A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

How They Make the Yellow Line

Those who know me well will be surprised to find my writing anything about sports. And I admit it: I'm totally lacking in knowledge of any major sport. I've never watched a basketball game in my life. I get caught up in baseball only occasionally. Watching golf on TV is a good nap spoiled. I grew up in football country, but I rarely watch a game on TV except during my brother-in-law's annual visit.

It was during one of those visits, when he asked if he could watch a football game, that I discovered the yellow line, that stripe that magically appears underneath the players to mark the down line. "Is that really on the field?" I asked. "Nah," he said, "they do it with the camera." He didn't know how.

But now, the magic of Internet video explains it all for us here.

Really, is there anything you can't learn from the Internet?
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