BlogSat

The NBA regular season is here, which means I have a reason to visit the Sports guys World again, and delight in articles like this . Excerpt below. " 3b. Khloe Kardashian Raise your hand if you're excited about Khlomar! (Happily raising hand.) Look, I don't have much ammo for the teams I hate right now. The Colts have been ruined for me; Peyton Manning has become such a monolith of clutchness that I can't even toss grenades at him; if anything, I respect the hell out of him. The Yankees are pulling for each other, slamming shaving pies into faces and looking unbeatable; even worse, it's the kind of likable, quirky (albeit, expensive) team that the Red Sox once had before they dumped their front office, ignored human intuition, decided that "business-like" was better than "personable," and used complicated statistical engines to assemble their 2009 roster. (Wait, we didn't do that? It just seemed like it. Sorry.) So really, hating the hatea...

....and there's great sports writing. Bill Simmons is one of favorite sports writers writing about my favorite sport to watch , and this article on the KG trade is a great example why. Most other writers did, "trade happened, X is good about it, Y is bad." Simmons makes everything personal, makes everything matter and makes everything interesting. He has the luxury of not having to churn out columns on everything that hits the wire anymore and he uses that time and freedom well. Each article is ridiculously long, but it doesn't matter because its interesting (to me anyway:)) throughout. There's an urgency, passion and a "talking to you" feel that Simmons successfully brings to almost every article of his I've read.

There was a time a long, long time ago when I cared very deeply about football (soccer, not American. Still don't care about real American football ; love it in the movies though .) I knew the teams, the players, the transfer prices, the rules, the leagues, the cups etc., etc. My interest started to wane mid-way through college, and has gone downhill since then. I still read soccer news on the web occasionally, but I haven't been able to recite the standings at the top of each league, like I once used to, for quite a while. But you don't need to be a soccer fan in the US to know that David Beckham has come to L.A. , to play for the L.A Galaxy (a team in the MLS .) The Posh and Becks show has been playing relentlessly on the US news, reality TV and dozens and dozens of magazines . Beckham is a pretty good football player (yeah, I'm going to call it football for the rest of this post.) There was a time when you could say he was the best footballer on the planet and ke...

Creative advertising is always entertaining, and I've always thought that the best Indian ads have always been particularly brilliant. Past advertisements revolving around cricket though, even the good ones, always seemed to be based more around cricket stars rather than cricket. In general, Indian ads of late have been over-using celebrities. So I absolutely loved the energy of this new Nike advertisement (below), which though it has Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan, just has them looking on rather than being the focus of the ad. The ad is very Nike "Just do it" , but also very Indian and very cricket-friendly. The ad was done by JWT Bangalore , and the soundtrack is a lot of fun.It is a Konkani song so in theory I should get it, but given all the flavors of Konkani floating around, I can barely make out a couple of words.:) Incidentally, I stumbled on to this link on AdAge , which ranks the top 100 advertising campaigns of the century . Most are really old, but interesting r...