It's common sense that competitive team sports are one of the best ways to become a better person, even if you're not participating yourself. It's even more beneficial to compete, though. I had been thinking about the specific mechanisms of how something playing on an amateur football team makes you a better person, and I think one of the most important ones is that it forces you to boost your social skills. You've got a team who need to work together to achieve a goal and overcome others in a competition. The team needs to be motivated, but there's no money and not much glory to provide that motivation. That makes leadership a challenge. You can't just yell and people, curse and threaten to fire them the way you could on a construction site or at a warehouse job. You gotta be good.

If you just plain don't like sports, you can get the same benefits in other settings. Any situation where long-term teamwork is necessary and money isn't much of a motivator will suffice. Playing in a bar band is another example - there's some money to be had but not much, and you have to keep the team happy and motivated with other incentives. Even if you're not the leader, you will learn a lot just by observing the ways in which people try to give others incentives to do a good job. If you're really lacking in social skills, you might even have to use your brain and consciously try to analyze these transactions the way someone like Roissy analyzes picking up chicks, but you should still benefit trememdously. Here is an example of a non-financial transaction serving as an incentive: if you do your job well you will be more liked and respected by your bandmates, meaning the pianist will invite you to his parties where there are plenty of women you can hit on.

In one way, playing in a band with crap pay or being a lousy amateur footballer is better for you as a person than being a well-paid pro.

We've written before that good-looking people are better singers and musicians than the rest of you, and now we also have scientific evidence that handsome guys are also superior athletes, even when rating the attractiveness of their faces alone (so, unfortunately for the girls participating in this research, they didn't get to check out their muscular bodies). We already know that guys with certain kinds of face shapes are stronger and more aggressive, but I was still somewhat surprised that this even works in not-so-aggressive sports like tennis.

So, there you go. Equality not just for the weak and stupid, but for the weak, stupid and ugly.

Racial differences can be discussed in polite society after all, and even featured on a mainstream TV program! They just have to be painfully obvious to the naked eye and have no really unimportant social consequences. Yup, Samoans sure do tend to be large. It's kinda interesting to see where the line for acceptable public discourse lies.

Have there been any condemnations of this as racism since the program was aired? I'm not aware of any, but maybe our American readers can correct me...

Over at Deadspin, Will Leitch writes that he can't understand Kurt Warner, but is inspired by him anyway. He's writing about Warner the way one might write about a Shakespearean hero, which I think makes a lot of sense.

Warner doesn't confound me, though. I can understand him because except for being really good at a really well-paying job (and yeah, that's pretty important), he's a lot like me. The one thing I can add to this is that you don't have to have especially strong religious beliefs to be that way. I don't, but I'm still never "nervous in an existential way" because I just find those existential questions completely uninteresting.

Yeah, a lot of people say all that makes me shallow or horrible or evil or whatever, but I sure as hell would never trade it for being deep. I know some deep people, and being deep seems like a horrible annoyance. But maybe I'm missing something. Do deep people enjoy being deep?

Being a racist is hard; sometimes it seems that just about the whole world is dedicated to opposing you, and never shows any mercy. But finally there is some good news! My favorite progressive is getting tired of beating up on you, and is calling for the NFL to get rid of the Rooney rule which, in short, requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for certain job openings. He doesn't want to replace it with something that will result in more real job interviews for minority candidates instead of the sham interviews common today, but just plain get rid of it altogether. Easterbrook writes: "The rule did its job, and now can be retired."

Maybe this is the start of a trend. Maybe more and more progressives will decide that fighting racism is so twentieth-century and that you really don't even make a good punching bag anymore. You can hope so...

Racists are often insulted and denigrated in public. No one wants to admit that they like or support racists, so they are rarely praised. However, we have some good news for you! After Chievo Verona supporters chanted racist slogans at a recent match, Mario Balotelli applauded them as he was leaving the pitch. Although the Italian FA has fined him for this show of support, this is still something for racists to feel happy about. I hope some white supremacist organization raises the money so Mario doesn't have to pay the fine out of his own pocket. He is still young, after all, and even though he is no stranger to controversy we all hope he doesn't become discouraged by this.

I don't generally bother dispensing training advice because to be honest just about anything works for me, as long as I'm eating enough and put some weight on the bar. Losing fat is especially easy - to be honest, all it takes is being less disciplined about stuffing myself with food.

Still, I know that a lot of people have gotten a bit fatter over the holidays and now want to get back to where they were a few weeks ago. Although this workout was described by coach Dan John as a soul-cleansing, character-building challenge and not as fat loss training, I've done it a few times and found out that it's also an exceptional way to get leaner quickly, then go back to regular training. (Yeah, that means it won't do you any good if you don't regularly train. You'll probably just get seriously hurt.)

I once entered a friendly "100 reps" competition. The rules were simple: 100 singles with an exercise. Not 10 sets of 10, mind you, 100 singles.

The first time I tried it, I did squat snatches with 165 pounds. That was insane. I lost about six pounds the next few days after the attempt. I think most of it was skin off my hands.

Another time, I power cleaned 205 for 100. Another, I clean and jerked 185 pounds. I also front squatted 255 for 100 singles. Unrack, squat, rack, rinse and repeat.

It will take you a few hours. You will be changed.

I tried this a couple of times when I knew I wouldn't be able to lift for a few days anyway. I found out that doing it works great for getting lean quickly. Just pick a lift that you can do well that many times and that uses as much of your muscle mass as possible. I've done it a few times with front squats off a pair of sawhorses. A weight that I could do for about eight reps seems about right and getting to 100 takes about two hours. Then take the next few days off, eat normally and get plenty of sleep, then go back to normal training. You'll end up a few kilos lighter. In six months you might feel like doing this again.

Looking forward to your horrible injury reports in the comments.

I ran across a research paper which found that while the average guy would like to have a lot more muscle, the average woman prefers men with only slightly above-average muscle mass.

Now, I could try to poke holes in this - say that university students' preferences are weird and they should go ask some farmgirls at a disco, or that you should always trust what women actually want and never what they say they want, but let's take this finding at face value. Assume everything in this study is true, and also assume that your only goal in life is to attract more desirable women. If you're a muscular guy, should you lose a bunch of muscle for the sake of the ladies?

Naaaah. I can think of two good reasons why you should keep growing more meat on your bones. One is that women like socially dominant men. For most of us being bigger and stronger than other guys helps achieve that. They'll take you over the better-looking guy who thinks you're more man than him.

Two is that this study is talking about "the average woman", and there are plenty of non-average women as well. Now, I know that when told women don't like something he does, damn near every guy tries to hide behind "well, most women don't, but the ones who are really worth it love it". That's bullshit, of course. No matter who you are, plenty of women who are really worth it hate you and hate what you do. You should be man enough to admit it to yourself. However, there are also plenty of women who prefer meaty dudes, and they sure seem to be more plentiful than the meaty dudes they crave. In other words, the distribution of women's tastes is wider than the distribution of guys' meatiness, and us bigger guys don't have as much competition. Average guys are plentiful - it's a meat market and you want to be in short supply!

I do suspect that there is a grain of truth to this study, though. Whether it captures women's preferences accurately or not, men do care about how big and strong they are a lot more than women do.

I just saw a Swedish documentary about mixed martial arts (MMA) clubs. Swedish MMA clubs, like all other sports clubs, receive benefits from the government to support their activity. Yet moralists and "health experts" now rail against MMA because it's too violent. No money from the government, they scream, this is anti-Swedish.

If the morons knew anything about martial arts in general, they'd realize that the really tough MMA matches you see on television only involve professionals. They know what they're doing, because they've been training for years. They deserve respect, not resentment. Why do we want to cut the benefits to MMA but not to other high-risk sports like hockey or football? Have you ever met a track and field athlete that hasn't been struggling with at least one serious knee- or back injury?

It's all really simple. Swedes don't hate martial arts because of its risks. They hate it because it involves two people fighting against each other. The oh-so-civilized and progressive Swedes can stand angry immigrants setting whole suburbs on fire, top political leaders supporting Communism and the end of the heterosexual family, and stand by while fanatic Jihadists demand we put an end to our freedom of speech.

But when two people fight each other in a ring, the line has been crossed. It's violent, and we want the Nanny State to ban it immediately. Let's all go back to our bureaucratic desks and shut the hell up. Life is safer that way.

My favorite open-minded progressive wrote something very progressive indeed in yesterday's column about whether athletes who play for American univerisities should get paid:

Surely if one considers only star players such a Durant, the NCAA is indeed benefiting from a free-labor system. But is that the way we should look at matters?

During Durant's college season, 2006-07, there were 343 Division I men's basketball teams, each awarding 13 full scholarships, and 270 Division II basketball teams, each awarding 10 full scholarships, for a total of 7,159 men's basketball scholarships. (The numbers are now slightly different.) The following season, Durant's rookie year, there were 55 NBA players who had just left college, either early or as seniors. Since 55 from that college season advanced to the NBA, we can roughly judge that 55 of the 7,159 major-program basketball players that year were being exploited financially, while the other 7,104 were not. The other 7,104 players were coming out way ahead financially, as they were receiving free college educations -- if they had enough sense to go to class -- plus experiences that might help them in later life, especially in the business world. ("Wow, you played basketball at Boston College?")

He actually made $4.3 million in his college season -- it's just that the money was donated to others.Divide 7,159 by 55, and get 130. So each player from Durant's college season who might have been earning an NBA salary was supporting the college educations of another 130 players. This is the key thought missing from free-labor complaints about college basketball. Yes, the tiny fraction of players capable of advancing to the NBA do perform for far less than their market price, but they create economic value that lets large numbers of others go to college on scholarship.

The thinking behind that argument is downright scary, but typical of the ways open-minded progressives justify forcing weird totalitarian policies on others. It basically can be summed up as: it's all right to steal value from people who are probably going to be rich anyway, giving them only crumbs (university courses they neither need nor want), if the money they generate is spent to give other people something most of them neither need nor want, as long as it's something that progressives value such as education.

Progressives especially love to heavily tax athletes because they like to think that athletes are overpaid - in other words, they believe they know what the "real" value of the athlete's performance is better than the team the athlete works for. The whole thing is a great example of the sort of idealism that I'm glad ran out of money and gave up running my part of the world 20 years ago - we know what's good for you better than you do and we feel good about forcibly taking that money from you to pay for it for other people, too, and while we're at it we'll pay some bureaucrats for administration and enforcement.

I suppose conservatives can be just as conceited and creepy but at least they tend to use their own money when they want to influence the way sports teams are run.

When it comes to the actual issue at hand, I don't like the way American high schools and universities act as de facto lower tier leagues for the NBA and NFL shrouded in amateur student-athlete idealism. I don't much care for idealism, and I don't care at all for enforced amateur status.

Robert Wilbin writes an interesting post about how some ways of chasing status are more beneficial for the rest of society than others; that's the kind of thing we often think about when we make fun of other peoples' status games for being worthless or condemn them as harmful, but we almost never put in Wilbin's clear and direct terms. Is a particular status competition positive-sum, zero-sum or negative-sum? That's an excellent question.

He's dead wrong about one thing, though: that competitions in which a few people gain extremely high amount of status are less desirable. If plenty of people make small-to-medium gains from something, I don't see the problem wtih a few at the very top making huge gains. The examples he brings up are popular music and sports, and I know for a fact that not being an international star still brings me plenty of status instead of creating unhappiness for me, as Wilbin seems to think it would.

The same thing with sports; I don't even compete anywhere but lifting weights makes me look better and more intimidating (both major status boosts), it also gives me the status of "strong dude you should ask for help when you need heavy shit moved". I come out well ahead in this status game even though I'm no Gennaro Gattuso or even Hossein Rezazadeh. Their far greater status doesn't make me sad in the slightest.

I don't think I'll ever understand egalitarians...

HT: Ilkka

Continuing my last post's subject of the exploitation of scantily dressed attractive young women, Gregg Easterbrook thinks NFL cheerleaders should be getting paid a lot more:

Cheer-babes dancing in short skirts, or posing for swimsuit calendars, is not exploitation. After all, you're supposed to look at the cheerleaders! Professional athletics is foremost a form of entertainment, and the scantily-clad dancing girl has a long history as integral to entertainment in theatrical arts as well as sport.

It is, however, objectionable if everyone involved in an NFL contest is making buckets of money, except for the cheerleaders. That's the case, and that is a form of exploitation. The NFL will have about $8 billion in revenue this season, and Green Bay, the one team that discloses financial information (the Packers are publicly owned), showed a profit of $20 million last year. There's plenty of money in professional football. But only crumbs go to the cheerleaders. NFL teams are believed to pay cheerleaders approximately $100 per game. (Several teams used to post cheerleader audition FAQs on their Web sites that included such info.) Some throw in two game tickets. Don't spend it all in the same place!

Cheerleader squads practice twice a week, and in most cases, cheerleaders are not paid for practicing. Some are charged to audition. They make unpaid charity appearances. In order to become cheerleaders, they sign away "subsidiary rights" to their images -- use in advertising, on swimsuit calendars and so on. Being a NFL cheerleader is glamorous and can entail exciting travel. Many women who take up this very time-consuming hobby would rather be cheerleaders receiving only token pay than not be cheerleaders. But that should not be the choice. "Do it cheap or we'll find someone else who will" is manipulation. Cheerleaders are professional performers and deserve decent pay.

His argument certainly has its appeal. The problem (if it really is a problem) is that there's no shortage of attractive young women willing to do the work almost for free, and $100 a game is probably pretty close to the actual free-market price for NFL cheerleading services. I'm sure having "NFL cheerleader" on a resume helps these young women tremendously when it comes to landing better-paying jobs in modeling, acting etc. and the high status greatly boosts their social lives, so they're getting a lot more out of cheerleading than just the crappy money. Libertarians think the current arrangement is great.

Still, though, it just somehow feels wrong for such a huge and profitable enterprise to pay highly visible employees who generate a lot of value so little. Should the government or the league force a price floor for cheerleaders' services upon NFL teams? I don't think I'd want that. Still, though, if a team paid cheerleaders $1000 per game plus some cut of things like calendar sales I would applaud it. Sure, one could argue that this is amounts to charity directed at attractive young women who don't need it, but to me it just feels like the best resolution on an instinctive, emotional level.

The entire situation reminds me of my dealings with some younger musicians who are perfectly willing to work for free. It's their right, but if I'm using someone for something I'm getting paid for, I'm going to pay them even if they say it's against their code of ethics to get paid for music. I just had one of these conversations with a violoncellist on Sunday, and after we agreed on an amount she admitted flat out that in other situations she's perfectly willing to charge other people an arm and a leg just for recording three notes, but because she likes what I'm doing she's got no problem working for a lot less and would do it for free. It's basically the same question, just at a small-business level, and my answer seems to be to voluntarily overpay out of a (possibly misplaced) feeling of moral obligation. I sure as hell wouldn't want a government or musicians' union forcing me to overpay, though.

What do you think and how do you feel about this? Are NFL cheerleaders underpaid or not? Should the teams pay them the pittance they do now, should they pay more voluntarily, or should someone force them to pay more?

NHL enforcer Georges Laraque is in a bit of trouble for violating the collective bargaining agreement between the players and the league by appearing in an alcohol ad. He says he didn't know what the ad was for and has apologized, but that s not the interesting part.

Here's the ad:

And here's the predictable feminist reaction:

33mag.com, the advertising company responsible for the spot, said it was done as a parody of sexist beer ads. Octane 7.0 combines an energy drink with alcohol.

"This is one more example of sexist advertising," said Alexa Conradi, of the Federation des femmes du Quebec, the province's most prominent women's group. "Why is it that when we're trying to market a campaign toward men aged 20 to 35, we always use this kind of ad? What does that say about our concept of masculinity?

"That's a very limited concept of masculinity, to always feature half-naked girls at angles where you don't see their whole body," Conradi said.

I'm not generally too hard on feminists - they never bother unreformable cavemen like me and most of their attacks are really directed against nerds, wimps and losers. In this I can't help laughing, though - it seems that feminists insist on taking parody at face value and can't resist giving this product tons of free publicity. Oh well. I suppose status-conscious people can now add attractive women to the list of things which cannot be enjoyed even ironically, alongside Ed Hardy clothing, "Nazi Uniforms, Ku Klux Klan Robes, and self-tanner".

As for what all this says about our concept of masculinity, I'd say that concept is pretty accurate when it comes to including the idea that young men like looking at attractive young women.

TC Luoma sees a guy who is behaving oddly in a swimming pool in Las Vegas:

I'd yet to see him sit down. Even though his large-breasted girlfriend was lying on one of the poolside loungers, he's so far refused to join her.

Keep in mind that I'd been watching for a while; my Churchill-length cigar has shrunk to a Clint Eastwood spaghetti-western cheroot, and the ice from my first prickly pear marguerita would now make a good model of the effects of global warming.

The little big man has been constantly wading through the pool like a Godzilla who keeps changing his mind about crossing Tokyo Bay and destroying the city or heading back out to his oceanic lair. During the brief periods when he does leave the pool, he stands next to it, flares his lats, and does that little pec twitch that novice bodybuilders and tip-hungry strippers are so fond of doing.

You see what I'm getting at? Sitting down would obscure his body from supposedly admiring eyes. Swimming in the water instead of wading would cover up his rippling torso. . .

His self-worth is entirely wrapped up in his muscle.

I got this image of how unfulfilling the rest of his life must be. I even got an image of his childhood. Chances are, he didn't get acknowledgement or approval from his parents. Maybe he didn't excel in any particular area, and his relatively diminutive stature kept him from at least getting physically noticed.

So weight lifting, bodybuilding, became a form of therapy and perhaps a means to escape his wretched existence, the same way excelling at high school football is an escape to residents of mouse turd Texas towns in every Hollywood movie on the subject. If he couldn't grow horizontally, or if he couldn't find a means to grow his status, he'd grow horizontally to take up more space and force the universe to notice, by God.

Meat may not have been born the brightest guy, and he might have shortcomings in charm, rapport with females, empathy, emotional stability, or any one or more of the human traits regarded as positive, but rather than work on them he chose only to work on the external.

If he'd given a little more attention to the inner Meat, he wouldn't be parading non-stop around the pool like a damn fool.

TC then goes on to write about shallow people whose self-worth and existence are centered around their physical appearance. I think "the tale of Meat" could be generalized beyond those obsessed with appearance - when you singlemindedly dedicate your life to excelling at a specific pursuit it can easily take over your entire life to the point where you've got nothing else going for you. Meat reminds me of a researcher in mechanical engineering that I once knew. The guy was doing work on some energy-efficiency measures for air-conditioning systems - hardly nuclear physics but the kind of work that makes our lives and the world a little bit better. He was really dedicated to his job to the point where it seriously damaged his family life. An example - one time he admitted that he was working late in his office until 8 pm and didn't really have anything important left to do, but he stayed in the office doing more work until 10 because he knew that if he went home at 8 his wife would nag at him for hours about working so late, whereas if he got home really late she'd be tired and only nag for a half hour or so before going to sleep.

I've got nothing against excellence but it really can destroy your life, like Jascha Heifetz supposedly said. If you want to excel at something, whether it's playing the violin or growing meat on your body, please try to be at least decent at a few other things.

One thing I like about American politics is that whenever either side doesn't like the government spending money on a particular cause, they never complain about misspent government or state money but about "taxpayer money". That's a good way to word it.

There are some new details coming out about a match-fixing scandal up in Poland and I see articles in the press complaining that because Zaglebie Lubin was sponsored by a state-owned copper mine then state money was used to bribe referees and opponents. That's supposed to make people more irritated than if it were a privately owned copper mine, though it's far from the most effective way to build public anger.

While I sure as hell don't want my goverment to fund match-fixing and corruption (in spite of this website's name we are generally against corruption, not for it), I think if you want people angry about this then do it the American way. Remind them that it's taxpayer money, in other words - your money. That will give you more reason to get angry. If you're a Zaglebie supporter, you should be angry that money you earned was spent on a corruption campaign which got uncovered and fucked your club over a few years later. If you support someone else, you should be pissed off that your money was taken so that referees would be biased against your club. If your club has a rivalry going with them you should be even more pissed off that your money was given to your hated rivals and used to cheat. Finally, if you are a nerd and hate football you should be pretty damn pissed off that you paid to have football matches fixed.

So the next time you hear about stolen or badly spent state money and want to put it in the proper perspective, just think "I am the state".

So exclaimed a man about to be eaten by a sea monster in the "Devil Fish" episode of MST3K. I'm not dying, but I'm also saying goodbye to beer for a while and switching to red wine. Now, I don't like wine, but I'm going to try this anyway. Why? As Chris Shugart writes, it's got hormonal benefits:

Don't ask me about Testosterone boosters if you drink estrogenic, tittie-growing beer all the time. Real men, hormonally speaking at least, actually drink wine. Put it into a big pewter mug with a Viking goddess engraved on it if that makes you feel more secure in your manliness.

Now, I know drinking beer every day (that's one beer, or two at most) sure doesn't prevent me from growing muscle or losing fat. But maybe I can do better. We'll see. I've switched to wine a few times when in a fat loss phase, and it didn't have any obviously visible effect, but I've never tried it when trying to gain mass. We'll see. I'll give it at least a month or two.

I'll still drink beer on Sundays and religious holidays, of course, because those are days for celebration, not for boring ascetism. But other than that, it's wine. So far I opened a bottle of some Uruguayan something that a vocalist from one of my bands gave me a while ago. I've managed to drink most of it over three days with dinners, and I can say that it, uh, tastes like wine. Ah, the sacrifices we make! But don't worry, there won't be any wine reviews coming from me.

In our continuing quest to bring some good news to society's most downtrodden group, we have unearthed evidence that white nationalists aren't merely a bunch of low-intelligence losers. No, there are some high-intelligence losers among your ranks as well, specifically computer geeks. They even feel powerful enough to take on the NFL - quite a mighty target to select, though as my favorite leftist has been saying of late there is no universal law that the NFL must remain popular. Perhaps you racist nerds can destroy it if you only believe in yourselves and never give up.

The numbers of your racist allies are rapidly growing. Remember late last year when some commentators declared America to have "defeated racism" on the basis that less than 50% of white Americans voted for a presidential candidate who is 50% white? Well, we have good news on that front as well - far from being defeated, racism is now found seemingly everywhere. It just takes a little more creativity to unearth than it did in the past.

"Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men's club — Joe Wilson yelled 'You lie!' at a president who didn't," declared Maureen Dowd in her Saturday New York Times column. "But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! "

Of course, it's fair. If inserting a racial epithet into a quote is wrong, I don't wanna know what's right. It is, moreover, common knowledge that middle-aged white men are bigots. If there's a problem with Dowd's premise, it's that Wilson likely lacks the intellect to string together more than two words per sentence. He is from South Carolina, after all.

I have written before that an asshole should never act insulted, but that is a good idea for non-assholes as well. During a recent Carling Cup clash between West Ham and Millwall, there was a good deal of violence and general unpleasantness - even more than usual when these sides clash. Some supporters also chanted insults at various players. Instead of complaining and condemning, though, Carlton Cole said the following about being called a monkey:

I heard it but it's football. I don't care. I know I'm not a monkey. I might be as strong as a gorilla but I'm not a monkey.

You've just got to carry on and get on with it and we got the result. That was the main point, the fans got what they deserved.

Being targeted is part and parcel of football. As you get bigger in football, you're going to get taunts.

That's the best way to react to insults - be dismissive or even act as if they were a compliment. On a lighter note, the vocalist in one of my bands was very happy that some old man who was angry at her called her a "snot-nosed brat". When you're 30 years old, that's just about the best compliment anyone can give you.

As is obvious from my posting frequency over the past few weeks, I have been a busy man. While Europe's middle class takes vacations in August it's the busiest time of the year at my job, plus I've got many gigs to play and two albums to record and I'm doing some house renovations. So, I have to slow down some of the other things I do. Instead of cutting back on lifting weights, though, I started training more frequently than my usual 3-4 days a week.

Insane? Burning the candle at both ends? Not quite. I'm doing a rather unusual program which allows for training several days in a row. The workouts only take about 40 minutes and I do them at home with minimal equipment so I can often get them done even if I have a gig or date that evening. If I don't have time to train at all, I just take the day off. If I have very little time I might do Tabata front squats (and then inevitably regret that decision for the next few days). I ended up averaging six days a week and managed to train 14 days in a row at one stretch. I make sure I get plenty of sleep and plenty of food, of course.

I still have two days to go on the program, but it has worked very well. I've gotten bigger and stronger without having to care if a band reschedules a recording session or audition after I'd already planned that week's off days around it.

The larger point is that when you're busy, don't have time to do everything and wish you could remember what being bored was like, the answer is not necessarily to do less but to find a way to do things in a more flexible way. Try to avoid scheduling things which can't be moved or which require extensive preperation time. That means, as a couple of examples, forget your Friday pottery class or amateur basketball league. Try whittling and pickup basketball instead.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of gambling websites sponsoring football teams. Wolverhampton's sponsorship deal adds a new feature to the trend - replica kits in children's sizes are offered in two variants. One has the sponsor's logo and the other instead bears the logo of the team's charity organization. I guess we'll be seeing more similar deals from teams sponsored by gambling houses, breweries and other adult pursuits.

Children are pretty smart, though, and the shirts with the Evil Gambling Logo are selling far better than the ones with the Responsible Charity Logo. I guess even four-year-olds realize that charity may be nice but isn't terribly interesting while gambling sure is interesting, just try not to lose all your pocket money or video games.

Are small kids who prefer to advertise gambling something to be alarmed about? I don't think it's a big deal at all. I remember when I was a small boy one of the reasons I wanted to grow up was so I could slaughter rabbits and decapitate chickens like my uncles did. It was fun and cool and adult. Today's little kids rarely seem to have similar desires. Wanting to advertise gambling instead of kill bunnies doesn't seem like much of a civilizational decline, and it's even arguably a sign of the long-term decrease in violence instead.