It is not Linsanity anymore. As of this morning, it is Linfamy. Jeremy Lin, the beloved Knicks basketball player has been turned into a leggy dancer, I am told. An infamy if you want my opinion, because, he looks better in shorts than in a tutu. But it was Linfamously announced at midnight that Lin will become a Rockette. And where do you find Rockettes? At Radio City Music Hall, wearing tutu-like red skirts, lined with faux-fur, performing synchronized choreographies in company of other Rockettes.
I guess the Knicks decided to let Lin "go Rockette" to bring diversity to this all female dance group. The Rockettes have had disgraceful discriminatory practices for decades, excluding males from performing. Up to this day, the Rockettes are an all-female dance company. But this is about to change. And Lin will be the one breaking the policy of bias. I guess hiring him was some sort of affirmative action measure.
I'm confident he'll exhibit the qualities required. On the basketball court, he demonstrated remarkable grace. He's a team player. The choreography of putting a ball into a basket can't be that different from lifting your legs in sync with other members of your team.
Hah?! You mean that the Rockets is not the same as the Rockettes? It sounds the same. At least to my French ear.
I've been living in this country for the past sixteen years and I still don't get your sports teams, your sports rules, your sports scoring, or your sports player transfer policies.
Seriously, did you get the whole luxury tax hoopla about Lin's transfer? Do you visualize the imaginary square in which the pitcher is supposed to hit his ball in a baseball game? Do you really understand baseball statistics? Really?! This is complex stuff, you know. It's worthy of a Ph.D in err... baseball stats. You barely know your state capitals but you have memorized the names of all the local teams, and for three different sports? I am impressed.
You see, in France, we love sports, but we can only take so much. We have only one national sport, which we call football, and rightly so, because, it is played with feet. In case this escaped your attention, what you call football is played with feet and hands, and therefore should be called foot-and-hand-ball. It sounds a tad too similar to foot-and-mouth disease, but at least it's accurate. The sport played with an oval ball, by the way, is called rugby, in case you're wondering!
So football, or soccer as you call it, is our national sport, and our local teams have easy names to remember. The Parisian team has Paris in its name, the Marseilles team has Marseilles in it. Simple. And football scoring is bordering on naïve. You see the cage? Put the ball in the cage! That scores you ONE point. The total scoring always stays in the single digits! We can't process higher complexity!
Americans are smart. Smarter than some foreign media want to portray. If you can understand baseball stats, you can understand subprime mortgage and derivative market collapse. If you can memorize the names of 92 sports teams and the cities they belong to, you know more geography than most Europeans. I can assure you that French women are Linfamously unable to memorize so many similar sounding names: the Knicks and the Bucks, the Nets and the Mets, the Hornets and the Nuggets, the Rockets and the Rockettes!