30 for 30: Ghosts of Ole Miss

while the site is working again…

Five points

  • The idea, at least in part, seemed to be to give more attention to a team lost in the fog of racism and a riot. I never felt like that happened. I couldn’t tell you what the undefeated 1962 Mississippi team did well or who were the key players on the team. The highlights made them look like a team which made key plays to win every game, which doesn’t separate them from any team in an NFL Films post season wrap up. I learned about their achievements and I learned a little bit about who they were away from the field, but the team itself still seemed lost among everything else.
  • If it wasn’t about the football team, it might have been about our willingness to remember things we’d rather not, but seemed to come down to “let’s remember what other people did while not totally holding it against them, and make sure not to look to close how people close to us acted”, which is not the most satisfying theme.
  • Re-enactness usually come off to me as hokey, but how it was done here amidst all the interviews of the riot. That whole section was the strongest portion of the documentary.
  • It is crazy to see a full football stadium all waving confederate flags. I don’t normally feel sheltered, but I did then. It didn’t even look like something of the past, it looked like something of an alternate time line.
  • They didn’t do polls after the season! There are so many smart people in colleges and universities, and they’ve always had the dumbest ways of determining the best football teams.

status check

Hello!

If you’re someone who’s visited this blog over, say, the last 3 months, I’m sorry for all the annoying script pop ups. Here’s what’s going on:

  1. thecubsfan.com wordpress blog works fine, but there are no posts!
  2. thecubsfan.com wordpress blog gets hacked! (and usually someone else notices first)
  3. I spend a couple hours trying to trying to fix it (which turns out to be mostly deleting and reinstalling the theme, and maybe doing the same wordpress)
  4. I partially believe I have it fixed, but have no way to be sure.
  5. I’m so annoyed that I don’t want anything to do with thecubsfan.com blog for a while
  6. REPEAT

If not for the Joe Versus The World podcast (and, at least in theory, Justin’s podcast), I’d probably close down the blog. I already have 1 tumblr account I barely use, and the readership might go up from 5 people to 6. I could move the luchablog stuff under it’s own domain so it’s doesn’t look like a bad grade school product, though that would require rewiring of a lot of bad code (a time consuming task I have yet to find them time for.) Also, it’d make it easier to wipe from the internet all the dumb stuff I’ve written on this blog at one point or another (though all the dumb stuff I’ve written on the rest of the internet would still exist…) I could still do the JvsTW podcast without WordPress – I did it before there was WordPress, I am ancient in internet terms…

But I still believe this is the best way to handle that podcast and want to keep it going. For now. The plan is to keep this going and hopefully figure out and patch all the holes. If you come around some day and see everything in different places, it means I’ve freaked out and/or given up, but we’re still a little bit away from that.

As far as content for this site that might actually exist, I still do want to write about every one of this season’s 30 or 30. I still haven’t watched the Bo one, because I don’t want to have two posts bouncing around in my head. And I haven’t written the Ole Miss one because the only reason I come here are to fix things. At some point it’ll be better, I hope.