I am a fan of the New York Giants.<\/p>\n
I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a critical play in the fourth quarter. I yell at the tv, though I know that they can’t hear me. When something goes wrong, I will punch things and curse. When they win, I will stay up late to watch highlights of a game I just watched<\/em>.<\/p>\n I will re-arrange my schedule so as to be able to watch their games as they happen. If I can’t manage that, I will go to great lengths to keep abreast of what’s happening. I’ve listened to entire games on my car radio on a distant AM station, making the announcers voices dim and staticky, like ghosts calling the 1958 NFL Championship game.<\/p>\n When they play on Fox, I will turn down the sound and listen to the radio call, because I believe that Darryl Johnston (a former Dallas Cowboy) is biased against the Giants, and goes out of his way to run them down. I will do this even though there is a ten-second delay between the video and the audio, meaning that plays aren’t described until after they happen.<\/p>\n I can and will describe great plays from their Super Bowl championships (XXI, XV, XLII). I can and will describe great plays from regular-season games played during losing seasons.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I have no rational reason to be this invested in the Giants. From a strictly logical point of view, I probably ought to be a Bills fan, as I grew up closer to Buffalo than New Jersey. My father was a Giants fan, though, and his father before him, so I am a Giants fan.<\/p>\n I will do all that I can to pass this fandom on to SteelyKid. Literally from the cradle I have been telling her that the Giants are great, and that the Cowboys are the NFL embodiment of everything that is dark and twisted in the American psyche.<\/p>\n There is absolutely no rational reason for any of this. But it’s something I do anyway, because it’s a part of who I am.<\/p>\n Does this make me less of a scientist (other than the decrease in productivity caused by blocking out several hours on 16-20 Sundays (plus the occasional Monday or Thursday) a year)? Have I somehow compromised my scientific objectivity by choosing to be so affected by the fortunes of one team playing what is (let’s face it) a pretty arbitrary and faintly ridiculous game? Is my ability to separate out what happens during the football season from what I do in my day job indicative of some sort of mental defect?<\/p>\n Or is this just one of those things that people do, that make us more interesting to talk to than robots?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am a fan of the New York Giants. I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a… Continue reading Rationality Stops on Sunday<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,28,37,30,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","category-politics","category-pop_culture","category-religion","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}