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captainsblogWe saved a movie to watch tonight. You may have seen me pimping it here the other day:
Sean Bean, of LOTR fame, narrates this tale of a still-extant form of primordial English football, which predates rugby, Assoc-football (as its North Murican version got named) and of course that American crap- all of which appear in the documentary. None of them have its legacy, its spirit, its lawlessness, or its ultimate place in a single English town.
Getting there was half the Unbox un-fun. I'd heard it promoted on this weekend's Only a Game podcast, which revealed that the film was available on iTunes. Cheap bastard that I am, I found a longer and slightly lower-priced rental version on Amazon, and so that was the one I ordered. THAT led to a good half hour of agitas, as I discovered that my year-old install of Unbox was Unwell, and neither repairing it or reinstalling it on this computer wound up helping a bit. Next, I tried installing Unbox on our Un-Modern XP tower in Emily's room, which didn't work because (a) Amazon insisted on bundling the install with Windows Media Player 11 (still installing while we speak), and (b) more to the point, that's the gorram computer that doesn't have a functioning sound card.
Ultimately, I found a way to stream it on this computer from amazon.com onto our living room telly, and the rest, as they say, was lovely-lovely.
----
Ashbourne is a small town with an incredible history of preserving this game. The match occupies most of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday; it has few rules to speak of (the only positive ones being that no new ball is put in play after 5 PM Tuesday and that ball must be goaled by 10 PM in order to count; the only negative ones being "no cutting through the churchyard" and "no advancing the ball by automobile"); and the camaraderie within each of the two teams is only slightly more intense than that linking the two as they try to preserve this sport which had been beaten down by every generation from Georgian to Victorian and now faces opposition from McMansionites that don't want their quaint country town shut down two days out of 365.
On this day when a major-sport male athlete finally announced his same-sexual preference, one of the most touching moments was hearing a father say he'd be perfectly fine with his son coming out as gay, but if he wanted to switch from an Up'ard to a Down'ard, he'd have to find a new place to live.
I'm down with that. Just as equally, up with it.
Sean Bean, of LOTR fame, narrates this tale of a still-extant form of primordial English football, which predates rugby, Assoc-football (as its North Murican version got named) and of course that American crap- all of which appear in the documentary. None of them have its legacy, its spirit, its lawlessness, or its ultimate place in a single English town.
Getting there was half the Unbox un-fun. I'd heard it promoted on this weekend's Only a Game podcast, which revealed that the film was available on iTunes. Cheap bastard that I am, I found a longer and slightly lower-priced rental version on Amazon, and so that was the one I ordered. THAT led to a good half hour of agitas, as I discovered that my year-old install of Unbox was Unwell, and neither repairing it or reinstalling it on this computer wound up helping a bit. Next, I tried installing Unbox on our Un-Modern XP tower in Emily's room, which didn't work because (a) Amazon insisted on bundling the install with Windows Media Player 11 (still installing while we speak), and (b) more to the point, that's the gorram computer that doesn't have a functioning sound card.
Ultimately, I found a way to stream it on this computer from amazon.com onto our living room telly, and the rest, as they say, was lovely-lovely.
----
Ashbourne is a small town with an incredible history of preserving this game. The match occupies most of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday; it has few rules to speak of (the only positive ones being that no new ball is put in play after 5 PM Tuesday and that ball must be goaled by 10 PM in order to count; the only negative ones being "no cutting through the churchyard" and "no advancing the ball by automobile"); and the camaraderie within each of the two teams is only slightly more intense than that linking the two as they try to preserve this sport which had been beaten down by every generation from Georgian to Victorian and now faces opposition from McMansionites that don't want their quaint country town shut down two days out of 365.
On this day when a major-sport male athlete finally announced his same-sexual preference, one of the most touching moments was hearing a father say he'd be perfectly fine with his son coming out as gay, but if he wanted to switch from an Up'ard to a Down'ard, he'd have to find a new place to live.
I'm down with that. Just as equally, up with it.