Sports: NFL Playoffs

I could talk about how disillusioned I was when the Boston Patriots became the New England Patriots when I was 11. It's been on again off again with sports and me ever since. I've been paying a little attention, however, to the Patriots this year, mostly because one of our esteemed founders, Randy Moss, is playing. If you don't know, the "Pats" haven't lost a game all year. That rarely happens. If you hate the Pats, as it is easy to do, you now can hope for one thing: they make it to the Superbowl, then lose the final game! I'm trying to think of a tragic equivalent for that, in sports or otherwise, but I can't!

Aside from all this, the one interesting thing I noticed in the one game I watched is that New England quarterback Tom Brady seemed to have been amplified. I've always said that the next frontier in televised sports is sound-- good onfield mics would change the way we view the game. The only reason they don't do it yet is because the profanity and its relationship to image. In one game, however, I seemed to notice this intensified sound. It was really nice-- it added a sense of urgency and excitement that's missing more and more as televised sports increasingly resemble video games.

The amazing thing I noticed in that game was that Tom Brady seemed to be yelling out his counts (and whatever else it is that quarterbacks seem to yell) in GERMAN! Is he German and I just always assumed he wasn't? How does the team understand him? Anyway, it sounds pretty aggressive and scary, and I think it must scare the shit out of opponents.