When I'm avoiding problems, I read. I read a lot. One of the books that I read last week was Michael Lewis's The Blind Side.
One of the marks of a great writer is that he/she can make me care about topics that I didn't care about before. I watch football, because it is usually accompanied by beer and chips. I would watch paint dry, if you gave me a bowl of guacamole. Any knowledge that I have about football comes from a very bad football video game that I used to play in third grade, which was really one step more advanced than Pong.
Because Michael Lewis is such an incredible writer, I attentively read about the evolution of the left tackle in football.
Apt. 11d 
I had much the same reaction as our hostess: I don’t watch football that much, but Lewis’s sketch of the conflict between the Walsh school and what you might call the Parcells school, and the left tackle position as the pressure point where that conflict came to a head, was fascinating. It reminded me of how slavery in the territories became the pressure point in the political conflict between North and South, or the Balkans in the conflict between Russia/France and Germany/Austria.
Last I checked, Michael Oher, the subject of the book, had been switched to right tackle. I don’t have a historical analogy handy for that result.
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Oh, just about any town in Central Europe will have switched sides several times in the last two or three centuries. (Terrific book; Moneyball’s next, right Laura?)
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My #1 read Blind Side – he is crazy for football – couple-three years ago,when he was 11. It really struck him. He was eager to see the movie when it came out.
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Impressive blog!
-Arron
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