After all the trouble I went through finding open volleyball gyms, some friends of mine invited me to do a league with them. It is at a "beach" called Golden Gardens. Our first game was Tuesday. Having not previously practiced together, we weren't all that great, but I discovered that by some cosmic glitch I still have the ability to serve. I had assumed that would have been the first of my skills to go after not playing for so many years, but when I tossed the ball up and hit it, it sailed right over the net with a touch of topspin. I still have to remember how to bump, set, spike, and block correctly, but I'm not worried about those.
The league has these rules where you have to have at least one girl on the court and no more than two guys. This bothers the part of my brain that tries to keep my views of the world consistent. Don't get me wrong: I think this rule would actually work great in many walks of life, from programming teams to ski lifts to road trips, to parties, to bars, dance classes, juries, lan parties, apartment buildings, bus stops, casinos, beaches, and hair salons, etc. What I don't get is having the rule on the volleyball court. I thought we were all saying that girls-can-do-everything-just-as-good-as-guys thing? Isn't that what we say now? Because of something about being modern now and leftover angst from the 50s? And the girls at Drexel getting pissy if I offered to walk them home?
According to complaints I've heard from the feminine gender, having a guy insinuate or even imply that he believes men are better at girls than something in some tiny way, even if its something most girls hate like playing Starcraft or deciding which Space Marine chapter more badass (I vote for either Blood Ravens or Blood Angels, although the Ultramarines have a pretty good shot), is one of the more grevious sins...something approaching rape or not using your turn signals to change lanes. So why is it that we tolerate having rules that demonstrate, in an ostensibly practical way, this philosophy? I don't know. I asked someone once--a girl, actually--and she whispered that guys play volleyball better or differently than girls, and we quickly drifted from the subject. What I do know, though, is that I don't really care, and I like making out more than making some kind of ill conceived stand for social consistency, so I'm going to go on with the "girls can do everything just as good as guys" thing, and try not to think about the glaring contradiction with the volleyball rules. If I have to choose between not condoning hippocracy and ever having sex, I know which side of the line I'm standing on.
That got me thinking, though. Can you actually compare two genders for something like volleyball? What does that even mean? Does every guy play volleyball better than every girl? No. Does every girl play better than every guy? No. If you took a random sampling of people, would one gender always be better than the other? No. You could, perhaps, get three (or two) of the best players from each gender to face off, but what would that prove? What if the guy team beats the girl team, but the average girl is better than the average guy? Would you have to start looking at percentiles? Normalize by years of experience, excepting those years spent in high school gym class because they play with screwy rules? Maybe try adding a ladder function to group the percentiles...but then you would need to subdivide by region and culture, oh and don't forget age, that will certainly throw you a curve, if you know what I mean. By the time you come up with a method, only people who have taken two probstat courses will even understand what you've done, and based on all the reality shows I've seen on the tv, that would be roughly no one.
I thought of this because I had the same problem when I asked if skiis are faster than snowboards. Actually I wasn't so much asking as arguing on the yes side. But I digress. There is no answer. There are many kinds of skiis, and many kinds of snowboards. Vis-a-vis (FINALLY!) there are many kinds of skiiers, and many kinds of snowboarders. There are many kinds of snow; in fact there are even different kinds of powder (wet, dry, man made, untracked...). Then there are all the different kinds of terrain. Moguls verses packed verses untracked powder verses cliffs verses half-pipes verses ice. You would have to factor all of that in. The only way, really, to answer the question is to throw one snowboarder and one skiier off of a cliff and have them fall all the way to the bottom, and see which one is more aerodynamic.
Oh, also, it rained. I'm no wimp; I've played volleyball in 40 degree weather at 2 am with crazy Drexel engineers with blinding lights on one side fo the courts and we had to let our feet go numb so they would stop aching. The rain, however, was kind of new. I didn't know you could play volleyball in rain. Also, the sand wasn't even that cold, but as soon as it got wet, my toes started going numb. It is a strange thing to be feeling raindrops in your head while tracking a volleyball with people wearing shorts and having your feet go numb. There's a lot of elements there that usually don't go together.
What's the important takeaway here? The moral of the story is I finally managed to use "vis-a-vis" in a sentance. I've been dying to figure out that phrase ever since I saw Matrix Reloaded but couldn't before because I didn't understand what it meant and never had both motive and opportunity. Well now. I'm going to sleep good tonight.
Also, after careful consideration I think there should be only one guy allowed in the entire league: me. Everyone else has to be a girl between the ages of....20.0 and ...oh yuck way less than 38. And everyone has to drink when we switch sides. And the winning teams from last week dress like pirates and have to scream "gyarrr!!!" when they serve or it doesn't count.
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In other news, Lego Capture-the-Flag??? I must try this. Red team and blue team, and guns and a simple arena, and when the lego men die they go to a timed prison, or respawn at certain points.
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We wouldn't be able to use the normal brick wars rules...need to introduce entropy. Maybe only very short-range weapons, and roll dice to see which lego man dies? The lego men need to fight for multiple turns to keep things interesting.
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make it a drinking game. After every flag capture, or maybe every time a lego man gets fragged, your opponent has to take a drink. It would be like beer pong but not retarded.
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Also, I should celebrate my birthday in the summer. Just to throw people off.
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Chris if you want to start with war with me, I want you to sit down for a moment and ask yourself a question. That question is: which one of us has more time on our hands to screw around on the internet? And I'm going to give you a hint. I just spent 40 minutes doing a painful interview over the phone for someone that was really bright but wouldn't make it past my colleagues' ridiculous interviewing standards, and I was so bored I started drawing a little lego man with his hands up in the air. Its actually pretty good; I might try to scan this even though its on ugly yellow worksheet paper. Thats not the point. The point is when I'm not coding I have a tendency to get bored and check the internet every 30 seconds, which includes reading my own blog when I run out of webcomics, so don't start another birthday war with me. I don't care if people know its the month of December. I just don't want them to know the exact date.
