Yesterday was one of the most interesting sports nights I've had in quite a while.



First of all, I realized for real that I really, I don't want to say hate, because that's harsh and uncalled for, but strongly root against Roger Federer, and I'm not exactly sure why. During the final, I was becoming angry and irritable at the likelihood of him winning when he went up 2 sets to 1 and becoming extremely pumped up to the point of loudly exclaiming "YES!" at the TV when Juan Martin del Potro broke Federer in the fourth set. I was so involved that I was doing what I do when I'm really frustrated by a sporting event I care about - instead of just leaving it on and watching it all the way through like a normal person, I keep changing the channel every time I see something that frustrates me because I don't want to see anymore, only to change it back a second later because I'm curious again and can't stay away for long. I realize this is neither the normal nor sensible way to watch sporting events, but I can't help it. Every once in a while when it hits me, I take my sports really seriously.

Now, Federer seems like a nice enough guy and extremely gracious champion so if I do say I hate him I mean sports hate in that I root against him on the court but that I hate him personally the way I even hate say, Derek Jeter (personally's a little strong for anyone you don't know, but a little more hate at least). Of course, as I've said many times, the wonderful thing about sports is that you can hate anyone irrationally, which you can't get away with in real life. Still, I'll try to semi-rationally try to figure out what I don't like about Federer.

- He's a huge favorite - Many people tend to pull for the underdog, but I think I feel this way as strong if not stronger than most. There's generally nothing worse than single domination of a sport. I generally root against Tiger - I root against Lance Armstrong (though for slightly some other reasons than simply his dominance, and credit for the scene in Dodgeball). I hate the Yankees and the Patriots and the Lakers and when my friend and I picked English Premier League teams to root for we ended up choosing a team closer to relegation in Blackburn Rovers rather than one of the big four that has any real chance of winning the league most years. That said, I'm a Nadal person, and I'd like to think that I'd root for him to win as majors as possible, but perhaps that's just to catch up to Federer - but really that should be the second bullet point.

- I'm a Nadal person - Over the last two or three years, we've had a worthy rival to Federer for essentially the first time in Fed's career of winning slams. Rafa actually has a winning record against Federer, and unlike pretty much everyone else, he doesn't cower against Federer and you don't get that sick feeling of inevitability when you watch him play Federer that Fed's going to find a way to pull it out no matter what. I'm not sure when and why I chose Rafa in the battle - it could be simply because I was looking for an alternative to Fed dominance or because I just liked Rafa better, and probably was a combination of the two. Rafa's a lefty which definitely helps, plus I think I like his demeanor and look better. And yeah, I at least say this now and mean to keep with it, I do want him to continue winning as many slams as possible, albeit he needs to get healthy and fast to do it. And Roger looks so, well, country club, as will lead into my next point...



- Roger looks so country club. Let's not kid ourselves, tennis is a country club sport. Not every but almost every tennis player grow up at least fairly wealthy, partly because in order to be a competitive tennis player you need to start playing at something like the age of four, and need to be able to afford not just the equipment but the type of coaching a young player needs. But seriously, can you appear more country club than Federer? I read an article recently about Fed's US Open suite in some hotel, and one of the panels it showed his monogrammed pillowcases that the hotel provides him. I mean, I'm not kidding myself, I know the top players all live a life of luxury and they should, but are you kidding me? How do you get more country club than that? (I don't mean to bash all country clubs, as a rule, necessarily, just as picking someone to root for in a sporting event, I can certainly consider it.)

There's got to be even more to it, and I'm still working on figuring that out, but that's certainly a start.

Anyway, now that he lost I can be gracious to Federer. He is an amazing tennis player and has always been a good interview, and I will be thankful that he played the game so well and for so long. Once he loses the next couple of majors, at least.



And yet, that was only half of my exciting sports day. I was then subjected to over three quarters of a near huge upset by the Bills, only to be devastated by a incredibly ill-advised fumble with two minutes left by Leodis McKelvin, who in classic Bills fashion couldn't simply avoid doing the one thing he needed to avoid doing which more than likely would have led to a Bills win. This is the type of thing that happens to the Bills routinely. The Bills haven't made the playoffs in a decade, which I think is longer than any other team (after checking, it's tied for longest with the Lions). For the most part, they haven't been truly awful during the stretch - only three times have they had double digit losses, 13 once, 11 once and 10 once.

The way I look at it of course, is that they couldn't even manage to get a top pick. I'm almost at the point where the most fun thing to root for as a Bills fan is four a fourth 7-9 season in a row, which has to be some sort of record, certainly for consecutive 7-9 seasons, but at least possibly for consecutive seasons with the same record. Dick Jauron is now, after the first game, the longest tenured Bills head coach since Marv Levy, and they've pretty much all deserved what they got, a fate Jauron probably deserves as well, and will likely get if they finish below .500 again this year.

It's just probably another humdrum year of Bills losses, at least a few of which are guaranteed to be of the last-minute stunner variety as happened against the Patriots. I like the no huddle, though I think there's a good chance they don't have the personnel to execute it, at least it's something interesting to watch. But that was a rough one, to start off the year, before their season is already over.

Honorary Mention: True Blood

Okay, this didn't get on to the list because - frankly, the second season hadn't aired yet, so there was really only one season to work with, I didn't realize how big it really was - it's HBO's highest rated program in ages, and its DVDs sold better than any other TV show this year, and I hadn't watched it yet. But now I have realized, the second season has aired, and I have watched. So while I don't want to bump anybody off an already constructed list, I'll just interrupt here to give True Blood an honorary mention and say my piece about it.

For whatever reason, as I mentioned, I didn't realize how much of a thing it had become, and somewhere around halfway through the second season, I realized that just about two thirds of my friends have been watching it, which of course, if I hadn't considered it yet, made me want to catch up all the more.

I'm not going to lie. It started out a bit slow. You probably all the know the premise by now, but here it is in short form - vampires have been around for thousand of years, and have needed to feast on human blood, but now that a synthetic or "true" blood has been invented, vampires can come out of the closet and live in mainstream America - but of course, some don't want to. Anyway, the beginning few episodes of the show are basically about setting up the love story between vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) and telepathic waitress Sookie (Anna Paquin) in small town Louisiana and about slowly laying down some rules of the show in terms of what vampires can and can't do, and such. There's a couple of other storylines that are generally not too interesting, except for the set up for the main season plot, a whodunit about the mysterious murderer of a number of waitresses associated with vampires who appears to be coming next for Sookie. The season improves greatly over the last few episodes when that plot begins to build steadily and we get introduced to interesting characters like Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) the vampire sheriff of the area (who runs the fantastically named vampire bar Fangtasia).

The second season is a lot more interesting from the start - there's simply more going on, and they don't waste time with the preliminaries which slightly plagued the start of season 1. Immediately there are three potential villains and each of them is not entirely straightforward - we don't know their complete motives - Eric (who well into the season continues to be one of the more interesting characters and best characters on the show), the Reverend Steve Newlin and his Fellowship of the Sun church, devoted to the total destruction of vampires, and Maryanne Forrester who volunteers to help Tara but soon appears to be far from human. In addition to al this, we have a minor whodunit with a couple of bodies found with their hearts tore out, though this mystery is more or less solved by halfway through the season.

Along with (and in no small part due to) Twilight, True Blood seems more or less responsible for the vampire revival in current pop culture (though who knows how long a revival focused on one supernatural creature can last), and not without reason. The show is a serious show in many ways, but it doesn't take itself too seriously (like Lost (at least two seasons in) always feeling a little trashy and featuring comic relief from Sookie's brother Jason (great lines include something like "it's from the bible, or the constitution"(Lost has Hurley I know, but the show takes itself too seriously - but that's a conversation for another time)). Partly because I wanted to catch up in time for the finale, but also partially because it does get you caught up, I found myself wanted to start the next episode right after I finished the previous even late at night (it should be noted that the show does feature my most hated practice of finishing each episode with a needless cliffhanger). I do want to note as well, I appreciate shows with serious seasonal storylines, and I often think it's the best compromise between the limitations of only single episode stories and the too unrestricted series long stories.

Over the course of the two seasons, my opinions of many characters changed, some of the better, some for the worse (it is impossible to stand Sookie at some points in the second season) but that happens with almost any show. It's too early for me to rank True Blood among my list of dramas, but I'm certainly glad to be watching.

48: Gilmore Girls

Honestly, I've never seen more than maybe 15 minutes of a Gilmore Girls episode, and that's being generous - it's probably more like 10. Here's what I know about it, more or less, and forgive me if I'm wrong. The two main characters are a mother and daughter, both named Laureli, but one goes by Rory (the younger I think). The mother, Lauren Graham, had the daughter, Alexis Bleidel when she was young, maybe 17 or so, so she's still relatively young and single herself, and her men are part of the story, one of whom is maybe Luke, owner of a diner, or something. The daughter maybe goes to Yale. I remember once I was at a big box electronics store looking on the DVD racks and I noticed the Gilmore Girls DVDs on the shelf in order, and feeling really weirded out about looking at how Alexis Bleidel has gone from something like 12 to 20, right in a row - like a strange flipbook of her growing up.

So that's the basics. The show was never incredibly broadly popular. But the show is here because of the niche cultural touchstone it has become - even though I've never seen it, I've considered watching it because somehow some things about the show have become pervastive in discussion - its characters fast talking, it's offhand pop-culture references. You can reference that something sounds or is like Gilmore Girls, and it means something - not just specific in that it fits in exact facts, but broader - there is enough that there is a Gilmore Girls way of sounding, or doing something.

Earlier in this list, contrary to the thought process of a couple of my friends, I have not committed to watching at least a little of every show on the list before writing about it - and I still stand by that - it's not essential to what the list is all about - which is the impact on culture rather than simply my favorite shows - and any shows I haven't seen are obviously here because of the impact, not my love of them. That said, for this show and the next (and maybe more, but who can say?) I have actually at points in my life been mildly curious about them, and thus decided to at least watch a few minutes of episodes. My choice of which episode to watch was determined by what was available on the WB website and it was a second season episode in which Lorelai is scheduled to get married to some Max, which obviously doesn't take.

It's still weird for me to see Alexis Bleidel so young, I suppose since most of the roles I've seen her in, she's far older, and she still seems to talk and act as if she is older is this. They really do keep talking (I don't mean that in a bad way - there's nothing wrong with talking) - perhaps the writers get paid by the word Charles Dickens-style. And my first seriously important revelation is that recurring character Kirk, portrayed by Sean Gunn is the guy from the endlessly-running KGB commercials. I'm pleased to say that otherwise though, the show is pretty much, exactly what I expected it to be. That is to say, I show I would have considered watching if I had gotten on the bandwagon at the time, but it's total episode count of 153 makes it extremely prohibitive unless I completely run out of other shows. But, more power to it.