This is rich coming from the turds who publish Gawker.
Jalopnik and (to a lesser extent since gamergate) Kotaku are about the only sites they have that aren’t full of circle-jerking.
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There seems to be a fairly widely-spaced dichotomy that Munroe is feeding here, and it seems to rely upon an assumption that anyone who thinks watching the Super Bowl (or any professional sporting event) is a boring waste of time akin to tuning in to the 700 Club every morning is going to loudly proclaim this opinion at every opportunity, which simply ain’t so. Here’s how it works in my circles: I know and respect and love a great many sports fans. I do not share their interest. They mostly know that, and universally don’t care. Even if I wasted energy wondering why they would show interest in a golf game (which George Carlin memorably summarized as “hitting a ball with a crooked stick, walking after it, and then hitting it again”) when there are so many other things to do, both indoors and outdoors, on any given Saturday afternoon, I would not be so crass as to berate those friends of mine who happen to be into watching golf. They do me the same courtesy of not giving me excessive shit for wasting time here with you guys, playing Badass games and writing science fiction screenplays with my favorite group of online randos, instead of picking a ball team and following its fortunes like respectable people do. Munroe apparently thinks the gracious non-sports-fan should hang out with his sports-fan friends during the Super Bowl and meekly enjoy their pleasure in a vicarious sort of way while chowing down on the snacks and thoroughly stifling any yawns. Fuck that. Last thing I want to do is drag a non-car-loving buddy to a car show, or make my mom come with me to an Iron Maiden concert. There are occasions when it’s perfectly cromulent for friends to indulge their differing interests separately, so while Munroe can put up with whatever he wants to put up with, he doesn’t necessarily have to imply that it’s the only proper thing to do. I listen to my friends every day of the year, except when they start talking about sports, upon which they fully expect my eyes to glaze over.
I embrace a great many… what’s that fancy-ass highfalutin term you used? Oh yes… “plebian entertainments.” I’ve read next to no Feynmann, probably can’t pronounce Proust properly, I’ve attended more than one NASCAR race (forgot I used to kinda like that sport), and I have little more than a high school education. But yes, if pressed to spout an opinion, I really do think I’d have to be nuts to spend money on NFL- or MLB- or NBA- or NHL- or NCAA-licensed gear and clothing, and to spend countless years of my life watching these pointless contests between teams of hopelessly overpaid and/or hopelessly exploited athletes, memorizing stats, and arguing over fantasy matchups and greatest-ever lists and all the endless horseshit that sports fans consume and excrete every goddamned day. But! That does not mean that I think y’all are nuts for so wholeheartedly and eagerly embracing all this stuff. You guys somehow find it fun. And interesting. And emotionally involving. And all that. Swell! Why would I insult you guys over that? Have fun! Knock y’selves out! Play, cheer, boo, scream, cry, don your warpaint and uniforms, revel in your rivalries, immerse yourselves in the sports culture till you drown in it. I will neither insult you for it, nor think any less of you for it. Really I won’t. Why would I? It’s a wide world in which we live, and I certainly know better than to expect people to share all (or even most) of my varying interests. But I am glad there’s a Super Bowl.
That Sunday I made a trip to Home Depot. Other than a handful of on-the-clock professionals and more than the usual crop of women shoppers per-capita, I felt like I was the only one there.
And it was glorious.
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Good day to go skiing in Western WA, too.
Particularly the last two years.
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Yeah, stick figures usually lean more towards Fahrvernügen.
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Nope, it’s still the other thing. People like to talk about what interests them, not about what interests you. I’ve found that most football fans would rather talk at me about football than talk with me about something I care about. Similarly, people get bored pretty quickly when I go on about my niche hobbies.
In any case, I wouldn’t get mad at someone for taking potshots at a cultural juggernaut like football. I think it’s doing pretty okay. If it makes you feel better, you can call these people “snobs” or “elitists”, but to me it’s more about social alienation. Not caring about something everyone else cares about doesn’t give you power - it makes you alone.
Yeah, fuck those sites. I would never go there. Hey, have you seen this crazy photo of a gorilla about to punch a dude?
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It sounds like you need to get better friends. Seriously. Good friends get excited about your shit, and then you can get excited about their shit, and then everyone’s more excited and having fun.
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So it’s now smug and passive-aggressive to tell people not to be smug and passive-aggressive?
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No, it’s a disdain for watching (and getting upset about) something that can be as well a rerun of one primal football|soccer|hockey|whatever match - you saw one and you saw them all. Then they act like the world is spining around the ball|puck|whatever while in reality it won’t influence the prices of consumer goods nor any other actual quality of life factor, and may at best precipitate a short war. Yes, and it kills; not only the usual riots - listening to a soccer match in a radio can be more important than setting navigation, and then a plane full of people runs out of fuel and crashes into a jungle.
And then you get a bunch of ballkickers welcomed on the airport by a noisy crowd, and the next day a world-famous heart surgeon comes and nobody is there but the driver. Priorities, this society has. One-way ticket to Mars looks pretty attractive from here.
Proust, and other intellectual wankers that cannot even figure out an experiment to see whose bunch of philosophistry is The One? No thanks; the beauty of philosophy is chiefly in the plethora of Big Names you can shop for to validate your own opinions, whatever they are.
Feynman, now we are at least talking. That guy’s writing can hold attention.
As of high or low culture, I personally have odd tastes from older pop to some flavors of country. So it is not some sort of cultural superiority - in that case I’d go for some obscure sort of musical art nobody else heard about that sounds like a tin bucket of fucking cats being slowly lowered into a wood shredder.
Not anymore. Giving up is liberating; a lot of constraints suddenly aren’t there, you can say what you want and think what you please, and you get the same results as when you tried, just with much less effort and way more fun.
So okay it is oozing into real news instead of staying on dedicated channels and dedicated newspapers, where it would not annoy those who don’t ask for it.
I tried to care. Just could not. Could go to the aspects of injury biomechanics or sports medicine, but everything even remotely interesting seems to be surgically removed from the public discourse, leaving only a pablum of pseudorandom-looking scores, useless trivia, and ballkicker “celebrity” gossip. Maddeningly BORING.
It makes you not just alone, very alone, but also quietly and simmeringly disliking the plebs for monopolizing the public space with such utter CRAP.
If archaeology was like football (except that archaeology is at least interesting…)
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I used to know a group of Americans living abroad - they were really into football, so every year they would set up some equipment, we’d get some food together and we’d all watch the superbowl. The important factors were a) they were away from home, so they didn’t have a big group of football loving friends, b) it was just once a year, and it was limited to that day. We had fun, went home and didn’t have to talk about it for another year and c) there was food and other activities, so you didn’t even have to watch the football while you were there. As long as those three conditions are met, I don’t mind spending one afternoon/evening a year watching football.
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[…]
Magazines yeah you know I’ve got 'em
Full’a young naked women with young naked bottoms
My name is House the albino mouse
I always read Penthouse never read Proust
I got every single issue of Bondage Quarterly
All but one of Gay Night Orderlies
I read the best I read the rest and now I confess
I got a life subscription to Enema Digest
[emphasis added]
So, uh, those memes, hunh!
I have this shirt, an original NTK bought around the turn of the millennium.
This picture is not of or by me.
Well, if you really want to get into the details, then the “people” in my post refers more to “acquaintances” or “people you’ve just met”. Generally speaking, your friends are the people who know you well enough to figure out stuff both of you would enjoy talking about (and vice versa). Even then, it’s still bad form to go on and on about something only you find interesting.
Unfortunately, one of the other things wrong with that comic is that it tacitly defends professional football as an institution. Pro football doesn’t need defending, and it isn’t really worth it. It’s weird to lash out against a minority opinion directed, in part, at a rather unsavory (not to mention massively powerful) organization.
It would be more understandable to urge for tolerance if the NFL didn’t help deify athletes (to the point of letting them off lightly for criminal behavior), while at the same time putting them through a brutal meat grinder that permanently ruins their health.
Anyway, I feel like all of this is massively off-topic, and I apologize for contributing to the derail. That xkcd was the worst one I’ve seen in years, so I kind of got carried away.
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Valid advice, however somewhat hard to implement at times. People who go after understanding of underlying principles (and like the same things as you, though having a broad range of interests certainly helps) instead of memorizing (and getting worked up over) trivia are somewhat rare. They also tend to be awfully busy with their jobs (as they are usually good with them); this also provides further constraints when they do the things in question as work and don’t want to talk about work in their time off. Then the families come and eat their time. Whatever is left is scattered and logistically difficult to handle; so it’s usually back to the lab/library alone…
And we didn’t even start addressing the gender issues.
Bleh…
Give me the world where archaeology replaces soccer and you could just randomly pop up in a pub and discuss radiocarbon dating, isotopic signatures, or molecular markers…
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There’s nothing worse than a bored archaeologist.
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Try a bored engineer. 
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True, but you don’t need to destroy a civilization to give them work.
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Well, the difference is that when the archaeologists start, the civilization they work with is already destroyed. 
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That’s just what they want you to think! XD
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This is exactly the kind of argument that we all make fun of when the talking heads go into anti-video-game histrionics because some kid killed another kid for stealing his shit in World of Warcraft.
And your article about the Football War says explicitly that it wasn’t actually about football, and the Varig Flight 254 article has one line that says “It is reported that the mistake may have been due in part…”, emphasis mine. If you need to go to such lengths to find evidence for your Sports Kill hypothesis, it’s probably not a very good hypothesis. You don’t like sports, and that’s fine, but don’t try to dress up your personal preference as righteous concern for the safety of humanity.
