Email Posting

This is pretty sweet. Now I can email to my blog and it automagically posts it for me. I don't know how useful it really is, but it's neat. I guess I can now blog more covertly and without my eyes being abused by big orange "B"s and things.

Anyway, this post doesn't really have one general topic. I did want to bitch about sport, or more accurately the state of umipring/refereeing in sport these days, though. So I think I'll do that now...

Umpiring these days is horrible. Perhaps it's just because we now have all this fantastic technology that allows us to see all the faults of the umpires with so much more ease. Sometimes that is an excuse, but a lot of the time it isn't. For example, the A-League grand final was ruined by terrible refereeing. The referee missed a blatant hand ball right in front of goal, which should have been a penalty and thus tied the game. The losing team was justifiably upset, and one even "struck" (very mildly) the referee out of frustration. But the worst thing is that the grand final was completely useless, and the whole season was a waste of time because an undeserving team won. They may have gone on to win had the game gone into extra time/penalty shoot outs, but we'll never know. The winners can't be satisfied with their victory, and the losers will forever have that "yeah well, the result wasn't fair" argument.

The entire point of a sporting season is to determine the best team/player. If we're failing to do that, and brushing off poor umpiring decisions with rubbish comments like "that's just part of the game," what's the point? Either we hand umpiring over to technology completely and accept some of the negative implications this would have, or we remove it completely and let viewers at home see only what the umpire sees. No slow motion replays, no hot spot, no hawk eye, none of it, unless we're going to rely on it entirely. It promotes armchair umpiring, applies more pressure on the umpires and leaves supporters a lot less satisfied.

Just as a little disclaimer, I don't care about A-League soccer and am a completely unbiased observer.

On a more humorous note, I was informed of the existence of a pretty hilarious bumper sticker, which reads: "Single women don't fart... they don't get assholes until they marry."