Welcome everyone to the all-new Cox Bloc!
What's that Mean Gene?
That's right, this baby's about to HATCH!
Big thanks to my brother, and our comrade, Randre Aacicot (That's Fred Isher to you -- ed) for facilitating this move to more salubrious surroundings.I've moved all previous entries over, but now it looks like they've all been written by me. That's probably fair. To paraphrase Shawn Michaels, Kim is the biggest piece of luggage in professional blogging - I have to carry him every night.
Actually, readers will know he's done the majority of the content, so I'll have that fixed ASAP. (Uh, nope -- ed.)
Another casualty of the move was our collection of almost 10 comments - some by other people! We may move these over, but for now, I'd like to mention a comment left by tybalt this week:
To paraphrase every corporate jackass ever, great point. This is a new blog, and as such Kim and I are still developing what we want it to do. It started simply as a way to make each other laugh, to move our daily bitching about the knee-jerk mediocrity of the Toronto sportswriting scene to a different forum. If other people happen to laugh, awesome. As it is something we both enjoy, this aspect of the site isn't going anywhere.
However, it is true that the problem of sites like Fire Joe Morgan and others is that their analysis stops pretty much at "LOLZ DUMBAZZZES!!!111" We intend to go further. Steve Simmons making shit up and Cox's negativity about any sport in which you don't wear a collared shirt are mere symptoms a larger problem. The problem is the refusal of the major voices to try and give some real analysis of Canadian sporting culture.
Canada, like many other countries, uses sports as a proxy, a national story, a way to comment on and understand the issues of class, gender, race, and state in this country. But for all the talk about how hockey shapes Canada, the inverse is rarely studied. Few writers, Stephen Brunt a notable exception, go beyond the easy headline or off-the-cuff opinion to ask the more difficult, and more interesting, questions. Kim's excellent piece on the handling of the Mark Bell case in the press is an example of this approach.
Simply put, we plan on putting Canada's sporting culture under the microscope, and ask how our sporting culture reflects our national dreams, failures, mythologies, and pathologies. Ideally, we'll write some of the sportswriting we want to read, but so rarely do.
So, we got snark if you want it.
But we'll have more than snark too.
Hope you stick around.
That's right, this baby's about to HATCH!
Big thanks to my brother, and our comrade, Randre Aacicot (That's Fred Isher to you -- ed) for facilitating this move to more salubrious surroundings.I've moved all previous entries over, but now it looks like they've all been written by me. That's probably fair. To paraphrase Shawn Michaels, Kim is the biggest piece of luggage in professional blogging - I have to carry him every night.
Actually, readers will know he's done the majority of the content, so I'll have that fixed ASAP. (Uh, nope -- ed.)
Another casualty of the move was our collection of almost 10 comments - some by other people! We may move these over, but for now, I'd like to mention a comment left by tybalt this week:
Guys, while all this stuff is fun in theory, isn't this just shooting fish in a barrel? You guys must have better things to do with your creative energies than mock the local dumbasses.
The only thing as bad or pointless as being a complete dumbass, is being someone who thinks a compete dumbass is worth a great deal of their time or energy.
To paraphrase every corporate jackass ever, great point. This is a new blog, and as such Kim and I are still developing what we want it to do. It started simply as a way to make each other laugh, to move our daily bitching about the knee-jerk mediocrity of the Toronto sportswriting scene to a different forum. If other people happen to laugh, awesome. As it is something we both enjoy, this aspect of the site isn't going anywhere.
However, it is true that the problem of sites like Fire Joe Morgan and others is that their analysis stops pretty much at "LOLZ DUMBAZZZES!!!111" We intend to go further. Steve Simmons making shit up and Cox's negativity about any sport in which you don't wear a collared shirt are mere symptoms a larger problem. The problem is the refusal of the major voices to try and give some real analysis of Canadian sporting culture.
Canada, like many other countries, uses sports as a proxy, a national story, a way to comment on and understand the issues of class, gender, race, and state in this country. But for all the talk about how hockey shapes Canada, the inverse is rarely studied. Few writers, Stephen Brunt a notable exception, go beyond the easy headline or off-the-cuff opinion to ask the more difficult, and more interesting, questions. Kim's excellent piece on the handling of the Mark Bell case in the press is an example of this approach.
Simply put, we plan on putting Canada's sporting culture under the microscope, and ask how our sporting culture reflects our national dreams, failures, mythologies, and pathologies. Ideally, we'll write some of the sportswriting we want to read, but so rarely do.
So, we got snark if you want it.
But we'll have more than snark too.
Hope you stick around.
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