your weapons" is different from "Fire!" to mean "get out of this theatre."

Now, actually, I checked this, and word is that, in Spanish, this is what they actually do. In many ways this makes it worse. Because it means that a whole language is not aware of the difference of imperative verbs from random exclamations. Now, I would be pleased if someone who's better at Spanish than I could correct me, but either way--either the films are wrong or Spanish is wrong--is no good.

French, though, I'm pretty sure they say "tirez" or something like that in real life. Not "feu." For the same basic, grammatical reasons.

It just sounds fake. Even if it maybe isn't.

Why is Andie MacDowell in movies?

More to the point, why is she generally supposed to be a woman of compelling beauty in all those movies?

I mean, in St. Elmo's Fire, Emilio Estevez makes an enormous imbecile of himself over her. And in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hugh Grant does essentially the same thing, but we mind it more, because his character is not as huge a schmuck as Emilio's.

Do they not notice that her teeth are the size of Canada? And that her voice comes on the ear like a grater on cheese?

Not to mention that she's a terrible actress. I know that not many of you have seen Riding the Bus With My Sister, but it really gave her scope for her non-talents.

And they still put her in movies! Is she still skating on Groundhog Day? That was fifteen years ago. There has got to be somebody better.

Why am I addressed as "Ms.?"

I'm not a Ms. I'm a Miss. I'm not married, and I'm not angry at men. About that, I mean.

When I get married, I'll change my name and turn into a Mrs. This makes things astronomically easier for the children, who will neither have to make sure people know their mother should be introduced as "Ms. Petherbridge" when their last name is Collingwood, nor go around being "Andrew Collingwood-Petherbridge," which would probably end in death aged five.

There are women who like being a Ms. That's fine. I don't mind. I'm not one of them. Some of them probably have professional reputations built under their maiden names which make it advisable to stick to it. That makes sense. Again, I don't mind.

The patriarchy has perhaps done many bad things, but the Miss-to-Mrs. one is not something that really gets my goat. I find it an aid to understanding family dynamics. I would rather not have that aid destroyed by hippies just because they like destroying things.

Why do athletes use performance-enhancing drugs?

I just don't get it.

I assume, when you're good enough to play a sport professionally, that you love it. For me, that would imply that you wouldn't want to compromise your relationship with the sport. It's cheating. Wouldn't it feel awful? You would never know if you were actually that good.

Plus, you might get caught.

And you know what's worse than not being able to throw a fastball three miles per hour more quickly? Ruining baseball. For everyone. Forever.

Why do people play "The Game?"

I was reminded of it by today's XKCD. But, instead of going "Oh, man, I lost the game," I was filled with an incandescent rage about the game itself, because it's the worst thing ever.

Where does it become fun? "I know, what the world needs is a game that consists entirely of not thinking about it!" How does this stupid post-modern absence of game piece of crap compel so many rational and even sometimes interesting people?

It's not a game. It's dumber than a brick. It's dumber than a load of bricks. What are you, eleven?