Monday, February 11, 2008

Bestest ever. For all time. Right this minute.

I am not much of a follower of sports, but I do occasionally flip by Sports Center to catch highlights. Sometimes at lunch I'll be someplace with a TV set to the midday ESPN shows and I'll see the commentators debating topics. Even after the conflict of the game is over, they continue by arguing things such as: whether that catch in the fourth quarter was the greatest in Super Bowl history, and whether the Giants defeating the Patriots was the greatest upset ever.

Unlike the actual game, there is no definitive end whereby a victor is crowned in these arguments; ESPN can hold a poll on its website where many, many people around the country vote and a particular opinion is identified as the most popular, but it's not as though those with another opinion are forced to stop having that opinion. The debate can rage on indefinitely. Without end. It stops not because a clock reaches 0:00 but because the people involved move on to some other topic to argue.

This is why there shouldn't be 24-hour channels devoted to any one topic. That's too many hours to fill.

~

We do love watching TV that purports to be definitive about completely subjective topics, like declaring what was the greatest [insert topic here] of all time. Like with politics, we need some method of determining whether we are like the majority of people (or at least the majority of people participating in whatever debate is at hand), and when we are not, we get the satisfaction of feeling justified in believing the people who participated are idiots.

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