Beginning in 2010, I started making a daily pilgrimage to ESPN.com to vote in the SportsNation poll on the front page of the site. Not because I necessarily cared about the issue being voted on, but because by voting I would get to see a US map of results of that poll, broken out by state. In many ways, sports fandom is one of the few vestiges of isolationism left; much of the rest of our differences has been washed away in a sea of connectedness and globalization.
I know, for example, that Boise St. fans (and thus Idahoans) passionately hate the BCS, while Southerners don’t mind an institution that has brought them so much success.
So, together with my brother Matthew, I’ve started collecting some of my favorite SportsNation polls of the past and present on a new blog called Sports States. Every few days, we post a poll that catches our fancy and play pop psychologist as we try to divine why fans from certain states vote the way they do.
One of my favorite current projects is Grate Reed, a new blog about homonyms. My wife’s grandmother Laura Beck used to create fun homonym puzzles to help students in her remedial English classes. We’ve taken some of those and turned them into a visual puzzle blog. The reader gets two pictures, like those below, and has to guess what the homonym pair is:
In this case, it’s Fowl Bawl/Foul Ball. Check it out and play along. We’ll be releasing a new one each week, featuring drawings from the awesome illustrator Ben Schwartz.
The Iron Horse trail is an awesome rail trail connecting Pleasanton and Walnut Creek in the East Bay. We were able to cruise the 20 miles pretty quickly, especially considering Ava got out of the stroller every few miles to join the walk.
I think I’m trying to convince Ava to smile in this photo.
Carl and I climbed all four peaks and about 16 miles in Mt Diablo State Park in the East Bay. Weirdly, the highest summit is indoors in a ranger station. Hardest part? Racing back in time to pick up Sara from work. We did not make it.
Here’s a piece I wrote about soccer ratings for Slate. Figuring out who started rating soccer players on a 1-10 scale was one of the deeper dives I’ve made as a reporter. I talked to about 15 soccer historians before I learned the agency responsible: Hayters. I should have guessed.
Along with Alistair, Carl and several other folks, Iwalked roughly 13 miles visiting 15 chocolate shops and rating them on a one-to-five finger scale along the way. The fact that the stores got progressively lower scores as we walked is probably more a testament to the fact that I shouldn’t be eating 15 servings of chocolate than the actual quality of said eateries.
Definitely one of the harder things I’ve ever been a part of. We left Park Slope at 8 pm on Friday and ended up in McCarren Park 24 hours later. We fought through blinding 3am rain in lower manhattan (see photo below), counting kilometers all the while.
After hosting a party the night before at our house in the Lower Haight, Sara and I set off around 6 am with Carl, Cynthia, Nate, and Brannan for a 25-mile walk to the top of Mt. Tam. Highlights included the Presidio, Muir Woods, and of course finishing. Lowlights included feeling hungover for the first 5 hours of the walk.
