Back in business

I have many blogging ideas, but I have been busy with other things, such as being in New Haven and playing Shout About Music (and having a great time with Jen...). Nevertheless, here is a post that has been sitting around for a week or two:

I recently went to see the documentary film Murderball. For those unfamiliar with this movie, it is the story of a sport called quad rugby (né murderball) in which quadriplegics compete in custom-made wheelchairs, violently knocking into each other and trying to score the most points. The game is played on a basketball court, and crossing the baseline with the ball is worth one point.

Now this is where I thought it got interesting. Each team is only allowed to have four players on the court at one time. And each player is given a rating from 0.5 to 3.5, based on his range of movement (3.5 is the best). Finally, the cumulative rating for the four player on the court has to be less than or equal to 8.0. This creates many interesting selection dilemmas for the coach, and reminded me of one of my favorite NES games, Ice Hockey! Remember how you had to choose four players, and each one could be fat, medium, or skinny? You couldn't choose all fat because they would be too slow, all skinny because they would be too weak, nor all medium because you are best off with different types of players. I usually picked two skinny, one fat, and one medium, but of course I experimented a lot as well.

I definitely enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to others. That said, I would also like to say that I found something else of interest. One of the major goals of the movie was to show that these quadriplegics are just like regular people, and this was largely shown to be the case. Especially in the fact that murderball athletes are just like regular athletes...they are often cocky meatheads....